Still it continues....

[Beelbeebub]

Stop pushing heat pumps or face major backlash, green energy magnate tells Labour

Party donor Dale Vince warns that urging homeowners to switch to clean-power technology risks political storm bigger than Ulez

 

Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and renewable energy advocate, called on Keir Starmer to rethink national programmes, championed by Boris Johnson, pushing the technology.

 

“It’s a Johnson-era policy, and like most Johnson ideas, it wasn’t thought through,” Vince said. “It wasn’t meant for the real world, if you look at the amount of money committed. Electricity energy bills overall in our households will go up unless you assume heroic levels of performance.... "

And now we come to the kicker..... 

 

 

" Vince claimed that he was speaking in the “national interest” in criticising heat pumps. He proposes an alternative – green gas, or biomethane, made from organic material, which his company Ecotricity develops." 

 

Isn't it convenient that the thing that is in the national interest just happens to be the thing his company is pushing..... Astonishing coincidence. 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/12/stop-pushing-heat-pumps-backlash-green-energy-magnate-labour-ulez

[nod]

So true

Most people getting HPs tend to think bills will drop 

[ProDave]

41 minutes ago, nod said:

So true

Most people getting HPs tend to think bills will drop 

I take the more realistic view, that for a house without mains gas available, a HP will get you down to about the same heating cost as mains gas and better than any other electric option or oil.

[nod]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

I take the more realistic view, that for a house without mains gas available, a HP will get you down to about the same heating cost as mains gas and better than any other electric option or oil.

With electricity nearly four times the price of gas Most people are being mis sold HPs and will expect there bills to be significantly less 

Unless they are in a well insulated airtight home Preferably with UFH

The vast majority will be disappointed 

 

We had no choice but to go for a HP this time round The BUS has made a great difference 

If our heating bills are the same or a little bit more than our previous build 

I’d be very happy 

[Beelbeebub]

2 hours ago, nod said:

So true

Most people getting HPs tend to think bills will drop 

It"s a fair point - we still get the slightly disingenuous "3 or more time more efficient" line, which is true but for people on gas that still isn't enough to make it cheaper. 

 

There are a growing number of "typical" homes out there achieving cost parity or better with gas boilers. The insulation and air tightness aren't actually the issues, all they affect are the size (and hence cost) of the HP and emitters. 

 

But the difference between gas and (typical) electric unit costs is the issue. Currently it's 3.5-4.0 meaning your SCOP needs to be 3.5+ to break even. Possible but not a given. 

 

If the differential dropped to 2.5 ie 10p a gas unit and 25p electric, then the break even performance would be 2.5 and people would be rushing to fit HPs. 

 

I seem to remember doing a fag packet calculation that if we moved the Green taxes from electricity onto gas it would push the ratio below 3.

[scottishjohn]

If i had the option for mains gas ,then iwold have gone that way  ,but still with UFH and the same insulation that ihave put in the house now ,

 powering ny solar and expensive batteries  wouldd not work out with associated costs -not in my life time  with the pitiful  fed intariffs you get if you send excess back to grid 

If it comes back to 20p a unit then i might consider it

to just change to ASHP on a house without the insulation  would not work in most cases 

 

It did work for me on present house as it was LPG 

 

[JamesPa]

6 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

Isn't it convenient that the thing that is in the national interest just happens to be the thing his company is pushing..... Astonishing coincidence. 

That says it all.  

 

 

[SteamyTea]

14 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

made from organic material

Which has the same emissions as natural gas (near enough as it does depend on the gas composition).

 

We are now about 170ppm of CO₂ above our pre-industrial levels, so releasing 'last years sequestered CO₂ does (expletive deleted) all to stabilise the atmospheric conditions.

We have to stop combustion technologies, that is the end of it.  We have the technologies to do this, it is really just a matter of doing it.

Edited October 13 by SteamyTea

[RobLe]

So he buys or rents pasture land, mows the grass,  biodigests it, cleans up the gas then inject it into the gas network.  He’s got a fact sheet:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/green-gas-mills-fact-sheet
I expect the only thing slowing him down is overall cost/kWh of the product - he claims 7p/kWh, which makes it sometimes profitable, but not at the moment.  (Does that include drax style subsidies though?). It seems very cheap up front costs, and easy to scale up.

Clearly he’s a vegan, that pastureland has something on it right now!  We could however do with eating less meat in the world, for the planet and our health.

