UKC

Proposal to ban new gas and oil boiler manufacture from 2025, globally

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57149059

I'm not questioning the ultimate aspiration which I see as highly commendable but I am definitely questioning 2025 as a date, this seems entirely counter productive

* Does UK power networks/national grid have the capacity to support transition of domestic gas/oil use to electricity, let alone capacity for generation

* Would electricity use just increase, which is *currently* largely based on natural gas gas-turbine

* Will pro nuclear lobby jump on this to argue an increase nuclear power stations

* Will Critical National Infrastructure become less resilient and become overly vulnerable to foreign attacks on UK power networks etc

It's an intriguing suggestion.

I think the UK Grid is pretty much at its limits, with resilience to an extended loss of off-site power a high priority for many businesses. It would take massive investment to have the generating and transmission capacity (and no-one can knock up a new fleet of reactors in a couple of years).

Electric heating is also massively expensive in comparison to oil/gas for older properties, and heat pumps really only viable for new builds or properties that can be easily retrofitted with the required insulation. Fuel poverty would be a real issue in the UK.

Sounds like a great idea. Gas-fired heating is a no-brainer from a cost perspective right now (and a bit less so for oil burners in remote areas) and will almost certainly remain that way for some years to come. Legislating against it seems like a great way push everyone towards greener alternatives.

This will be a gradual transition. You have to remember that these boilers last 10 years or more and you get close to that 2025 deadline, a LOT of people are going to be renewing their aging gas/oil boiler while they still can, so the transition to "no gas and oil boilers" is more likely to be around 2035-40.

I don't understand what you are asking here, it isn't clear.

Maybe. I assume from this comment that you are anti-nuclear? Personally I can see a greater role for nuclear power during the transition towards more renewables and possibly fusion.

I can't see any reason this would be the case. Are you assuming that the increased need for electricity generation will make the overall network more vulnerable? What leads you to think this?

That seems a bit mad. What about all of the bio-gas which is going back into the grid and the multi-million ££££ recycling plants etc.? A fair amount of gas going into the grid isn't just from natural reserves. 

I agree with the national Grid issues.

But this just isn't true. 

We own a 170 year old stone cottage and our air source heat pump has worked great and efficiently through this long and cold winter. Without any secondary heat source.

We don't have space in the cottage for the water cylinder so had to build a lean to for it which we have then insulated (a lot), this works fine.

We couldn't have underfloor heating as we don't have the ceiling height to sacrifice, so have large panel radiators, this works fine.

The roof is well insulated despite two of the bedrooms being in the attic space so this works fine.

The main problem with installing heat pumps in older properties is a lack of joined up thinking at all levels of government. They will have to be a massive amount of flexibility in listed buildings regulations and conservation areas which rule in favour of a green future not in favour of a living museum.

The demand for electricity will only jncrease as boilers are replaced. Maybe this is the kick the uk builders need to start communal heating systems, or even towns. The biggest problem are low building standards around insulation and energy efficient design. 

I agree with those who say that the grid would need substantial upgrading to cope with demand if electricity was the only energy source for heating homes.

However, what is being proposed is that after 2025 a new design of gas boiler which can be converted to run on hydrogen should be available. Of course, a hydrogen grid is a long way in the future.

We use 15,000kWhrs of gas per year. Some of this for gas hob. Does anyone have a feel for how much electricity would be required to provide the same level of heating using heat pumps? 

Counter productive in what way, unrealistic, I could agree easily but I'm confused by counterproductive. Do you mean will stop people modernising gas systems leaving them with old inefficient boilers?

It wouldn't all happen at once, boilers typically last 10-15 years and that could be massively extended if there were greater incentive to repair than to replace. I'm not sure about generating capacity, wind lulls and really cold weather often coincide, it's much easier to answer for electrifying cars which have very low duty cycles and no significant need to synchronise demand. Domestic heating demand across a pretty small country is well synchronised, when we need it we often all need it and it's often out of phase with renewable energy availability. A long stable cold spell potentially drives too big an energy demand to be bridged through electrical/mechanical storage alone.

Yes but even used to run simple ohmic electric radiators it would still be cleaner than burning it in a home boiler (or car for that matter) and you can get a 2 to 3 fold output boost by using a heat pump at the point of consumption. We have a lot of wind, nuclear and woodchip capacity, even today it's not all fossil fuelled by any stretch.

Probably. We should have been on this seriously twenty odd years ago, we're edging toward a bit late really. I wouldn't bet on another big wave of fission plant builds.

The answer is likely yes for a while at least until regulation and design practice catches up, as things gets more technologically complex the opportunities for exploitation grow but I'm not sure I see the connection you appear to be making between phasing out gas boilers and this trend? Also it'd still almost certainly be easier to fell a few key pylons or punt a load of chain over the fence into a switch yard, these are not actions requiring sophisticated/state capability so are arguably even more deniable.

jk

Do you suggest that I buy a new one before then ?

