Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts The UK should abandon its efforts to replace gas boilers for heating homes with hydrogen systems, an independent advisory commission says. The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) said there was no public policy case for hydrogen to replace natural gas for home heating, in a dramatic rebuttal of a bold government …
Yet elements still lives on with equally daft plans to power trains with hydrogen, to fuel cars with hydrogen, to fly planes with hydrogen. Just another eco-pipe dream that appealed to those people who thought that because hydrogen burns to leave water that it had to be a solution.
Of course, the NIC's ideas for universal heat pumps don't solve the problem of where the electricity will come from, especially in winter anti-cyclonic conditions, nor where we'll find the trillion odd quid needed.
Switching a home from gas to heat pump and generating the additional electricity using gas results in a net reduction in gas use. If you want a better solution that works when Europe has several days in a row with almost no wind: import nuclear from France. There have been accusations that France subsidizes its nuclear electricity. If true that would mean French tax payers would be subsidizing UK heating.
"import nuclear from France"
That is true for now, but I see you're totally unfamiliar with the challenges France faces with its ageing nuclear fleet, the inordinate costs for replacing them with EPRs which are currently the only option on offer, and the fact that Germany is no longer the swing generator in Europe.
France has about 56 nuclear power plants. Fifteen are end of life by or before 2035, with a good few soon after and even though the French government has made positive noises about more, only one new one is under construction. Moreover, because Germany and a number of other EU countries have forsaken nuclear, any French surplus power will have to be bid for in the open market, and in the scenario that we need this, most of Northern Europe will want it. As we can't forecast weather ahead with much accuracy, buying this power would be in the spot market, and the cost would be eye watering. Unfortunately the higher cost won't magically create more available power, so there will be lots of losers. And you need to allow for the fact that France and other EU countries will be following the same policies of electrifciation of road transport, and retiring the gas heating systems for the circa 11 million homes currently ehated by gas.
Even when France does build replacement nuclear, why would they make the same mistake as before, of trying to meet their national peak demand from wholly inflexible nuclear power? If I were them, looking at the eleven year delays and three fold cost over-runs at Flamanville, I'd seek to make the new EPR fleet more reliable (so less downtime and planned service outages, at the expense of more development time) and I wouldn't build the fleet to serve peak load. All of which means that France's historic surplus of power generation is likely to decline.
We cannot rely for entirely expected energy demand in the UK to be made up for by interconnectors using magically available spare capacity elsewhere. I really don't understand people who think like Mr Micawber that "something will turn up" when we're talking energy shortages, but this seems popular with people who don't understand weather patterns, seasonal and diurnal energy demand, and energy transport and distribution systems, and it seems they're making the executive policy decisions in most governments.
13 years ago , the tories propped up by the liberals had to make a decision.
The problem being our aging nuclear power stations, do we start the process of replacing them with new ones, and increase the number thus reducing our CO2 output.
The decision was made
"Naww fuck that ,they take 13 yrs to build, it wont pay off in the term of our government,and we'd have to convince the population too. lets kick the can down the road for some other government to make the call. Maybe we could grind up american forests into woodchips, transport it 3000 miles by bulk carrier, then burn it and claim thats CO2 neutral"
Close but no coconut.
25 years ago, Labour all on their own stopped the Nuke plant replacement cycle because Blair just liked to be popular.
2008 - Brown starts ball rolling on new plants.
2010 - Cameron announced Hinkey C, had they not wasted years of faffing about before starting the build billions would have been saved and we'd have the leccy to use.
2020something - Labour? PM to cut ribbon and bask in the applause.
It's a little more complicated than that. This article is interesting.
Precis: Privatising everything produced the expected results
It will do.
Uranium fuelled reactors of any kind are more expensive than coal and water moderation makes them more expensive still on the thermal side (wet steam)
There are sound commercial reasons why no nuclear plant has been planned for purely commercial reasons since the mid 1960s (France's ones were to mask the nuclear weapons program, as were the British AGRs. Japan's ones are for energy independence/pollution reduction)
Alvin Weinberg made a "Mark Two" design in the 1960s and was driven out of the nulcear industry as a result. The Chinese have just finished rebuilding what was abandoned at Oak Ridge in 1969 and picked up where Weinberg's team left off - running on thorium (the first molten salt reactor to ever do so and the only molten salt liquid-fuelled reactor currently running). Other countries are playing catchup and the British efforts look like very typical Heath Robinson lashups of "old designs with new features" that Weinberg rejected in 1963 for operational safety reasons.
2008 - Brown starts ball rolling on new plants.
Err.. One G. Brown Esq, after demonstrating his prowess as a gold trader flogged off Westinghouse and most of what was BNFL? Thus leaving the path clear for EDF, who's design became the 'only option'? And his brother just happened to work for EDF at the time.
Genius move that crippled the UK's nuclear capabilities, especially around that tricky problem of creating a decent fuel cycle that processes and reprocesses the fuel needed for a large nuclear fleet.
2010 - Cameron announced Hinkey C, had they not wasted years of faffing about before starting the build billions would have been saved and we'd have the leccy to use.
Well, it was shortlisted in 2010. Whilst his erstwhile (Lib Dem) Deputy PM was badmouthing them and casting FUD. Also worth noting that the 2005 Conservative manifesto made no mention of nuclear. So they were not particularly interested in energy security either.
And then the Tories delayed the whole process by insisting that the private sector fund it themselves (backed against extremely generous guaranteed strike prices). This of course was a period when interest rates were <0.5% and the government could have borrowed extremely cheaply. Far cheaper than EDF could borrow from the commercial money markets. The government dragged those CfD negotiations well into 2013 - instead of just issuing gilts and hiring EDF to build it on a contractor basis. Discounting the (not inconsiderable) site prep, major works for Hinckley C didn't start until.. 2019. We could be at least 2-3 years ahead, but for government.
So yes, the Tories did get on with it... eventually. But they still managed to do it in the slowest, least efficient and most expensive manner possible.
Borish the Cockroach: "13 years ago , the tories propped up by the liberals had to make a decision. The problem being our aging nuclear power stations, do we start the process of replacing them with new ones, and increase the number thus reducing our CO2 output. The decision was made....Naww fuck that ,they take 13 yrs to build, it wont pay off in the term of our government,...."
Whilst that's true in the sense that the Tories managed to order only a single nuclear power station, your political point scoring is rather typical of the left: It ignores the even more miserable performance of the preceding 13 years of Labour government that saw not a single reactor ordered, and no coherent energy policy either. And under Labour we also saw the closure of nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point A 1&2, Calder Hall units 1-4, Bradwell A 1&2, Chapelcross 1-4, Dungeness A 1&2, and Sizewell A 1&2.
As it happens, we have a uniparty parliament with the same inconsistent, poorly planned, uncosted mess of an energy policy. You can't tell them apart.
As it happens, we have a uniparty parliament with the same inconsistent, poorly planned, uncosted mess of an energy policy. You can't tell them apart.
Sadly the case in too many European countries, which is why people are increasingly voting for extremist/populist parties, just to try something different. Unless moderate politicians start offering us a real choice it isn't going to end well.
Consider this: Take whatever number of 1GW power stations exist today and TRIPLE it (if not Sextuple).
That's the number of nuclear plants which are needed to decarbonise
Renewables can only match existing power generation capacity and piussing around spending trillions on a vapourware interconnect from Morocco which can only supply 7% of current needs is going to look even more stupid when it's more like 1.5% of future needs
To be fair, "plans to deliver 3.6GW of power from Morocco to Devon for £21billion" will probably mean a final project cost of around £30-40 billion given how these things usually go, but certainly far short of 'trillions'. Still at least on par if not probably better than nw nuclear plants in terms of both cost and time to delivery, but it's not really an either-or, both are needed
Cost overruns.
The good news is, that in comparison to HS2, this project does not carry the same risks of cost growth. However this power gets to us, it does not go through leafy Conservative constituencies requiring it to be re-routed in as expensive a way as possible.
Neither Devon or Morocco are represented by old Etonians, members of the blue rinse brigade or even dodgy landowners.
If someone wants to chain themselves to undersea rocks, that is up to them. If Devon is having a few blue MPs at present, they should have replaced them with adults by the time the project gets there.
XLinks.. is that interconnect some kind of Brexit fever-dream? I can see an easy way of knocking about 50% off the build-cost of that project: Connect 1 GW DC interconnect between Morocco and Iberia into the European Synchronous area, then build another 1 GW DC interconnect between the European Grid and GB. Electrons are electrons - you push some in the South, you draw some off in the North. The rest is accountancy..
Building a super-long undersea DC interconnect to bypass an existing and highly redundant electricity transmission network strikes me as something engineers wouldn’t willingly do.
Electrons are electrons - you push some in the South, you draw some off in the North. The rest is accountancy..
My thought exactly. Offset Spanish/Portugese demand, which leaves them surplus to sell into Southern France, which leaves the French with surplus to sell GB/Ireland.
If the paperwork on that is too complicated, then run the interconnect to France and cut the Spanish out. But it's all just numbers in a spreadsheet.
" why should Morocco give up 1700 sq km for the UK?"
a) it's 0.3% of Morocco's land area, which while a sizeable chunk is not comparatively that big, and it's mostly unused desert land anyway
b) They're going to be very very well paid for it, certainly more than any other economic return they could get for that land
"...will get caught up in planning hell in Morocco... Every other plan to put renewables in north africa has died off..."
Well, that will come as a surprise to Morocco!!!
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211115-how-morocco-led-the-world-on-clean-solar-energy
Whatever the costs there is still the minor issue that it is in another country (well actually continent).
It is also politically remote.
At least you can stockpile uranium easily and only a small amount is needed. Anything that relies on a cable or pipeline can be cut at a moment's notice. Then you are in a right mess,
Look at the gas issue when Putin invaded Ukraine.
Why the blazing f- would anyone build an interconnect from Morocco to... the UK?
Transmission losses are projected at 13%, which is not as bad as I expected... but still significant.
Surely it makes more sense to interconnect Morocco with Spain/Portugal(1), offset Spanish/Portugese demand, which means generation in northern Spain/Portugal can be sold into southern France, and we continue to buy from the French. Surely you want generation to be as close as possible to demand?
Or at the very least, connect from Morocco to France.
But I suppose in applying a vaguely sensible engineering approach, I haven't allowed for geopolitics, or the ability of grifters to leverage government subsidies. And yes, I know this is attached to generation specifically built for export, not just a load-balancing link.
1. Yes, there's already an 800MW Spain-Morocco interconnect, with another 700MW link in the works. Which will be dwarfed by this 3.6GW link.
Consider this: Take whatever number of 1GW power stations exist today and TRIPLE it (if not Sextuple).That's the number of nuclear plants which are needed to decarbonise
Not entirely true. Poland recently ordered 3x Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, which the UK used to own. So they're building 1 power station with 3 reactors. Which is one way to bring the costs down, ie building multiple units at a site to spread the overhead costs. So a 1GW reactor would have all it's overheads loaded onto 1GW of electricity sales. Build 4x1GW and those costs are spread out. Also the reasoning behind SMRs that can be stacked to produce <whatever> from standardised, more easily manufactured and transported units. But this is also part of the deceptive practices used by the anti-nuclear lobby, which assumes FOAK costs for existing reactors, and ignores the economies of scale possible from building multiple reactor sites.
"Consider this: .... waflfe nah , nope , stupid "
Whats the answer then Alan?
I get tired of all these
Electric cars be stoopid , my car can do 500 miles between refils , so all electric cars should be scrapped .
p.s. i've never driven more than 30 miles in a day in my gas car.
I have to drive over 500 miles a few times a year(*). Its normal to see queues several vehicles deep waiting for the EV charging bays along the way. Not really interested in my journey being made 2 or 3 hours longer (thats a long time to stop for a piss and a sandwich).
(*) Car load of tools and not exactly off the shelf materials, when its just myself that I need to move I take the train.
Yes, of course, people have varying use cases and requirements. In the past week I drove 2800 miles (New Mexico to Michigan and back, the return trip in a 26-foot rental truck, and boy howdy was that fun). Obviously most folks don't do that often, or indeed at all. And obviously some of us do.
An EV wouldn't work for me; even for my local driving, most EVs aren't suitable (I need decent ground clearance and while 4WD/AWD isn't strictly necessary, it's helpful), and I'd have to plan out charging because there are few facilities in my area. Also I believe most EVs have touchscreens and frankly I'd rather walk than use a vehicle with a touchscreen, just on principle.
But for many people they seem to work. Even around here I see Teslas and there's someone with a Rivian that I've spotted around town.
