UK ministers have resisted an organised backlash against heat pumps and the hype over hydrogen for home heating and are about to confirm targets for heat pump manufacture. The Scottish Government recently confirmed its ambitions on heat pumps with a target to end fossil fuel heating by 2045.
If you have read something negative about heat pumps, be it in a newspaper, a Facebook forum or even on Mumsnet, it is very likely to have originated from a PR campaign paid for by the Energy and Utilities Association, the trade body for boilermakers and others in the gas industry. Surprise, surprise people who make boilers want to keep on making boilers, not heat pumps.
Stories have ranged from heat pumps not working at all, not working in older properties and not working in our cold climate to plans for heat pumps being a Soviet-style plot.
In fact heat pumps have been working well. Many European countries, including those with climate colder than ours, are well ahead, with Norway having 30,000 heat pumps per 100,000 head of population. The European average is 4,000, yet for the UK this figure is only around 560.
The other side of the anti-heat pump propaganda is the gas industry’s continued push for hydrogen as the fuel of the future. This is no surprise given that they own a huge network of pipes which are going to be completely useless when we stop using fossil fuel gas. Originally both UK and Scottish governments were keen on hydrogen for heating. So much so that, in 2020, Boris Johnson said we would have trials demonstrating a hydrogen village and then a hydrogen town by 2030.
For the village trials, the good residents of Whitby in Ellesmere Port decided they were having none of this and were about to roundly reject a trial in their area through a council-run referendum when the government pulled the plug. For a short while the alternative site at Redcar was going to have 1,000 houses connected to hydrogen, but clear local opposition caused that trial to be cancelled too.
Bids had been put in for the hydrogen town trial in six areas but the demise of the village trials means these will never happen. This leaves the H100 project in Fife as the only trial of hydrogen for home heating in the UK. 300 homes are to be connected to a new hydrogen network and their boilers, cookers and gas fires swapped for hydrogen appliances.
This project has been running massively late. It was supposed to connect houses to hydrogen at the end of 2022 but works in the Methil and Buckhaven area are only just getting underway.
Dozens of studies have concluded that using hydrogen for home heating make no environmental or financial sense. The Scottish Government recently ruled out hydrogen and a UK Energy Minister said it was unlikely to play much of a role and pulled the plug on the funding.
It is very clear that hydrogen is not going to be the fuel of the future to heat people’s homes, making the H100 project completely pointless. People will have their homes and appliances converted to hydrogen, run them for two or three years, and then have to be converted back to natural gas and conventional appliances.
In their initial flush of enthusiasm the Scottish government invested nearly £7 million in the H100 scheme and energy regulator Ofgem £16m. They should try back to get it back.
Hydrogen has been a distracting dead end for home heating, heat pumps are clearly the future, despite industry’s propaganda campaign, and the UK is about to do the right thing and start catching up with our European neighbours.
A version of this article appeared in the Scotsman newspaper on 13th March 2024.