8: Too hot to handle? Decarbonising heat in homes and industry
Heat is a key challenge in achieving carbon net-zero. What is being done to decarbonise heat systems, and how can this work be accelerated? Heat policy experts Richard Lowes and Jen Roberts address barriers and challenges to a just transition of heat. We also hear from some of very few householders to have already installed heat-pumps.
Episode transcript
[Music flourish]
Matt: So in this episode, we’re going to be covering quite a lot of technical jargon. I think there are three key terms that we’re going to use quite a lot: heat pump, district heating and EPC or Energy Performance Certificate. Our guests, who we’ll introduce later, Rich and Jen, have kindly offered to explain some of these terms in a few key words. So Rich, what is a heat pump, please?
Richard: Thanks, Matt. A heat pump is a device which uses electricity to extract heat from the environment. It works with similar components to a fridge, so it’s got a compressor and a pump. Basically, it takes heat that’s at a lower temperature in the environment, then squeezes it to give you a higher temperature and that heat is then put into your house to run your hot water or to heat up your radiators.
Matt: Brilliant and Energy Performance Certificate, please?
Richard: An Energy Performance Certificate is a certificate which is supposed to measure the energy efficiency of your house and give you some idea about the running costs. Most people will see them when either you buy a house or you rent a new house. They are notoriously unreliable.
Matt: [Laughter] Excellent and Jen, district heating, please?
Jen: District heating is a form of heating, or distributed heat, where you have a central source like a boiler or a source of heat which could be a heat pump even. That heat is then distributed through pipes to a number of different homes or buildings. I suppose, at the moment, I might have a single boiler in my flat that services me and that’s it but in a district heat system, you would be taking that central source of heat and distributing it to a number of heat users. District heating doesn’t necessarily mean net zero compatible heating. It depends very much on the source of that heat.
Matt: Okay, thank you very much.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Matt: Hi, and I’m Dr Matt Hannon. We’re recording this episode as we come out of the coldest spell in years – minus 230 in parts of Scotland. We’ve all been cranking up that thermostat and it’s starting to really focus the mind on how we can keep ourselves warm.
Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee, told us on Local Zero a few weeks ago that heat is something we really need to move radically on.
Chris: You’ve got to have a strategy in place over the next decade, which is two parliaments, to get to the point when you’re ready for people to start, en masse, replacing high-carbon boilers with something low carbon. If we look at that heat question, we’ve always known about the technologies that would decarbonise heat. We’ve always known about the things that could be done. We just haven’t been doing them.
Rebecca: Today, we’ll be talking to two experts on how the UK can deliver on its ambition to decarbonise heating, Dr Richard Lowes and Dr Jennifer Roberts.
Jen: The challenge is huge. I mean we’ve got the challenge of decarbonising heating across the board in the UK, whether that’s from commercial buildings through to the houses that we live in. Currently, we are massively behind on all of our targets, whether that’s for renewable heat or other forms of low-carbon heat.
Richard: It requires nothing short of a total transformation. I think, yeah, we should have a ban on gas boilers because you can’t have gas boilers in a net zero energy system.
Matt: We’ll also hear from people who’ve installed their own heat pumps about what prompted them to make the switch to clean heating, how they went about this and what it’s like to live with it.
Alan: After we did the installation, the firm said, ‘Would you mind perhaps showing some prospective customers what we’ve done?’ So we had several people come around and we said, ‘This is what it’s like. This is what it sounds like. This is what it looks like.
Rachael: And this is how warm it is in our house.
Alan: Yeah, quite.
Rebecca: As always, remember to follow us on social media. Use our handle @EnergyREV_UK and the hashtag #LocalZero. Reach out to us with any questions or comments you’d like us to address in future episodes and we’ll make sure to get back to you.
As always, we’re joined by Fraser Stewart. Welcome, Fraser.
Fraser: Hello, how is everybody doing?
Matt: We’re alright. We’ve survived the Big Freeze. How about you?
Fraser: Yeah, much the same. I was very, very glad to see that quick thaw the other night.
Matt: Yeah, and wasn’t it quick?
Fraser: It’s nice. It’s tropical now.
Matt: From three or four inches of snow, within about 24 hours, we were back to wet, drab and windy [laughter]. I don’t know about you guys but we live in a drafty, cold, single-glazed semi-detached house. We woke up to ice on the inside of the windows about three or nights on the bounce. I feel particularly bad because I actually went into the kids’ room and there was ice there as well [laughter]. So double-glazing is on the hit-list for this year I think.
Rebecca: We’re very lucky. Our home does have double-glazed windows but still, with those really high ceilings and poor insulation, we’ve definitely been relying on our wood-burning stove during this cold snap. So I’m very, very pleased to get out of it and, of course, it’s an absolutely critical focus for today’s show. I know, Matt, you’ve been studying up hard and bringing in all the facts and figures to wow us with today.
Matt: Swatting is the technical term. Yeah, there has been a bit of background and you know why. It’s because there’s just been so much...
Fraser: A bit of background.
Matt: [Laughter] A bit of background, yes. A little bit of light reading [laughter].
Fraser: For the benefit of the listeners who can’t see our preparation documents ahead of every episode, Matt’s note-taking is... Becky, I don’t know how you would describe it but I think Matt takes more notes than either of us might write in a standard journal article.
Rebecca: It’s the basis of a PhD thesis we’ve got going here [laughter]. Figures galore as well.
Fraser: I like that there are figures in our podcast where you can’t actually see anything [laughter] and so we know that it’s just for Matt’s benefit.
Matt: There’s just been so much happening in this space of late. We’ve had big announcements from the 10-point plan which followed into the government’s White Paper. We’re expecting a big heating and buildings report and another policy statement coming out in the next few weeks. The Scottish Government have got their own one out. So there’s so much happening in this space all in the name of net zero.