While I believe wind turbine + heatpump is a better long term heating solution, the capital cost of this makes it just that - long term.  Nothing to stop both approaches happening.

Dale Vince, eco hero!

 

[JohnMo]

I recently did a study on HVO (hydrotreated Vegetable oil), not bio diesel, which is full of nasty chemicals, and bad in lots of ways. HVO sounds great on paper, until you start looking a little deeper. So used as a green alternative to diesel, in use almost identical to diesel. Effectively used cooking fats etc. treated by heating and filtering.

 

Tail pipe emissions almost identical to diesel, same soots, same everything. 

[Beelbeebub]

23 minutes ago, RobLe said:

So he buys or rents pasture land, mows the grass,  biodigests it, cleans up the gas then inject it into the gas network.  He’s got a fact sheet:

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/green-gas-mills-fact-sheet
I expect the only thing slowing him down is overall cost/kWh of the product - he claims 7p/kWh, which makes it sometimes profitable, but not at the moment.  (Does that include drax style subsidies though?). It seems very cheap up front costs, and easy to scale up.

Clearly he’s a vegan, that pastureland has something on it right now!  We could however do with eating less meat in the world, for the planet and our health.

While I believe wind turbine + heatpump is a better long term heating solution, the capital cost of this makes it just that - long term.  Nothing to stop both approaches happening.

Dale Vince, eco hero!

 

Do we have any figures for how many kwh or bio gas you can get per hectare of land? Ideally net figures as I imagine there is considerable use of tractors and other fuel hungry machinery to harvest, prepare and transport that biomass. 

 

And do we have the figures for how much land we would use to replace all fossil gas with bio gas?   I have a gut feeling we would end up needing an unrealistic amount. 

 

Beyond that is there a figure for the efficiency of harvesting biomass, digesting it, piping the methane to houses and burning it for heat vs harvesting the biomass, burning it, transmitting the electricity and using a heat pump. 

 

I get that people like gas boilers, they are super convenient. A small and relatively cheap box that fits in a cupboard that can do all you heating and hot water via some small and cheap radiators you already have fitted. That is very attractice

[Gone West]

13 hours ago, ProDave said:

a HP will get you down to about the same heating cost as mains gas and better than any other electric option or oil

Around here oil is 62.45p/l. One litre of heating oil contains 10.35kWh and allowing for burning inefficiencies will reduce that to 9.32kWh. So 9.32kWh for 62.45p is 6.7p/kWh. My current electricity cost is 23.03p/kWh so an ASHP would need a SCOP of 3.4 to break even, so borderline as to whether it's cheaper than oil to run. For me, in an old house, it would be much cheaper to upgrade the existing oil boiler than to fit an ASHP.

[Beelbeebub]

24 minutes ago, Gone West said:

Around here oil is 62.45p/l. One litre of heating oil contains 10.35kWh and allowing for burning inefficiencies will reduce that to 9.32kWh. So 9.32kWh for 62.45p is 6.7p/kWh. My current electricity cost is 23.03p/kWh so an ASHP would need a SCOP of 3.4 to break even, so borderline as to whether it's cheaper than oil to run. For me, in an old house, it would be much cheaper to upgrade the existing oil boiler than to fit an ASHP.

The cheapest thing to do in most cases is a like for like swap, but for co2 reduction it is always Heatpumps. 

 

So we need to decide (as a nation) which way to go. 

 

3.4 is doable in most properties as long as you can get the flow temps down below 45C.

 

The capital cost is the issue, both for upgrading the emitters to achive the lower flow (and any water cylinders if required) and also the unit itself. A large leaky farmhouse could be heated efficiently but the cost of the 30kw heatpump would be prohibitive. 

 

There is no reason HPs can't achive cost parity with gas boilers - it's just production volumes and supply chain.

 

Any all electric houses (about 2m) should be converted ASAP. In fact it would be a good way to "prime the pump" for the supply chain. Offer really generous subsidies for swapping storage heaters and direct heater houses to HPs - air to air if necessary (cheapest way). Thwt will give you 2 m households to build up the industry with.

[IGP]

8 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

 

The capital cost is the issue, both for upgrading the emitters to achive the lower flow (and any water cylinders if required) and also the unit itself.

This is the kicker, I personally would scrap the BUS but offer 20 year interest free loans to spread the capital cost.

