The move to heat pumps

Baxter100

4 bed detached house. Radiators. Annual space/water heating requirements of 25,000kWh.

90% efficient gas boiler. Average cost of gas 3.80p/kWh. Annual bill = (25,000 x 3.80)/0.9 = £1056 annual bill

Replaced with 220% efficient air source electric heat pump. Average cost of electricity 14.37p/kWh. Annual bill = (25,000 x 14.47)/2.2 = £1644 annual bill

A well over 50% increase in simple running costs, not to mention the initial £5,000-£10,000 installation costs.

How is the government planning to make this work?

Martyn1981

Just some suggestions:-
Insulate, insulate, insulate - 25MWh for space heating and domestic hot water is a massive amount.
Try to find a more average ASHP, where the annual weighted COP should be closer to 2.9.
Accept that the gas price doesn't include externalities (AGW), so a carbon cost should be acceptable.
Get E7 (or similar) and try to load as much heating as possible into those hours during the coldest months.
Get PV, this should cover all DHW and heating from Apr to Sept, and contribute to the other months (considerably in Oct and Mch).
Look at the govt grant - RHI - which will hopefully be around £7k-£9k for the works (paid over 7yrs).
Encourage the Gov to look into large scale and longer term storage of RE generation excess, possibly as Hydrogen, with an eye to producing bio-methane to maintain some of the existing domestic gas heating infrastructure.

Verdigris

A ground source heat pump is far more efficient. You'll need a fairly large garden to bury the collector coils or you could have a borehole sunk. RHI payments will cover most of the costs over 7 years. RHI expires April 2022 then a less generous scheme will come in.

And, as Martyn says, make your house more efficient.

michaels

I disagree with the numbers in your first calc - you have an average electricity tariff but a gas tariff costing about 25% more than mid market - the actual comparison is much worse.

Also insulating won't do anything to reduce your hot water usage where the COP will be worst due to the temperature differential needed.

The only thing that might help is if the externality cost global warming gets added to gas bills.  Politically that would be a brave thing to do though.

[Deleted User]

The OP is right. The Government has to get the public onside with the whole concept of heat pumps and why they are necessary. I live in a high EPC B rated home (possibly A since we had PV installed) but I just don’t see how I could install ASHP without a lot of internal and external changes - and associated cost. I dread to think what the additional installation costs would be some of our very poorly insulated properties. We are talking about major works: not just a guy with a ladder throwing some more insulation into the loft.

I also worry about the level of installer expertise. I doubt that many installers would know a COP if it was staring them in face. They just want to install something and walk away.

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses. It is not as if it is gas boilers today: heat pumps tomorrow. Gas boilers will be here for many many years to come. 

michaels

Perhaps they could load the environmental costs onto the cost of the boilers themselves rather than the gas.  People tend to be much more swayed by the 'sticker price' than the running costs.

QrizB

[Deleted User] said:

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses. It is not as if it is gas boilers today: heat pumps tomorrow. Gas boilers will be here for many many years to come. 

Noted, but there's already carbon costs included in the price of CCGT electricity. Adding them to gas would bring the market back into balance (or at least, closer to balance).

Burning a cubic metre of natural gas creates 1.8kg of CO2. With carbon credits currently trading at £50/tonne (5p/kg) you're looking at adding 9p to a cubic metre of gas, or roughly 0.8p to a kWh.

Hexane

Dolor said:

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses.

Good! It's gas being so cheap that encourages people to keep on burning so much of it and not bother insulating their homes properly because they just don't care - they can just turn the heating up! Until the, as Martyn puts it, externality costs are reflected in the cost of the fuel, nothing is going to change. And it has to change, we can't go on like that.

Mickey666

Hexane said:

Dolor said:

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses.

Good! It's gas being so cheap that encourages people to keep on burning so much of it and not bother insulating their homes properly because they just don't care - they can just turn the heating up! Until the, as Martyn puts it, externality costs are reflected in the cost of the fuel, nothing is going to change. And it has to change, we can't go on like that.