About time we had a couple more nuclear power stations.

Very roughly: About 1/2 of that as kWHrs-electric given a fairly pessimistic 200% efficiency for air-source heat pumps. Basically about the same energy input overall given ~50% efficient conversion from chemical to electrical energy in the best grid scale plants, if, and it is an if, that extra energy demand is sourced from chemical reserves.

Of course improving our housing stock would make a big dent in this comparatively cheaply.

jk

I hope so.  It's the only practical way to get carbon emissions down quickly, coupled with electrification of the whole transport system.

A start would be mandating Passivhaus standards for all new-builds.  Those are good enough that conventional electric heating is adequate for the small amount of heat you need to add.

Would also help save the massive noise nuisance heat pumps (alongside aircon units, as a heat pump is basically an aircon unit running backwards-ish) will present when they're attached like warts on the outside of every home

Interesting, thanks. That will more than treble our electricity consumption. What with electric cars as well, I hope someone has thought about all this! 

I'd imagine they have, and thus that 2025 probably isn't realistic (as you can't chuck up nuclear power stations and distribution infrastructure quite that quickly) but 2030 might well be, and 2035 almost certainly is.

Energy yes, power, not necessarily. The key is first reducing how much heat we need through insulation and next, spreading the load across the day. They are also very rough numbers, both the efficiency figures I used are low-ball (distinctly so for the heat pump). 300% and 60% (both possible) make a significant difference compounded together.

jk

You first need to work out if heat pumps and your rads can actually supply the heat you need. The pumps generally have a low output temp - 50degrees max? If your current boiler is outputting at 70 degrees to make your rads hot enough then you may have an issue, especially if your rads are relatively small. Otherwise, theoretically you're looking at a 200-400% efficiency i.e. 1kW of electrical power puts 2-4kW of heat into the house.

2025 is the proposed start of the change and only away from fossil-only boilers. Allow 10-15 years for phasing out over a life cycle and bear in mind the replacements may simply be crude gas-electric hybrids with grid surplus detection and a return to tanked hot water. Possibly even just the theoretical ability to convert to hydrogen, likely never to be used... it's not that radical. Still, I doubt we'll commit.

jk

The Thread

We are about to buy a new house and I think a new boiler will be needed. I have been contemplating if buying a Gas one and getting it fitted before the deadline is the wise thing or buying an Electric boiler is the wise thing, and this was when I thought Gas Boilers were going in 2030.

One concern I have is if I might be buying a Beta Max electric boiler, when they will go VHS, if you see what I mean.

When I say wise I mean from a personal self centred financial point of view, not the wider moral perspective of accepting responsibility for and paying the cost of my own pollution.

The problem is the big housing company plans going through the system now for construction in the next decade will be for the same old standards, not much beyond the 1970s level. UK housing standards are about 20 years behind the times. 

That's a matter of opinion and the opinions vary wildly. The numbers aren't comparable or reliable.

If you construct a study to look at the carbon footprint to build the power station, run the power station for its lifetime, decommission the power station and the footprint of the fuel as well  (bear in mind for decom people are just wildly picking numbers) and use that carbon total to then be divided by the units of electricity produced in the power station lifespan  you get a feel for the overall carbon in gCO2/kWh.

On the rationale of the above, nuclear can come in higher than coal based largely on the huge energy in mining and processing of uranium ore and the wildcard value of what decommissioning and waste disposal means.  Pro nuclear lobby suggest for a new build an ukltra optimistic 7g CO2/kWh, anti nuclear lobby put that in the 700 range, many supposedly neutral estimates put that at around 200.  For perspective in 2008 it was estimated that UK electricity (as a whole) was about 500 having improved from 718 in 1990.

It's a politically muddied topic and I'll leave you to research and form your own opinion. I just want to make the point that Nuclear being lower carbon than Gas may or may not be true but it is unfortunately a purposefully muddied political swamp and very unclear - certainly not a foregone conclusion. Swapping domestic heating relatively like-for-like Nuclear produced electric alternatives, which I fear would be the outcome of this, may not be a good outcome. This is one reason I think it's counter productive, as well as causing people says "rubbish! those enviro loonies again" and tuning even further out from the issue

Wouldn't fixing the awful mess of UK planning and building regs be a far better entry point for change? 

A bit like buying a petrol/diesel car, I think you'd be mad to buy a new oil boiler today if you were in the market for one. Legislating seems like a good idea even if there's lots of protest starting with 'but what about...' as a result. It's not like on Jan 1st 2025 every single oil boiler will suddenly be replaced with electricity so the grid won't fall to it's knees, and however bad things might be with a subpar electricity network, it has to be better than the alternative world that continuing to burn fossil fuels will bring us.

We bought a house 18 months ago with an ageing (40 years old) oil boiler which is like something from the engine room of the Titanic (it's in the basement but you can hear it everywhere). I can't wait to get it replaced (planning this year) with something much more sensible. 