[Music flourish]
I’m going to ask you both – here we go, a bit of a quiz – so heating accounts for about 84% of the energy consumption in the home. That includes space, so that’s heating the air around us; water for your showers and baths; and cooking. So what percentage of the total heat energy budget is given over just to keep you warm sitting in your living room?
Rebecca: Oh, I reckon about half of that.
Matt: Fraser, higher or lower?
Fraser: Mmm, I’ll say about 40%.
Matt: It accounts for 65% of our total energy budget in the home is just keeping the heating on. Water is 17% and cooking is actually very low. It’s only about 3%. There you go. All of that is accounted for through the burning of gas at the moment and so we can see where the emissions are coming from.
Rebecca: So what can we do about it?
Matt: Well, that’s why, today, we’re going to be chatting to a few folk who have actually installed heat pumps. Very few people in the UK have these at the moment but we’re really going to have to push renewable and low-carbon heating technologies. The CCC, the Climate Change Committee, is looking at a large number of these going out by 2030. They’re assuming around a million heat pumps a year being installed and that’s alongside 3 million insulation measures. An insulation measure might be having your loft lagged, for instance. So you’re getting a sense of just the scale of this and to give you a bit more context, Scotland alone has 2.5m dwellings and so we’re insulating the equivalent of Scotland every year if not more.
Rebecca: Wow! Of course, this raises huge questions about the supply chains to deliver on this, doesn’t it? How are we going to build up those supply chains? I know the Green Home Grants that we’ve had recently have had a very poor uptake because of issues with the supply chain. It’s not for a lack of desire in many places; it’s a lack of being able to get appropriate installers to support that. I think that’s going to be a key issue we’re going to have to talk about but, of course, there’s the cost. Where is the money coming from to deliver this? A lot of this is household-level action and that means we need to be thinking about whether households are able to find the finance to do this. Also, what about people that don’t own their homes? I think that’s going to have to be something we can touch on as well and hopefully, our experts on today’s show will be able to guide us through some of these issues.
Matt: Yeah, I mean tenure is a huge one and even if you do own your own home, it’s a big assumption to make that you’ve got the money to put in double-glazing or to put in a heat pump. Just maybe taking a step back here, looking at these efficiency measures and looking at the policies, when we get the policy right, which we haven’t often done in the UK, around efficiency... but if you look at things like the Energy Company Obligation where the utilities have to meet certain criteria and put in efficiency measures like free loft insulation, when we were going full tilt at that in 2012, we installed 1.6m loft insulations. In 2019, that’s fallen to 27,000.
Rebecca: That’s, presumably, not because they’re all insulated. I’m pretty sure mine isn’t. So why is that happening?
Matt: Again, because we really haven’t placed the emphasis on it in a policy context. You mentioned the Green Home Grants which is looking to draw down grant funding between £5-10,000 to cover some of these costs, yet people are struggling to get the suppliers. If they do, the suppliers are struggling to draw down the funds but it’s not for lack of demand. There has been a huge demand for this. So yes, lots of work to do. Fraser, I believe, from memory, that you’re in rented accommodation at the moment.
Fraser: Yeah, I’m in a drafty tenement flat. I don’t have the figures to hand but I’d love to see how much emissions are accounted for and how much of the heat load is accounted for within this tenure because the things that we can realistically do here, like maybe some of the stuff that’s been done in the Nordic countries, it’s not inherently accessible at this moment in time. You can’t just come in and insulate a tenement flat as easily as you could a detached house. You can’t just throw a heat pump up.
Matt: So let me ask you a question. When was the last time your landlord tapped on your door and said, ‘What are your views on insulation and efficiency? What can I do for you in that regard?’? Has that ever, ever happened?
Fraser: No, absolutely not [laughter]. Categorically not. Anecdotally, a few episodes ago, we spoke with South Seeds and a huge amount of their work is helping people to access things in Scotland like the Warmer Homes Grant and these different grants and funding schemes that are available. They just aren’t widely publicised, advertised or promoted, particularly among a lot of people experiencing fuel poverty who maybe actually stand to benefit more from accessing them.
Rebecca: Well, that’s a great point actually and this idea of how to go about doing something. I own my home and I would love to live in a more efficient home but I get stumped at knowing even how to go about doing this. Who are the trusted advisors? Who can I trust to provide me with that advice and support me on the journey?
Matt: I thought it was telling, when we were chatting to our producer, Dave, earlier and he was saying, ‘Nobody has put a heat pump under my nose,’ which I thought was quite telling because he won’t be the only person who’s saying, ‘Actually, if somebody maybe had presented this as an option, I may have considered it.’ There’s a whole marketing exercise out there. Even if, and this is a big if, we get the marketing right, we get the policy right and we get the education right, we might not even still have the people to install this correctly. Again, and I keep going back to the CCC’s work but their work, in conjunction with the Construction Industry Training Board, they’re estimating that about 200,000 new jobs are going to be created by this but that’s largely because we need to train these people up. There’s a huge effort here to get the skills in place too.
Fraser: Yeah, I agree with that and I think that’s maybe not necessarily concerning but it’s an added pressure when the CCC says that we have until 2030 and we need to get X amount of heat pumps installed. Actually, we have to spend a few years first training those 200,000 installers. So the window is getting smaller and smaller when you add in these different variables.
Matt: I guess the question is how realistic are some of these targets? To say that we need to install 1 million heat pumps per year by 2030 and 3 million insulation measures per year, I feel like the insulation measures are far more realistic. I feel like there’s a supply chain there and if we look at past performance, we got up to about half of that a few years ago. I think we can do that. The 1 million heat pumps are where I’m less confident.
