Pump up the volume
◆ Dr Richard Dixon turns down the fossil-fuel industry’s anti-heat pump propaganda to push for an increase in their adoption
Having resisted an organised backlash against heat pumps, and the hype over hydrogen for home heating, UK ministers are about to confirm targets for heat pump manufacture.
The Scottish Government recently confirmed its ambitions on heat pumps, with a target to end fossil fuel home heating by 2045.
If you have read something negative about heat pumps – be it in a newspaper, a Facebook forum or even on Mumsnet – it may have originated from a PR campaign paid for by the Energy and Utilities Association, the trade body for boilermakers and others in the gas industry.
Surprise, surprise people who make boilers want to keep on making boilers, not heat pumps.
In fact, heat pumps work well. Many European countries – including those with climates much colder than ours – are well ahead, with Norway having 30,000 heat pumps per 100,000 people. The European average is 4,000, yet for the UK it is only around 560.
The other side of the antiheat pump propaganda is the gas industry’s continued push for hydrogen as the fuel of the future. Again, this is no surprise, given that they own a huge network of pipes which are going to be completely useless soon.
Originally, both the UK and Scottish governments were keen on hydrogen for heating. So much so that, in 2020, Boris Johnson said we would have trials demonstrating a hydrogen village and then a hydrogen town by 2030.
For the village trials, the good residents of Whitby in Elsmere Port decided they were having none of it and were about to roundly reject a trial in their area through a council-run referendum when the government pulled the plug. For a short while, an alternative site at Redcar was going to have 1,000 houses connected to hydrogen, but clear local opposition caused that trial to be cancelled too.
This leaves the H100 project in Fife as the only such trial in the UK. Some 300 homes are to be connected to a new hydrogen network and their boilers, cookers and gas fires swapped for hydrogen appliances. This project has been running massively late.
Dozens of studies have concluded that using hydrogen for home heating makes no environmental or financial sense. The Scottish Government recently ruled out hydrogen, while a UK energy minister said it was unlikely to play much of a role and pulled the funding.
It is very clear that hydrogen is not going to be the domestic fuel of the future, making the H100 project completely pointless. People will have their homes and appliances converted to hydrogen, run them for two or three years, and then have to be converted back to natural gas and conventional appliances.
In their initial flush of enthusiasm, the Scottish Government invested nearly £7 million in the H100 scheme and energy regulator Ofgem £16m. They should try to get it back.
Hydrogen has been a distracting dead end for home heating. Heat pumps are clearly the future – despite the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda campaign – and the UK is about to do the right thing and start catching up with our European neighbours.