Around one in five households increased their consumption of gas after installing energy efficiency measures such as loft and cavity wall installation, according to an intriguing survey published by two economists at the University of Cambridge. It was found that insulating lofts and cavity walls of existing U.K. housing stock only reduced gas consumption for the first year or two, with all energy savings vanishing by the fourth year after a retrofit. Presenting their findings, the economists propose other means to cut gas use including rationing. “Energy reduction targets could be established for households,” they suggest. Of course, stealth rationing is already becoming common in the elitist Net Zero war on personal transport, with £6 billion of petrol taxes planned, along with increasing numbers of local charging zones.
Researchers analysed gas consumption patterns over 12 years to 2017, and found that cavity wall insulation led to an average 7% drop during the first year. This shrank to 2.7% in the second, and by the fourth year any energy savings were “negligible”. Loft insulation was even less effective with 1.8% of savings after one year, and any gains disappearing after this.
The findings call into question the recent announcement that the Government intends to spend £6 billion trying to reduce energy consumption over the next eight years by 15%. Much of this money will be spent across the residential sector. Last November, the Business and Energy Secretary Grant Shapps announced a new £1 billion ECO+ scheme to target those in the least energy efficient homes. He claimed it would save consumers £310 a year, a claim that seems fanciful in the light of the Cambridge report.
In less wealthy areas of the U.K., the reductions in gas use were half those found elsewhere. The figure was as low as 3% during the first and second year after refit. In the bottom 20%, gas consumption actually rose after installation.
Economists have a theory for this type of behaviour called ‘rebound’. If you cut the price of holidays to France by half, some people will go twice. The researchers suggest that when it comes to home insulation there may be a significant ‘rebound’ effect. Any savings through energy efficiency get cancelled out by a steady increase in energy use. Behaviours associated with this ‘rebound’ including turning up the heating, but can include opening windows in stuffy rooms and building extensions such as conservatories.
Home insulation is not a “magic bullet”, states co-author Professor Laura Diaz Anadon, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance. “High gas prices will reduce the rebound effect in the short term, as homeowners have the need to keep costs down at the front of their minds. In the long term, simply funding more of the same insulation roll-out to meet the U.K.’s carbon reduction and energy security targets may not move the dial as much as is hoped,” added Anadon.
Blowing six billion pounds of taxpayers’ money on home insulation that in many cases may actually increase gas consumption might seem a spectacular waste of money even by Whitehall standards. But as with personal transport, more forceful measures are also planned, namely replacing automobiles and gas boilers with inferior products such as battery cars and heat pumps. The Cambridge authors note that heat pumps extract warmth from outside to heat internal radiators, and are “highly efficient and negate the need for gas boilers”. Other explanations are available, including the view that heat pumps are noisy, expensive, difficult to install and produce only tepid water that needs further heating to warm a U.K. house in the middle of winter.
Both loft and cavity wall insulation are at the easy end of the improvements market. Cavity wall insulation is a common procedure, while securing a loft is a home DIY job. To make a substantial difference, all the doors and windows in often leaky U.K. houses need to be made airtight. This is impossible with natural wood frames, and all must be replaced. Unless this is done, a heat pump will struggle to warm a British house to a comfortable temperature.
As with most Net Zero innovations, the real cost is stratospheric and largely hidden from consumers of mainstream media. The Government’s own in-house green activist unit, the Climate Change Committee, claims it would cost £10,000 to insulate a home and install a heat pump. Earlier this year, Professor Michael Kelly said that insulating a home and installing a heat pump would actually cost £65,000. Professor Kelly arrived at his figure by referencing his experience in refitting social housing as Chief Scientific Adviser to the then Department for Communities and Local Government. Allowing for economies of scale, Kelly said that insulating and installing costs for 26 million homes, along with 5.5 million non-domestic properties, would total £3 trillion.