Quote
"your political point scoring is rather typical of the left: It ignores the even more miserable performance of the preceding 13 years of Labour government"
And if the labour party had been in power for the past 13 yrs , I'd cheerfully be throwing bricks at them too.(and most likely will after the next election)
We knew back in 2000 that the nuclear power stations would need replacing in 2020'ish + the coal fueled stations would be going too.
Labour's answer was the same as the tories... kick the idea down the road so we dont have to take a possibly unpopular decision that costs money.
And if you think this problem is new, just think of London's sewer system.. finally got approval to fund and build only after the great stink when MPs finally got a dose of what the Thames had been turned into at the time.
> wishful thinking
Yep, it will never happen, well not in our lifetimes.
Even if they manage to fuse stuff, Thunderfoot on youtube debunked the whole fusion thing when he pointed out a big flaw that once I realised I had missed it I was convinced fusion couldn't happen.
The problem is the engineering of the plant itself. Once we manage fusion, well you have to actually design a reactor that can make it work. What nobody bothers thinking about is all the fusion waste.
Fusion waste?
Yes, those particles don't disappear into another dimension in the reactor, no they fuse together into harmless and useless junk crap. You have to devise a way to clean them all out of the reactor because when they get created they will stop further fusion.
So the process would be:
1. Fill the reactor with fuel
2. Fuse it and draw off the energy. Fusion now becomes impossible due to interfering waste.
3. Clean out all the superheated waste.
4. Re-establish the conditions for fusion again.
5. GOTO 1
Everyone is still working on getting 2 working and nobody has any answers for steps 3 and 4. It will be a very long time before anyone builds anything but a demo plant.
The ONE advantage of kicking the can is that MSR-thorium liquid fuelled designs now appear practical (modulo development work in China), can be built on a modular basis in normal factories (no stupidly large pressure containment vessels/Building required) and are small enough to replace burners in existing coal/gas thermal plants
Existing nuclear only runs at 280C or thereabouts (AGRs are hotter but not much hotter). MSRs run hot enough (600-800C) to produce supercritical steam and don't need to use rivers/estuaries as heatsinks, so they're more immune to heatwave-induce shutdowns
"development work in China"
But not here. Why not? Because of all the can-kicking. I doubt we'll see any sensible thought about power requirements until the lights start going out. Then everything will be done in a panic so there'll be no sensible thought about the ways and means.
Ooohh, and I forgot, one of the single most stupid, misguided Labour ideas ever was NETA, introduced by Tony Blair's government in 2001, which replaced the previous Pool trading arrangements. The direct and almost immediate consequence of NETA was that CCGTs were able to undercut nuclear, leading quickly to the effective bankruptcy of British Energy who owned the UK's nuclear power stations. Out of necessity Blair's government of morons had to bail it out, in a move that wiped out the UK shareholders and promptly solld the lot to the French EdF.
The Tories are useless cretins, unfortunately the Labour party have proved themselves to be even less competent. And it's not just energy - look at the circa £80bn of costly PFI strung round the NHS neck by Gordon Brown. However, facts won't stop the Laboiur faithful whining on about "austerity" and the damage done by the Tories.
"Maybe we could grind up american forests into woodchips, transport it 3000 miles by bulk carrier, then burn it and claim thats CO2 neutral""
Short version:: Drax Group plc, see e.g. https://www.drax.com/about-us/our-sites-and-businesses/drax-power-station/
Yes, the former coal-fired Drax now appears to be a subsidy-harvesting project largely burning imported biomass from the other side of the atlantic. You know it makes sense.
When I looked at gridwatch.templar.co.uk earlier today, it showed 2GW (and a bit) of biomass going to the UK grid. It's around the same now, several hours later.
Gridwatch(tm) also shows that solar input to the grid rarely exceeds 2GW for more than a few consecutive hours.
All of this (and more) was foreseeable and was foreseen during energy privatisation and subsequent spreadsheet-driven insanity.
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Politicos won't care enough to commit serious spending until the long term problems become short term permanent problems, maybe something like the lights going out on cold nights BEFORE the next election is due.
Ten year lead times on national infrastructure are no good, they want to announce the spend now and cut the ribbon next week to loud applause.
Thanks for the explanation of how France always seems to be exporting to us according to GridWatch. I'd upvote you 10 times if I could.
On a really good day, like in the gales of the last few days, our own windmills meet about 60% of demand (yes, more are coming, huzzah). A large fraction of the remainder is our own nuclear and import also mostly nuclear (bit of hydro from Norway) with a few other bits and bobs.
Without nuclear we'll be facing a serious hole in capacity (right now its producing 7GW or 20% of demand, BIG hole). So quite a lot of the new generation capacity build-out will need to go to making up the shortfall due to nuclear going off line before we can even think about displacing more fossil generation. The intermittent nature of renewables means they aren't well-suited for that job unless you over-provision several fold making the task even more challenging. Or maybe there's another cunning plan for that? Battery farms, EV to grid?
Not too hard to imagine that a case will be made to life-extend existing reactors until we get some new ones out of the ground.
"import nuclear from France"
There is a grand total of 5GW of interconnect between Britain and mainland Europe, with another 1.5GW from Norway
The "underwater link from Morocco" is unlikely to happen. Energy losses would be _staggering_ and if it was practical, the Spain/Morocco one would be a lot bigger than 700MW
The most promising future source is nuclear - TMSR-LF1 is where we should be keeping a weather eye (a nod to dear departed Lester is in order)
"The "underwater link from Morocco" is unlikely to happen. Energy losses would be _staggering_"
HVDC losses are about 6% - 8%, I wouldn't call it staggering at all. There's some extra conversion equipment costs but it's doable. The Morocco-to-England distance is around 3500km, and they are proposing IIRC 3.6 GW. China already has (since 2019) a 3300km cable transmitting 12 GW.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200127003106/http://www.sgcc.com.cn/html/sgcc_main_en/col2017112406/2019-01/18/20190118183221870335071_1.shtml
From the linked article ... "it passes through (various towns)".
3300km with various points where there is demand for electricity is very different to 3500km across the bottom of the ocean. For the same reason that eating three meals a day is very different to eating nothing all week then 21 meals on saturday.
You seen the age of Frances nuclear power stations?
Currently 37 years and they are looking to see if they can push their life span up to 80 years!
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long-road-to-extending-life-of-french-nuclear-reactors_6014297_7.html
When there’s no wind and no sunshine, where will the electricity come from? France won’t export it when it needs all production for itself. Further, about 5 times the grid capacity would be needed if all homes were heated by heat pumps - which are not efficient on, er, very cold days which is when there’s no sun and no wind.
Net zero will kill people through lack of heating and lack of food.
As will climate change for different reasons.
That is slower but appears to be becoming rather more of an issue to the large carbon producers (directly or indirectly)
Mankind is the smartest yet most stupid and selfish being that has ever existed.
The only point at which the impact of climate change will be taken seriously is if somewhere like Washington or New York disappears under water or is flatten by a "one in a lifetime storm".
By then it will be too late as we will probably be beyond the point of reducing or reversing the thermal runaway.
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Vast ‘battery’ storage facilities like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Hydro, Geo-thermal, Tidal, Wind, Solar, Ocean Currents are all in the mix.
Once much has been decarbonised and make as energy-efficient as possible … I think there is an argument for some sections of transport, electricity generation, industry etc to be licences to continue to use carbon fuels where a viable eco-alternative is not there. That could be aviation for example.
There seems to be a Direction of travel to eliminate carbon completely.
"What an utterly spurious comparison.
You need to consider how much of the UK's demand at any one time can be supplied by Dinorwig."
Indeed.
Here's one someone wrote earlier:
https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electric_mountain/
Sadly the Visitor Centre closed a few years ago (space needed for a car park?).
"The station, run by First Hydro Company (jointly owned by Engie and Mitsui), can go from stand-by to 1.32 gigawatts in 12 seconds, making it one of the fastest installations of its kind, with a peak output of 1.728GW."
Which combined with the madness of the markets is why the station is used more for fast response "frequency stability support" than for hours at a time "peak lopping" (which was the original intention).
Can I suggest you get an old envelope (fag packets appear to be in short supply), and see how many "Dinorwigs" you would need to keep the lights on in the UK for say 14 hours, when the "wind does not blow and the sun does not glow".
My last guestimate was around 200. Sure batteries are an alternative, but the bottom line, as from above is "too little, too late".
The heating capacity of heat pumps isn't sufficient for many poorly insulated 19th and early 20th century British homes. You'd need additional electrical resistance heating or supplemental natural gas heating to compensate.
Also, heat pumps take up valuable space and make continuous irritating low frequency noises. IMHO only new, highly insulated homes should have heat pumps. For older homes we should just upgrade the electrical network and use resistance heating. New nuclear plants and a huge investment in the power distribution network should therefore be top priority.
BTW I personally had the same idea as Johnson since there's already a well developed gas distribution network and hydrogen gas can be made to flow through those pipes. Gas heaters can also be modified to bun hydrogen gas relatively easily. Maybe we were both wrong but I don't think it was (or is) a bad idea.
"Maybe we were both wrong but I don't think it was (or is) a bad idea."
I believe it was a bad idea. Hydrogen is really small, and therefore leaks. This means potentially none of the existing infrastructure is suitable.
Not that heat pumps are the answer, unless you've got a very modern well insulated house.
We had a problem after fitting a gas cooker. We have bottled gas, so nice bulky propane. A manufacturing fault in a join led to a small leak. Hard to find and the first time our plumber had ever seen such a problem.
If there are tiny faults that allow something as big as propane to leak,how many more are there that will allow hydrogen to leak?
Easy to say, but harder to actually do.
You are talking about retro fitting hundreds of millions of joints. And is that even enough? How much is that all going to cost? And how do they stand up over time? How long would it take to get through that amount of work?
Get it wrong, and you've got lots of houses becoming Hindenbergs. That's quite some risk.
It's not just the unsuitable joints and valves that are the problem. Hydrogen doesn't have the volumetric density of natural gas so would have to be pumped much faster to maintain the same pressure (it's about 3 times faster). Our pumping stations just can't do that - they'd all have to be upgraded. Even then the energy delivered to the household would only be 88% that of a current natural gas supply.
You also get much higher NOx levels from burning hydrogen than for natural gas as hydrogen burns much hotter. So that's another downside as well.
"Gas pipes need retrofitting and replacement every couple decades
They might need it but they certainly haven't been getting it. When they came fix a gas leak outside our (London) house, they revealed a 10" gas main that might have been eighty years old. (Actually it might have been original, so ~125 years.) It was made of about 12' lengths of cast iron pipe each bolted to the next at joins sealed with putty.
The repairer explained that the old town gas has enough water in it to keep the putty moist. "New" natural gas is dry, so during droughts, the putty dries right out completely and leaks.
They were repairing three joints.
I waved vaguely in the direction of Kingston about a mile and a half down the road and asked how much of that was the same and how much were they replacing.. "Oh, all the same," he said. "We only fix the leaks that people call in."
He said that if they were to walk down the road with their gas sniffer device they'd find leaks on almost all the joints.
And that's with the natural gas. Replacing it with hydrogen is an utter, total non-starter!
Replacing the joints would not be nearly enough. Hydrogen will leak through solid steel. It's really bizarre how incredibly slippery it is. You would need to replace all the pipes.
It is also explosive in a much wider range of concentrations than any other gas. So leaks would be a lot more dangerous.
People look at the energy per interaction and say it's good, but the low density, high pressure and extreme cryogenics needed for liquification mean it's a bad fuel for most uses.
Burning hydrogen in common applications is a stupid idea.
I vaguely recall the "dash for gas" and the conversions of gas appliances from "town gas" the new Methane from the North Sea. IIRC correctly, "town gas" was "gasified coal" which produced a mix of H2 and CO, which was stored in gasometers and piped to peoples homes for heating, cooking and even lighting. Is it something to do with the mix that made it "safe", or were there frequent gas explosions back then? I really don't recall, so would appreciate some input into why H2 is more of a problem than the old "town gas".
the composition of gas made from coal (pre-naptha days) was apparently
hydrogen 50%
methane 35%
carbon monoxide 10%
ethene 5%
The gas made in more recent times was from Naptha and had no ethene in it (or other left over rubbish)
So it would seem that back then as long as you only had 50% hydrogen the distribution network was good enough to contain most of it.
The local infrastructure used to distribute town gas has mostly gone and what is left (the yellow pipes) is Methane tight but almost certainly not Hydrogen tight so leaks will be a bigger problem than before. Of course the old cast iron pipes had other issues as well but life was cheap...
With a will you could make the network hydrogen tight but its a much bigger job now than the conversion the other way - for a start every gas valve in every gas appliance connected to mains gas will have to be changed; there are rather more of them around now than back in the late 60's early 70's when 100%(ish - theres a bit of mercaptan in there for the smell) methane took over from the hydrogen/methane mix.