Rebecca: This is where the community and local becomes so important as well because knowing somebody that’s done it, having that support and supply chains and businesses being able to start to develop in a place and build out from there is why we really need to be focusing on local action. These numbers are huge and I think if we just look at it from a national perspective and expect us to be pouring some money in and maybe even developing some training programmes and for this to just materialise, to me, that feels unrealistic but developing coordinated, local and targeted strategies, that starts to feel like we could really start to see some action on the ground. I also think it’s important for us not to just focus in on heat pumps because heat pumps are going to be a big part of this story but they’re not going to be the only part of this story. In fact, I saw an article this week in the newspaper about the first few homes that are going to have hydrogen-powered heating and cooking which are going to be installed this year. So hydrogen might be part of that story and district heating might be part of that story as well.
Matt: Yeah, you’re quite right and I think, ultimately, it’s probably going to become a blend of these. There are going to have to be some tough strategic decisions because if you do want to start to heat our homes and workplaces using hydrogen or even electricity, you’ve got to start making those decisions today and plan forward. I do a lot of work with distribution network operators. They’re the people who deliver and maintain the low-voltage network that connects your house to the wider grid. They’re having to plan forward for this massive uptick in electrified heating and transport today.
Rebecca: Absolutely and do you know what? We’re looking at getting an electric vehicle and just getting a connection point in the house, and that’s for an electric vehicle, let alone heating which would have much more significant demand. So there’s going to be real implications, not just on the supply chain but, as you say, on the wider infrastructure and we really need those coordinated efforts to make sure that we are investing in the right things and that we’re not wasting that investment.
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Richard: Hi, I’m Richard Lowes. I’m a researcher currently based in the University of Exeter Energy Policy Group and I’ve been working on heat for around a decade. I was previously working in the gas industry and moving into academia about six years ago. As well as that, in my free time at the weekends, I am an advisor to the Scottish Government’s Heat Decarbonisation Programme Board and occasionally, I do some secret work for people like WWF and the Regulatory Assistance Project.
Jen: My name is Jen Roberts and I’m a researcher at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. All of my research concerns social technical risks around the low-carbon transition, whether that’s from how we decarbonise heat to how we treat water in a more low-carbon way or to how we derisk subsurface energy storage solutions.
[Music flourish]
Matt: A big welcome to you all here. Thank you very much for taking the time. It’s great to have you here and I’m hoping you both survived the Big Freeze okay.
Richard: Absolutely fine, thank you.
Matt: Did you get any snow down in Cornwall, Rich?
Richard: We did. I even went surfing in sub-zero temperatures which was nice. I was concerned that my house would get cold and I’m pleased to report that it was toasty all the way through.
Matt: Right, you’re lucky then. Jen, you’re up in Glasgow with us, so I know how cold it was for you [laughter].
Jen: It was utterly freezing, yeah, and I do not live in a very energy efficient or warm home, so I was very much struggling to stay warm, although I was pretty excited to have a whole series of icicles across my window and then got panicked that that was really bad for the guttering.
Matt: Yeah, well I felt the exact same panic. Listen, we’ve all been through a cold spell. I think the importance of heat has never been more acute than it has been over the last two or three weeks. I guess it really brings into focus just the scale of the heating challenge that we’re facing. We’ve all got to keep just as warm as we have over the last couple of weeks and ideally, warmer for those who are really struggling to pay for that. In a few words, to gboth of you, how big is the scale of the heating decarbonisation challenge?
Jen: I feel like I should have statistics to mind here but the challenge is huge. I mean we’ve got the challenge of decarbonising heating across the board in the UK, whether that’s from commercial buildings through to domestic buildings, so the houses that we live in, through to how we actually generate heat for industrial processes. Currently, we are massively behind on all of our targets, whether that’s for renewable heat or other forms of low-carbon heat. The challenge is still very much at large and I think, as you say, with the recent cold snap, it’s particularly felt right now. It’s winter and it was minus 230 not too far north of us in Scotland. People’s homes were utterly freezing inside and that was with the heating working at the maximum and that’s with their fossil fuel-powered heating systems as well.
Richard: It’s such a huge issue. I genuinely don’t think that the public at large, certainly, and even policymakers have really grasped the scale of this challenge. It is a fundamental transformation. Heat is half of the world’s energy demand, basically. It’s half of the UK’s energy demand. It’s about a third of our emissions in total and it requires nothing short of a total transformation. Pretty much every house needs to have something done to it. If you look at the last decade, we’ve gone backwards in many ways. Energy efficiency stopped, despite the fact that we had a climate change target from the Climate Change Act way before 2010. We’ve lost a quarter of the time that we’ve got to get to net zero heating by 2050. So it’s a huge target and I totally agree with Jen that by all metrics, we are well behind on it.
Rebecca: So Rich, tell us a little bit about some of the biggest hurdles facing us right now. Why is this such a difficult challenge to solve?
Richard: Well, many reasons to be honest. It costs more. This is going to be an investment. A lot of money is needed to pay for the heat transition or to pay for everyone’s houses to be treated with whatever system. We know, pretty much, technically that it’s possible. You can fit a low-carbon heating system to a house and you can do energy efficiency measures but they tend to cost a bit more than running your gas boiler and fitting an oil boiler. The other thing is, and this links to it, it’s in people’s homes. We’ve seen these really incredible steps for renewable electricity, particularly wind, in the UK and offshore wind in particular too. That has been an amazing transformation and that reflects the sort of global momentum towards renewables but that’s all been fairly invisible, particularly the offshore wind part of it. I think the fact that this has to happen inside or to people’s homes makes it a totally different challenge. I guess the other big thing going on at the same time is transport. Transport now looks really easy. The government has banned fossil fuel cars from a set date in the future and the economics of that look good. Whatever pathway you look at for heat, it’s going to cost something and it happens to people’s homes. I think for those reasons, the policymakers aren’t particularly that fussed about really driving it as rapidly as it needs to be driven for the goals that they’ve actually set.