We ran out of oil last month (mistimed the delivery) and my plumber told me to fill it with some diesel from the petrol station (which is basically slightly more refined version of heating oil) to limp through for a few days. Getting up close and personal to diesel, emptying jerry cans into the tank made it feel real to me how noxious this stuff is, and having homes burning it all day long all over the place is just a really bad idea.

That's interesting. How big is your property and what are the walls made of, if you don't mind me asking?

How close we came to multi region power supply outage at one point mid 2020 is probably best kept quiet. We don't have spare capacity to cope with simultaneous unexpected peak demands and hiccups in production. We really have no wriggle room without significant program of multi year upgrades

You can get low power electrical fans to force air currents through radiators - we use those when just heating one room off a condensing boiler to lower the return temperature.  Also there’s a couple of dual cycle high water temperature ASHPs out there.  Not ideal but it helps improve the range of properties that can use an ASHP.

Likewise gas supply exhaustion during one of the two exceptional winters a decade ago.  Wasn’t much left in the tanks by the time the big boat came in IIRC.

Sounds like a vote-winner! Here in happy Germany where of course the word comes from the passivhaus movement is huge. Despite the massive subsidies we built 94 in the last year statistics are available ( 2019) compared with101,040 newbuilds and 19m existing houses. Going to take a while to save the planet at that rate!

Even in the peak year of 2012 420 were built and 30% of those have subsequently be re-certified downwards, they are basically shit to live in.

But you can build or modify a house that's a lot more energy efficient than current uk specs and is arguably nicer to live in. 

As you know there's much more cost and work involved in chasing the last few percent. Much of the uk has yet to make the easy wins happen. 

I don't think this is really a proposal that will be implemented.  Its really a series of measures that, if they were implemented, would achieve the objective of stabilising global warming.  It highlights just how immediate our problem is.

It's small approx 75m2, but the heat pump is sized accordingly. It's Welsh whinstone with metre thick walls. No external insulation (we completed just after the deadline for entering the scheme for free external insulation in our area). uPVC double glazing and 3 velux windows including a massive one in the bathroom which we need to replace so will upgrade to their highest rated glass, which should bring bills down a bit as this is the coldest room in the house.

We changed all our radiators for larger ones as advised by the installation company. Unless you are in to designer radiators it really isn't a significant cost relative to the overall bill for the heat pump system.

Of course but that's different to moaning about newbuilds and going on about passive houses which is going to do nothing about global warming and make the housing shortage even worse for low income families.

Gas going in to the grid from bio gas plants? Every bio gas plant I have been to uses the gas to generate electricity on site. Are there ones that put gas in to the gas network?

Bio gas opens another question too. What is better for the environment, digesting the waste to maximise the gas yield then burn that to generate electricity or send the waste to landfill where the waste will still rot down and release gas to the atmosphere. 

Thanks SAF.

I wonder if metre thick walls are actually an advantage, and they maintain a bit of a steady state once the interior side gets warm?

Some old 'solid' walls are often dressed stone on the outsides, with rubble fill in the middle, all the debris and irregular shaped stuff. It's often less compacted and can be a pain to drill through as it moves. 

Not can be, is! I know from bitter experience. And as for cavity wall insulation, forget it.

Not even close. Peak demand in winter relies on significant imports via multiple interconnectors. Electric car usage is going to make this more common, domestic heating will put extra strain on the system as it currently stands.

Probably.

Yes. However there are big issues with funding large scale plants and is a problem faced by many countries. Small modular reactors designs are being pursued in a few countries. A £1 billion price tag per unit is more palatable than the ~£15-20bn Hinckley Point C scale plants. Rolls Royce in Derby has a design derived from it's submarine reactors which is the most likely UK design to be built.

The national grid has some serious money spent on cyber security as you would expect. I'm more concerned about the roll out of smart meters. A thread on here several months ago was awash with issues associated with smart meters. One compromised software update and your house, car and heating don't work - not ideal.

It's pretty standard for thick walls, I spent all day core cutting two extractor fan holes once, nightmare! 

Well yeah, Germany is a leader in bio-gas plants and feeds into the gas network. 1/2,000,000th of the annual demand so basically nothing.

It isn't derived from a submarine reactor, it's more like a standard PWR but smaller and optimised to smooth/derisk the construction process. I used to work on the project.

(I haven't much else to add to this thread, I would love to be able to use a heat pump but my house too big and draughty for that to be possible with current technology. I had heat pump salespeople around to talk about it when there was a government grant still available 18 months ago, but they told me to get a boiler, so I did.)

Understatement of the year.

Trying to drill through a rubble stone wall near the bottom for a cable did my nut in last year.  Every time I removed the drill bit, something fell down the cavity blocking the hole, like a demented game of Tetris.  After 4 goes I got an over-sized meter long bit through, removed the drill in situ from the bit, then aligned a rigid stainless steel pipe section (left over from a bathroom job) to the bit and hammered it in, pushing the bit out as it went.  Then I could feed the cable through the pipe, then with the cable anchored inside I could remove the pipe from outside with some mole grips.  What a carry on.  If I have to do it again I’m going to drill through the inner stone wall and then inject a large quantity of concrete in to the cavity to set it ready for drilling.