Going the other way, from "town gas" to "natural gas" was relatively easy - anything with a pilot could be tweaked with the turn of a screw so the burn was clean "enough"; many/most industrial boilers still used coal rather than gas as a fuel and gas fired central heating was rare - consequently thermocouple controlled gas valves and automatic ignition were largely non-existant.
Hydrogen is a very difficult gas to control. One of the problems of creating high quality vacuum chambers is that hydrogen migrates into steel, and, then out again:
"Hydrogen is the predominant residual gas at very low pressures in SS [Stainless Steel] vacuum systems,"*
As many pipes are now plastic or copper, much softer than stainless steel, it would be interesting to find out how robust they would be at supplying hydrogen gas. My own 'gas tap'** has seized up due to the normal effects of ordinary heating gas, although the one on the gas meter does still work. (One of my friends is a plumber / gas fitter. He came round and serviced the boiler, checked the pressure in the system, put it all back together again and amazingly IT STILL WORKS!)
*from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233997565_Outgassing_of_Hydrogen_from_Stainless_Steel_Vacuum_Chamber#:~:text=Hydrogen%20outgassing%20is%20a%20major,their%20inner%20surface.%20...
** JOKE ALERT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1dvAxA9ib0
Town gas was made "as-needed" and was distributed at _very_ low pressures (far lower than modern gas systems, which is why the regulators are needed)
If the gasworks ever shuts down for more than a day or so (I lived in a town where that happened thanks to a gasometer collapsing), gas stopped working shortly afterwards
During peak demand periods it wasn't uncommon for street pipe pressure to fall so low it became difficult to light anything
"Commonly referred to as “town gas” or “illuminating gas,” it was a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane, with small amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Depending on the gasification process, hydrogen concentrations ranged from 10 per cent to 50 per cent."
When the distribution network was converted to Natural gas there were many leaks - because the dry Natural gas dried out the 'wet' joints. So it is quite possible to distribute Hydrogen, CO and methane.
"Perhaps Insulate Britain had a point?"
It doesn't matter if you're heating your home with a gas boiler, hydrogen boiler, heat pump, electric bar heater, or even a raging fire in a fireplace.... if the heat is going to leak out anyway!!
Proper insulation has to be a first step!!
And all the costs associated with that.
This is the conundrum:
The majority of UK houses have mostly had the quick wins on insulation done.
We are now left with all the stuff that cannot be done either because:
The construction is inappropriate (1970-1990) timber framed rubbish
Older properties with solid walls.
Properties where the costs are just too high.
You could argue that it would be better to replace all the timber framed junk however there is a huge carbon footprint to do that. Probably far greater than continuing to heat as it is.
The other point that is missed is that for most people houses (and offices) are simply overheated anyway. Wandering around in shirtsleeves with the heating at 25 degrees in winter is a far larger issue and very easily fixed. Jumpers are cheap! Far cheaper than insulation and fuel.
"Perhaps Insulate Britain had a point?"
There are not enough trained insulation fitters to insulate all the houses in the UK nor enough people to train them. And even if you did manage it then they would all find themselves out of a job at the end.
Insulation is for new builds.
There are huge risks with trying to retrofit insulation like all the damp problems and thermal bridging that can happen with retrofitted cavity wall insulation.
"BTW I personally had the same idea as Johnson since there's already a well developed gas distribution network and hydrogen gas can be made to flow through those pipes. Gas heaters can also be modified to bun hydrogen gas relatively easily. Maybe we were both wrong but I don't think it was (or is) a bad idea."
Well, not all gas is the same, and hydrogen's a blighter - the small molecules escape far more easily than nice bulky CH4 (natural gas, methane), so the gas tightness of the existing network is nowhere near good enough. It embrittles steel, and if hot can embrittle copper, so that's a complication that's difficult to allow for in existing networks and any combustion arrangements. Its flame velocity is far higher than methane, so it needs completely different burners. It has a higher combustion temperature so NOx levels are likely to be worse than for methane. And whilst less likely to create explosive atmospheres, they could occur with a gas leak in a moderately air-tight propertly, but the because of the higher flame velocity the resulting explosion will tend to be far more destructive.
So actually there's lots of challenges to overcome - and they could be, but at a very high cost, and at the end of that you'd still have the problem of where you'd get the required volume of hydrogen.
Let's assume we had some source of low cost high volume hydrogen: The logical thing is to process that into methane for heating, into synthetic paraffin for aviation, or propane or synthetic petrol for automotive. Virtually no network or end use device changes would be needed. Unfortunately the great energy conversion has little planning or thought behind it.
The only real source of "green hydrogen" is by cracking existing natural gas down to hydrogen, for which you'd burn more methane to get the power to do it.
This is a semi camouflaged method of hiding an intention of "remain reliant upon gas indefinitely" and if this was obvious to me I assume that it was equally as obvious to everybody else who looked at it.
The only real source of "green hydrogen" is by cracking existing natural gas down to hydrogen
I believe that's termed "blue hydrogen". There's also "white hydrogen", although how realistic that is remains to be seen.
It is obvious, and that’s why what you’re describing is referred to as “Grey Hydrogen”, because it’s not really green. It’s actually very hard to find any reason to prefer grey Hydrogen to just shipping methane and reforming it locally if H2 is what’s needed.
The fossil-fuel industry prefers the term “Blue Hydrogen” for the same processes, but even they admit that in order to be environmentally acceptable, it requires carbon-capture, that most unicorny of unicorn green tech.
“Green hydrogen” is strictly hydrogen produced by a process that does not itself emit CO2. Currently, that’s electrolysis of water using renewable energy. It’s an okay backup for renewables, but it’s less capital-efficient that simply extending grid interconnections to ensure that there’s always somewhere that will take surplus wind or solar, and somewhere else that will produce it when you need it.
In theory, methane pyrolysis, where you subject pure methane gas to such a high temperature (1065°C) that it splits into H2 and solid carbon, is a carbon-neutral process (also illustrating the silent “dioxide” in environmental policy use of the word “carbon”). In practice, whether it is or not really depends on where you’re getting the methane: emissions from decomposition (e.g., landfill gas, bioreactors) are good, but drilling it out of the ground is not.
"And whilst less likely to create explosive atmospheres"
The flammable range of methane in air is 5-15%
The flammable range of hydrogen in air is 4-75% (explosive detonation between 18-60% - methane doesn't have a supersonic mode and can't detonate)
On top of that, methane needs 0.4-6.8mJ of energy to initiate a reaction (ie: a decent spark), whilst hydrogen only needs 0.019-0.1mJ (something red hot, or simply taking off a jumper)
I get that hydrogen is lighter and more likely to escape but in reality enough will hang around in a room if there's a leak for everyone in the vicinity to have a VERY bad day
Oh - and you can't use odorants like mercapton - that works because it's almost the same molecular weight as methane and as such tends to go much the same places methane does
You're talking about using huge amounts of renewable energy to create green hydrogen at scale. Then using more renewable energy to capture carbon from either industrial sources or from the atmosphere. Then using even more renewable energy to combine those to make methane and various synth fuels. There isn't going to be anything remotely low cost about the end products as the amount of energy required and energy lost due to inefficiencies will be colossal.
It's much smarter to use the renewable energy directly to power EVs and Heat Pumps and cut out all that faff.
If one ignores the carbon capture rubbish using renewables to create hydrogen is actually the one thing that has the least environmental impact.
You have an over capacity of renewables then increase hydrogen reserves at those times. It smooths at the peaks and troughs.
Storing electricity is also hugely expensive and not without significant risks. BEV is just a sticking plaster to make people think they are being eco-friendly.
The raw materials to make the batteries are produces with huge environmental damage as well as CO2 emissions.
It just happens away from where people consume the end product so like anything else is not seen as an issue.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future
https://www.mining-technology.com/marketdata/ten-largest-lithiums-mines/
https://www.talisonlithium.com/
https://www.talisonlithium.com/greenbushes-project
Much like open-cast coal mining but in many ways worse.,
Fortunately new research from Princeton has developed a method of extracting Lithium (and Sodium) from brine that is cheaper, faster, more compact and environmentally friendly than the traditional method.
They're also experimenting to see if they can perform the extraction direct from seawater
https://scitechdaily.com/new-extraction-technique-revolutionizes-lithium-production/
Ah yes - because the heat from a heat pump leaves the house faster than the heat from a boiler.
If you have leaky and/or poorly insulated buildings then you'll just need a larger heat pump, but the energy saving will actually be larger (since you would have thrown an enormous amount of gas at it).
Of course the better solution is to insulate and eliminate draughts, and then to install a smaller heat pump.
Boilers take up valuable space, usually *inside* space, which is at more of a premium than roof/alley/wall space for a heat pump.
They also make very annoying noises when running, because they are a machine... and that's what machines do.
You need insulation as the maximum heat power delivery to the interior is so much lower than with a gas boiler:
* The available head power is lower.
* The temperature of the produced heat is lower restricting the rate at which the heat is delivered into rooms.
So, you only get a house that is not bitterly cold in winter by thoroughly insulating it.
You can get heat pumps which will output north of 16kW of heat... if you're losing more than that then you have a serious issue, or a *very* large house (at which point a pair of pumps might be a reasonably option) or you should actually install windows and doors rather than just leaving gaping holes in your property.
A flow temp of 50 degrees will require non microbore pipework to your radiators, but assuming a 20 degree room temperature then you've still got a better thermal gradient radiator-room than room-external with an outside temp of negative 10 - which is not at all common across the vast majority of the UK.
If only you'd told the norwegians before they installed their heat pumps... oh wait - the engineers already resolved the icing issue (to paraphrase tony stark).... they simply run a defrost cycle.
That doesn't cool the house, but it does take some energy - hence the SCOP being the important figure, and 3.5 is readily achievable - that's around four times as efficient as a gas boiler.
When it's -really- cold outside, the air is also very dry, because all the moisture has er, freeze-dried out of it.
The most unsuitable weather for heat pumps, is when it is cold and damp, just a smidge above freezing outside.
In other words, exactly the sort of weather that the UK has very often but US, Europe and Scandinavia not so much.
Your heat pump will run for a few minutes, ice-up, and have to run backwards for a few minutes to de-ice itself. When that de-ice ratio reaches 50% then it is just sitting there using power but doing nothing useful to heat your home.
Oh dear - someone clearly forgot about negative temperatures.
Air has a heat capacity of about 700J/kg/K - so at a mere 273 kelvin there is 191kJ of heat per kg of air (about 820 litres) [yes, I know it doesn't extrapolate all the way to absolute zero - it goes far enough that it doesn't matter for illustration]
They can produce 16kW if that's their sizing... in the same way that a mini can't put out 1000HP, but that doesn't mean that no car can.
Heat pump ratings are usually their output - the issue is that gas boilers are generally massively oversized - and therefore turn on and off repeatedly, so spend alot of their time in their least efficient phases (or just wasting heat up the flue as they cool).
36kW output is great if you feel the need to heat a house inside ten minutes... but that's not actually what's needed, you want a slow and steady flow of heat into the house, so that the heat source can operate continuously at a low output.
High output gas boilers are almost (except in very large houses) always combis that need the heat output for instant hot water at the tap. 16kW is plenty to heat a 3-bedroom home.
How to get hot water out of the tap becomes an issue though. The obvious solution is tanks, but many/most flats have ripped them out for combis and used the space for other things in the meantime. Not everyone is going to have a spare closet to hide a hot water tank in.
This is very much the elephant in the room, or one of several...
A HP needs a *lot* more plant space than a combi which can usually be hidden inside a kitchen wall cupboard and that's all the space it takes up. The trend nowadays by the mass builders being to reduce floor area and plot area as much as conceivable. Good luck finding space to retrofit all the gubbins you need.
And the tank will need to be bigger than it used to be because you're not storing water at 70+ degrees like with a gas boiler or immersion heater. With a HP you want to just be skimming the safe Legionella limit of about 60' so as not to drive the COP down any further. Bigger again because back in the day when we had hot water cylinders as the primary source of hot water you didn't have every family member taking a shower every day (we were smelly buggers but no one seemed to mind).
And lastly, if and when we actually get to the point of energy efficient homes in terms of space heating, the space heating component of demand becomes tiny and the water heating component dominates. Which is the mode HP's are *least* efficient in. At that point you might as well just go back to an immersion heater (but you still need the fuck off huge tank).
"You need insulation as the maximum heat power delivery to the interior is so much lower than with a gas boiler:"
So your argument is that since it's better to have a boiler than a heat pump if the house isn't well insulated, then it's better to keep your boiler and not bother with better insulation??
Better insulation is anyway needed even if you have a boiler, otherwise you're using twice the amount of gas (at twice the cost!!) to keep the house warm. And once the house is well insulated, a heat pump is better than a boiler. Both are needed rather than none.
