Net Zero FOI
By Paul Homewood
I FOI’d the BEIS for detail about their Net Zero plans. They refused to give me their costings (which of course have subsequently been released to the GWPF), but their reply did include some useful titbits.
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Heat Pumps
I asked for their costings, and they sent me this:
An 8KW unit would be typical for an average semi, but the comment at the bottom is noteworthy. If you want to be able to heat your house as you do now, you will either need to replace your radiators, which pushes the cost up to £14750. Or buy a more powerful heat pump, which is likely to end up costing the same.
Fitting underfloor heating of course will also be hugely disruptive, and may involve extra costs such as for carpets. Extra insulation, almost certainly needed, will cost much more still.
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Insulation
They also sent me this:
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The CCC assumptions below would be consistent with the higher end of the govt’s costs, so we can reasonably assume around £65bn.(Although the CCC did point out their costs did not include scaffolding or planning, which could add another few billion.
EPC C is not a particularly demanding standard, so fuel savings would be tiny, maybe of the order of £800 million annually, which certainly would not justify spending upwards of £65bn.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/12/18/home-insulation/
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Carbon Capture
They admit they have no idea how much this could potentially cost:
They have also given me some detailed information regarding hydrogen rollout, which I need time to digest.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Don’t forget redecoration costs.
Did you ask them how any of that was supposed to take tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere to reach their NET-zero goal? Do they even have a NET-zero goal?
So BEIS’s data shreds greenies’ projections – to the surprise of none of the knowledgeable.
On R5 this morning they made carbon capture – sequestration, storage and making into fuels/plastic – sound like it was all possible here and now, all ready to go! And airliners are going to be fueled by dandelion wine apparently.
I look forward to not living long enough to see the disaster that our carbon neutered (sic) economy will be, and the anger of the grown up school strikers and the revenge that they will take on the people that brainwashed them.
and the solution for flats/high rises???
Sent from Outlook
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Are homes all made of brick and stone? It seems that insulating is very different in England than in the USA. It’s easy and cheap here. It’s required in new homes. Yet England resists doing the insulating.
That’s because the cost of insulating existing houses is far more than any energy savings.
And yes. Most houses are still made of brick
New builds in the UK are well insulated and many are ‘sips’ type construction these days – they have to be highly energy efficient by law/building regs.
The problem is all the old stock of stone/brick etc. housing that was designed for the whole structure to breathe. The materials to do the work retrospectively and the intrusiveness of the work is very expensive and unlikely to ever be recouped.
It’s not like the US where they bang up a house out of 4×2 in the morning and spray foam the structure to death after lunch. Well that’s how it seems to me!
In our county (Washington State, USA) now, for walls, they insist on 6×2 — actual measurement is 5.5 x 1.5 inches. Floors and attics are done differently.
I could show you my narrative license but it’s expired, apparently.
Always good to have some perspective from the USA ,. You would be forgiven for regarding the UK Zero Carbonistas as economically illiterate with all the comprehension of the gadarene swine
That’s because you haven’t bothered to find out where and what most people live in
Costs apart, insulating most British houses will either involve adding cladding to the outside walls which in most traditionally built houses will make them look ridiculous or adding several inches of cladding to the inside walls which in most small houses will make the rooms unacceptably smaller. The local roar of all these air sourced units will cause unacceptable noise levels.
Old houses have mouldings and eaves features which would have to be altered. The thickness of foam insulation on the outside or inside will be 7 inches plus plasterboard. The piping and wiring on the walls would have to be altered as well as larger radiators. The floor boards will have to be taken up to insert insulation against the wall. Suspended ground floors will have to be taken up and insulation put between the joists. Air heat exchangers will be needed for ventilation. Chimneys will have to be blocked. The windows will have to be changed to triple glazed. External doors will have to be upgraded. After all this is done, the party wall will conduct more heat than the external wall if the neighbouring house is unheated.
What floor boards? Both houses we have owned have had concrete floors. Our local builder made a good point that all these changes in Regs means that news skills are required each time changes are made and we have no real idea how current builds will fare over time. My son has a new build with wizzy solar panels in the roof, and a heating system that looks like something out of Star Trek. Already had several visits from the plumber to fix.
“local roar of all these air sourced units will cause unacceptable noise levels.”
An 8kW unit is the maximum ‘input’ power , which means its 2-4 times that as output or around 20kW more or less. A typical house doesnt need 20kW apart from a cold start in heating , more likely it will quickly go down to 1-2 kW input producing 5kW output to maintain the heating, and thats for coldest days.