Makes you think about how much money is going to have to be borrowed to find this transition.

When you think about that it makes you realise why the Tories are so hot on aggressive Green targets.  For them it isn't about climate it is about a business opportunity for their friends in the City.  Just like student loans and private healthcare, this is going to mean ordinary people taking out loans from banks and more of their income going on interest.

Maybe, but if everyone knew it was a pain before starting the task where would the fun be!?

Yeah, you can't retreat once started and need some form sleeve to insert. Even more fun cutting cores, as you can't do the hole in a single push and have to retreat to clear the core out. Joys of retro fitting. 

Money has to come from some where. Scottish oil and gas has received a whack of subsidies for exploration and tax perks over the years too. A lot recent wind power investment in Scotland came from money added to everyone in the uks bill. 

No free lunches. 

 'Subisidies and tax breaks' for an industry that is pouring tax into the UK government's coffers is meaningless.  It is like a shop saying the price is £100 but you get 25% off rather than saying the price is £75.   It makes no difference: you are still paying them £75.   As far as London is concerned oil is a cash cow, they suck out as much milk as they can get and when it starts to fall off they will shoot it.   They're already getting ready for that with 'the oil industry will need to be shut down to meet our green targets'.   If England needs to reduce CO2 it can f*ck one of its own industries. 

 There's so much green energy in Scotland and such a low population density we could probably get away with a fair bit of oil industry and still stay under climate targets if we were accounting as an independent state but because we are ruled by England they'll immediately go for our industry when they need to sacrifice something.

Unless you are a Tory.  Then you can have a 200 million quid contract for PPE.

Which would imply it didn't need tax breaks, it could and should have supported itself. But also means that if an area like say the city of London put twice what the entire uk oil & gas industry does into the treasury, they deserve tax breaks too? Or bailouts which you are, or were against? 

but who has funded that Scottish green energy? In many cases a subsidy added to the household bill of everyone in the uk. 

Will the snp take over paying the various wind farm subsidies? 

In reply to 

And a quick look in my bio-gas books tells me if all of the UK was average agricultural land and turned entirely over to gas production it could produce 2/3rds of the annual gas demand.

All new uk housing really needs communal or district heating, it's at least 20% more efficient. The idea of individual boilers having to fire up, warm up etc.. every time somebody wants a bit of warm water is some what behind the times.

I'm sure Germany has lots of district power and heating plants, although they are more natural gas, than biomass? 

All this talk about installing heat pumps and investing in the latest technology is absolute pixey dust for a large proportion of the population.

Most people don't have the means to do this and every government backed scheme for upgrading the UK's housing stock so far has been a total heap of crap more effective for lining the pockets of dodgy installers than improving people's living environments.

District heating is more about capturing the waste heat of combustion r fission plants than the economy of individual boilers.

The other way to do this is to distribute power generation in to domestic/commercial/industrial units that run a small fuel cell or ICE to produce electricity and capture the waste heat.  Seems over complex mind.  If small, endurable Stirling engines ever happen that could change it a bit, it’s it’s a technological dead end given that we need to get off the combustibles.  (Unless we distribute RTGs to every household!  I’d love a 2 kW thermal RTG with a 0.5 kW electric output.  Can’t see any down sides...)

Sometimes at the expense of the fabric of the house.  Some of the “we rent your roof” solar installs were shockingly bad in terms of how the roof array was mated to the structure below.  Holes in tiles with expanding foam around them etc.  These are schemes where home owner pays nothing, gets an array, gets the electricity for free and the installer collects FIT.  The big operator around us sold out to an investment group and now the home owners have a difficult time getting it serviced as installer numbers dropped with the end of the FIT and the contract holder doesn’t do servicing but shops around for the cheapest.  So much money poured in to it, and most of it seems to end up in the same old places.

I was thinking more in terms of straight forward biomass, wood chip burning plants... providing hot water to all homes and businesses. Although most generate power too. 

There are a couple of district cooling plants in Gothenberg and Stockholm used by hospitals, offices and commercial premises. Both use rivers or sea water as their cooling element. 

The big issue with these rent your roof schemes is if you ever need to sell or re-mortgage your house.

The examples was referring to and have seen are dodgy cavity wall insulation installs which resulted in damp bridging, dodgy loft insulation where for a ridiculously inflated price (charged to the gov. scheme) they shove a bit of fibreglass in the loft which doesn't go anywhere near the sides (personal experience), dodgy external insulation where they didn't remove and refit the gutter downpipes and just insulated up to them and then a few months later half the render falls off.

And then you have the renewable heat initiative where farmers in Northern Ireland were being paid to heat their sheds.