(also, incidentally, in many places where it's humid, a dehumidifier can work as well as a heater)
"(also, incidentally, in many places where it's humid, a dehumidifier can work as well as a heater)"
I'd suggest looking at heat recovery and ventilation units. I've 3 in-wall units. Way cheaper to run then the two dehumidifiers I used to use and way more effective.
I did look at the whole house solutions but they were difficult to retrofit and would have cost significantly more to fit (pipes to a large number of rooms).
The key is to significantly reduce your heating input requirements by insulation, draft proofing and effective ventilation.
That will reduce the load on the boiler meaning it will last a lot longer, cost way less to run and when it finally dies years later there might be a better heating solution available.
I've only turned the heating on for two hours so far this autumn...
Lovely. I take it that your ok with telling the people running the UK's conservation areas that their existing rules (causing most of the problem as that's where the older houses are) are being torn up and we no longer need to keep to heritage materials etc and can do what we want to insulate, and we can put a heat pump on the external walls then? If I insulated my house by putting in external wall insulation, knocking my chimney down and putting in a heat pump on an external wall then at the moment then the council will take me to court and force me to remove the insulation, reinstate the chimney and remove the external heat pump. If I do none of these things and instead burn [smokeless] coal through the chimney i'm forced to retain and maintain then it costs roughly half of the gas heating cost. Guess what we tend to do? Answers on a postcard.
Also; Electricity costs 27 pence per kWh. Gas costs 7 pence per kWh.
Even if electric heating via heat pump is 3 times more energy efficient then 7p*3=21p, and electricity is currently 27p per kWh, so a heat pump still has a run cost of being a third more expensive, after you get saddled with a huge bill for buying and installing it.
This [and colder houses after installing them] is why heat pumps have all the popularity of a migraine.
When most of the electricity generation comes from gas you are never going to make electricity delivered to the house cheaper than gas burned in the home.
Yes - we need to make changes to conservation areas in order to conserve the planet.
There are plenty of ways to make adjustments which you haven't mentioned, but the objection to having a car parked in front of the house has generally been overruled - having a heat pump around is far less of an obtrusive change to an area.
"even if" you car got 10mpg.... Getting a scop in excess of three shouldn't be aspirational, that would be the bare minimum you should be aiming for. Over 4 is good, 3.5 should be standard.
Taking your values of 7p and 27p, and assuming (optimistically) a 90% efficient boiler a SCOP of 3.5 would be about the breakeven point in terms of opex - You also omit the (small) saving from not having a gas standing charge.
Of course not everything has to be a financial "investment"... What's the ROI on that new kitchen?
There are plenty of ways to make adjustments which you haven't mentioned, but the objection to having a car parked in front of the house has generally been overruled - having a heat pump around is far less of an obtrusive change to an area.
Yes. Now we've just got double yellow lines down the road in front of the house "to keep the road clear".
Of course not everything has to be a financial "investment"
My friend, just imagine for a moment that you are requiring people to spend half the average uk salary to buy a new bit of equipment to continue to obtain heating.
Most people are not financially privileged enough to have this sort of money lying around. This means you are going to require people to go into debt to buy them. Any existing subsidies will be axed as soon as they move from being a toy for the upper class to something that the plebs are required to have.
The "ROI" is going to have a pretty major impact on the lives of the people involved such as pushing that family into poverty.
"The "ROI" is going to have a pretty major impact on the lives of the people involved such as pushing that family into poverty."
I just read an article on the BBC News site bemoaning the same points. Yes, the same BBC so many accuse of being "green cultists" and similar :-)
Ah yes - the conservation area friendly bright yellow paint.
See - the area is already changing... and will continue to do so. An unobtrusively located ASHP isn't going to cause the ground to swallow up the area in disgust.
Ah yes - the "but I can't afford something that will save me money"
I am well aware of vimes' boots. That's why grants for such things exist - because it's actually a societal benefit having them installed. As more are installed the price then comes down, and more people are trained in how to install them so the availability and price comes down further. For some reason our electrical consumption attracts ~12% "green levy" compared with ~3.4% for our gas consumption - despite about 40% of our electricity coming from renewable sources, and some from nuclear.
Imagine requiring people to spend much of their income of device to allow them to continue travelling...
The starting position should have been (ten years ago) to ban gas in new builds... Then to look at replacing failing "old" boilers, then more modern boilers as they age and fail... There simply isn't the capacity, the will, or the benefit to suggest that all boilers should be immediately ripped out and replaced with heat pumps.
I am very well aware that there will be people who aren't in a position to install a heat pump at the moment... many of those people should, at the time their existing boiler fails, have the equipment installed by their landlord (some proportion of which will be the council), rather than out of their own pocket.
In the same way in the early days of cars, telephones, televisions, mobile phones, computers.... any of the things you now think of as ubiquitous parts of society - they weren't immediately accessible to everyone. Why do you insist that heat pumps buck that trend?
That's the Nirvana Fallacy in action - you seem to be saying heat pumps aren't perfect so we have to have to replace gas with H2.
Also Strawman because no on asks you to knock down the chimney because you aren't using it
The conservation rules are created by law and can be modified by law. to permit heatpumps etc
That's the Nirvana Fallacy in action - you seem to be saying heat pumps aren't perfect so we have to have to replace gas with H2.
Nope, i'm saying heat pumps are an economic insanity which is going to enrage anybody saddled with one, and replacing methane with hydrogen is a stupid idea, which to be fair the article points out that even the politicians have realised.
Also Strawman because no on asks you to knock down the chimney because you aren't using it
. . .
Living in a conservation area I am forbidden from knocking down the chimney. I'm required to preserve it very exactingly as it is using the original materials and methods etc. This means that it is comprised from [water permeable low temperature fired clay] bricks. These get wet when it rains, which wasn't considered a problem by the original architect or builders because they are then dried out by hot air being forced through the chimney. What do you suppose happens if you sealed the top and bottom of the chimney?
Humidity, damp, mould, and other problems is one answer. Google "hygroscopic salts chimney" for another. Basically, if you seal a chimney in a heritage building then the brickwork deteriorates quickly and causes a wide variety of headaches and you then have to have to repair very exactingly using the original materials and methods. People trained to work at height plus putting in scaffolding etc ain't cheap.
Therefore, the two cheapest solutions are either to leave a hole in your house and keep burning the central heating to shove air through (it to avoid the brickwork deteriorating and having to do building work) or you burn things in the fireplace and the warm exhaust dries the brickwork out and expels any moisture out of the [water permeable low temperature fired clay] bricks. And you have lower heating costs because coal is cheaper than gas.
The conservation rules are created by law and can be modified by law. to permit heatpumps etc
Then would you permit me to make the suggestion that rules with perverse incentives and outright requirements to do things we don't want people to do should be modified forthwith?
"Nope, i'm saying heat pumps are an economic insanity"
Well then you're spouting more crap than the back end of a bull with diarrhoea.
"outright requirements to do things we don't want people to do should be modified forthwith"
You mean like lying about how fossil fuels are brilliant and cheap and have no drawbacks, but electrons are the work of the devil?
Or do you mean that we should allow people to drive at 90mph through town as school ends because "they want to"?
Perverse incentives exist - and do need to be mitigated. For instance there is no way coal should ever be cheaper than gas, and gas prices shouldn't be subsidised by clean energy generators.
There should be an outright ban on hooking up new builds to gas - because better solutions exist - both individually and societally. But no - we can't do that because someone's ancient house might need a coat of sealant on the old chimney.
> need a coat of sealant
Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.
That's why nobody bothers. Even if you get a grant to install insulation it's going to cost you time and money, in a cost of living crisis and with todays time poor society most dont have the time to sit at home for a few days while someone installs the stuff.
They may be able to work from home, but instead of the cat jumping in front of the webcam you now have the builders bum in the background :D
DIY? Well maybe, but these days you are soon to be legally unable to change a light bulb without getting it signed off or installed by a sparky. It wont be long before putting a ladder up into the attic to install new insulation will also be something that only naughty people do as, you havnt been trained to use a ladder, and dont have the PPE.
>> need a coat of sealant
> Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.
Several grand for a coat of sealant? Look I've got this bridge to sell you.
Permissions is just something that can be changed... it's not actually a technical objection.
There are very good reasons why various bits of work (gas and electric) are required to be carried out or checked by a qualified person. And yes they can just be checked - wired up a loft conversion myself, and got it signed off. A competent and interested DIYer is likely to do just as good a job as a professional, but we aren't necessarily up to date with the latest regulations, nor do we have the tools to run all the tests which ensure our safety.
"your ok with telling the people running the UK's conservation areas that their existing rules (causing most of the problem as that's where the older houses are) are being torn up and we no longer need to keep to heritage materials etc "
It's perfectly possible to have a properly-insulated house with heritage materials, although of course it can be more tricky / expensive to retrofit. What is really the question is - what qualifies as 'heritage'? For me it makes no sense to keep large swathes of badly-built / insulated old buildings just because they're old. If the reason is to keep a certain aesthetic, then the rules could be altered to allow certain types of insulation / heat pumps as long as they conformed to such-and-such rules, rather than ban them outright. If there are true heritage sites (ie buildings of historic importance or very specific architectural / cultural importance) then sure, keep more restricted rules, but that should apply to one building in 1000 / 10,000 not in 10.
So I'm not telling them to tear up their rules, just update their policies a bit. And also if heritage is such an issue, get some extra grants to deal with insulating houses in a way that doesn't ruin their aesthetic.
"That valuable space is a wall-hung box, usually around 80 x 40 x 20.
Now look at all the larger radiators that have to be put in for heat pumps. They also need some sort of intermediate buffer tank.
Heat pumps are seen as some sort of magical solution however they are not.
It is not exactly environmentally friendly to rip out all the heating pipework and radiators to replace then with larger bores & panels.
So the size of the radiators is your biggest concern?
Well why did you put stupidly small ones in to start with?
The wall is already occupied with a rad, so you aren't losing more space.
Replacing microbore is a pain, but even 15mm pipe will carry just under 3kW at a dt of 5.
It needs to be done, microbore must be one of Crowley's inventions (Good Omens).
"Heat pumps are seen as some sort of magical solution however they are not."
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Those of us who understand them know that they are an excellent part of the solution - those who don't believe we think they're magic.
There are vanishingly few scenarios in which either EVs or heat pumps are not actually a substantial benefit.
Air travel and container ships are the main ones for EVs at the moment, with even road freight moving closer to electrification (either with new models or by retrofitting existing trucks).
Heat pumps won't do much for industrial processes requiring very high temperatures, but for anything "low grade" heat (like domestic heating/hot water) it's as close as we're likely to get to free energy.
The heating capacity of heat pumps isn't sufficient for many poorly insulated 19th and early 20th century British homes. You'd need additional electrical resistance heating or supplemental natural gas heating to compensate.
If that's the case, how come my late Victorian (1896) house is perfectly comfortable with a heat pump?
Also, heat pumps take up valuable space and make continuous irritating low frequency noises.
Nope, no irritating noises (and it wouldn't be continuous anyway). A properly installed heat pump should be on anti-vibration feet. Yes, if you're standing next to it, it makes fan noise when working, but you don't have the windows open when you need heating so don't hear it in the house.
IMHO only new, highly insulated homes should have heat pumps. For older homes we should just upgrade the electrical network and use resistance heating. New nuclear plants and a huge investment in the power distribution network should therefore be top priority.
Agreed on the grid needing upgrading, but resistance heating gives 1 kW of heating per 1 kW of electricity, a heat pump will give 2-3 kW heat per kW of electricity under the worst conditions likely in the UK. Even if your house leaks like a sieve you'll be warmer with a heat pump. "Fabric first" is a daft idea.
BTW I personally had the same idea as Johnson since there's already a well developed gas distribution network and hydrogen gas can be made to flow through those pipes. Gas heaters can also be modified to bun hydrogen gas relatively easily. Maybe we were both wrong but I don't think it was (or is) a bad idea.
It's a bloody awful idea when you get into the details. Johnson's qualified in bullshitting with a minor in Classics, and doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground about anything technical.
It was a clear example of magical thinking to look good while kicking the can down the road. All the science says that hydrogen is useless for anything but transforming at the point of use. Add to this the enormous problem of how do you produce all that hydrogen. This is why ammonia is being touted both as the way to transport hydrogen over distance, and even as a fuel source: apparently Toyota has an ammonia engine ready for cars.
Air-sourced heat pumps are a bad idea for anywhere that gets cold and doesn't have oodles of cheap energy. Yields decline quickly as the temperature drop because water vapour in the air is the main source of energy for pumps. Ground-sourced heat pumps are a much better option for northern Europe, but only then where plots are large enough. Where possible this can be combined with solarthermal heating and solarelectric for power. This could make a lot more residential properties self-sufficient. But it's pretty useless for cities.