This last figure, of course, approximates to the annual GDP of the U.K. Add it to the growing pile of fantasy Net Zero costings and projects. How will all those electric heat pumps keep going when wind and solar fail for weeks on end in a freezing winter? How can batteries possibly provide the vast amounts of storage required when vital minerals such as cobalt quickly run out, and they all need replacing every ten years?
Treble ration books all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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‘….a failure of the British political machinery, notably the work of the unelected Climate Change Committee. “We have set out to decarbonise the economy without anyone having thought through all the engineering issues, let alone put a cost on the exercise,”
So let me get this straight…..a totalitarian committee of environmentalists has completely ignored one of the basic tenets (cost/benefit analysis) of the ‘precautionary principle’, a ‘principle’ first invented by totalitarian environmentalists (in Germany)
Isn’t that all a bit, you know, what’s the word……oh yes…..totalitarian…….
In fact Socialist Fascism…..
Mass electrification has always led to human death and injury – often reported as ‘flu’ or an epidemic. Radiation has its consequences including enormous eco system and wildlife destruction. I suppose handcuffing Gaia in endless chains of electrified radiation will be ‘proven’ by the ‘science’ to be ‘safe and effective’.
For the record Fossils Fuels is a bullshit moniker. The Russians 100 years ago discovered that clean burning hydrocarbons are self renewing and created at the mantle and core. Dinos and algae produce nothing. Try the algae experiment at home and see if crushed sea weed or kelp yields hyrdocarbons.
I’d like to read more on that. Do you have a reference?
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2008RG000270
It’s amazing, saving the planet always appears to resemble large scale environmental destruction. How many ppl must be frozen to death, how many trees must be felled, whales beached and birds/bats chomped to appease Thunberg? Answer you should never appease communists.
“The urge to save the planet is almost always a false face for theurge to rule it”—-Mencken
It’s all based on a contempt for humanity
Scottish wind farm contempt for humanity leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
““The Green future is an industrial wasteland of concrete and steel built to line the pockets of billionaires and bankers” …… and the bank accounts of the politicians who are endorsing the lunacy and forcing it on us.
This Net Zero insanity must stop, but I can’t see the Tories doing much about it and Labour will almost certainly double down on it.
Sometimes though reality punches you in the face like you just fell out with Mike Tyson. Western governments are going to get a huge uppercut that will put a stop to them in the fifth. It’s going to make “Rumble in the Jungle” look like handbags in a working men’s club
The COP enthusiasts should be reminded that we (humanity) like to behave as the top dogs with regard to the environment. However, there are lots of matters that we can’t actually modified when it comes to the weather; we need to adapt to it and improve the efficacy of our resilience to various changes.
Looking at the concept of long distance transmission capacity, the local distribution in urban areas, and rural areas down at the District Network Operation (DNO) part of the grid is the one that is most likely to affect people directly. I’m not advertising (YouTube do that), but this 5 minute YT entry about a recent local cable renewal might be useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS8VFhRMsYY Towards the end, I’ve included a few notes about the latest issue of BS7671. It allows the introduction of remote control (“Load Curtailment”), in effect, so that usage of certain devices – like EV charging – is within the local capacity of the cabling. That won’t be popular when it comes! There are other requirements re the use of “SMART” metering associated with charging devices, which would lead to the concept of varying pricing, including taxation for EV charging.
Time to do the Maths
Presumably this needs to happen across the whole of Europe, the USA and indeed all around the World? Can it be done? are there enough natural resources in the world to achieve this? Can we ever generate enough electric to actually make use of this level of supply infrastructure?
If humanity survives for another 100 years, will people in the future look back and wonder what madness drove our society to try and think that this unachievable pipe-dream was all a good idea?
If you look up the performance of the system via this https://grid.iamkate.com/ or other places, you’ll see what the variation is like. A degree of load management would be required, but I think the real issue is local distribution (see my notes elsewhere here today) to deal with a transition. Although my notes are to do with EV development, similar issues could be related to a move from domestic gas fired heating to electric only.