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas so its better to burn the gas and release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Ugh. Semi-related fun, I tried to core cut 150mm through Wimpey No-Fines concrete. Snag-tasting and broke the teeth off the core drill in the end. Theoretically, a wet core rig would work better but since No-Fines concrete is a entirely permeable it would result in water running straight down the walls and into the house. In the end I ended up having to chisel through and concreted the resulting hole back to a cylinder...

Apparently 13,9% of homes are on district heating but what powers them is variable, where I lived in Munich it was gas/rubbish incineration, the town near where I live is geothermal and the smaller town the other way on bio-energy. My workshop is on waste heat from a bio-gas generating plant.

The hassle with smaller (1-10Mw) bio plants is the pumping distance, over a kilometer or two the heat loss is too high. The village nearby actually has the gas pumped over and then through a generating plant on site.

Burn it (the gas or the waste). Methane has roughly 30x the global warming effect of CO2.

jk

Propose an alternative.

jk

Our cans of ..petfood put out a couple of hundred watts thermal.

Not only this but landfill is often an anaerobic environment and so the waste actually does not rot so the waste is either generating methane or just occupying a hole in the ground for eternity.

Controlled combustion, capturing the heat, is also even better because the temperature of that combustion can be chosen to maximize energy output and minimize by-products.

Talking of dodgy installers it occurs to me reading the kinds of problems that people have raised that there will be a problem finding people with the skills to do what seem like frequently very complex installations. And who’s going to do the training?

Not so. We have an Air source heat pump in a cottage that was built in approx 1830. There is no gas, and we are saving approx £300 per annum on our total fuel bill, plus we have solar panels as well. It's certainly a viable option for older properties.

I fail to understand why ALL new build properties are not mandated to have solar panels in the roof...

Corruption.

Lobbying and donation if you prefer a euphemism.

jk

Optimum angle and aspect being part of the overall housing estate design. Large triple glazed windows, south facing, getting as much of that free heat and light as possible. 

More likely it's the bottom line that's the issue. The builders want a bigger one.

Might have to look into it again then. The opinion of the installers I talked to last time was to avoid it due to the costs of upgrading the insulation and new rads/floor slab. Maybe the tech has improved. Was the cottage on oil previously?

No, solid fuel plus calor gas fires. Yes all the radiators have to be double, but some of ours were already.

We actually found a local plumber who'd fitted a couple of these, and by buying direct from the manufacturer we saved nearly 50% of the installation cost...and that included two additional radiators and an electrician!

LG do a high temperature ASHP that uses two refrigerant cycles to get a higher temperature.  This means well insulated houses without underfloor heating and without giant radiators can use it well.

I’ve recently become the proud owner of a single compressor -80°C freezer.  This uses some cyclical thermodynamic voodoo using a mixture of gasses with different boiling points to achieve what would normally take multiple separate cycles.  I assume the same can be used for heating as for cooling; although you’d need a minimum thermal mass to the heating system to absorb the cyclical nature.

For a very brief time I even thought I understood the auto cascade cycle...

This is all a bit frustrating.  I too looked at a heat pump for an old property and the advice was not effective, so went for gas which I didn't really want. Further,  I installed a hi-spec wood burner which is great for heat and mean the boiler is little used for space heating.  It was the recommendation of the carbon trust for the type of house.  Now, however, the Guardian has decided I am a social pariah for burning wood.

No, it would imply that the government were trying to take too much tax and it was killing their cash cow so they dialed it back a bit.  The cow was perfectly able to support itself.

Can you buy green electricity cheaper from someone else?  Would it be cheaper to put enough wind farms in England to produce the same amount of power?

My guess is that if the prices were not regulated by the English and Scotland set out to get the maximum price for its energy we could get more.    It's going to be extremely expensive to build wind farms in England of the scale necessary to replace wind farms in Scotland.  Scotland is mountainous and a turbine on top of a mountain is going to get more wind.

If Scotland was independent and England wants enough green electricity to meet its climate targets we could probably charge more for it and still come in below what it would cost to put the same number of wind farms in England.

It's the climate targets which are taking fossil fuel generation off the table and forcing people to buy green energy even though it costs more.  That is not a subsidy to wind farms, it is a decision to pay more for a superior product.  As long as England wants to meet commitments to CO2 reduction it is going to have to buy green energy and Scotland can be a price competitive supplier.

My guess is we will put the price charged to England for green electricity up after independence.  In a free market we will charge the maximum price for our wind power consistent with winning the business.   Where else is England going to get that amount of green electricity from?

I'm amazed at a man of your talents has installed a cable subject to very probable damage unprotected! I'd've left the tubing in.

I've never seen a wind turbine on top of a mountain before. Most are built on moorland and lower hills, or offshore.

The Scottish turbines I can see from the house are built on exactly the same terrain as the English ones.

You'd be better going for hydro if you're going to economically destroy the enemy over the border.

I didn’t have an impromptu sleeve big enough to take the cable; it’s an SWA cable so it won’t be in the least bit bothered.  (It’s joining the 48 V DC bus together between out buildings).