I'm still hoping that we'll learn from nature and develop closed-loop e-fuel systems for individual or district use. These will use the abundant energy in the summer to produce hydrocarbons that can be used in the winter. Any excess can be sold off, but it has to be at market prices. But I'm open to alternatives that follow the same principle: make hay while the sun shines.
Ground-sourced heat pumps are a much better option for northern Europe
At the risk of bringing more facts into the discussion, Norway has the most heat pumps per capita in Europe and more than 90% of them are air source.
The linked paper has a useful discussion of heat pump types and economics. If anybody cares about such things, rather than merely wanting to grind their axe on the nearest hobby horse, have a read.
Thanks for the link: Norway has, of course, very cheap electricity compared to other countries… Also, the ground-sourcing (GSHP) has to be deeper: 2m is recommended here, which makes a big difference. It's then largely a matter of digging a big hole in the ground and laying the pipes; the paper goes into detail about more sophisticated and expensive pumps. But these only make sense on a street/district level, which may be less relevant in Norway due to the lower population density.
From the conclusion: GSHP technology requires a high initial investment, while it can be more economical in the long term…
>The linked paper:
“ Ground source heat pumps are more suitable than air source heat pumps due to maintaining a higher coefficient of performance during cold periods.”
Nice to a see a report support the blindingly obvious. It’s one of the reasons when the Conservatives came up with their air source heat pump imitative, I laughed derisively at it. Not saying air source heat pumps don’t work, but given people want the heating on when it is sub 12C outside and definitely when it is sub 6C, air sourced heat pumps were always going to struggle; just like (air sourced) heat pump tumble driers (located in the largely unseated utility room) are totally incapable of actually drying washing.
As the temperature drops, the pump has to work harder to extract energy from the source. This drives down efficiency and increases electricity use approaching 1:1, from 3-4:1. At which point it would be better just using electric heating directly. As electricity prices vary widely between countries, it's impossible to say any particular system makes financial sense. However, from a neutral perspective, it's reasonable to sugges that any system that uses power from the grid isn't helping to reduce aggregate demand.
At which point it would be better just using electric heating directly. As electricity prices vary widely between countries, it's impossible to say any particular system makes financial sense.
Resistive heating is also 'un-green'.
Once upon a time, the UK had the opposite problem to today. So too much energy in the evenings. So 'Economy7' was born to created demand/load during off-peak hours. Houses were fitted with cheap energy storage systems like storage heaters and hot water tanks, and it was all controlled by a simple radio teleswitch to turn those on at night.
But these are currently considered 'not energy efficient' and thus don't attract the same subsidies and bungs as far more expensive 'solutions' like heat pumps. Especially they're also usually far cheaper to service and maintain. Replacement heating element for a hot water tank is <£50. So there are already a bunch of 'Net Zero Ready' homes, but they're usually charged a premium rather than a discount. Plus in our infinite wisdom, the extremely simple radio signal that controls the meter is due to be turned off soon. And we've 'invested' billions in 'smart meters' that can't do the same thing.
Of course having a distributed energy storage solution that's cheap to install in UK housing stock is far less profitable than installing battery farms. There are also challenges, as with electrifying transportation and forcing heat pumps. A lot of properties don't have space for those, or hot water tanks. But it's something home owners might want to consider, especially if they've been suckered into solar. Run the energy from that into hot water heating and storage, and it's 'free' heat. Installation is pretty simple because most resistive heating elements don't care if they're being fed AC or DC, and thermostats and mixer valves are cheap & simple. Downside is insolation is lower during winter. There's also other dubious greenwashing around this kind of solution, ie hot water tanks may not be efficient because they 'waste heat', but if that heat is leaking into a home, it's not wasted.
"Resistive heating is also 'un-green'."
Resistive heating is 100% efficient, which is substantially better than gas, but *way* worse than a heat pump.
"Plus in our infinite wisdom, the extremely simple radio signal that controls the meter is due to be turned off soon. And we've 'invested' billions in 'smart meters' that can't do the same thing."
Except that what we've done is move the logic. My storage heaters were never controlled by a radio signal, only by the clock on the meters - what I have now is a simple timer.
Turning on/off immersion heaters across the whole country at the same time is daft anyway.
The local control, which is actually better now that we have smart meters and other associated options, is an upgrade - not the downgrade you consider it to be.
If heat is "wasted" into a home *in winter* then it isn't wasted... it certainly is in summer, and might actually increase the cost of cooling (whether active AC or just fan based).
Distributed storage is, of course, less profitable than concentrated storage - that's why we don't see hundreds of tiny coal power plants in people's sheds - the economies of scale are obvious.
However home storage is still a valuable technology, with or without solar.
Resistive heating is 100% efficient, which is substantially better than gas, but *way* worse than a heat pump.
Sure, but that's greenwashing for you. In perfect conditions, then a heat pump might be more efficient for the duration of those conditions. Which may not be very often. Then there's the economic effciency, ie installation cost and ongoing maintenance. Plus the need for alternative heating/cooling for when you want hot water or a warm home and the weather isn't co-operating. But that's Green thinking for you. We're told we're getting more 'extreme' weather, yet we're told we have to invest billions in stuff that's vulnerable to weather conditions. So if people want heat, they'll need to invest in resistive heating in addition to heat pumps. And then hope the windmills are turning when they need electricity.
Except that what we've done is move the logic. My storage heaters were never controlled by a radio signal, only by the clock on the meters - what I have now is a simple timer.Turning on/off immersion heaters across the whole country at the same time is daft anyway.
More like removed the logic. E7 is/was very simple because there's a seperate circuit for the loads. Switch goes <clunk> and power flows to the heaters. New logic is to force everyone to install 'smart' meters that simply can't do this. Sure, there's promises of demand management and being able to turn on & off devices, but that doesn't exist with most of the installed meters. Plus for that to work anyway, everyone would need to replace appliances with 'smart' ones that can talk to the meters. An alternative might be 'smart' sockets, but again a lot of additional costs involved.
And it wasn't daft when our energy system was more centralised. Now, it's increasingly fragmented, decentralised and unstable, then like much of our energy policy it makes less sense. So when electricity supply exceeds demand, we 'solve' this problem by throwing millions at wind farmers. That subsidy gets added to everyone's electricity bills. As an alternative, users could get cheaper, free or even paid to sink that surplus.
If only there was a way to do that remotely.. Which there has been since E7 was developed. Somehow, radios and mobiles can find me and spam me. If only the technology existed that could communicate to a fixed location and turn on a few kW of load. Of course that tech has existed for decades, would benefit consumers but not the subsidy sucking scumbags that have captured our energy market. Or course done badly, it'd have the potential to make our grid even less stable.. But then that's a risk with assuming demand can be managed via 'smart' meters anyway.
The local control, which is actually better now that we have smart meters and other associated options, is an upgrade - not the downgrade you consider it to be
Nope, it's very much a downgrade because it gives consumers no control. They meters aren't at all 'smart' and offer consumers no real benefit, except for ones too lazy to go look at their dumb meter. Turn appliances on, you use more electricity! Who knew? They may provide some benefit to energy suppliers, ie the ability to create exciting new tariffs that often end up costing consumers more, but they offer users no control.
greenwashing is what you're doing to gas.
The weather is *always* good enough for a heat pump - you just have some grudge against the idea of preserving the planet in a state where we can carry on living.
This concept that heat pumps don't work when it's cold is only slightly less intelligent than flat earth...
Local control is an upgrade - because it *is* consumer control. The meters aren't what gives the control, but they allow for dynamic pricing - and that encourages consumer control (whether individual or using other services).
EVs, or their chargers, can time their usage, you can set the timer on your immersion heater, my storage heater is on a timer.
There are some "electron retailer" controlled devices - the Ohme EV chargers can be controlled by Octopus - and *all* the electricity you use whilst that happens is charged at off peak - that's far better than a radio clock signal - for both the consumer and the electricity retailer. You just set how much electricity you want by when, and it happens.
There are also other systems with external control - Mixergy tanks will stop heating at times of peak grid load, they'll still heat if they *need* to, but they'll delay if they can.
For all the "end up costing consumers more" bollocks you spout I pay far below the 27p you claim for electricity - it's been 9.5p over the last year. Gas over a similar timescale (309 days) has cost me 10.9p. Interestingly I've used similar amounts of each this year so far (8.3kWh electricity, 7.4kWh for gas) but I expect gas to overtake electricity as the year finishes off with colder weather, and since the price has recently dropped, and I expect higher usage, the overall cost of gas will drop somewhat. However since the price of electricity has also recently dropped, and the value of exported electricity has increased - that value is unlikely to rise much, despite the lower insolation as the year ends.
Yes - Vimes Boots - I appreciate that I was able to put some more environmentally friendly technologies in place last year, and I expect to continue doing that (when my current boiler fails for instance).
As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's my parents house had storage heating and it was controlled by a time-switch.
Smart meters handle economy 7 and 10 just fine. They are SMART meters, they just need to support multiple rates.
Nobody uses the "radio signal", unless its a very old system. They use a time switch or the smart meter. All the meter does is log how much leccy is used overnight separately to the daytime use. Thats it. Two readings. Smart meters thus support storage heaters that switch on due to a timer, anything that draws power overnight is counted as the reduced rate.
ITS HOW PEOPLE CHARGE EV's AT HOME TOO!!!
Smart meters handle economy 7 and 10 just fine. They are SMART meters, they just need to support multiple rates.
Nope, they are dumb meters. One of my properties has E7, is served by Scottish Power and when they keep offering to fit a 'smart' meter, tell me they can't do that because it's E7. Or I could, if I wanted to waste money rewiring the property.
Nobody uses the "radio signal", unless its a very old system. They use a time switch or the smart meter. All the meter does is log how much leccy is used overnight separately to the daytime use. Thats it. Two readings. Smart meters thus support storage heaters that switch on due to a timer, anything that draws power overnight is counted as the reduced rate.
You're rather missing the point. E7 uses dedicated spurs from the supply to the heaters, so there's no power to those spurs unless switched on by the remote control signal. The same principle could be used to sink power, if there's a surplus and there's a risk of the grid becoming unstable. Again, instead of paying millions, if not billions in 'constraint' payments to suppliers when there's no demand for their service, consumers could benefit from lower cost energy.
Sure, I could look at installing a time switch and having the distribution panel rewired so the E7 circuits instead, but that would cost me and offer no benefits for 'demand management' that the allegedly 'smart meters' are supposed to offer. A truly smart meter could look at a rates feed, ideally from multiple suppliers and just let me pick to charge the heaters with the lowest rate on offer. But because that would benefit consumers, supplies won't offer that, even though the technology is pretty straight forward
ITS HOW PEOPLE CHARGE EV's AT HOME TOO!!!
You don't say. Except new home installations are now meant to have a seperate feed, and an EV meter. The useless shower of shite pushing EVs finally twigged that EV's will both increase electricity demand, and eliminate fuel duty. So now there's a domestic 'fuel pump' that can be charged an EV tariff, and potentially be used for demand management. So if EV adoption increases, 'peak rate' will continue shifting into the evenings when both wind and solar typically generate less power.. And evenings of course will also be the time when people need heat. Plus there are other genius ideas like having the EV meters able to switch from suck to blow, and you get up in the morning ready to go to work and find Tesla's sold all your battery power.
"You're rather missing the point. E7 uses dedicated spurs from the supply to the heaters, so there's no power to those spurs unless switched on by the remote control signal. "
I've only ever come across that on an E10 system, not E7 - and it doesn't need a rewire anyway - just a contactor switched by a timer.
"So if EV adoption increases, 'peak rate' will continue shifting into the evenings when both wind and solar typically generate less power.. "
No - the EVs will always charge at off peak. An average UK vehicle needs about 5kWh a day, that's peanuts, it really is. You can do that in less than an hour with a normal home charger, so there is no way in hell you'd do it during the evening peak. You plug in when you get home and then the car gets charged in time for the morning - but *not* at peak rate or time.
Resistive heating is also 'un-green'. I never said that. I pointed out that returns from heat pumps diminish as temperature falls until they have the same efficiency as using the electricity directly.
Whether it makes financial sense depends upon the price of electricity in comparison with other energy sources. Whether it makes environmental sense depends on how the energy is sourced and burning fuel to create electricity to heat places is one of the reasons why electric heating is usually more expensive than the alternatives.
But my argument, derived from Amory Lovins, is that as soon as you're using power from the grid, you're contributing to aggregate demand for generative capacity, which has a concealed cost in building and maintaining capacity, and the cost is huge. This is especially important in the winter when, as efficiency drops due to lower temperatures, and demand spikes for the same reason, more and more heat pumps need energy from the grid once local storage has been exhausted. This is why the environmental argument for efficiency is also the best economic one: the cheapest electricity is the stuff you don't produce, to quote Lovins.
