PREDICTING THE ROUTE TO LOW-CARBON HEATING
David Hilton reviews the complexities of low-carbon heating, and predicts the future could comprise of both heat pumps and hydrogen
In 2019 there were 1.67million gas boilers sold in the UK. The Future Homes Standard, due to be introduced in 2025, will change all that, effectively prohibiting them from being fitted in new homes. The government’s proposed solution for decarbonising domestic heating is the Clean Heat Grant, which will go towards the upfront costs of installing a heat pump or biomass heater. However, this will only support 12,500 homes switching to low-carbon heating each year — a far cry from the government’s November 2020 proposal to be installing 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028.
A Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) report, titled ‘The Cost of Installing Heating Measures in Domestic Properties’, outlines the fully-installed costs for different heating systems, including gas and oil boilers, heat pumps and biomass. The report states that installing a new gas boiler ranges in price from around £2,250 for a combination boiler swap to around £6,228 for a new central heating installation. Installation costs for heat pump technologies are higher, ranging from around £13,200 for an 8kw ground source heat pump (GSHP) and cylinder (excluding ground works and controls), and up to £27,350 for the full installation of a 12kw GSHP (including the cylinder, ground works, controls, underfloor heating and radiators). An air source heat pump (ASHP) is quoted at around £14,050 for a 16kw ASHP (excluding a central heating emitter circuit) on a new build, and around £16,500 as a retrofit, which includes the upgrade of some radiators.
The Union of Gas workers naturally believes that all existing central heating systems should remain on the gas network until such a time as boilers can be replaced by zero-carbon alternatives such as hydrogen, or synthesic gas, and can be supplied at cost-effective prices. It also says that these costs, plus the infrastructure improvement costs that will be required to expand the grid to have enough capacity to run them, means that heat pumps are not the right solution.
Meanwhile, the Gas Users Organisation has raised questions about the huge expansion of electricity capacity required for the rollout of heat pumps.
MULTI-SOLUTION FUTURE
Gas workers may be expected to defend the gas network, and the carbon theories add up nicely for the electricity network, but the truth is that the future will realistically comprise many solutions. Staying on the gas grid when the gas is zero-carbon sounds like an ideal solution, but in reality there are a lot of hurdles, and the costs of the fuel will certainly be higher than we currently pay for methane-based gas. On the other hand, switching everyone to electric heating is not possible and that huge hurdle is compounded by the requirement to switch transport to electricity.
The answer is somewhere in the middle. We need around 10million homes off the gas grid and running on heat pump technologies to meet 2050 carbon reduction targets. Given that not all of the existing gas infrastructure is hydrogen-ready, the future energy mix could already be defining itself.