British Gas has thrown a large spanner into the Government’s Net Zero ambitions by stating that it will refuse to install heat pumps in millions of homes where they won’t make it warm enough. Ross Clark writes about the intervention in the Telegraph.
British Gas has come out this week and stated what has doubtless been obvious for a long time to some homeowners who did take the plunge: that a standard heat pump runs at water temperatures which are too low to heat many properties. From now on, says the company, it will only agree to install a heat pump if it is convinced that it will succeed in getting the property up to a target temperature on the coldest days. If any of the heat pumps it installs fail this test, it says it will refund the money.
Fair enough, but that will mean millions of homes cannot have a heat pump installed by British Gas. There are eight million homes in Britain which have solid walls and which, as a result, are hard to bring up to required insulation standards at a reasonable cost. If other companies follow British Gas’s example, the Government will have no hope of achieving its target of retro-fitting 600,000 homes a year with a heat pump by the end of this decade. British Gas has just thrown a very large spanner into the Government’s Net Zero ambitions.
I don’t want to sound negative. I would much rather heat my house with an electric heat pump than its existing, smelly oil-fired boiler, and I would have made the switch years ago if I could be convinced it would keep the property warm. But to judge by the experience of many people, the air-source heat pumps being marketed en masse at the moment simply aren’t up to the job. They are an effective way of raising the temperature in your home when you don’t really need it to be heated, but if you live in an old property, and you have no other form of heating, you are likely to find yourself shivering on the coldest days.
Ross concludes that “British Gas’s intervention this week should sound a warning to the Government – it is never a good idea to set targets before you are sure that technology is sufficiently advanced to allow them to be met”.
Worth reading in full.
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