There’s an old saying that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions, while the road to heaven is paved with good actions’.
When it comes to decarbonising heating, we’ve seen a lot of good intentions in the last decade, but not enough action. That needs to change says Malcolm Farrow, OFTEC’s Head of Public Affairs.
There are a lot of good intentions contained in the many heat decarbonisation strategies published in the last decade. We’ve also seen some taxpayer’s money spent incentivising various technologies – particularly heat pumps – via schemes such as the RHI, Green Deal and BUS. Proposals to phase out the installation of oil boilers have come and gone, and we’ve seen a lot of hot air spent discussing how best to achieve the looming net zero targets (fortunately, all that hot air hasn’t added significantly to carbon emissions😉).
It’s right that we ask what’s been achieved by all these good intentions. The answer, sadly, not a great deal so far. Yes, we have moved forward in terms of installing heat pumps, but at nothing like the pace needed to keep us on track to achieve net zero – anyone remember Boris’s 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028? The record on energy efficiency is even worse. Far fewer homes are being improved now, compared to the early 2010s, and the last decade has been a wasted opportunity to reduce emissions and improve the lives of countless thousands of households.
Does this lack of progress matter? Let’s ignore for a moment that some still doubt that climate change is happening, and probably a bigger number think it doesn’t matter what we do, given how small the UK and Ireland’s emissions are, compared to the rest of the world. The fact is, we have legal targets to reduce emissions, a lot of which come from heating buildings, and, with every passing year, the challenge gets more difficult and expensive.
Decarbonisation efforts
Most of Labour’s current decarbonisation efforts are focussed on delivering clean power by 2030, although they claim their Warm Homes Plan will upgrade five million homes over the next parliament at a cost of £6.6 billion, through a mix of grants and low-interest loans. Given the scale of the challenge, it’s questionable whether this is remotely enough. The average cost of a heat pump installation is still north of £13,000, and a typical retrofit of an older home can easily exceed £20,000. Millions of homes in the UK need improvements, so that £6.6 billion will be stretched pretty thin. And given the dire economic situation the government faces, it’s possible that even this funding could be squeezed in future years.
The UK Government has repeatedly said that households won’t be forced to rip out their boilers. However, while committed to deploying heat pumps – no surprise given its efforts to decarbonise electricity generation – the Government admits that reducing cost is critical to consumer acceptance and uptake. Forcing households to buy clean heat technologies that are significantly more expensive than existing fossil fuel types would be political suicide – as well as being doomed to failure. But unless prices fall very significantly – which is unlikely – it’s hard to see how they can provide sufficient funding to bridge the gap.
That means the Government is betting big on more stealthy approaches, like the controversial Clean Heat Market Mechanism (CHMM), which they hope will force manufacturers to offer heat pumps at lower prices to avoid potentially business-damaging penalties. They are also looking at tightening appliance efficiency regulations which, if set too high, could effectively outlaw boilers without having to actually ban them.
High risk options
These are high risk options. There’s little evidence the price of heat pumps will fall significantly and any sudden removal of boilers from the market would leave customers with only a few, very expensive alternatives. Oil Installer readers can be reassured that boiler manufacturers have no wish to abandon the market, but they’re likely to want commitments regarding the future market for their products before agreeing to further efficiency-related product investment. One obvious way for government to provide this is by agreeing to the introduction of renewable liquid fuels like HVO for heating. It would allow them to make progress towards those pesky carbon budgets without having to spend a penny.
Alongside this is the thorny issue of green skills – one of the biggest challenges all governments face. The problem is that many in the existing workforce may opt not to retrain, so thousands of new installers may be needed, and their pathway into the industry is often difficult. Even if the government manage to solve that, it’s still very much a chicken or egg situation. Few will wish to go through the process of getting trained, entering the industry and acquiring the necessary registrations unless the demand for their services will be there. Governments needs to continually strike the right balance between stoking consumer demand and ensuring installers are there to do the work – no easy task – particularly when there’s little money available.
The time for talking is over
What should be clear is that the time for talking, and for yet more plans and strategies, is well and truly over. The next five years and beyond must instead be the time for action. And if those actions are underpinned by pragmatism and common sense, rather than a dogmatic heat pump first approach, then there’s a chance that targets can be met. But these are big ‘ifs’, particularly when money and consumer confidence are in short supply. It doesn’t help that plans to achieve to net zero have not featured prominently in political discourse, and households have had little or no say in how it should be achieved.
Achieving citizen buy-in is critical and this is best achieved by prioritising choice and minimising cost and disruption as much as possible This make it imperative that all solutions are on the table and, for the off-grid sector, that means the introduction of HVO for heating needs to be near the top of the list.
Image supplied by OFTEC
