Heat pump lobbyists resort to PR stunt about heat pump costs
By Paul Homewood
Current costs of heat pumps are on average about £10,000 per household to install, with worryingly high running costs due to the inflation of electricity prices caused by astronomical subsidies to renewables such as wind and solar (£11 billion a year at present).
According to reports in the Sun, Octopus Energy’s CEO Greg Jackson has now replied, admitting that buying and running a heat pump today is “expensive”, but promising that costs will halve in “the next couple of years”. It is doubtful that Mr Jackson really believes this “jam tomorrow” language.
Heat pumps are a mature technology, with much of the cost being accounted for by plumbing and other works, such as new radiators, underfloor heating, and digging trenches for heat coils, where large cost reductions are not to be expected in short order.
Mr Jackson also hopes that electricity prices will fall because the subsidies to renewables will be taken off electricity bills. What he doesn’t say is that the subsidy costs will only be relocated to general taxation, hitting householders equally badly but in a different part of their budgets.
Mr Jackson should also have disclosed that the heat pump lobby is the major beneficiary of the expected government grant of £4,000 per household to 600,000 households a year that it plans will want to switch to heat pumps. That £2.4 billion a year subsidy to heat pump suppliers like Octopus will have to be paid for by taxpayers, putting further indirect pressure on household expenditure.
Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) said:
This PR stunt shows that the heat pump lobby is terrified about the public outcry over enforced installation of heat pumps as the truth about this very costly technology becomes better known. Energy companies already have a bad name with the public. Implausible and self-interested promises about falling heat pump costs won’t help.”
https://www.thegwpf.com/heat-pump-lobbyists-resort-to-pr-stunt-about-heat-pump-costs/
Benny Peiser is being generous here.
In my view the likes of Greg Jackson are the scum of the earth, prepared to take money from those least able to afford it, whilst at the same time demanding that taxpayers also fork out so that he can make a profit.
Of course, I might be being totally unfair to Jackson and the rest of his fellow scum balls. Maybe heat pumps, wind and solar farms will be the most economical option future. But if that is the case, the market will decide, and consumers will make their own decisions, without the need for government coercion.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I guess the consumer will choose heat pumps in the future when there is only a choice of heat pump or no heat at all. I look forward to the day when my electricity costs actually reduce by having an ASHP and that ain’t going to happen. When will we ever hear any of our elected representatives actually stand up to all this bulls**t and I speak as someone who has run an ASHP for 11 years now. We make it work for us but it only makes sense when I include the RHI payments.
Paul, it must be Friday, because you are being very polite in your language.
Yes, I noticed that slight (unnecessary) hesitation about being fair.
The Greens besides being intellectually challenged on numeracy and economics, are also quite gullible. Their belief in unicorns and the Fairy Godmother is obvious. They have (somehow) convinced themselves that heat pumps* will work miracles in homes. A theoretical figure from an artificial laboratory trial is assumed to apply in real life.
I’ve got mine going right now, and it is struggling to heat the room because it is 5℃ outside. It has managed a rise of 1.5℃ in just over an hour.
* the American term and best description of a device for pumping heat uphill.
It’s because the Greens footsloggers are genuinely scared of the future and desperately want to believe these “solutions” will work.
The real reason for the heat pumps are that those needs and runs by electricity.
And they can cut down the electricity, so it can and will be the controll tool.
Some friends of mine, who live in a housing association property, had an air source heat pump system imposed upon them by their landlords as a (HMG grant funded) replacement for their existing, outdated (and expensive) electric storage heating system. The cost of installation was £12k, borne by the landlords. The installation took 3 weeks and entailed the addition of new and obtrusive pipework and extra large radiators throughout the property and the loss of their existing large airing cupboard where the brains of the new system was now located. Despite the initial survey indicating that the property’s existing insulation/glazing etc was not suitable for the owners to maximise savings from the installation of a heat pump system, the landlords chose not to upgrade on grounds of (non grant funded) cost, estimated by the installers as being circa £25k for the property in question.