Wind and solar vary from 60-70% of current generating need all the way down to more or less zero. Installing more wind turbines and solar panels might get that up to close to a peak of 100% and a low of….more or less zero (unless somehow there are parts of the UK that are windy and/or sunny when others are not that they haven’t yet got round to covering). So you need a backup that you can switch on, or batteries/pumped storage. If you have a backup that you can switch on, it has to be burning stuff, so if that’s off the table then it’s nuclear, which is harder to switch on and off so if you need close to 100% coverage from nuclear then why bother with wind. Some miracle storage technology might arrive but no sign of it so far, so regardless of the logistics of cabling, it seems obvious that even the generation is unfeasible.
Yes, there is not much rapid response backup for unexpected spikes. There are just a couple of relatively tiny ones, which are pumped storage hydro, like the Dinorwig one in N Wales https://www.fhc.co.uk/en/electric-mountain-visitor-centre/ , and other conventional hydro stations in Scotland. Nuclear stations are slow to respond and are generally used for steady demand round the clock.
Since Dinorwig was commissioned, a couple of old nuclear ones in N Wales have been shut down, with potential replacement projects being stuck in the financial mire for the time being.
Unexpected spikes but also the wind not blowing and the sun not shining. Those pumped storage stations take up a lot of space and don’t last very long. You would need a lot of them to provide enough coverage to cater for the wind not blowing, if you eliminate gas, and transition from gas heating, ICE cars etc. I doubt there’s enough space on this island to fit enough of them in, or enough suitable sites, and the environment impact is huge.
When I stumble across the many many climate crazies one meets on Twitter, I ask them how NetZero can be reached without the most humungous use of fossil fuels.
Oddly, they never respond
Also, given that the Internet runs on fossil fuels, what are they doing there?
On barrel of oil has the same amount of energy as a person working 40 hours a week for 11 years. ———–Try replacing that with wind and sun and you are going to look pretty stupid.
Sort of. I understand the blades to be made of carbon fibre but that requires petroleum, as well as heat. It also has that magic word ‘Carbon’.
Energy demand globally grows by one United Kingdom’s worth every year. Renewables cannot even get close to covering that growth, never mind replacing the existing energy sources which are 80% fossil fuels. ——-When doing something makes no difference then why do it? -Because you’re not doing it for the reasons you say you are. Net Zero is not about climate change, and climate change is not about science.
I’m sure there are some true believers who think it can be achieved, or haven’t really thought about it, but I cannot believe that the principal actors in this actually think it can be achieved. Which begs the question, why are they pushing for it?
Exactly ToF. – you have more or less said what I was going to say. It is good to do this work to show it to the believers, but the .0001% don’t care. They are simply going to reduce energy supply and force everyone to stop travelling and heating their homes and using the internet etc. You can’t use more fuel than is supplied, so we will be left to adapt.
“We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available” ———-Head of the National Grid (Steve Holliday) a few years ago. ——–He meant when the wind is blowing or sun is shining———-Welcome to the 21st century Green Utopia of restricted and rationed energy.
I know you know this ToF so I’m just exercising my own take on it…You just need to look at religion and how so many take, at face value, the scriptures, especially the Old Testament. Then look at all the wars and struggles between the different religions. Why? My god better than your god etc! A lot of belief comes from a source of fear. I’m not saying ALL belief but a lot of it i.e., so hell and damnation and not following God’s guidance i.e. religious texts, written by men, underpins much religion. We mustn’t anger the gods and so on. Net Zero is also grounded in fear so I do feel that some of the principal actors – (the willing servants perhaps or even those who think it’s the best most vote-winning thing to do) – believe that we really are unleashing hell on earth if we don’t live like humble hermits in caves. Then of course there are those who know it’s all a big lie and a means by which to control us and depopulate the planet legitimately.