Matt: It’s interesting when you frame it that way. They’ve come out with a ban on the internal combustion engine. It’s fair to say that the Brits are pretty keen on their cars and yet there seems to be a hesitancy about doing the same thing with gas boilers. We may know more in the next few weeks as the decarbonisation papers come out but that did surprise me, I have to say.
Richard: Yeah, we should have a ban on gas boilers because you can’t have gas boilers in a net zero energy system. It’s a more embedded transformation than transport and, as I say, I think people have really looked at transport and seen the multiple benefits of EVs, the flexibility that they can provide and the cost reductions. People, when they learn about running costs, are often staggered. There are lots of good elements to it and you can see why the government can say, ‘Yeah, we can actually see this headwind. We can see the groundswell coming and so we will ban cars because we know, in ten years’ time, they’re going to be even better.’ But for heating, there should be a ban and there’s not. I think it’s because that groundswell hasn’t quite reached the policymakers and the government and it hasn’t captured them in the same way that electric vehicles have yet but we can hope, hey?
Jen: I think there’s also another thing at play here. There’s quite a big disconnect between what the policymakers are saying in terms of – ‘We must do this. We have to transition away from fossil heat.’ You can see it in the 10-point plan but actually, there’s a huge variety of ways that we can deliver low-carbon heat. There’s not one solution and not one scale of solution as well. I think possibly part of the problem is how you visualise what that difference or that change will be. You’ve made a really good point, Rich, that if we have a ban on boilers... so you gave the example of electric vehicles but the thing is by banning fossil fuel vehicles, you can think of what the alternative is. People know that the alternative is actually going to be electric vehicles but with low-carbon heat, I don’t think that policymakers nor individuals or communities can visualise what that low-carbon heat looks like and what it means for them. That’s a really huge barrier as well in enabling local-level change as well as national-level change.
Rebecca: I’m just wondering from your work like working with communities, do you see there being ways in which we can support that? How can we support communities getting engaged or households getting engaged beyond just banning something or putting it into the regulations?
Jen: I think that’s a massive, big, exciting and challenging question and something that we really do need to try and resolve. Again, I feel like there’s no single response to that [laughter] in terms of what the best or appropriate methods for engagement are or how to improve community or local-level engagement because it kind of depends on what low-carbon heat solution you’re looking to. Are you talking about an individual homeowner? Are you talking about a renter? Are you talking about a community? I live in a tenement. Are we talking about a community heat system? The ways that we can engage heat users and the communities that surround those are really very, very varied. I can give an example of something I’m really, really interested in and quite passionate about which is the role of embedding community needs and community choices in how we developed district heat schemes. In this case, you’ve got a heat source or multiple low-carbon heat sources going to multiple households. This can be quite a radical shift in the way that they heat their homes. Actually, you really need to involve the communities and involve the heat users in how you install, how you design, how you finance and how you operate these systems because it’s not just a technological problem at all.
Matt: But if we’re looking at something like a hydrogen boiler or even a domestic heat pump, we’re looking at individual householders and treating them like consumers. So analogous to transportation, you could say the same things with EVs; it’s a single person often making a decision about a single unit and purchase. The question to Rich, I think, is to what extent do we need to look at heat as a community and as a local issue or to what extent can we go about this in a free-market approach and just treat householders as individual consumers?
Richard: I guess we’ve been taking a free-market approach for quite a long time in energy policy in the UK and that certainly seems to be the way with transport and the focus, again, is on EVs rather than making things like public transport better, and cycling better and so on. I was just thinking of the similarities between the two actually and you can sort of think of district heating as almost public transport that’s centrally driven. You can then think of these unique building options that would be expected to be much more free-market driven. The thing about district heating is it is needed and so whenever we look at the cost-effective pathways to get towards a low-carbon heating system, a big increase in district heating seems to be a necessity. In many ways, it’s just more practical than heat pumps in cities because each building doesn’t need to have its own unit and so on but the delivery of it is something that we’re just not very good at because we haven’t done much of it and growth has been so slow.
Rebecca: Why is that, Rich? Why haven’t we done very much of it in the past? Because when we look at some of our neighbouring European countries, we do see countries where district heating is much more prevalent, so what has stopped us in the UK?
Richard: Yeah, so there’s a really big and long answer to that question I think and certainly, one of them is that we chose to go down the gas route in the ‘60s and ‘70s. We discovered the North Sea gas and we just went full gas and because you’ve done that route, it doesn’t make much sense to do district heating unless you’re looking at the grounds of purely system diversity. The costs, actually, between gas and district heating based on gas are quite similar, so it’s not really a cost issue. It’s just a decision that’s been made but we do have this very free market and very liberal competitive energy supply and demand business and that doesn’t really match up with the deployment of district heating. Whenever I think about how best to deploy it, it seems like the local authority has got to have a really huge level of involvement and possibly a stake; likely a stake but they’ve clearly got to help with things like planning, regulations and so on.
Matt: You’ll know this, Rich, with your involvement with the Scottish Government, I think that’s what they’re pushing at here with these local heat plants.
Richard: Yeah, that’s right. I should also say that Energy Systems Catapult has done a lot of work on what they call Local Area Energy Planning which I think has got huge value for lots of local authorities because the vast majority of local authorities now have declared climate emergencies, of course, and some of them have got extremely tight timescales to meet their net zero ambitions and possibly quite unlikely timescales. It’s good that the ambition is there but lots of those local authorities don’t have a plan for heat. That governance and that politics hasn’t been devolved to them yet but maybe it will be but if there was a requirement on them for some sort of local area planning, you can just see it becoming more thought out in total and areas being zoned for district heating, having a zone for heat pumps and so on.