The landlords assured my friends, prior to insulation, that their new heating bills would be 40% cheaper than electric storage costs. To date, their bills are 20% more expensive. Some of the hike was caused by low late winter/early spring temperatures causing the system to run almost continuously in order to guard against freezing but poor insulation is a major ongoing issue. In short, my friends have a word of advice for anyone considering a heat pump system who isn’t loaded, lives in the Northern Hemisphere and can’t afford proper insulation, don’t! And, by the way, the system is noisy as hell, irritates the neighbours and is not designed for any light sleepers out there.
“the system to run almost continuously in order to guard against freezing”
A gas system would have to do the same, surely.
As for poor insulation, that would apply no matter the heating source. Doesnt even sound like they were using gas to start with and ‘electric storage’ is hot water for domestic use not for heating, no wonder it cost so much with radiators etc as they didnt previously have a central heating system , presumably they used electric heaters in room as needed.
I checked and an 8kW air source heat pump ‘pack’ is £3500, a 15kW is £5400. and the claim ‘The AroTHERM Plus Uses The Natural Refrigerant, R290 To Achieve Flow Temperatures Of Up To 75°C. Can Use Existing Radiators And Operates Down To -25°C’
The pack may cost that much, but as anyone who’s paid for home improvements knows it’s the actual installation that costs the real cash
“and ‘electric storage’ is hot water for domestic use not for heating, ”
Are you not familiar with electric night storage heaters?
https://www.heatershop.co.uk/storage-heaters
You are very ill informed about everything you wrote. How anyone in the UK doesn’t know about economy 7 Electric storage heaters is a mystery.
“The AroTHERM Plus Uses The Natural Refrigerant, R290 To Achieve Flow Temperatures Of Up To 75°C. Can Use Existing Radiators And Operates Down To -25°C”
Yes I am sure it does but at what rate of energy consumption? The Coefficient of Performance for air source heat pumps is measured according to regulations set out in EN16147. This has a cold sink temperature of +7°C with a hot sink of just +35°C (hence the larger size radiator requirement) with most models achieving a CoP of 3 to 1 under those parameters. Clearly the test regime is absurd as +7°C is not really cold, in fact the mean daily temp in Aberdeen is well below that for 4 months of the year.
The AROTHERM achieving 75°C in -25°C is probably running well below 1 to 1 and it would be much more economical to just use resistance heaters.
Heat pumps require electricity to run. You can’t produce electricity without releasing some carbon dioxide. You can’t reach Net Zero if you are releasing carbon dioxide. Your £12k investment is only a stop gap. By 2035, you will have no heat in your homes.
Enjoy.
The NANNY state is getting stronger!
from https://order-order.com/tag/nanny-state/
Latest report says
The Nanny State Index (NSI) has been updated for 2021, and it makes for grim reading for any libertarian – with author Christopher Snowdon claiming “everything is steadily getting worse” and that “all the momentum is with the paternalists of ‘public health’” in the wake of the pandemic. Lifestyle restrictions on eating, drinking, smoking, and vaping have all steadily increased across Europe for the past four years… and now the call is for banning gas/solid fuel boils in UK residential homes and the installation of inefficient, unreliable and inadequate, costly heat pumps.
The UK is in particular affected by this stupid idea of keeping everyone and the environment absolutely ‘safe’ much to the detriment of personal freedom and wealth creation, industry, and employment. Stagnation or regression of personal wealth, stagnation of industry and employment will become evermore evident as the UK regresses below developing world standards for the majority, while those wealthy well connected elites cream-off evermore money from the public with the excessive costs, and the public purse (through subsidies and tax relief). The rich will get richer and freer, while more of the population labours under more restricted lives, and are likely to fall into poverty traps so becoming more reliant on government hand-outs (and more restrictions).