[scottishjohn]

this discussion 

It depends what we are really talking about 

 

the savings from insulating all houses properly would drop energy consumption so much  and it is needed for any system to be effiecent ,

that that is the way it should go first  as a country 

 just chucking heat into to leaky houses is never going to be a good solution to the base problem

alot of houses are not big enough to do the obvious of internal insulation , like stud walls etc ,especially the older ones 

 so massive exterior insulation  must be the way for those dwellings.

non of this is cheap -but insulation is a once only cost

Edited October 13 by scottishjohn

[Beelbeebub]

5 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

this discussion 

It depends what we are really talking about 

 

the savings from insulating all houses properly would drop energy consumption so much  and it is needed for any system to be effiecent ,

that that is the way it should go first  as a country 

 just chucking heat into to leaky houses is never going to be a good solution to the base problem

alot of houses are not big enough to do the obvious of internal insulation , like stud walls etc ,especially the older ones 

 so massive exterior insulation  must be the way for those dwellings.

non of this is cheap -but insulation is a once only cost

I agree we need to upinsulate alot of houses and external is the preference but that bumps into a raft of issues itself. 

 

Fire safety is obviously top of a lot of minds but also damp prevention especially when the roof overhangs are less than the cladding thickness.

 

Then there is the biggie - appearance. External insulation will change the appearance of buildings. In places. Like the cotswolds this is going to be unacceptable. Nationally we need to reach a consensus about priorities, climate change or olde worlde cottages. 

 

But there are many houses that are already suitible for HPs. If your max hear demand is less than about 12 kw, which is about half the properties already, then they are good to go now. Realistically there isn't much point of getting the max demand below 4 kw as your sizing starts to be dominated by hot water demand. 

 

But efficency isn't affected by the size of the unit.

 

If you have a large leaky house you can still achive a high SCOP. You just need a bigger (and more expensive) unit.  The scop is (largely) determined by the flow temp. The reason people think big leaky houses can't be efficiently heated is because they also tend to have undersized radiators. The tendency was, my In-laws farm house as a case in point, to run the rads hot (scalding hot) to compensate as it didn't really affect the consumption but replacing dozens of radiators with k3's would be expensive. 

[SteamyTea]

51 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Do we have any figures for how many kwh or bio gas you can get per hectare of land

You can calculate if from the dry mass of the harvested crop and the energy conversion of that crop (around 0.2% in UK).

 

So if a m² of land receives 100 kWh of sunlight, a 'plant' will convert that to about 0.2 kWh.

If you extrapolate that to the world, include the poles and all oceans, lakes etc, and burnt all the biomass there is, which includes all the animals, and us, then there is enough energy to last about 350 days and current usage.

 

PV on the other hand converts about 12% of the incoming energy , so 1.2 kWh for every 100 kWh received.  6 times greater.

These are rough figures from memory, but quite simply, burning biomass is pointless as an energy source, especially when you take the conversion from solid, to gas, to thermal to delivered energy into account.

 

Don't get suckered into claims about Brazilian sugar cane as a bio crop, while about 6 times better than maize, it is still low compared to even wind power (which is about half that of PV for the UK).  Brazil has an ideal climate to grow sugar cane (at the moment) and very few restrictions of farming practices i.e. water and chemical inputs.  And they steal land from the indigenous population, then cut down the forest, decimate the local environment and move on.

 

Read this, as old as it is now.

https://www.withouthotair.com/

 

Download here:

https://www.inference.org.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

 

 

[scottishjohn]

9 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

27 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

I agree we need to upinsulate alot of houses and external is the preference but that bumps into a raft of issues itself. 

 

Fire safety is obviously top of a lot of minds but also damp prevention especially when the roof overhangs are less than the cladding thickness.

 

Then there is the biggie - appearance. External insulation will change the appearance of buildings. In places. Like the cotswolds this is going to be unacceptable. Nationally we need to reach a consensus about priorities, climate change or olde worlde cottages.

yes you might have to extend the roof line and as for exterior appearnce ,whilst it would not be cheap you could still apply cotswold stone slips to outside  and keep it looking like it did 

 

its a money not a tehcnical problem 

maybe the rates need to go up on badly insulated properties to make people do it .a bit like the window tax of the 1700,s

there certainly will be little chance of grants  the way the economy  is 

 and maybbe a better defintionn of what should have listed status - a lot really should not have it

 

[JohnMo]

1 hour ago, Gone West said:

My current electricity cost is 23.03p/kWh so an ASHP would need a SCOP of 3.4 to break even, so borderline as to whether it's cheaper than oil to run.

