Banning gas boilers will help tackle living costs crisis
The soaring price of fossil fuels makes it all the more important for Britain to decarbonise swiftly
Global events and the soaring cost of living have rightly absorbed a huge amount of our domestic political bandwidth and provoked renewed discussions about our need for greater energy security. These discussions are welcome, and long overdue, but we must ensure they don’t distract from the existing challenges we face, and the existing measures we have to confront them.
Decarbonisation of the economy, of our building stock and of our infrastructure, presents such challenges. While many of the solutions emerging to enhance our long-term energy security would also support decarbonisation, there are few quick wins. But one area that has the potential to move us closer to both goals is reducing the amount of gas used for home heating.
The University of Birmingham’s Energy Institute has long championed the urgency and efficiency needed to tackle this particular challenge. Its most recent report, Pathways for Local Heat Delivery, is the result of the hard work of a range of industry and academic experts who form the University’s Decarbonising Heat Commission, which I chair, and its recommendations form the basis of the insights below.
Decarbonising domestic heat is the major remaining challenge of climate policy. Progress on heat lags behind that of electricity and transport – heat for buildings causes 23pc of Britain’s total greenhouse gas emissions and heat for housing alone causes 17pc. As a result, we need to cut emissions from heat more in the next eight years than we have in the past 30.
The implications of this are stark: unless we replace 24m gas boilers, we will never reach net zero.
This means that, contrary to some of the stances circulating since the invasion of Ukraine, the soaring price of gas makes heat decarbonisation yet more urgent – not less. Indeed, tackling the decarbonisation of domestic heat provides a central platform through which the Government can address some of its biggest challenges: energy security; air quality; health; jobs and skills; fuel poverty and levelling up; the cost of living – the list is long.
So why has there been such reluctance to make headway?
The decarbonisation of the UK’S homes is difficult. There is no one size fits all approach – our housing stock is varied, the majority of UK homes (other than some examples in social housing, which is generally well insulated) are old and built using inefficient materials, and rural homes which don’t sit on the energy grid rely solely on fossil fuels for power.
This Government, and previous ones, have looked to solve this problem through national schemes, but heat is by definition local. We need to allow for bespoke place-based solutions to develop alongside overarching national policy and targets.
Heat resources and patterns of demand differ from place to place, pushing each neighbourhood towards one or other of the main technology options – heat pumps, heat networks and possibly hydrogen. Building infrastructure to supply all three, everywhere, would be expensive and needless duplication. Each area will need to choose which technology or combination suits it best.
The Government must therefore empower and fund councils to start conducting local area energy planning (LAEP) to map and zone their area by technology, immediately. This must start now, with proven technologies, if we are to achieve the 2050 target.
And that leads us to the second prominent reason for a lack of movement – the required behavioural change from consumers is significant. Whereas electricity emissions can be reduced in ways that are largely invisible to consumers, and transport emissions slashed by selling them sexy new products, tackling heat requires the Government to influence building efficiency and heating choices in every home. None the less, it can do this through subsidy, grants and regulation, for example by banning gas boilers beyond a certain date. Government cannot remain cautious.
The transition will not be cheap, but is an investment we cannot afford to delay. Already, 10m homes in the UK could fit a heat pump without additional insulation. That’s a massive market in which competition will bring costs down, not to mention the benefits felt by the demand for a high-skilled workforce.
Recent announcements such as the slashing of VAT on the installation of energy saving materials to 0pc for the next five years, the windfall tax on gas and oil firms and ambitions to increase the UK’S renewable energy capacity are useful, but don’t come close to the long-term levels of ambition we need.
They will have a limited impact in the near term on the underlying cause of emissions, soaring costs and energy insecurity: our overwhelming dependency on gas. We now have an opportunity to craft a single set of heat policies to deal decisively with all three.
Our commission at the University of Birmingham suggests that to galvanise progress, the Government should fund pathfinder projects to decarbonise neighbourhoods of 10,000 homes each by 2027. The costs of decarbonising heat can only come down if we start to tackle the problem, build the market and learn. At least three clean heat pathfinders would kickstart that.
We face unprecedented threats on many fronts: continued threats to our health from the lingering impact of the pandemic; threats to our living standards as a result of inflation; and of course the threat to humanity posed by the climate crisis. To address these and to mitigate their impact we need clear, long-term policy interventions now.