Such things as a call for BANS on anything that can be deemed (even remotely) dangerous to the population or the environment, is no more than gesture politics at its most dangerous. The government and the media appear to have abandoned any calculations based on cost/benefit analysis, or communicating real risk (absolute risk, not relative risk) to the public, in favour of top down management.
The Bojo’s UK government is pushing the development of a form of socialised tyranny driven by government blessed think-tanks, media and social manipulators. (Evidence of manipulation see https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team )
They seem to assume that only fellow manipulators will browse their site.
Big Sisters are tweaking you.
If I understand y’all, you UK types use circulating hot water as your heating medium. This is very traditional and stuff, and oh-so-Roman Empire. Put your cuppa on the rad to keep it warm, ta? I can see this making sense locally. Burn gas or coal, heat the water in what I believe you call the boiler or geezer, use a bitty lil’ pump or just Brownian motion to circulate the water. Plus you can use the water for your bath. I can dig it.
But to run the heat pump, you run a boiler a long way away to generate steam to run a turbine to generate electricity that is run with non-trivial loss through copper wires to heat water to warm your house. The waste steam may or may not be used to pre-heat water in the steam cycle, but it sucks.
I spent a lot of years working in commercial buildings with heat pumps. They suck. I was expected to do a monthly PM on every unit. I set up a checklist. Replace air filter. Inlet water temp (heating). Inlet water temp (cooling). Replace inlet water filter. Flush PRN. T-stat calibration. Took an hour per unit. Printed up worksheets for each unit. All 250 of them. Kept the sheets in a 3 ring binder.
Now you may notice that there are 200 working hours in the average working month. Plus I’m covering the usual tickets – dead bulbs, dimmer doesn’t work (damn compact fluorescent bulbs!), tripped breakers, leaky faucets, clogged toilets. All this in addition to trying to make sense of the workshop area, where my co-worker (hah) had squirreled away every broken part, in the hopes that it would somehow be needed. (I binned literally TONS of broken door hardware).
This is in addition to coming in on weekends to replace 2 – 3 failed heat pumps every weekend.
I finally got the monster under control. Mapped out the location of every heat pump, and installed temp gauges. The shop looked like no-one worked there, it was so organized. Parts in labeled bins! Even a space for my bicycle! I mean, I lived all of 2 blocks away, why drive? Bosslady took exception. You gotta park outside. Fine. Chain my bike to a post. No, you don’t rank a covered space! Okay, to the chain link surround by the genset. Verboten. I’m getting a bad feeling here. Bike rack next door. There is nothing in the parking lot except a couple pillars with 6 foot tall 4 foot radius bumpers, so my poor bike looks like it has been hanged. No, and No.
So I’m finally fired for having 2 shirt buttons unbuttoned.
I have no idea what you are on about and seriously doubt you do either. Is there some point you are trying to make?
There are situations where an air-sourced heat pump works well.
In our case (central Washington State) the house was built with ducts throughout and a central location for an air-conditioner and resistant heater. The system was 15 years old, and failing. Electricity, from hydro, is inexpensive. We are 7 miles from the nearest gas line.
Installation (~5 hours) involved taking the old heater/AC out and fitting the new unit in. It automatically switches to resistant heating if the outside temperature gets too cold. I built a concrete platform (50 cm high) to keep dogs from peeing on the outside unit. SOP is just a 5 cm slab. Standard walls are well built with ~9 cm of insulation.
Because winters can be very cold, we also have a wood stove for emergency heating and cooking. There are trees on the property for fire wood, and I’m relatively healthy.
If you can duplicate all of the above – – sure go for the heat pump.
John
If the cost of heat pumps is going to plummet, then that is a very good reason for every rational person to not install one now. Why not wait until the promised cheap electricity/installation costs materialise, thereby saving a wedge?
I rather hope that uptake is terrible enough that the whole project gets lost in the weeds.