Hmm.  Easy to say, not easy to solve.  Sure, it's 'simple' to tax fossil fuels into being more expensive than renewable alternatives but not everyone cares about the best interests of the environment, especially when they've been taxed into fuel poverty and they're shivering in a country sitting on centuries worth of coal stocks.  Revolutions have begun over lesser things and governments tend to take more notice of rioting in the streets than worrying about end of the century climate change.

These are primarily sociological problems rather than technological ones.

The real elephant in the room is global population growth, which has almost trebled in my lifetime.  Imagine what fewer environmental problems we'd have with only 2.5bn people on the planet instead of 7bn and rising.  Not only do governments and pressure groups have a very hard sell to wean the public off fossil fuels in the first place, they have to do it against a background of a rising global population and rising global living standards such that we're being asked to pay more for a lower standard of living and ultimately it won't prevent climate change anyway!

Basically, humanity won the lottery when it discovered fossil fuels a few hundred years ago and the winnings (basically unimaginable energy wealth) have funded astonishing growth and the unprecedented rise of our global industrial civilisation.  But we've almost spent these winnings and in doing so have inflicted tremendous environmental damage.  In short, our civilisation is not sustainable, and no amount of windmills and solar panels is going to change that for our current global population, never mind for the projected additional 3-4billion people by the end of the century.

Something is going to have to give and it isn't going to be pretty.

Reed_Richards

Baxter100 said:

4 bed detached house. Radiators. Annual space/water heating requirements of 25,000kWh.

90% efficient gas boiler. Average cost of gas 3.80p/kWh. Annual bill = (25,000 x 3.80)/0.9 = £1056 annual bill

Replaced with 220% efficient air source electric heat pump. Average cost of electricity 14.37p/kWh. Annual bill = (25,000 x 14.47)/2.2 = £1644 annual bill

A well over 50% increase in simple running costs, not to mention the initial £5,000-£10,000 installation costs.

How is the government planning to make this work?

• Everybody needs electricity but perhaps you can eliminate gas usage completely so not pay a standing charge.  The gas standing charge is not included in the calculations.
• A modern Air Source Heat Pump should achieve better than 220% efficiency.  Mine has a SCoP of 3.05 for space heating, a bit less for hot water.
• Given the need to also replace all the radiators your installation cost estimate may be optimistic.
• You're right, at current prices a gas boiler will be cheaper to run than an ASHP.
• The Government is planning to make this work by banning the sale of gas boilers.  If they have other plans they have not announced them yet.  

Hexane

Mickey666 said:

Hexane said:

Dolor said:

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses.

Good! It's gas being so cheap that encourages people to keep on burning so much of it and not bother insulating their homes properly because they just don't care - they can just turn the heating up! Until the, as Martyn puts it, externality costs are reflected in the cost of the fuel, nothing is going to change. And it has to change, we can't go on like that.

Hmm.  Easy to say, not easy to solve.  Sure, it's 'simple' to tax fossil fuels into being more expensive than renewable alternatives but not everyone cares about the best interests of the environment, especially when they've been taxed into fuel poverty and they're shivering in a country sitting on centuries worth of coal stocks.  Revolutions have begun over lesser things and governments tend to take more notice of rioting in the streets than worrying about end of the century climate change.

All true, but rioting in the streets is a summer activity, and the average man in those streets has neither understanding nor interest in what coal stocks lie beneath them. It's the pensioner votes that affect policy on taxation of fuel costs, and last time the winter fuel payment was enough to keep them in line. Something similar would work.

Hexane said:

Dolor said:

Shifting green taxes to gas will just p**** off the masses.

Good! It's gas being so cheap that encourages people to keep on burning so much of it and not bother insulating their homes properly because they just don't care - they can just turn the heating up! Until the, as Martyn puts it, externality costs are reflected in the cost of the fuel, nothing is going to change. And it has to change, we can't go on like that.

In short, our civilisation is not sustainable, 

Yes indeed; Malthus came to that conclusion shortly after the population of England topped the alarming figure of ten million.