What everyone misses is the electric cost associated with a boiler. So the pumps and controllers etc. they use the electric as a heat pump. Those costs are included in a heat pump SCoP but missed conveniently from a boiler. We can regularly be using 40 to 60W

 

Our heat pump generally gets a CoP when heating of around 4 to 6, this diminishes with standby in mild weather to closer to 3.5 to 4. But as it gets colder daily CoP gets better due to less standby costs.

 

Interesting is a poorly insulated building with a low design temperature will always beat a well insulated house with like for flow design flow temp, because with a well insulated house your standby and DHW generally are higher than running the heating.

 

A hybrid heat wins the day most times. Leave heating system as is, basic heat pump generally about 4kW will do most properties. Heat pump can generally supply enough heat through that system cheaper or as cheap as gas, down to 4 to 5 degs. But with none of the emissions issues. After that you start to get frosty of the condenser and a hit on CoP with the heat pump, so switch over to gas at that point. Very low capital costs, £1500 to £2000 plus a days work. 3 houses for the same as a one house grant.

[scottishjohn]

you tell me the reason why one is listed and one not

first one is not listed the second is

[JohnMo]

12 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

very few restrictions of farming practices i.e. water and chemical inputs. 

And replacement of bio diverse forest with mono crops, and the huge impact on wildlife and species  diversity.

[SteamyTea]

I think the biggest problem in changing household heating systems is the unbelievable prejudice to new technology, just think back to Dieselgate.  People still believe that our government at the time told us that we MUST buy diesel cars, and now government is now telling us that we MUST NOT buy them.

People still believe that the embodied carbon and energy in renewable energy system is greater than they can ever pay back, never been true.

The times when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, well a quick look at the UKs power generation shows that this has never happened, and never will.

People often say they they are all for renewables, but they need to be in the right place i.e. not near them.  Well the truth is, for an efficient system, they do need to be near them, with turbines up high and PV on hillsides, facing the right way.  I take a special interest in this as I live in a place with great wind and solar resources (for the UK).  I often point out that Penzance has a windturbine and it cannot be seen from most places.  If a windfarm was installed over say 5 hectares of land, a mile from Land's End.  No one would say it is spoiling the view, the view is the ocean, not the grade 4 farmland behind it.

People say that covering good farm land with PV will effect food security, how/why.  No farmer will rent or sell his most productive farmland for the income potential from renewables, farming still pays better.  Wind and solar are put on unproductive land, what the rest of us call scrubland.  About 30% of farmland is not farmed.

We throw away about 30% of the food we produce.

 

I was in a conversation with a maintenance person the other day about cooking on gas compared to cooking on an induction hob, he knows I am a chef.  He told me that there is nothing batter than cooking on gas. After a bit of probing, it transpires that he cooks on an old electric heater and had never used an induction hob.  He also says killer wots an our, but he is from Bolton.

 

As many of you know, I like collecting data and analysing it for my amusement.  We often get people on here wanting to know how much their heating system should cost to run, or why the usage is so high, but are unwilling to look at their data, or spend a few quid getting some monitoring kit.  I tend to loose interest in their problems.

Edited October 13 by SteamyTea

[ToughButterCup]

14 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

you tell me the reason why one is listed and one not ...

 

The golf club , or the Rotary Circle,  squash club ,  Freemasons, or a friend of a friend .....

[saveasteading]

Someone puts a good  case for listing. No one disagrees. Listed.

It doesn't have to be an amazing building, just significant or rare.

[ProDave]

14 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

I think the biggest problem in changing household heating systems is the unbelievable prejudice to new technology, just think back to Dieselgate.  People still believe that our government at the time told us that we MUST buy diesel cars, and now government is now telling us that we MUST NOT buy them.

Yes but we still have contradictory "messages" from the government.

 

I drive a diesel car as I wanted a car capable of towing a heavy trailer.  To buy a petrol one that powerful would have cost a lot in VED.  So I chose a diesel one. The VED is based on Kg of CO2 per km and that is lower, a lot lower, on the diesel one so lower VED so it must be less bad for the environment.  But on the other hand I am told my diesel car is way too dirty to drive into a LEZ but the previous, older, petrol one with higher CO2 per Km was okay.

 

One can forgive the public for being cynical with such mixed messages.