Getting a heat pump down to 1:1 would be a once in a "long time" event... and since even at that point you're no worse off than resistive heating...there is no benefit to relying on resistive heating.
Not that I won't have other sources of heat available... I have a gas boiler, I also have a storage heater in one room, as well as fan heaters stored in cupboards and an IR panel heater.
When I replace the gas boiler I expect that I shall only replace* the gas boiler with a heat pump - I don't expect the other heat sources to disappear.
* I'll need a hot water solution, since combi boilers were all the rage when I installed my boiler twenty years ago.
so adequacy at +7°C, which is the sort of number I've just seen quoted for a 10kW unit, is going to be stonking inadquacy below zeo.
Not in my experience(*). We've had our heat pump for 2 winters and have got daily data for it(**). The COP can be as high as 4 on not very cold days (>5 °C external temperature). It falls to 2.8-3 around 2-3 °C depending on humidity. High humidity means we have regular defrost cycles(***) reducing the COP. Below freezing the COP doesn't fall any lower because there's far less need for defrost, although with the caveat that we've not seen daytime temperatures below -5 °C. (This is in Cambridge, I have no idea what performance would be like in the Scottish Highlands.)
(*) "Oh god, the bastard is using facts again!"
(**) My wife's an environmental consultant, specialising in building energy efficiency, so everything energy related in the house is monitored, evaluated, plotted and statistically analysed. Fortunately she doesn't do it for my beer consumption.
(***) Not done by resistance heating, but by using some of the heat in the system to melt the ice and then running the fans backwards to blow the frost off. We get a mini ice storm for 30 seconds every couple of hours.
What a load of Bovine Excrement. Resistance heating is horribly inefficient.
I replaced my Gas Boiler with a heat pump in 2021. At the same time, I upgraded four rads and did other work to make my home a 'C' rating on the HPC scale. Not bad for a house built in 1930.
My running costs are around 30% of the old Gas System.
>> "What a load of Bovine Excrement. Resistance heating is horribly inefficient."
It's 100% efficient, which isn't great - but it's still better than gas.
The down side is that a decent proportion of that electricity probably comes from gas (at ~50% efficiency).
Using microwaves to heat water is less efficient than just using resistance heating. It adds unnecessary complexity, and will be less reliable than just using a hot element to heat water. In short, it's a clever idea, but not a very good one. Using microwaves to heat food can be more efficient, because the heat goes straight into the food and you waste less of the heat warming up your kitchen. You don't lose the waste heat in a well insulated immersion heater setup.
Heat pumps are only the solution if you radically improve the heat efficiency of our homes.
For many of the existing homes, even ones built as recently as the turn of the century, this cannot be done to a suitable standard at a reasonable cost.
Generating more than about 10kW from an air-source heat pump is difficult and increasingly costly the more power you need (and occupy a large amount of space, and use quite a lot of electricity), and as most gas boilers put out 20-30kW of heat, even the largest common heat pump rated at 16kW will leave a larger house cold.
I know that the building industry is relishing knocking down all the inefficient properties, and replacing them with hermetically sealed shoeboxes with lifetimes of 25 years or less for us all to live in, but that is just not going to happen in the timespan we're talking about.
That does actually raise an interesting point. Will it affect the "heat island" effect of towns and cities? Will the surrounding micro-climate be colder in the winter and all those 1000's, nay 10's of 1000's of heat pumps sucking the miniscule heat from the air make out cities even colder? And what about the hot summers (LOL, yeah, even in the UK), when everyone realises heat pumps work backwards as air conditioning to pump the heat out of the house, will we see our city's summer temperatures increase?
Anyone know and care to comment? Have there even been studies looking to the effect of so many air sourced heat pumps in such close proximity?
No - heat pumps aren't going to make a city colder. The heat that you 'suck' out of the air returns to the air through losses through the walls/windows/roofs. If it didn't the house would progressively get hotter and hotter until it melted into a puddle of slag. In fact a heat pump will warm it's surroundings slightly from the pumps etc, which is why heat pumps are more efficient at heating than they are at cooling.
I do wonder how the push for heat pumps is going to interact with the incredible number of houses you Brits have which can't be changed because they're designated as historical.
I guess you're going to find out how they dressed when the houses were built; i.e. put on another sweater, if you can afford it.
If not, well how much will the environmental lords care about another peasant who died of hypothermia?
Unless those houses were being rented out by landlords, who then came afoul of the rule requiring rental properties to have a better energy efficiency than grade E for any new tenants.
Most buildings in a heritage area are pretty bad because of being in a conservation area; many conservation areas will push back against such radical concepts as double glazing, preferring the look of the original single glazing. (although they can't actually stop you from leaving the external single glazing and then installing double glazing behind it as secondary glazing because that's not an external change and so is permitted development...)
"(although they can't actually stop you from leaving the external single glazing and then installing double glazing behind it as secondary glazing because that's not an external change and so is permitted development...)"
That may not be true. It depends on the grade of listing which may preclude certain internal modifications and/or any modifications visible from outside. And let;s not even go near the vagaries of local planning consent and the phrase "in keeping with the local area/surroundings"!. For USAians, think, local neighbourhood associations and the weird demands they come up with such as the colour of the fence or the length of grass allowed before you have to go mow it etc :-)
You would think that you could do something clever with the location of the fan - if the loft hasn't been converted, then you could pump heat from up there to the living space of the building.
If the loft has been converted, then you might be able to do something with the existing historical flues as part of the pre-20C fireplace network. Probably wouldn't be cheap but surely all the unit needs is access to external air rather than actually being physically outside on display to the world?
If the loft has been converted, then you might be able to do something with the existing historical flues as part of the pre-20C fireplace network. Probably wouldn't be cheap but surely all the unit needs is access to external air rather than actually being physically outside on display to the world?
Yes - you can duct the air supply to a heat pump - though that's normally done for dedicated hot water heat pumps, which need to move substantially less air.
A chimney would be rather restrictive for a heat pump pumping out a handful of kW of heat.
Some councils seem to be quite forward about helping people improve their energy use eg
https://www.greatercambridgeplanning.org/design-heritage-and-environment/historic-environment/making-historic-homes-more-energy-efficient/
But this all seems to be a case of trying to make a big noise over the fewer special cases than addressing the issue with majority of housing stock which is not in conservation areas nor listed
And anyone wanting to have a heating of the blood need only look for Hampstead Garden Suburb's restrictions in their search engine of choice.
(Additional heating will come from discovering that in certain uber wealthy streets/sections the restrictions don't seem to apply)
To give you an idea of how much insulation is required (without the maths), my walls are 60cm thick brick and stone, the roof is 60cms thick concrete and insulation, the building is half underground and I still need a fire in the winter.
The average 1900 terraced house in London with its 9" brick walls wont stand a chance with a heat pump. And IMHO hydrogen is a non starter.
Better get used to one room living and jumpers.
The 'won't stand a chance' argument is just wrong. A kW of heat is a kW of heat. Once it gets into the house it really doesn't care where it came from. If a house is poorly insulated you need to add more kW of heat, so a bigger gas boiler or supplementary fires etc. But if you put the same number of kWs in through a heat pump the house is just as warm. That's not to say there aren't practical considerations, e.g. sizing of radiators, pipework etc., or economic constraints on capital and energy costs. But basic thermodynamics says - it's the same.
Wrong, A 10 kW heat pump puts out the same heat as a 30 kW gas boiler. Equally you are falling in to the age old trope of 'it's not perfect so we can't deo anything'. no doubt 100 years ago you would have complained about 'how can we possibly retrofit gas heating to houses that have managed perfectly well with an open coal fire' . things change, engineering evolves, society adapts, and often a lot faster than people expect.
"The project was started under Theresa May..." - so why is this Johnson's mad plan?
The enthusiastic leap to heat pumps doesn't look to be any more sensible - the latest government report suggests that we'll need tens of billions per year of subsidies to make people switch. In which case, it's clearly not "cheaper" nor particularly efficient.
If the National Infrastructure Commision's report is to be believed, the current plan to switch to heat pumps will add around £1500 per year to our tax/bills. Why is it we only call the previous attempts at solving this "mad", when the new plans are no less insane? It's not really journalism to single out disgraced former PMs (we've got plenty of them) for criticism when current policy is so shoddy.
It's easy to blame BoJo, he's really not well liked. A lot of people hate him with a passion.
OTOH, it was Theresa May who signed us up for legal Net Zero commitments, with little scrutiny. That's going to be one eye-wateringly massive bill that someone is going to have to pick up. Might even top the lockdowns / Furlough as one of the worst single decisions a government has ever made in the history of everything.
Still, the worst thing she ever did was walk through a corn field (oh, and impoverish the whole country for a couple of generations, unless we reverse it)
Who do you think is paying for all those wind turbines and solar farms (the subsidies)? And why do you think our energy bills have gone up so much, whereas countries which haven't "invested" in these technologies haven't gone up in the same way. So, they are actually spending the money to implement it already.
We're already paying, but it's small fish compared to what is coming to meet Net Zero.
Please show your working on this. It's just an arbitrary target. What difference would it make it we get there in 2070 or 2080 instead of 2050? What technologies will be available by then?
I've seen some modelling on this, and "the bill" is actually a small percentage difference in economic growth.
"I've seen some modelling on this, and "the bill" is actually a small percentage difference in economic growth."
When economic growth is already at very low percentages, that's not reassuring!
(I take it, of course, that you meant "a small percentage difference of economic growth" eg 2% of 0.5%, not 2.5% compared to 0.5% :-))
> Please show your working on this....
> I've seen some modelling on this...
You need to do better than that, you need to show the modelling.
Because sea level rises are inevitable if we don't clean up our act, and fast.
Weather patterns are already changing, which will have significant impacts around the world.
Precisely. Our house is an old terrace. Very common in London. We had a loft extension 20 odd years ago with improved roof insulation as part of the requirements.We've had external insulation added to the front and back walls from the coffers of a poorly organised subsidy scheme, because, knowing it was going to be a fiasco I got my application in within minutes of the scheme opening. And it was still difficult to get it arranged btw.
But none-the-less the house is not all that energy efficient. Our double glazing is almost 30 years old now. There are all sorts of small gaps and draughts in the house. The front door, though safely within a double glazed porch area and having a draught excluder on the bottom and foam strips on the frame fits where it wants to.
Ours is probably a reasonably heat efficient home compared to many around, but it's still no where near good enough
Already part of the government's renewable gas ambitions, with some treated for injection to the gas transmission system, although in reality most of it (from landfill and sewage slidges) has been captured and used for many decades. I was part of a project to generate renewable power from landfill sites thirty years ago, and sewage plants have captured and re-used digestor gases for sixty or more years, and there's few unexploited sources that would add up to much.
Yeah, the plan is to reduce, if not eliminate landfill, so as per my comment on bio-fuels from waste in the article about aircraft fuel, it's probably not good to invest much in yet another dwindling resource. Producing gas from organic digesters isn't a bad idea, but that's only ever going to be small scale. Without lots more nuclear, energy costs can only every go up as we reduce large scale energy productions and go back to "cottage industry" production, losing the economies of scale, apart from solar and wind which can't provide base load.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as I recall from chemistry many years ago H2 is a very small molecule and tends to leak very easily, escaping through surfaces/pipes/joins that it finds to be somewhat porous compared to larger molecules like CH4. Could hydrogen even be safely transported along old pipes buried in the roads intended to carry methane?
Town gas was supplied at much lower pressures at 0.8 ounces per square inch. Natural gas is supplied at 5 times the pressure, leakage is proportional to (molecule size)^2 so pushing hydrogen down the gas main would leak 64 times as much as methane. If you reduced the pressure down to Town Gas levels to get the leakage the same the pressure would be so low it would be unusable at the consumer end.
Hold on - there's a bit of a non-sequitur here - natural gas needs the high psi, but town gas that was mostly hydrogen didn't - and still ran fires/ovens/boilers etc? So why would hydrogen distribution need the high pressures? It's not as if appliances etc won't need modification,
Town gas mostly ran gas lighting and a bit of cooking rather than heating? Including public lighting
In 1969 domestic town gas use peaked at around 88,000 GWh
By 1979 domestic methane use was about 240,000 GWH (town gas was about 600 GWh)
(from "Historical gas data: gas production and consumption and fuel input" gov.uk)
Gas usage expanded with availability of North Sea supply. We need to get a lot more gas moving now compared to then.
As others have correctly stated, heat pumps only work well when the houses are properly insulated. So why not mandate that all new houses built from (say) 2025 meet a much higher standard**, have underfloor loops fitted during construction, and maybe even have pipes under the garden for ground-source pumps if applicable?