Matt: On the basis that we’re going to have to plan forward at a national level but, as you say, also at a local level, what does net zero heating look like for these places? Jen, you mentioned there are other heating options out there. As the BBC says regularly, ‘There are other brands available.’ So what does net zero heating look like for the UK?
Jen: I don’t actually know the answer to that but what I do know is that there’s a whole range of different solutions. You even say heat pumps as if there’s one single type of heat pump and actually, are we talking about air-source heat? Are we talking about water? There’s a whole suite of different options. Actually, there’s a bit of a desire as well not just to have a single menu but also an integrated menu. Do we know what the net zero heating solution looks like or is it, at the moment, just a drawing board of different options? That’s what I see. Perhaps they’ve got mixed hydrogen. Perhaps they’ve got district heating from bioenergy. Just going back to the district heating, there’s a whole suite of different sources there. It could be biofuels. At the moment, we’ve got a few natural gas-centred combined heat and power systems. Perhaps we’ve got mine water-driven district heat systems. There’s a whole different set of solutions and I think that’s where it also gets very complicated, let’s say, for the individual as you mentioned, Matt. I think it’s actually also worth saying that we know that individual consumers do not necessarily act as individuals in that there’s a whole suite of different things that influence individuals’ perspectives or views and that’s individual drivers and agencies but also social factors and material factors like things that actually allow them to make the choices they want to make, whether that’s the house that they live in or the geographical context. Maybe they don’t live near a deep geothermal source of heat. Taking apart that analogy to EVs a little bit, people know what they’re shopping for in terms of cars. They kind of know what they want and what they need. They’re used to driving a car. They know that they want to have enough space in the back for two kids. It’s that sort of choice; whereas, when it comes to low-carbon options, whether it’s for our homes or for our industrial processes, I think for our homes, it’s more distributed in terms of choice. Those sorts of things become very challenging. Actually, the recommendations that were made by the UK Citizens Assembly on climate change, one of the three appeals around heating and energy in the home was just clearer information.
Rebecca: I want to bring up a related point and that’s that a huge number of these heating purchases are made in an emergency context, right? You tend not to think about replacing your heating system until something goes wrong with it and you really need to but what’s going to happen around the supply chains? Are we going to be building them up? What does this look like in the future and what policies do we need to put in place, not just to facilitate the transition but to ensure that people have the right sort of information and that the supply chains for these are developed and built up as well?
Richard: It’s a really good question. We’ve got the Renewable Heat Incentive that’s giving households a bit of cash, a sort of bung, to have a heat pump installed and it’s really only households that want the heat pump installed that will do that because it’s not like it’s a money-making scheme. It covers some of the money of the installation but you’re not going to make a profit on it like you could do on solar panels, for example. It’s similar with the Green Homes Grant really which is underperforming as well. It’s just a fairly rude lump of money that’s put into the market to try and cause a behaviour change. It’s not investable that sort of policy because if you want to build a heat pump manufacturing line in your factory, you’re going to want more than a year’s worth of policy certainty. You’re probably going to want a decade’s worth of policy certainty really for that sort of thing. They’re saying we need to have our last gas boiler installed in 2033 which is the date that’s been put forward by the Committee on Climate Change. By the time we get to 2033, when your boiler breaks, it needs to be easy for you to phone up Phil, or whoever the plumber is on the phone, and say, ‘My boiler has eventually gone. I know it’s been rattling for a few years and that fan has eventually gone. You need to come and fit me a heat pump now,’ that needs to be a seamless process. Currently, we have nothing like that. If you want something, it takes a long time to happen because there aren’t many people to do it.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: I just want to break into the chat with Rich and Jen at this point because we’ve been talking for a while now about policy and high-level issues around low-carbon heat and particularly heat pumps but what does installing a heat pump actually entail? What’s it like to have a heat pump in your house? To understand this, it’s important to get the perspectives of householders, people who have actually made this decision to install a heat pump and are at the vanguard of this transition to low-carbon heat. So before we started recording this episode, I sat down to speak with Rachael and Alan, a husband and wife from Cornwall who replaced their oil heating system with a heat pump, and also the next voice you’ll hear, Rob Whitney, who snagged a free heat pump installation as part of a trial being run by one of the UK energy companies.
[Music flourish]
Rob: The heat pump was free. It was through the OVO Energy Zero Carbon Heating Trial. The heat pump has been supplied, installed and commissioned and we’re now running on 100% electricity in our home and heating our home using an air-source heat pump... and it’s great.
Rachael: Okay, so we moved into this house in November 2014 in a village which is off the gas grid. The house was installed with an oil tank and it was oil central heating that we had. We had a few problems with that [laughter]. Firstly, it doesn’t go with our sustainability ethos at all to be using fossil fuels. Also, we found that there were some leaks in the pipes, so we were actually losing a lot of oil.
Alan: We’ve got a friend who runs a business installing solid fuel stoves. He’s got a new build and he actually said, ‘Have you thought about a heat pump?’ I thought, ‘Wow! Here’s a guy who’s dealing in solid fuel and he’s saying he’s got a place and he’s putting a heat pump in.’ That was a real wake-up call for us when we heard that.
Fraser: That’s really interesting I think. Not to go off on a tangent but you find it a lot with solar as well is that generally, it’s when people know each other. That’s how the word sort of spreads about it and that’s how uptake...
Rachael: Connections are made.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah. It’s much less about actual promotion at a government level or a local level but generally, word of mouth.
Rachael: We paid, in total, about £9,500 for the system. Of that, [laughter] the actual heat pump itself was only £2,500 but we also had a new hot water tank and we did replace the radiators. In total, it came to £9,500. Against that, we received the RHI payment and that comes to about £1,200 a year, so that’s for seven years and so it pays for itself through the RHI. For those that aren’t going to get that [laughter], it’s a big upfront cost.
Fraser: Yeah, it becomes tricky in the absence of the RHI eventually. What was the process for that? How did you get the heat pump off the ground?
