Selling or Significantly Renovating Will Mean No Gas Boiler?

[Ralph]

I'm not sure there is the political will for this but it's interesting. I assume this would also apply to oil?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/u-k-homeowners-could-be-forced-to-ditch-gas-boilers-in-new-plan

[IanR]

It seems clear there will be no fossil fuel boilers in New Builds from 2025, and the briefing and lobbying is starting for what carrot and/or stick is required to get existing fossil fuel boilers swapped out in the years that follow.

[Mr Punter]

It just won't can't happen.  I am doing some new flats and I will put in gas combis.  No chance of ASHP and SAP will kill me with electric resistance heating and the flats would be more tricky to sell.

 

The running boilers on hydrogen gas sounds like dreamworld too.

[Bitpipe]

2 minutes ago, Mr Punter said:

It just won't can't happen. 

 

It can but I'm sceptical whether it happens in the discussed time frame (see also ban on ICE) but it does seem the direction of travel.

[Ralph]

2 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

It just won't can't happen.  I am doing some new flats and I will put in gas combis.  No chance of ASHP and SAP will kill me with electric resistance heating and the flats would be more tricky to sell.

 

The running boilers on hydrogen gas sounds like dreamworld too.

Yes, it's going to take a lot more than bunging in some loft insulation to make ASHP viable in the average UK home. Even those built in the last 10 years.

[Temp]

There is some spin going on. Some reports suggest the govrnment will allow new gas boilers to be installed if they are "hydrogen ready". 

 

 https://www.hvnplus.co.uk/news/uk-boiler-industry-provisionally-backs-mandating-hydrogen-ready-systems-01-03-2021/

 

The Heating and Hotwater Industry Council (HHIC) has confirmed in a letter written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson that there is consensus in the sector to ensure boilers coming to market by 2025 could be effectively converted to operate purely on hydrogen.

 

I recall reading somewhere this might add £200 to the cost of a new boiler?

[SteamyTea]

Resistance heating may well be a viable option in the near future as the carbon intensity is now getting very low nationally.

 

I think SAP now has an updated number to use (or it may be next year).

I suspect that a combination of heat pumps and resistance heating will be the solution for hard to heat places. They could still halve the overall energy usage.

Flats, generally, are low energy use buildings, so air2air is a cheap option.

 

I studied renewable energy at university and I am still amazed how fast we can build generation now, and we have not built any significant onshore wind generation for a few years now.

[IanR]

26 minutes ago, Temp said:

Some reports suggest the govrnment will allow new gas boilers to be installed if they are "hydrogen ready". 

 

 https://www.hvnplus.co.uk/news/uk-boiler-industry-provisionally-backs-mandating-hydrogen-ready-systems-01-03-2021/

 

 

That's the boiler industry lobbying the government, which the the Government appear to have ignored for the 2025 Future Homes Standard, where the response to the consultation has said new homes are to be fitted with low carbon heating, not low carbon ready heating.

[joth]

1 hour ago, Ralph said:

Yes, it's going to take a lot more than bunging in some loft insulation to make ASHP viable in the average UK home. Even those built in the last 10 years.

 

So true. Unless the home really is insulated well, with an ASHP you really need to design in some sort of time shifting for heat energy (e.g. storing heat in a thick UFH slab), and using direct resistive heating just increases that need (by 3x), which means much more disruption for any retrofit than the insulation & airtightness alone.

 

Storage heaters largely fell out of favour due to the need to plan usage patterns and not just "turn on the central heating" when needed for instant warmth. (Remember all the Bob Hoskins "Don't you just love being in control" adverts?)

So IMO any electrical low carbon source either needs to solve time-shifting in the home, or depends on grid-scale storage, to actually deliver on its goal

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, joth said:

IMO any electrical low carbon source either needs to solve time-shifting in the home, or depends on grid-scale storage, to actually deliver on its goal

That's interesting as the suppliers are going to control what people use either through price or automation.

Bob Hoskins also said "I have put money in all your pockets, but now there has been an eruption".

[AliG]

I spent quite a while researching this at work as a lot of people have been investing in hydrogen which always seemed stupid and wasteful to me.