A good interpretation. But don’t forget that there are many of us that operate as opportunists, whoever wrote the script. Money talks, after all. That includes the investments made by pension schemes, and the Treasury.
I broadly agree with you Aethelred of course, but I’d like to defend religion here a bit even though I am not religious. I’m sure Islamists go to war for their religion and no doubt some other faithful do likewise, but I think mostly warfare is underpinned by religion and culture and used by warmakers (and let’s face it the general public who often like a bit of a punch-up). In other words, I suspect in most cases religion is used as a motivator for soldiers and civilians, not the reason for it.
…and as with EU laws, it’s primarily Britain and Germany who follow and implement the Net Zero folly to a T. For the same reason: they like to legalise their corruption.
I have a friend who used to works for MANWEB (Merseyside and N Wales leccy board) at the time of much activity by the Free Wales Army. On a number of occasions he was called out to restore power after the FWA had blown up supply poles/pylons.
Where are the resourceful activists to do the same with on-shore wind turbines?
Perhaps some of them are campaigning against the London ULEZ scheme, with the odd camera failing for whatever reason.
With the CO28 hysteria in abundance in the MSM plus this article I thought I would look into one aspect that is often overlooked .The reckoning is that man made CO2 production may be around 3% the rest being natural sources .
The biggest being Volcanic activity .A quick Google , did you know there are around 1500 potentially active volcanoes globally ?
In 2023 so far there have been 67 eruptions from 66 volcanoes .
We could all live in caves , eating bugs and dieing from exposure yet the planet will still be producing 97% natural CO2 .
It really is total bollocks !!
https://www.takimag.com/article/green-groups-are-no-longer-promoting-a-cleaner-environment/
Unless Nikola Tesla’s wireless electricity and free energy devices are implemented, that is.
That is 50 million miles/82 million kilometres of copper wire.
That requires a vast tonnage of copper and an even greater tonnage of copper ore.
One tiny detail.
The necessary amount of copper ore to produce the copper to make the wire cannot be mined within that timescale. In fact to scale up ore mining to the levels not even close to need would take over 50 years.
As supply of copper wire increasingly fails to meet demand, prices will rocket.
And. A recent report indicated investment in copper ore mining had eased back due to… drum roll… declining demand for copper.
So Sceptics – with what does the Team think those millions of miles/kilometres of power lines will be made?
It’s a lot of material, but mostly aluminium for transmission cable, including buried cable. E.g. the one that distributes power to this place is 3-core Al under the street, with a short copper service cable to this house. Copper is flexible, but more expensive than the rest of it.
The transition is not from fossil fuels to non-fossil fuel energy source, this is a smoke screen, but transition from multiple energy sources to a single secondary source – electricity.
This replaces primary energy sources: oil, gas, coal, motor fuels – which can replace electricity to provide heat, light, cooking, transport and which can be controlled and used to generate continuous output of electricity.
Worse, being a secondary energy source electricity is reliant on some other energy source to produce it – it cannot be mined, or extracted from wells.
This means our economies have a single point of failure – the part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
No engineer would design or retrofit a system to make it so vulnerable.
And it will be vulnerable from vagueries of the weather, natural and intentional high energy electro-magnetic pulses.
It also is instantly controllable by those in charge offering an excellent means of crowd control.
“excellent means of crowd control” ———-Yep. The smart meter. Many think the smart meter is there to save them money, but it is actually there to ration energy use and charge more at peak times and times when the wind isn’t blowing. —–Just as the head of the National Grid (Steve Holiday) said a few years ago “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”———-This is the green future. Having electricity when the wind decides to blow.
Nuclear SMRs can be built where they are needed and where the infrastructure exists
Money is always the bottom line. We are badly in debt and on course to get more, without this extra spending
Another giant step towards bankrupting the west. Surely the CCP will at least lend us moral support.
They lied about Covid-19, about vaccines, lockdowns, EV’S now Net Zero…just ignore them.