Rachael: Yeah, it was really easy. They came round and they measured...
Alan: They did a survey and assured us that it would be compatible with our existing system. They worked out an estimate of the government subsidy we could expect and we took it from there.
Fraser: How have you found it in comparison to a typical gas boiler?
Rob: Day-to-day, it’s no different. It’s honestly no different [laughter]. I mean we’ve got a multi-zoning control system that allows you to set the times and temperatures in different rooms completely independently if you want but what we’ve done is run it in the normal way. We’ve not really changed the scheduling very much from how it was done before with the boiler. The house gets warm. Looking at a snapshot of the energy bills, it’s at parity already and this has been a hard-use time for the heat pump. It was really cold last week.
Fraser: When you say ‘parity’, Rob, do you mean as in it’s cost you this winter how much it would typically cost you in a winter?
Rob: Yeah, so obviously, if our gas bill (using round numbers) was £150 typically a month for dual fuel, electricity and gas, it’s looking similar to that.
Fraser: Obviously, you’ve gone from oil rather than gas but have you noticed any marked difference in your heating bills?
Rachael: We pay £168 a month for our electricity all year round and so we’re paying more in the summer to be able to run the heat pump for all our heating during the winter. We were paying a substantial amount for our oil [laughter], bearing in mind that we also had leaks in our oil system [laughter], so we were quids in on that.
Alan: But one thing I would say in its favour is that it’s evened out the cost because we found, with oil, that the prices fluctuated quite a bit month on month and so you could just end up being unlucky when your tank became empty and you needed to fill it up. If the prices had shot up since you last had it filled, there was nothing you could do about that.
Rachael: We need consistent heat in our house. We’ve got my 88-year-old mother living with us and so with the heat pump, we have all of our rooms on the thermostat. So it’s all thermostatically controlled and so there’s constant heat 24 hours a day now when we need it.
Fraser: Ideal. What’s the presence of the heat pump in your home? Where does the actual unit sit?
Rachael: The heat pump is outside on a side wall and [laughter] it’s no bother to us whatsoever. It’s just on the side of the house. I mean we think it looks great.
Alan: It looks a bit like an air conditioning unit like the ones you would see, perhaps, if you were on holiday. You expect to see these on the sides of apartments. It’s relatively quiet. After we did the installation, the firm said, ‘Would you mind perhaps showing prospective customers what we’ve done?’ So we had several people come around and we could say, ‘Look, this is what it’s like. This is what it sounds like. This is what it looks like.’
Rachael: And this is how warm it is in our house [laughter].
Alan: Yeah, quite [laughter].
Rob: So my cupboard in the kitchen, once, was filled with a white box and it now has lots and lots of special-looking pipes, valves and pumps and a big control box for the heat pump. There’s also a heat meter and a flow meter. It looks a little bit like the engine room of Starship Enterprise now.
Fraser: How does it look outside the house, the actual unit itself?
Rob: It’s basically like having a chest freezer plonked outside your house [laughter]. Opinions vary on its aesthetic and whether it’s a thing of beauty or an eyesore. It depends very much on your perspective. There’s a unit and it’s 4” long by 1.5” wide and it’s at waist height. It’s got a big fan in it and a load of radiators around the back and sides which are the evaporators. It sits there quite happily humming away to itself. Literally, everyone that comes to the house, like delivery people, they’ll question about it and it’s a good opportunity to have the discussion.
Fraser: Yeah, I think that’s great. I think it’s those kinds of conversations as well that will kickstart the wider rollout of these things eventually.
[Music flourish]
Thanks so much to Rachael, Alan and Rob for taking the time to speak to me and share their experiences with the show. Back now to our policy experts, Rich and Jen, on the likely need for many more people to train as heat pump installers to meet future demand.
[Music flourish]
Richard: We know we need double the amount of heating engineers because a heat pump requires double the amount of work to install it. That’s a really simple number that we can work out. These are really good jobs. If you’re a heat pump installer at the moment, you’ll earn a lot more than your average academic does for sure and a lot more than you’d earn in retail, absolutely. I had my heat pump serviced the other day and it was £230 and the man did four in a day. That’s just labour, basically. So the money is really good, the jobs are good and they could be there for a long time.
Jen: The other thing that very much frustrates me is that there’s a knock-on effect to all this in that we know that social relationships or social networks are really, really important and really valuable in knowing who installs something. I had this guy called Rich to come and install my heat pump. He was great!
Matt: He is great.
Jen: Becky, however, did a terrible job of my cavity wall [laughter].
Rebecca: Thanks again [laughter].
Jen: Becky, I’m sure you’d be absolutely sterling as a cavity wall insulator [laughter]. Those networks really matter and we should have been building those ten years ago. It should be that we’re now in a situation where we’ve got a fantastic, almost keeping up with the Jones’ type of thing... you know, ‘My next door neighbours have all got these heat pumps on their balconies. How come I can’t?’ We’ve missed out on ten years of that.
Matt: It’s a massively important point you’re raising, Jen, because as soon as this stuff is deemed fashionable and if we start thinking about heating systems like we think about our kitchens, our patios or our cars, this is going to transform, I believe, quite quickly. So this relational approach you’re talking about is so important to kind of educate but also encourage and nudge people in the right direction.
Rebecca: But let’s talk about tenure for a minute because I feel like underlining some of the conversations we’ve had so far is an assumption that whoever lives in that home or whoever owns that workplace is able to make this change and drive this change but, of course, that’s not the case for lots of people. So how can we make sure that people don’t get left behind in this low-carbon heating transition?
