Public enthusiasm for heat pumps has been overestimated by ministers, putting the Government’s Net Zero goals at risk, spending watchdog the National Audit Office has warned. The Telegraph has more.
The National Audit Office (NAO) found that 27 times more gas boilers were installed in homes in 2022 as taxpayer-funded subsidies failed to spur demand.
In a report published on Monday it said the rollout of heat pumps has been “slower than planned” despite the fact they are a “key component” in meeting climate targets.
It comes just days after Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, scrapped the so-called “boiler tax” which would have fined boiler makers if they failed to meet sales targets for heat pumps.
The policy, which has been delayed until after the election, was meant to encourage adoption but was seen as politically toxic as it would have pushed up the price of gas boilers.
Just 55,000 domestic heat pumps were installed in 2022, the NAO found, which is a fraction of the Government’s longer term aim of 600,000 installations per year by 2030.
By contrast about 1.5 million new gas-fired boilers were installed, mostly to replace worn-out models, even though homeowners could have chosen heat pumps instead.
The Government’s flagship Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which offers homeowners a grant to help them pay for the cost of a heat pump, has also underperformed, the NAO said. Just 18,900 heat pumps were installed between May 2022 and December 2023 under the scheme, less than half of the 50,000 installations that had been expected.
The NAO warned ministers were “relying on optimistic assumptions about consumer demand and manufacturer supply of heat pumps increasing substantially” to hit the 600,000 target.
It also said that to meet the Net Zero target installations would need to carry on rising at pace to reach 1.6 million a year by 2035.
Worth reading in full.
No wonder people don’t want heat pumps, says Ross Clark. They’re unreliable and cost a bomb. Yet they were supposedly going to be cheaper than gas boilers, he reminds us.
[Heat pumps] were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips renewable energy from wind and solar farms. … Remember how Government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? That’s not quite going according to plan. The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices). It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.
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