If I’d thought about it I’d have done a smaller hole above the cable run and put a smaller diameter plastic pin through - prevent rubble falling down and minimise thermal bridging.  Would have then made the main drilling event much easier too.

<Sharp intake of breath through tight lips and teeth...> the sheath gets compromised and the armour rots like nobodies business

SWA should be buried in sifted sand.

I reckon it’ll survive.  Not much weight on the rubble.  It’s only in for a few years whilst I chip away at clearing things out for the final, proper set up.  I wouldn’t have run a 240 V AC cable through there though.

I over simplified in the earlier post - it was a case of pushing the cable in as the drill sheath was removed; memory is a bit hazy as mainly it’s dominated by the sheer annoyance of trying to drill the hole, having until then been unaware of how mobile the middle of a “solid” stone wall could be.  

The price of solar panels is only getting cheaper. You can buy a 500W panel for £140 these days and that's just buying them singularly. The cheapest from the supplier I've just used is £0.19 per Watt.

In the not too distant future electric cars will be helping to balance the grid not hinder it. The newer Lithium chemistries have much larger charge cycle lifetimes meaning discharging to the grid won't adversely affect the range. Once the battery is no longer good enough for the car though they can still be used for household battery storage. A Tesla model S battery could power my house for about 8 days.

Our last boiler lasted 23 years. Not exactly a cliff edge if no new ones are being installed after 2025.

If anything there need to be incentives to get people switching early.

I am not sure if this is a house wall but be cautious of injecting cement based concrete as it can lead to moisture problems.  Lime-based may be better.

Thanks.  This is an old outbuilding that's, er, more than adequately ventilated.  I leave work on the actual house to people who know what they're doing...  (Which, when core drinking for the flu for the heat recovery ventilator through such a wall, was swearing as much as me, but in a professional capacity).  

I think a lot of the responses here highlight just how varied the housing stock is in terms of suitability for various energy saving technologies. But on that note I'm seeing an increase in thermal render and new windows being fitted, was once a rarity, now I notice it here and there on my travels as a relatively ordinary home improvement. Maybe there's just a lot of solid walled properties where I am?

I'm annoyed by this too. Our house is old and listed so insulation improvements are constrained and the prevailing message online is that ground/air source isn't worth considering, but there are several testimonies on this thread that suggest it's not that clear cut. Our gas boiler is currently fine, but I'm making plans around adding PV solar and the idea of being able to effectively generate our own heat using electricity captured ourselves (plus grid top-up) is attractive.

I'd be very interested to find an impartial source of information on this. I wouldn't want to commit based on the word of an installer that stands to profit from the deal.

There is a further problem around government support too.  There are heat pump grants available but only if you first put in loads of insulation which, as you say, isn't practical in many old properties.  This makes sense if heat pumps really don't work in them but not if they do.

I think a general problem with these assessments is they all assume that everyone heats their entire house to 22C, whereas in an old house this would be nuts, regardless of the heat source.  Instead buy jumpers and blankets and heat one room.  Our energy bills are about a third of friends in "efficient" houses.

As I pointed out above, the proposal is that in 2025 it will not be possible to install a boiler that is only capable of running on gas. It will be possible to install a boiler that runs on gas, and can be converted to run on hydrogen in the future.

I suspect that won't be possible with boilers that run on oil.

Unfortunately these recent articles only refer to a recommendation from an independent body. They are not policy from government and they are not about to be forced on everyone, overload the grid and plunge us all into darkness and poverty.

I think it's a deliberately provocative date, trying to create a sense of urgency and accelerate the transition. Can it be done by 2025? No. Will telling people it needs to be done by 2025 increase the chance of it being done by 2030? Maybe. But I don't think a report designed to inspire exactly this debate is counter-productive.

Yes and no. It's the Daily Mail 'your electric car will melt your kettle!' thing. If every gas appliance is switched to electric with no change in usage pattern then absolutely the grid cannot cope.

But there is plenty of capacity for the distributed demand. At peak the UK grid can see loads of about 60GW, but an average over the day is only ~30GW. Local or grid level storage would be a way of flattening that peak demand and keeping a massive increase in total energy within transmissible levels.

Electricity use would have to increase, yes. Although interestingly, we currently use 16% less electrical energy than we did 20 years ago, as TVs and LED lights and Fridges etc have got more efficient. Even retrofitting millions of homes to direct electric heating (or millions of EVs) would only bring us back up to that level, not tip us off a cliff. Certainly for the near-term (5-10 years) we have capacity to keep us going while more generation is brought online.

As you say there is a large proportion of natural gas in the mix at the moment (check out electricitymap.org for real-time info) which amounts to about 40% of total generation. Zero/Low-carbon sources now make up more than 50% of our mix, and this will only increase. A gas boiler cannot get cleaner over time.