Richard: Well, I mean we currently regulate landlords. There’s a good side to this and a bad side to this. If you’re a social tenant and if you’re in social housing at the moment, you’re likely to have a more energy-efficient house than your counterparts in privately rented housing. The social housing sector is ahead basically and that’s years of investment, it’s paying off and that’s great. If you’re in a privately rented house, which I’ve been in only up until the last two years basically and I’m lucky enough to have bought a house now, it’s just terrible and you have absolutely no say over what you can do. Politically, this is a really interesting one because most MPs or a large proportion of MPs are landlords and so there’s been this hesitancy to introduce regulation on landlords for political reasons and that’s a real shame. It’s a really undemocratic state of affairs to be in but there we are. Unless you regulate landlords, I don’t see how you can make any progress in that sector because as a tenant, you can’t even hang a picture on the walls a lot of the time.
Matt: Yeah, I mean there’s been some interesting recommendations from the CCC about EPC standards being a minimum of C for renting and also for sale. Could that be the kind of regulation that you’re talking about which could really spark landlords into action on this?
Richard: I’m just thinking of people who look after buildings and particularly in Cornwall, we’ve got a lot of solid-walled granite buildings which are very insulatable but require significant work. You probably wouldn’t want to stop landlords from letting out anything above a D immediately [laughter] because this would take some time to do. It’s one of those things and it’s the same with appliance bans; if there’s enough foresight, it just becomes something that you factor into your business plan. It might be that your solid-walled flat needs full internal insulation and that’s the only option, so that will be quite a disruptive thing to do. It will be disruptive for a few weeks but honestly, it will totally transform that house for the tenants and it will dramatically reduce energy costs and emissions. It’s one of those things that is quite disruptive but ultimately, it’s got to happen and basically, it’s a matter of political will and if the politicians won’t do it, then we’re in big trouble.
Rebecca: It sounds like it’s a very complex environment involving politics, regulation and all sorts of different owners like householders and local communities. We’ve talked around a huge number of different actors in this space, so how important do you think local action is going to be in delivering this net zero carbon heating solution, whatever that is? How important are locals?
Matt: And I’m going to throw in that one of the actors we didn’t mention which was the construction companies, just in case it wasn’t complex enough [laughter].
Jen: I don’t want to distract from the massive role that policymakers and local authorities have to play in this as well. It’s really disheartening to almost see a blame on individuals and communities for not uptaking these technologies and I find that just a very disruptive narrative. Actually, as we’ve described, making these choices is hard. Often, you cannot because you’re a tenant and you’re renting a home. Perhaps you’re in an infrastructure that doesn’t allow for readily available efficiency measures. To answer your question, there’s an exciting role for communities if we listen to communities, if we go and meet them where they are and if we give them the capacity, the choices and the governance structures, I suppose, to be able to really roll out the solutions that suit them. We know that there is not one single technology and not one single solution. Not one single building has the same needs and not one single community has the same resources, whether it’s the heat resources or the climate in which they live and so on or even the community capacity. So there’s a whole range of different ways in which we can involve communities.
Richard: I’d say there is such an important role for business here as well. I’m looking at companies that are trying to package up heat pumps and give them to customers on time-of-use tariffs. I’m looking at manufacturers that are now basically paying to train up installers to get accredited so they can install heat pumps within the Microgeneration Certification Scheme criteria so that they fit in with the policy and all those ticks too. I saw a presentation from one of the electricity network companies looking at how they can support households to apply to get heat pumps and looking at things like free fuse upgrades and that sort of thing. I also think that if we can unleash the power of business, it’s also worth noting that there’s a lot of cash sat in zero-interest accounts across the world that needs to find a home. If this can be packaged up into useful business offerings or consumer offerings, then I’m optimistic that whizzy businesses, not necessarily the old ones but some of the new ones, can come in and really make this cost-effective and easy for people because it’s got to be both of those two things. I’m not so optimistic, Matt, that heating systems are ever going to become a new kitchen.
Matt: Well, IKEA might have something to say about that [laughter]. Finally, in 15 words and I’ll maybe give you 20 if you’re nice, what’s the one thing you’d like to change to get this transition on track?
Richard: Drop that one in at the end, Matt [laughter]
Matt: It’s a zinger.
Richard: Yeah......
Matt: We can cut all the pausing as well [laughter] from this particular incredibly pregnant pause.
Rebecca: I feel like we should call this section ‘Transition in a Tweet’ and maybe make it a regular ending [laughter].
Richard: I’ll try and make this 15 words.
Matt: I’m going to count them on my fingers as well [laughter].
Richard: Don’t count the words I’ve already said.
Matt: I’ve already got ten [laughter].
Richard: So we need some sort of wide market reshaping and something that places a cost on carbon is a requirement.
Matt: I think that was 20 words. It may have been 21 but... well done [laughter]. Jen?
Jen: I want to see – now that’s a waste of words [laughter].
Matt: Yeah.
Jen: We need people to no longer feel or be locked out of decision-making and locked into these traditional forms of heating, so we need to break that down and I don’t know how to turn that into 15 words but it’s about mobilising choices.
Matt: Yeah, that’s perfect. Both of you, it beautifully captures everything you’ve been saying beforehand. So it just leaves it to Becky, myself and Fraser to say many, many thanks for coming along today. It’s been a pleasure to have you. We hope that you will stick around for our Future or Fiction? game shortly.
Jen: I’m extremely eager. Look at my face [laughter].
Matt: I can see some nodding which is great.
Fraser: This is what everybody comes for. This is what everybody comes on the show for.
[Music flourish]
Everyone ready? Okay, so now it’s time for everyone’s favourite segment, the real reason that people come and listen to Local Zero, Future or Fiction? So for Jen and Rich and anyone who doesn’t know how this works, Future or Fiction? is a game whereby I present our guests with a new, exciting energy technology and they have to establish whether they think it’s real, i.e. the future, or whether they think that I’ve completely made it up off the top of my head in which case, it is fiction. So in this episode, the technology is called Power FM.