Of course we all know why that won't happen, but in reality that's the only way to kick start the transition.
** We could borrow the German building standards as a good place to start.
Insulation is red herring in this argument, it isn't really more important for heat pump use case than it is for gas boilers.
In terms of decarbonisation, how is case one where a decent gas boiler running at 85% efficiency spaffing much of its heat energy out of a drafty victorian homes roof, doors, walls and windows any better than case two where a heat pump running at 300% efficiency is spaffing much of its heat energy out of a drafty victorian homes roof, doors, walls and windows?
Just fit a bigger more powerful heat pump you are still wasting exactly as much heat as you were before but now you are using maybe a quarter as much initial input energy in order to do so.
The wastage and lack of insulation is an entirely separate (but important) argument.
"Just fit a bigger more powerful heat pump you are still wasting exactly as much heat as you were before but now you are using maybe a quarter as much initial input energy in order to do so."
If the person/family living in said drafty Victorian house can afford the £35k for the larger heatpump, then they can afford to do proper insulation and have a smaller cheaper heat pump. The real problem is that most people living in drafty housing can afford neither without taking a a debt with a 10-20 year payback time, even with the current subsidies[*].
* those subsidies themselves depend on you bringing your house insulation up to a certain standards, possibly costing you £1000's before you even qualify for the heat-pump subsidy. And good luck qualifying for insulation subsidies. Some even REQUIRE that you have cavity wall insulation, even if you don't have cavity walls. Computer says no. There is no other option.
For those paying attention, they'll know much of this has already been mandated. Search "Future Homes Standard".
However, GSHP is problematic - you need a lot of space or really deep boreholes, and unless done very cautiously risks permanent ground cooling. Given how things happen in this country, what's the chance of British housebuilders doing the job properly?
So why not mandate that all new houses built from (say) 2025 meet a much higher standard
Because it would cost major Tory party donors a lot of money.
"Because it would cost major Tory party donors a lot of money."
Not to mention the built-in delay in reaching net zero since housing stock tends to have something in the region of 100 years life-span almost by definition. Setting a standard now will have almost no effect by 2030 or whatever the current target is. It's not a bad plan to do it, it's just not especially helpful in meeting current targets, so will likely be a low priority, especially if there's no results before the next election.
Yes, building codes can be changed for much better thermal efficiency at relatively little cost. But this will only affect new buildings. It's possible to follow the German model and extend it to cover existing properties when these are sold or rented when "energy passports" are required: this is good at encouraging insulation, better windows and more efficient boilers over time.
But, as recent German politics have shown, this is nothing like enough to make up the shortfall and it also presupposes equipment and technicians in numbers that don't exist yet and cannot be created organically in the appropriate time.
But there are many other approaches that can reduce the total energy requirements. Proto-hippy, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has for years being arguing that giving the poor energy efficient tech is in our own best interests, because anything that reduces generating capacity will, over time, reduce costs. So, LED bulbs for everyone. Washing machines should all have hot water intakes. Electric water heaters should be replaced. If we can start reducing our need for power generation, we will find transition a lot cheaper. NB. this probably means finding an alternative for batteries in vehicles because EVs are a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Washing machines should all have hot water intakes
That one's actally not very useful. Modern machines use so little water that unless you have a large tank of hot water right beside them, the chances are they'll not draw enough water for any significant amounted of pre-heated water to reach them before they are "full".
"So why not mandate that all new houses built from (say) 2025 meet a much higher standard**"
'cos people won't pay. Offered the choice of "this house is D rated and costs £100K" vs "this identical house is A rated and costs £150K", nobrainer, people are going to buy the £100K house. People are only going to AFFORD the £100K house. Mandating that the only houses available are the £150K ones is mandating making houses to expensive for people to afford.
....but who wants plebs to be able to afford homes? They should live in hovels and LIKE IT.
We should have had these improvements in Building Regulations years ago, They were planned and have been postponed by Tory government's ever since.
The only people who have benefitted are the major house builders who are noticeable big donors to the Tory party.
New houses are typically B rated not D.
The additional cost, on a new house typically costing £250k, not £100k would typically be less than £10k (with current HP subsidy) and would soon pay for itself. Retrofitting the same would cost £30k.
And it is alway open to the government to choose to subsidise more: infrastruture investment is capital spend and is allowed under the fiscal rules.
The quality of new builds is shocking. Just some basic thinking at the planning stage would help. The wonky rooflines, no suitable south-ish facing roof area and general poor design.
As people have said in this thread Germany and the Nordic countries have vastly superior new builds and I don't believe they cost much more.
Also the govt should not be subsidising things. It encourages high prices (and profits) and ultimately we pay for it.
The pricing is a mix both of additional real costs and developers wanting to push people towards higher volume units. Many changes that would have an effect could be done at minimal marginal cost. And, again, anything you can do to reduce aggegrate demand effectively reduces future energy prices.
Ok - fair point re costs. But reductio ab absurdum, why are people wasting £100k on brick and tile roofs? You can buy a tent at Decathlon for under £100. And how much of that £150K house is actually the cost of building the house, and how much is going to the land owner, on the basis that their great great great grandfather was particularly successful in appropriating bits of the countryside?
....but who wants plebs to be able to warm afford homes? They should live in cold hovels and LIKE IT.
I realise all the conversation about changing heating for homes has been about heat pumps and reducing gas (methane) consumption, but I have an induction hob, and that heats up water pretty quickly. it is, allegedly, as energy efficient as a gas hob, so why (and I'm asking the question, not criticising here) not exchange my gas water boiler for an electrically powered induction heating boiler? They must be reasonably early to design and make, and could generate hot (up to boiling) water.
I'm sure that, as in many other of my 'good ideas', there is some fatal flaw due to technical details of which I am unaware, but could el Reg's assembled engineers explain it to me, please?
Thanks in advance.
A standard immersion heater is already pretty much 100% efficient at heating water. There is nothing to be gained other than complexity in coming up with a magnetic induction water heater.
Also, induction hobs are not as efficient as gas. They’re significantly more efficient (a lot of the combustion heat of gas escapes up the sides of the pots) and have the added bonus of not producing combustion products which contribute to indoor pollution. :)
And all but the expensive ones are rubbish.
A gas hob can have it's power output controlled.
An expensive induction hob probably has a phase-angle power controller to vary the output.
The ones we all get just cycle the power on and off. Not too often, it wears out the cheap switch. So, even with a heavy-gauge pan base, the temperature goes up and down, burning the sauce/gravy/custard you are making.
Ah, that's interesting. So, despite having the tech to do proper variable induction heating, most go the cheap route of an "average" output rather than a variable output in the same way the almost all microwave ovens do de-frost or lower power settings by switching it on and off rather than using a variable magnetron.
Shirley induction heating works by inducing heat in the target, so the target has to be metal. Water is not metal. From hearsay an induction hob is cold to the touch because it doesn't get hot, it induces heat in the metal pan placed on it. Any heat on the hob is from transmission from the metal pan from contact with the hob.
"Shirley induction heating works by inducing heat in the target, so the target has to be metal"
Careful. "Metal" isn't specific enough. "Ferromagnetic metal" probably is a better choice. For example, copper or aluminium pans probably won't work on an induction hob.
Now, where were we?
Resistive heating is very efficient, very cheap, and very well understood, so there's no benefit from using induction heating for a household heating circuit that has slow response times and high thermal inertia. For cooking use, the instant response of an induction hob is of high value, and that's why they're preferred to resistive heating. So if you were using direct water heating, then resistive wins every time.
However, the argument about your gas boiler versus any form of non-heat pump electricity then depends on a lot of other things - gas versus electricity price, net conversion losses in the gas boiler (both induction and resistive heating could be considered to be around 98% efficient), plus things like the cost of the gas standing charge and boiler service. At a system level there's also gas transmission losses to account for and electricity transmission losses as well, although from your point of view that's all bundled up in the cost per kWh.
In terms of ease of use, efficiency, and overall cost, I suspect a well insulated house would be best served by electric panel heaters (not storage heaters). Maintenance costs are near zero, installation cost is very cheap in a new build or heavy refurb, with no gas supply you save £100 a year on gas standing charges, and perhaps the same on boiler safety check and servicing. Controllability is excellent, zonal control is easy and doesn't impair system effectiveness. Electricity is more expensive to buy so operating costs are higher, but when you take into account the capital or occasional costs of gas systems of around £600 a year, then the savings of gas aren't as great as they first seem. But if everybody had electric panel heaters then the problem becomes generation and distrobution capacity - although we're looking at similar problems with heat pumps and the mad commitment to EVs.
Panel heaters only when alternatives are not available: all that power incurs additional but hidden capital costs required to generate it all. So, heat pumps, preferably ground-sourced, and solar thermal have important roles to play in reducing total aggregate demand. One idea that has been floated is making utilities the owners of the equipment and requiring that they fit it. This would have the advantage of spreading the capital costs across all customers (and paying to reduce max capacity makes sense for us all) and rollout much more structured. We are talking enormous sums of money but not that much more than, say, building a few new nuclear plants and it starts paying off much faster.
I love induction. But using electricity to heat anything is usually the worst alternative, which is why it's generally the most expensive. Though gas turbines are vastly more efficient that a gas cooker, you'll still find it cheaper to use gas.
why not exchange my gas water boiler for an electrically powered induction heating boiler?
Doesn't matter if you use inductive or simple resistive heat, you'll still get 100% of the electricty turned into heat in the water.
The thing about heat pumps is that they pump heat from outside to inside, so 1kW of pumping power can being 3kW of heat into a house, about 3x as efficient as any sort of resistive or induction heater.
Unfortunately electricity is about 4x as expensive as gas, so heat from gas is still cheaper.
"most gas boilers put out 20-30kW of heat, even the largest common heat pump rated at 16kW will leave a larger house cold."
But isn't the point of heat pumps is that they operate at a lower power but continuously? Our house has a standard gas boiler and with our central heating on 24hrs a day (boiler regulated by the room thermostat) I reckon it's actually burning with a duty cycle of 20%. So if your figures are correct we could get away with a continuous running heat pump of about 5kW. Of course, this is just space heating, I wouldn't make the same claim for water heating.
Much depends on the heat loss rate and the thermal mass of your property, plus the speed at which the house can be brought up to a comfortable temperature.
Based on the heat loss maths my house needs 8~10kW to maintain an average temperature of 18C when it is -1C outside. However, additional heat will be required to raise the temperature from say 8C to 18C, with even more being required if the structure has become cold and damp. My gas boiler has an output rating of 15kW and being 82% efficient an input rating of 18kW, currently, the house only starts to feel cold when the outside temperature goes lower than circa -10C.
So basically, a 5kW heat pump would be wholly inadequate, unless I massively improved both the thermal insulation (reduce rate of heat loss) and the thermal mass (building retains more heat so can give it out to,smooth fluctuations caused by say a door being opened.
I think a key point is not letting the house cool down too much: 16°C is considered the minimum to avoid problems with damp. You normally use more energy trying to warm something up that you let go cold rather than just keeping it warm.
Other than that: lucky you! Our place seems to require quite a bit more than that but then it is 100 years old.
Agree, most of the time this is what I am able to do, but then for some reason (children, dogs, weather etc.) it can get a lot colder than intended…
Damp is interesting, had to deal with mildew etc. in my daughter’s student house - they learnt the lesson of using central heating to keep the building warm as opposed to rapid heating when they were in, resulted in both a more comfortable house and lower energy bills. To help with the mould problem, I put a room stat where the mould was, so they could monitor that thet part of the room actually got to 16C for an appreciable length of time.
My next home project is to not use the central heating circuit for the hot water - the hot water has to be heated to 65C to avoid Legionella. However, the central heating only really needs the water heating to 45C, at which the boiler can operate at a much higher level of energy efficiency.
Our boiler has separate outputs with different temperatures. As the boiler itself heats water to the same temperature anyway, it usually mixes cold water to achieved the desired temperature for the relevant circuit. BTW at least here in Germany 55°C is the recommended temperature to prevent Legionella. Have legions of thermostats and hygrometers in the house and a strict regime about how to open windows (only ever fully) to ventilate.
To help with the mould problem, I put a room stat where the mould was, so they could monitor that thet part of the room actually got to 16C for an appreciable length of time.
Germany discovered much the same. They had a craze for 'superinsulating' homes. Then noticed a lot more black and other hazardous moulds.. which can be very expensive to deal with. I blame marketing, ie incessant guff about the need to insulate and draft-proof homes leads to poorly ventilated homes and mould problems. Current messaging may make this even worse with calls to 'save energy' and turn down heating. Admittedly some of this is also user error, ie not using extractors or opening windows when cooking, showering, or putting away damp clothes.