(side-rant: when you see wind turbines not turning, it doesn't mean there is no wind. Up there, there is almost always wind. It means there is oversupply on the grid, and it is cheaper to pay wind farms to stall their rotors and stop generating, than it is to wind down a gas plant. In 2019 these wind curtailment payments were over £700m. Madness)

Yep. And they won't be wrong. But they will overlook how much cheaper it would be to install gigawatts of wind/solar and gigawatt-hours of storage to meet the same baseload, with no ongoing cost to store poisonous waste until the end of time.

I work in an area decarbonising heat, not international espionage. But I'm of the opinion that as long as Gavin Williamson is in Westminster/London/the World we are more likely to fall foul of domestic incompetence than foreign aggression.

More seriously: if done wrong, yes. But I have faith in the engineers at National Grid ESO, who spend more time thinking about it than most readers of one BBC article. They're well aware where the stresses are on the grid and how to remedy them. It's likely we'll see more decentralised generation and demand-response technologies come online, which will decrease demand at bottlenecks and actually make the existing infrastructure more resilient.

I know this post is really dragging on now, but I work in the industry and it's quite nice to see the interest in this thread, thanks for sticking with it!

I've got lots of thoughts on heat pumps, but they've been fairly well covered already. Some for, some against. Both are right, we need some heat pumps, and we need some alternatives. They are not the silver bullet that some (especially government) are making out (and while we're at it Roger Harrabin could do with expanding his research) but they're an excellent tool in the box.

The main reason they're so coveted is the headline COP of 4-5. This means you'll be paying 5x the unit price over gas, but using 1/5 as much. Same cost, same heat. Ideal. The downside being all of these units would be in use at the same time, still driving a peak time surge in grid stress. And ignoring the fact they get less efficient in cold weather. Doh.

Gas boiler manufacturers want you to believe that hydrogen will save us. While hydrogen is a very versatile and interesting material it really isn't a good fit for domestic heating. This is a delaying tactic so they can keep selling 'hydrogen-ready' boilers while they pivot to an actually viable technology. A few % of homes at most.

Biomass is absurd greenwash. The renewable heat incentive had to be pulled because it was so abused by b**tards wasting literal megawatts of power collecting the incentive, burning thousands of tonnes of carbon-absorbing trees. Madness.

Biogas. Certainly a better option than fracking, as we gradually phase out gas boilers.

Demand-side response. An interesting company called Connected Response is proposing fitting smart controls to over a million homes with storage heaters, making them more versatile with when they can charge and alleviating the stress on the grid by absorbing oversupply, and turning off when under supplied. Not a big part of the solution, but definitely part of it.

Thermal storage. Sunamp make a unit which can store the heat from a heat pump and use it at a later date - this will be very useful in offsetting the electrical demand from the heat demand, and lowering the peak on the grid. It has the disadvantage of being low temperature/low capacity and therefore unsuitable for most retrofits. Great for some new builds. 

For higher temperature thermal storage, Caldera recently came out with their 100kWh store, the size of an oil tank and designed to replace and replicate the functionality of an oil boiler. This offsets the demands and is suitable for off-gas-grid retrofits. Tepeo are also working on a Zero Emission Boiler (ZEB) which stores 40kWh and replaces gas boilers in homes. By combining a heat battery like this with a variable-rate electricity tariff you can 'charge' the unit when electricity is clean and cheap and 'discharge' it when electricity is expensive or overloaded. It is really the variable tariff that makes this competitive with gas. Both are high-temperature and therefore high-water-power, meaning there is no need to upgrade radiators. These are a very useful retrofit options, and can be specced in new builds that can't make best use of a heat pump. Just another few tools in the box.

What we really need are regulation changes. Certainly in building regs, but particularly in energy tariffs. At the moment about 22% of your electricity bill is a levy passed on by your supplier, which they're mandated to invest in renewables. And about 30% of your gas bill is subsidy paid for by income taxes. These reasons contribute to the p/kWh rate for gas being about 1/5th that of electricity. 

What would be really great is if the renewable levy was instead applied to the gas bill, and the subsidy used to equalise the electricity bill. In this way the actual cost to people would not change much (for some it would go down) but it would be a very clear incentive to install electric heating, and make it very easy for a plumber to recommend over gas. We can but dream.

If you made it here, well done. Have a cookie.

That sounds like a massive loophole.

It's not a loophole, it's an acknowledgement that it would not be possible to get the infrastructure in place by 2025 for everyone to switch to electric or hydrogen based heating.

The hydrogen bit is dodgy. It implies a hydrogen supply, suitable piping in all houses where it's used and it ignores the fact you have to make hydrogen. It's a delaying tactic.

Over here the grid problems are mainly low voltage (415v) underground joints having too much load placed on them and cooking themselves. The casing cracks, then when the water table rises in winter they go bang.  Our electricity provider is actively looking to distribute battery storage around the grid in order to reduce the load on parts of it. Luckily everything is underground so we don't have weather-related problems.

That looks interesting, thanks for posting.