[Music flourish and low, steady beat]
Researchers have established a way to harness radio waves to power small devices by picking up energy from the waves that bounce around existing broadcasting infrastructure. The hope is to harness these waves to power the Internet of Things for use in smart cities and small, wearable devices. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Now I feel like I’ve fallen foul of a very similar one of these previously [laughter]. I also feel like the title of it makes me want to say this is not one of your creations, Fraser.
Matt: Mmm, and I can also see just how carefully Jen is studying this. I should say, for listeners, that Jen is a qualified professional engineer here. Like I say, she’s studying this. There’s possibly a bit of truth in this one [laughter].
Jen: I’m trying to do little equations in my head [laughter].
Matt: Oh god, you’re on to equations. Right, now we’re in trouble here.
Jen: I’m not [laughter].
Fraser: What’s your gut feeling, Jen? What’s your instant reaction?
Jen: Well, I feel like I’m going to be ridiculed by all the listeners for not knowing my wave physics [laughter]. I will also default and say I’m not an engineer by training. I’m a geoscientist [laughter]. I’ll tell you what my feeling is. My feeling is that it’s fiction and my feeling that it’s fiction is because I’m thinking, ‘But won’t we be sapping the energy from the waves?’ [Laughter]. Will we not then cause blackouts? That’s what my brain instinctively did and you can ridicule that but that’s my thought process there. That’s what I was studying [laughter].
Matt: So you think it could cause communication blackouts? Is that what you’re suggesting?
Jen: I don’t mean to be quite so dramatic but if we’re going to then harness the energy from that wave, might we be taking energy out of that wave? Yeah, I think my physics teachers might be crying a bit here.
Matt: This is getting really, really heavy.
Fraser: You see, I like this a lot. I like this a lot. I like when we have people on who know about it because it really messes with you. It’s like you will never trust again after this segment [laughter]. Rich, what’s your instinct on this?
Richard: I actually think it’s future and the reason I think that is because I remember reading something about 5G sensors, probably about five years ago, that didn’t need to be plugged in because they could use energy from the 5G radio waves to power themselves and link into the network.
Matt: So your phone would be charging itself, basically, once it’s on the 5G network?
Richard: This is things like sensors on traffic lights, movement sensors and that sort of thing, so nothing particularly with a heavy requirement for electricity but equally, it could be something that I read on some mad conspiracy site late at night [laughter]. So it’s difficult to know but I’m going to go with future I think.
Fraser: Okay, so Rich is sticking with future. Matt, do you have a hunch about this?
Matt: From the limited physics that I can recall from my little brain, I guess all waves are a sort of form of transfer of energy. So, in theory, yes, it should work. How much energy it would actually confer, I don’t know but I think there’s something in this. So I’m going to go future.
Fraser: Becky?
Rebecca: This is where I hate to confess that I actually am an electrical engineer and feel like I should know something about this [laughter].
Matt: She’s done it again [laughter]. There’s always a research project that Becky has done on one of these technologies.
Rebecca: Through your intro, I was thinking, ‘I’m not sure if I believe this,’ and then you talked about the Internet of Things and it made me start to think about some of the Bluetooth devices that are particularly low power. I actually think that this could be the future. I’m going with future on this one.
Fraser: Okay, so Becky future. Jen, what’s your final verdict?
Jen: Ah, but now I’m getting... because I’ve had more time and I’ve listened to you all and I’ve also been thinking. Like Richard, I also remember maybe not a conspiracy theory website but something else about capturing or harnessing natural background waves, so natural electromagnetic waves that occur. Do know what? I’m going to stick with my initial gut instinct that it was fiction but I’m very much on the fence [laughter].
Matt: So that’s three futures and one fiction.
Fraser: Rich, you’re sticking with your future? Matt, sticking with future? The answer is... future.
Matt: That was a good one.
Fraser: I am not smart enough to have come up with that. That’s got to be a dead giveaway. The last episode was a moving scarecrow powered by solar [laughter].
Matt: That’s Fraser’s forte [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah, I like these nonsense ideas. Yes, it’s the future. Researchers at Georgia Tech have honed a technology using ultra-wideband antennas and charge pumps that can successfully harvest energy at ultra-high frequencies from radio and TV signals to power small sensors and other Internet of Things devices. At present, they have been able to pick up that energy at a distance of seven miles, so it’s not just small and local. They can do it on quite a big scale.
Matt: Very good. Excellent. Fraser, the more you do this, the more you remind me of Chris Tarrant actually [laughter] of Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire.
Fraser: Oh, I don’t know if that’s a compliment.
Matt: I’m not sure whether it’s a compliment [laughter]. I think it was.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Brilliant. Well, thanks to Fraser for another fantastic Future or Fiction? Of course, thanks to Rich and Jen for their brilliant insights into heat decarbonisation... and thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Remember to tweet us @EnergyREV_UK. Use our hashtag #LocalZero and ask us any questions and we’ll try and get to them in future episodes but for now, bye.
Matt: Bye bye.
Fraser: Bye bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
I want to hear more about Rich’s 5G late-night reading [laughter].
Rich: It was bloody right, wasn’t it? [Laughter]
Rebecca: Okay, a really important question, Fraser. Was the name yours this time or was it their name?
Fraser: Well, I wanted to pick up on that, Becky, because the name is always mine. It’s always me that comes up with the name.
Rebecca: Subpar on this occasion.
Fraser: I know [laughter]. I was trying to think of a really interesting radio pun but my head was wasted after coming up with a name for one of your papers this morning, in fact. I used up all my pun finance.
Rebecca: I know. I looped Fraser in to come up with a name for a journal article that he’s had absolutely no contribution to just because he’s so good at naming things [laughter]. I think you should start offering your services, Fraser.
Fraser: Yeah, I will.
Rebecca: I think people would pay for that [laughter].
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