No roar when you are running at a fraction of maximum capacity
As another point fibreglass insulation is better than sprayed foam which is mostly used for the small cracks around windows and other openings
It may not be a roar, but it is still an annoying background hum for those of us who have sensitive hearing in a particular range. It is particularly annoying at night when the overall level of noise is much reduced.
Hearing sensitivity is never discussed. My OH and I have very different hearing sensitivity; things that annoy me, they do not notice, and vice versa. Just because you do not mind the hum, does not mean that everyone will not mind it.
I put my tinnitus down to 50 years working next to or in close proximity to electronic equipment with cooling fans, more often than not in a airconditioned environment. The silence when the power failed was deafening
Assuming that the population are ok with borrowing and spending huge amounts of money to replace their existing gas boilers with electric heat pumps and insulation to make their houses uglier and/or smaller (which I’m certain they won’t be) isn’t the elephant in the room the fact that domestic gas is roughly 2.75p/kWh and electricity 14.5p/kWh………or am I missing something?
The Elephant in the room is that the UK has roughly one third of the skilled labour required to achieve all this by 2050.
The solution?
Immigration.
Why insulate buildings when we will soon enjoy the climate of the South of France, that is what the Government believe!
We also insulate against the heat…. I’ve seen 42C before in the Loire Valley
Anyway can “Zero Carbon be achieved, I would doubt it, especially as Carbon is a small mollecue to mess with and in any case it is needed for the Green fields so that we have them. No Carbon = no Green fields, no green fields = no Food.
OFGEM quote the gas bill cap as being of the order of £500 for 12MW p.a. So an 18% saving is of the order of £100 a year. So that’s 85.9 years payback for insulation, and meant to be economic?
12MWh please – completely different from 12MW. Only energy correspondents like Jillian Ambrose should get the units wrong.
Thank you, Ray.
Tell the Red Wall
GWPF reporting Kwasi Kwartang let it slip government have effectively blocked the Cumbrian coal mine.
honestly, I h*te our political class with a vengeance.
https://www.thegwpf.com/ministers-irresponsible-statement-on-cumbrian-mine-could-cost-the-public-tens-of-millions-in-the-courts/
UK is not a safe place to live in or invest
until our Islington overlords have been overthrown.
I have 3 questions, can you, Paul,BEIS, or any readers help me?
1) what is seen as the ideal global average temperature these memories want to achieve?
2) what is seen as an ideal level of CO2 in the atmosphere by them?
3) when did “climate” become a science
Well you can add on VAT onto those costings because ordinary householders have to pay it.
Paul you’ve seen Kwasi/Boris/BEIS tweets they are busy sending out green promise grants to all regions
They’ve just given £15m to Norwegian corp Equinor to build a hydrogen plant in Hull
by coincidence Today’s news is that Norway’s government is refusing to let the last Hull trawler fish in Norwegian seas.
How in God’s name can Hull be down to its last trawler? How?
Astounding political mismanagement.
When I was born in Hull in 1956 the city had one of (if not the) largest fishing fleets in the world. I grew up virtually living on fish every day! It truly beggars belief that the city is now down to its last one.
Blame Ted Heath – another in the line of failed Tory PMs – who knew full well he was destroying our fishing industry when he signed us up to the EEC. They suddenly – and legally questionably – made fish a common resource as the joining procedure was in progress. The Norwegians took one look at it and abandoned their application but with a pack of lies to the public Heath carried on.
From a longer post at bBBC by John at 11:12pm
Sir David Attenborough answers dinosaur query from Otis, 4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56429104
Why on Earth does that deserve a slot on the front page I wondered.
Well, it starts by being sickly sweet in story of cute little Otis but quickly becomes intertwined with climate change agenda.
Greta’s name gets thrown in of course
https://biasedbbc.org/blog/2021/03/16/midweek-thread-17th-march-2021/comment-page-2/#comment-1110839
In their justification for their proposed low carbon demonstrator housing estate, my council assumed the ASHP system would only cost an extra £500 over a conventional system. It’s taking a long time to get off the drawing board. I wonder why.
typical Boris-talk promise 110% in 5 years
and deliver 30% in 15 years
“Net Zero 2050”
is just a PR phrase for “we’ll be claiming 30% CO2 reduction by 2060”
… I don’t know anyone with a smart meter.
That prog is years over on time & budget.
More about the net zero heroism of nation states.
Building/installing will mean a sizeable short-medium term increase in CO2 emissions. Same with EV.
James,
I don’t believe that it will be short term.