An excellent post.  In your opinion, if electricity and gas were subject to the same taxation and levies, with zero subsidy for either, what would their respective kWh prices look like?

I'm on the verge of switching my tired gas boiler for ASHP but it's very hard to make the economics work out.  Gas is ridiculously cheap and therefore very hard to match, even with a decent CoP from the pump.  

One thing to add to this is that the current demand is in the region of 33GW today, in the daytime.  Between about 11pm and 6am this drops to around 22GW.  11GW x 7 hours charges a lot of cars and household (and larger) batteries, and lets a lot of heat pumps reheat thermal stores.  The better we get at storage, the more we can make use of that currently underused capacity.

Well the spot price for electricity is about  €50 per Mwh, with gas it varies more, €15- 30 is a good range ( dropped to €3,5 at one time last year though).

'Gas is ridiculously cheap'

It's not likely to remain ridiculously cheap though, as the government attempt to move us towards electrical heating systems.

A top tip for doing this is to tape some rope the same diameter as your drill bit to the tip of the bit once it’s passed through the wall. Pull the drill bit out to pull the rope through the wall. Then tape the cable/pipe to the end of the rope and pull that back through the wall.

Works a treat…

Or the same as what you did with a metal pipe, but use plastic pipe and leave it in the wall as conduit to protect the cable

My previous house (rented) had an off-peak heat store of that kind, they've been around a fair while, mine was installed in the 1990's. Made by Thyssen or one of the other big German companies it was 500kWh, just a huge, 2.5 ton red box in the celler which hummed slightly! According to the manual the ceramic blocks inside were at 700°C and it ran underfloor central heating.

The most noticeable thing about it was the sound of the relay when the off-peak started!

According to the landlord who lived in the other half of the house it worked out the same cost as oil (which he had) after 20 or 30 years because there was no servicing costs etc and he had to replace his boiler and the tanks due to their age. Fairly rare though, two years after it was installed the gas main appeared!

They do look interesting - nice simple concept and I assume modern ones could be nice and quiet. 
 

I think I’d have space in the garage for even the big one....

It was only the circulation pump really, there must have been something clever inside that stopped the heating water from boiling though when it wasn't extracting heat. It had a programmable system that read the inside and outside temperatures to decide how much energy to store depending on the weather.

Space might be the issue. I've plenty of garage or outbuilding space but some distance from the house. Definitely something to think about for the future though.

yes - but for the average semi/detached with built on garage they could be a great option - as long as everybody has not converted their garages into home offices etc.

Looks like they may be developed to be able to run combi-boilers as well - which is a big chunk of the market

I googled the manufacturer and it looks like the UK prototype has been coupled to a conventional heating system. It's essentially installed in series with a conventional boiler, using the same pipework and circulating pump. They claim you just need a local plumber and electrician (and probably a load of hefty blokes) to do the install.

Neat idea if it scales, especially for off-mains properties. In my case I'd probably need a well insulated trench with trace heating to connect between garage and house.

small lean to? Not that bigger than some water butts I've seen.

Not really, it's an old cottage that had been built into a hill on one side. It's been dug out now (probably damp) and now has a metre wide path around it with the house on one side and a low retaining wall for the garden on the other. No room for a lean to without some excavation.

I'd probably be able to fit one in a utility room next door to the existing oil boiler, just need to persuade Mrs Ridge to chuck out a couple of cupboards....

What an absolutely fascinating and educative post. Many thanks! 

Good luck with that!

It's difficult! Running your heating remote is no problem, mine goes 14m from the plant to the house.

But off-grid? I've a lot (300m²) of roof area perfectly angled and orientated in southern Bavaria which is the best area in Germany for solar energy. With solar water and heat storage or pv and a heat store I'd be looking at a payback of over at least 35 years if I was off-grid. Wood on the other hand is CO2 neutral so my money stays in the bank earning nothing and on my roof there is moss!

Sorry Jim, by "off mains" I meant no mains gas so reliant on oil or tanked propane. 

Ah, that's different! The size and cost of a PV array and heat store to reliably heat through a long grey winter doesn't bear thinking about! There's a 45kW PV system on my workshop roof and when I wander past the control panel during a freezing fog period it wouldn't even operate my coffee machine.

What I've considered building is a solar water panel system with a storage tank that heats up all summer as the array would be a reasonable cost and the tank cheap enough, there's a few of these around my way which seem to work fairly well. The hassle is planning permission for an 8m dia and 3m high tank but I've a plan to try some used shipping containers, €10,000 would get the 150,000l I need and they could go in one of my barns. Better start looking at some solar panels I guess!

Coming late to this discussion I’m interested in learning more about your ASHP system as we live in a similar old quarryman’s cottage near Llanberis. Just wondering about what make of heat pump you installed and what you estimate your annual electricity consumption/running costs might be. At the moment we use a couple of log burners for heating and a immersion heater for hot water and are looking to upgrade to something more sustainable.

I've messaged you.