More bad thermodynamics. Heat loss is proportional to the difference in heat between inside and outside. So keeping a house at a constant temp needs more energy than warming it up from a low temp when needed. This doesn't preclude issues of how long it takes to heat, dampness etc. But it's just factually wrong to say that you use more energy trying to warm something up that you let go cold rather than just keeping it warm.
I was countering the assertion: “ we could get away with a continuous running heat pump of about 5kW.”.
Also, whilst most of the time we can “get away” with low spec kit, you will really notice it when things go more extreme - what will be the output of at 5kW heat pump when ambient air temperature is lower than -10C and you really need the heating to keep the house near to 16C.
Or are we?
We have to dismiss heat pumps as the overall solution, due to the unbelievable cost associated with retrofitting millions of older homes in a timeframe of two decades.
Heat pumps are part of the solution, but only a relatively small part.
The grander solution is to stop using natural gas to produce electricity, switching completely to renewables.
Older properties unsuited to heat pumps would have gas boilers replaced by electric boilers.
It's a tough ask, but it is the only viable solution to net zero the UK actually has.
It's the most obvious choice - a slow and steady on-streaming of more and more renewable energy, a phasing out of using gas to generate electricity, coupled with a slow and steady replacement of the domestic gas network.
Agree with your main point re HP's. Fine for new builds provided they are constructed to meet their design spec, not the piss poor rabbit hutches being thrown up by the mass builders.
But delivering enough electrical energy to directly displace combustion boilers is an enormous ask. Direct replacement meaning high flow temps and high instantaneous output.
My boiler is 35kW, that's 10 immersion heaters all running simultaneously. Or about 150A current draw on a single phase (most cable heads are 60A per phase).
> My boiler is 35kW, that's 10 immersion heaters all running simultaneously.
You obviously live in a very large house, you stinking tory bastard! My boiler is only a measly 18kW, and I don't live in a rabbit hutch
But other than that I agree. There isn't the electrical infrastructure in the UK to take the load of the gas grid and what we do have is far too fragile.
Hydrogen is, as enough others have pointed out, a "pipe dream" (or a nightmare when it leaks and explodes..) and impossible to store
"There isn't the electrical infrastructure in the UK to take the load of the gas grid"
And not forgetting the intent to also transfer the fossil fuel "network" for vehicles also to the 'leccy grid. If electricity is going to be "the answer" to all energy usage, then most of the predictions for increased need probably need to be doubled or tripled since in most cases, the increase in electrical infrastructure usually only ever refers to EITHER Evs or home heating, never both.
Heat pumps are tricky and very, very expensive to install, impossible in some situations. They take up too much space and make too much noise. The UK will eventually switch back to hot water tanks and radiators powered by electricity, pre-'Dash for Gas' tech, which is easier and cheaper to fit. So get cracking with the on-shore and off-shore turbines, solar, hydro and storage cells required, and stop wasting money trashing farmland to create beaver and buffalo habitats.
Lots of people forgetting the fact that the electricity distribution network needs massive upgrades to be able to move enough leccy from the windmills to homes and industry to drive all the HP's and charge all the BEV's, so why not the gas network? In lots of places the gas network is pretty old and decrepit (decades old cast iron) and *IS* being upgraded, I wonder if its occurred to those dunces to rebuild it so that it works for hydrogen?
And of course Town Gas. Which was half hydrogen anyway. How did we ever manage to make that work...
"Just upgrade your insulation"
I am, constantly. Its a fucking difficult thing to retrofit effectively. Its not just a case of a couple of lads pull up in a white transit and throw a few rolls of rockwool up into the loft. That was called Green Deal and it was about as effective as setting fire to ten pound notes.
First you need to take a stab at air tightness, because insulating without that is a bit like walking around in a gale with your puffer jacket unzipped. Your nuts are still going to freeze off pretty quickly.
Then you need to make sure you aren't trapping interstitial condensation. The reason that interventions like cavity insulation, EWI, spray foam etc. make buildings *WORSE*. Wet walls are bad for humans and even harder to heat up.
Its difficult. Very, very difficult. And lets face it most of the workforce in this country are not all that bright or motivated or detail oriented so how can we expect miraculous outcomes? Only a very few highly motivated and well-informed home owners have made meaningful progress on this.
"A COP of 2 or 2.5 is still better than burning gas"
Not with our broken energy wholesale market. On my tariff electricity costs 4 times as much as gas per unit, so any COP < 4 is going to proportionally increase my running costs. There isn't a HP on the planet that manages 4 under real world conditions. Realistically the high temperature HP I actually need to use is not going to get above 2 so electricity costs need to half for me to break even. They should really drop to about a quarter of what they are now to put us back to where we were pre-Ukraine in terms of running costs. And thats ignoring the capital cost of 10's of thousands of pounds. Are HP's going to be so much better made that we won't need to replace them every 10 years like gas boilers?
I really don't see why we can't have a blended rate in the wholesale market right now. If wind can meet demand then the price should plummet (after all the Greenies keep telling us how much cheaper it is to produce). When it can't (which is quite a lot of the time at the moment) then you bring gas and coal online and the price per unit goes up a bit. Forget all the fucking around with claims of fuel mixes in the tariff's, its all green-wash anyway, everyone gets whatever is going. Until that happens people adopting HP's are going to get a very rude awakening when the bill plops onto the door mat.
"But its an emergency"
There is no solution to any of this shit at the moment, emergency or not. Especially whilst China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and North America literally do not give a fuck. Cutting our own throats, destroying our built environment in the process, ain't gonna' change that.
What needs to change is how we calculate the price of electricity vs. gas as the relative prhce incentives for consumers are all wrong.
At the moment gas is usually the marginal energy source for electricity generation on an hour be hour basis so this also sets the price that renewable sources receive. So they make lots of profit some of which the government may claw back if they are on Contracts for difference or there is a government claw back on those with ROCs. All the profits are going to the suppliers or the government not to us consumers.
The electricity price for consumers should be set equal to the long run marginal cost of supply (including a sensible mark up for the suppliers) , which will be mostly renewables and it would be then much cheaper to run heat pumps than gas central heating and we would all have lower energy prices.
At the moment most hydrogen is made from gas for when it's needed as a chemical intermediate to eg make ammonia for fertiliser.
Hydrogen made this way is more expensive than gas if just used as fuel because of the losses in conversion while the carbon stripped from the gas (CH4+O2 - > CO2 +H4) will result in even more CO2 is emitted unless you can expensively pump it underground.
In the future we may have green hydrogen from electrolysis (or other innovative processes that are electrically powered) once we have so much renewables that we start to want to store it as hydrogen - at the moment we simply pay the wind turbines to stop turning when we have too much generation.
But even then there are better uses for hydrogen, which would sensibly be used on site at ammonia plants or to displace coke for steel production.
There is no solution to any of this shit at the moment, emergency or not. Especially whilst China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and North America literally do not give a fuck. Cutting our own throats, destroying our built environment in the process, ain't gonna' change that.
We are about to drive off a cliff, but no pint us braking because there's a bus alongside us that's going to go over anyway.
Hydrocarbons - including petrol, diesel & natural gas, are molecules containing hydrogen bonded to carbon.
When we burn hydrocarbons it’s the numerous hydrogen molecules bonding with oxygen that is producing the most heat, carbon bonding with oxygen is also producing heat too.
Hydrocarbons should be thought more of as a way of storing hydrogen in a safe and convenient way which is easier safer and cheaper than storing hydrogen gas.
Lastly the science on co2’s role in climate change is also very much not settled.
There is no such thing as 'settled science' but equally we know that CO2 is changing global climate, and despite the hot-air postulating of 'free-(from) thinkers' we haven't identified any other factor that could theoretically or by observation account for the changes that we have already seen. and if you actually believed that the science 'wasn't settled' you ought logically to be even more scared than we are about climate change- after all it 'might' not be as bad as we fear, but it 'might' be much worse. strangely no climate change sceptic ever adopts the Cassandra option.
strangely no climate change sceptic ever adopts the Cassandra option.
Possibly because we look at the science and aren't afraid of our own shadows. Back in the '70s though we were told an Ice Age was coming! Probably true at some point over the next thousands of years because they've happened before. Science can't really explain those, but science also shows CO2 cannot have been the dominant force. There's very little correlation between CO2 and temperature, but CO2's been a very lucrative con to fleece the gullible.
Whatever the future power source the UK uses, you can be sure that those in power, Blue or Red Tory, will be positioning themselves now to ensure their own bank balances benefit from any policy.
This is the current state of the UK and yes there will be those who benefit from above policy who will state, this is how its always been. Well actually no it hasn't. De Piffle, Pishi and Pals have made corruption an expectation amongst the electorate and the fanatics who support them are over the moon without realising that in the end, they may actually have to hold their breath whilst they count their money.
Upvote, downvote, don't give a fuck, whether you have the personality or intelligence to admit it or not, this country is a shitheap.
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As someone with a 100-year old semi detached house with no cavity walls but roof insulation and (mostly) double glazed, I'm always on the lookout for alternatives to eye-watering gas bills in the winter.
An idea which seems to be making a comeback from the 1980s is the "Zero Emissions Boiler", which is essentially a high tech, high temperature electric storage heater that can be plumbed into an existing hot water tank / radiator system. GEC built these for commercial buildings and they enjoyed a life long after GEC went bust.
Like any other heating solution, it won't be for everyone. It's currently expensive to buy and being essentially a big solid block it's heavy, but at least it'll be worth keeping an eye on.
Sorry, but there is no way we will have another heat pump installed. We installed one at great expense in 2012 and had it replaced with gas 6 years later. The heat pump was expensive to run, kept breaking down and didn't heat the house if the outside temperature fell below -5 degrees. When they stop supplying gas we'll install wood burners.
As a kid I grew up on a house that had storage heaters.
I remember the mornings being warm, the afternoon being "meh" and the evenings being cold.
At the time I was used to it, I was also used to wiping up the huge amounts of condensation on the windows every morning. Double glazing did reduce that a little.
Then I moved to my own house, which had central heating. First time I ever saw anything like that! Then the parents installed a CH system replacing the storage heaters.
So, 10 years after moving in and having a new boiler installed some wacky gov plan to replace the whole lot for heat pumps takes the biscuit. In a country that has no tradition of even installing AC, installing heat pumps is a very expensive and specialist operation. In the US you can practically DIY your own install using cheap second hand gear of cheap new gear aimed at an already saturated and competitive market. All a HP is is a reversible AC unit after all.
Apart from not being able to afford the luxury price of a HP install (which would set me back £15,000 and have the house ripped and stripped apart to install the pipework etc), it also turns out I, like many terraced houses, simply cant have one fitted!
Rules on distance between the pump and next door restrict my option to not having one installed. Too close to next door, thus too noisy. And yes they make a racket, one house across the road from me has one and even though there is a whole road width between me and it, I can hear it running. Just imagine all houses having one, the additive noise would be new and greatly noticeable.
So I cant afford one. I cant have one installed legally, maybe that will change and the g'ment will tell everyone to clam up and put up with the noise.
Options...
Storage heaters again. And of course, a return to wearing seasonally appropriate clothing indoors, no more t-shirts indoors in January. Wollen jumpers, like the good old days!
But I'm running the boiler till they switch off the gas.
Just a side note since apparently you all live in the UK (and it sounds like the southern part).
I live in Canada (in the livable part). It still regularly gets below -20C in the winter, accompanied by a fair bit of wind. I live in a 25 story building.
Heat pumps are just not possible - there's not enough footprint to suck the ground heat from.
I imagine there are some high rise buildings in Britain as well. I'm not sure what the government will mandate for them. Probably something equally stupid as hydrogen.
Hydrogen is an answer to many of the problems of decarbonisation but domestic heating isn't one of them. There are far more important and effective uses for the green hydrogen produced eg production of fertilizers and steel - the first 30 million tonnes of green hydrogen should go straight to replacing the grey hydrogen in current ammonia production.
By the time we are generating enough green hydrogen for all these industrial uses we will have been able to replace all the domestic gas boilers with heat pumps in well insulated houses.
According to the Guardian on Saturday, the dash for hydrogen boilers is continuing:
"The government and sections of UK industry will continue to back the prospect of using hydrogen for home heating, despite a clear verdict against the technology from the UK’s infrastructure watchdog.
The National Infrastructure Commission advised this week, after an exhaustive investigation of the technology, that hydrogen was not suitable for heating homes. The report was unambiguous: “The Commission’s analysis demonstrates that there is no public policy case for hydrogen to be used to heat individual buildings. It should be ruled out as an option to enable an exclusive focus on switching to electrified heat.”
However, the government indicated to the Guardian that it would continue to push hydrogen for home heating, and the body that represents most of the heating industry also vowed to continue to pursue it."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/21/hydrogen-boiler-home-heating-uk
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