Given that both EVs and heat pumps are mandated must mean a very large increase in grid demand, and that increase will largely be met by gas generation, with some coal for the next few years..
Nuclear generation will decrease by 2030 by half, I would guess, assuming Hinkley Point is up and running by then. (Hinkley Point 3 Gwatts, for example is equal to about 6 to 7.5 Gwatt capacity of wind, thus wind construction is slow and some earlier wind farms will be at end of life.
I don’t see how non CO2 generating cpacity wll match the increase in demand, never mind overtake it significantly to offset some of the extra CO2 emitted.
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Ed Miliband’s climate doublethink – must save steel jobs, don’t want coking coal jobs – both are being killed by the climate fanatics/policies he supports.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56437665
A business secretary saying a business should not open. That’s what we have come to.
No, it’s worse than that. He wants to ban the coking mine while subsidising the steel industry 🙂
Miliband is now talking about nationalising the steel industry. The perfect solution. Stop producing steel – no more CO2 – but continue employing all the steel workers. Brilliant economics – or am I missing something?
A decent article in the DT which is about decarbonising UK industry. Very short on costs from HMG so no surprise there but they’ve had a go themselves.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/03/18/getting-industry-go-green-will-not-come-cheaply/
” Chris McDonald, chief executive of the Metals Processing Institute, estimates it would cost between £6bn and £7bn to decarbonise the UK’s steel plants, assuming they were replaced by new facilities. Eurofer says the entire EU and UK steel industry going green by 2050 would push up production costs by between 35pc and 100pc per tonne.”
The risks are high in relying on technologies that don’t already exist and even more so when you are the vanguard of this sea change.
“Although other countries are likely to follow, until new technology is developed and becomes cost effective, industries may avoid the UK for locations with looser regimes, and consumers may choose cheaper products made using more polluting methods.”
At least some people are trying to calmly look in to the future and calculate what might happen instead of blithely carrying on as though the magic fairy will transform everything in to a benevolent green world. We need more of this.
Any planned project that relies on unproven technology for its success might as well be written off before it starts.
I like the way they use “polluting” there. I have a book about air pollution. There are chapters on particulates, ozone, oxides of nitrogen, sulphur dioxide, fluorides, VOCs, wet-deposited acidity….. but not one on carbon dioxide. Funny that.
Surely some people in government must be reading this blog. What goes on in their minds? Perhaps they are all too stupid to understand it. They can’t deny the truth of what is said.
David, in answer to your questions, many politicians are, indeed, too stupid to understand it. I would suggest that many others’ careers and current positions rely on them not trying to understand it and, of course, the majority in both camps would struggle to identify the truth unless it was ringing a green virtue signalling bell or had votes attached it. However, when current policies inevitably lead to a public backlash, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few rats starting to desert the sinking ship of state.
David, the UK is currently being run by the completely incompetent. That may sound a somewhat strident remark but consider this website for a “new” wind turbine development.
https://alpha-311.com/
It quite clearly states
“One A311 Vertical Axis Wind Turbine can generate as much power as 24 solar panels.
24 solar panels measuring 1m2 will produce 6KW per day.”
Think about that for a second – a wind turbine manufacturer that does not even understand the basic difference between units of power (kW) and units of energy (kWh) and can’t even get the abbreviation correct. (I even wonder if they know he difference between mW and MW as it’s only a factor of 1 billion.)
It beggars belief but Jillian Ambrose in the Guardian believes it and she’s got an English Literature degree so it must be true! After all as she notes it “can generate electricity without wind.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/16/good-vibrations-bladeless-turbines-could-bring-wind-power-to-your-home
And while i am on about It, the other vibrating model she enthuses about has a maximum power output of just 100W in a 25mph wind.
You really cannot make this sort of sh1t up
No, David, they won’t be reading this as Paul is not within the bubble and does not have ‘prestige’. And as the man who spotted the SS Panzer divison resting at Arnhem found out, being correct gets you nowhere without ‘prestige’ and dealing with men who know they are right.
https://electroverse.net/noaa-confirms-a-full-blown-grand-solar-minimum/
NOAA confirms a grand solar minimum
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243
Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling
Slightly OT, according to a letter from a Mr Hughes in today’s DT, fungi are the main culprit for CO2 (and therefore the climate emergency). “Fungi are responsible for some 85 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, mainly by decomposition of woody material. This is the largest of all sources; eight times greater than that from human activity.”
When is the Government going to take effective action to deal with this massive problem? All fungi producing plants must be shut down immediately.
Why should you take mushrooms to a party? Because they’re fun guys!
I thank you – I’m here all week, try the veal.