 

However, as we now believe we have solutions for road transport in the form of battery vehicles in the main and fuel cell vehicles later for scenarios where batteries don't work then we will need to move on to residential heating as the next largest producer of greenhouse gases. Fuel cells are more expensive now but they are expected to get considerably cheaper over time as well hydrogen. Batteries will be the dominant technology however in road transport.

 

The expectation is that once almost all electricity production is renewable then we can start doing things that today don't make sense - i.e. using electricity to turn water into hydrogen or using direct electric heating or e-fuels. Hydrogen is a very inefficient way to fuel things but if electricity is zero carbon and cheap then the assumption appears to be that you can waste it to get carbon emissions down. One thing that surprised me is that the price of electricity is forecast to fall considerably in the future as renewable electricity is now roughly cost comparable with fossil fuels and continues to get cheaper. I am still bit skeptical re this, but it changes a lot of the calculations.

 

ASHP will be the preferred heating method, but hydrogen boilers may be needed for the worst insulated houses where an ASHP would struggle to produce enough output. Electric boilers could be used where an ASHP does not fit. If electricity produces no emissions then electric boilers will be fine from an emissions perspective, although not the cheapest to run.

 

This is all based on targets for net zero carbon and it is impossible to hit this target without drastic changes. The good news is technology continues to improve and fix these issues and I don't see it being too much of an inconvenience or cost to people. We can get emissions down about 60-70% relatively easily. We then need more expensive and awkward solutions to get all the way to zero. We may also beed more carbon taxes to force people to use these solutions if they are more expensive. I am not opining on net zero, but that is almost certain to be the target everywhere.

[SimonD]

Apart from that they really don't seem to know what on earth to do, I suspect a lot of this is hot air, merely using the time honoured political communication strategy of informally leaking extreme end of possibility - really bad, unpleasant and unpopular ideas - to then gauge push back and outrage, finally resulting in a policy that rows back on a lot of it, but seems to everyone much more reasonable. Unless of course the government is riding so high on its own self-belief,  it thinks it can get away with what would almost amount to a new poll tax.

 

For all the other talk of national economy and the importance of investing in infrastructure, there seems to be a glaring hole, screaming for investment into renewable energy infrastructure, development and implementation, including various storage technologies. Hopefully that is built into the new policy somewhere in a way that doesn't just rely on private companies but looks to develop a national public resource for the long-term.

 

[pdf27]

May be helpful here...

Edited May 26, 2021 by pdf27

[joth]

Following on from my comments about the convenience of gas, there's a pretty good (if long) article on the challenges on Engadget today:

 

https://www.engadget.com/air-source-heat-pumps-uk-120044198.html

 

I think this section hits it on the head, I see the same mistake being made here: that economic savings are the only / prime basis on which sustainability measures should sell themselves and compete against the incumbent technologies. Most mod-cons sell themselves on the convenience and lifestyle aspirational aspects. (It's literally what the term modcon is derived from). While we all like thriftiness, en-masse it's not how the population works. (otherwise, explain all the Sky TV in low income estates)

 

Quote

 

The sales pitch for many clean(er) technologies often focuses on the total cost of ownership being dramatically lower, even if the initial outlay is higher. If you’ve ever spoken to a Tesla owner, you’ll likely have heard about how little each vehicle costs to run. Similarly, when speaking with solar panel installers, the talk is often about how much money you stand to make (or at least save) compared to your existing solution. That conversation, says Clemow, is the wrong way to sell people on the future of heat pumps.

 

“There’s this conversation about payback,” said Clemow, “you don’t have that conversation about gas boilers — no one goes ‘I’m gonna put in a new gas boiler because it’s gonna pay me back,’ you’re gonna go ‘I want heat,’ therefore you’re gonna put in whatever.” He said that there is, however, a genuine payback case for people on alternative fuels, like oil and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). But natural gas users are, at least right now, likely to feel short-changed. “That is absolutely driven by the disparity between gas fuel prices and electricity,” said Clemow. He feels that there should be a “rebalancing” between electricity and gas, but that to avoid throwing millions of people into fuel poverty, it would be unwise to “just throw it all on electricity.”