Same for electric vehicles. My approach is to wait until all the practical lessons have been learned by others, and to give time for the real costs to emerge. The real costs are not just the price of the vehicle, but the costs of re-charging, and the availability of re-charging points, the lifespan and performance of batteries, and one or two other things.
In the meantime, the auto manufacturers get no repeat purchases from me. They’ll have to fight their corner for themselves, and bear the consequences if they lie down to all this climate emergency nonsense. Who knows, there’s even a chance of distress sales of IC engine vehicles, and I might dip-in, if cheap enough.
I note that Harrabin on twitter is now pushing shi$ for fuel …
see https://twitter.com/RHarrabin/status/1398334892476403717
And let’s be clear, the £4,000 “grant” is also paid by taxpayers in two ways. First as tax and second as opportunity cost – that’s £4,000 either the government or the taxpayer would have spent onnsomething we actually want or need.
O/T but still the same agenda, make our infrastructure dysfunctional:
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/ca-reservoirs-filled-to-top-in-2019-being-drained-by-state
If energy and heating were left to a free open market, customers and suppliers interact and choices are made. Notwithstanding light regulation to ensure reasonable standards, the market decides. Reputable and efficiently run companies succeed, others don’t.
Current energy policy rigs the market with enormous subsidy and eventually, taxes.
That policy is itself rigged by ideology, often masquerading as science.
Paul Homework sums it all up perfectly.
There are significant “market failures” in power supply which get in the way of a free open market IMO.
One is the inevitable “pooling” of essential elements of the service, when supply passes through a common network. Sharing a network is the natural way to go, due to economies of scale.
Quality of supply (voltage support, short circuit protection, reserve and supply margin) are shared benefits and costs – so everybody gets the benefit and shares the cost.
Supply margin (the excess of installed generation over peak network demand) means security of supply is “socialised”. All users share the same loss of load probability, and will be forced to take turns in rota disconnection.
These things are either impossible or difficult to allocate in a manner which remotely approaches a bilateral arrangement between producer and consumer. And this means a free open market cannot be created.
There are ways to try to create a more open and free market, but not benefitting from economies of scale, which means higher prices for those who try.
Another point is the mismatch of commercial risk borne by producer and consumer. Power production is capital intensive, and producers invest in assets with a commercial lifespan of at least a couple of decades. Consumers expect freedom to choose supplier, and to switch supply whenever they think there is an economic advantage.
If there is a bilateral arrangement between producer and consumer to support an investment, one approach would be for consumers to commit to a producer for many years (or decades). This is an obstacle to producers to provide good service, as locked-in consumers would have little or no bargaining power to drive quality of service.
Things like the above convince me the power industry is not well suited to the private sector. I’m not a socialist, but after three decades of power industry privatisation in the UK, the experience has been peppered by major government interventions to deliver policy, I’d be happy to conclude that privatisation of power failed to live up to Thatcherite dogma.
I readily accept your observations, coming as they do from experience. My general point is the way the market is skewed ends real choice.
Mr Hobson is in the chair.
This another ‘O/T but still the same agenda’ post!
ConservativeHome has ‘entertaining’ articles, often written by sitting MPs, that promote NET Zero Emissions, to the point of mirth, and then the knowledgeable posters do their work and bring some sanity to proceedings, even if questions about the MP’s sanity still lingers!
And then the Sun breaks through the clouds and an informative article appears!
https://www.conservativehome.com/thecolumnists/2021/05/sarah-ingham-a-blue-party-green-promises-yellow-vests.html
I do like this quote from the article:
“In an interview with Andrew Marr, Jo Biden’s Climate Tsar, John Kerry, conceded the highly inconvenient truth that half the technology to get us to Net Zero has not yet been invented.”
The fact that the British version of Net Zero doesn’t have an overall plan (it’s the same plan!) which, I expect, hasn’t been given much BBC airtime, means our Government is as competent as, well, as competent as Greg Jackson!
The articles comments are worth reading, especially one with a YouTube link by Henry Savile.
I investigated heat pumps to warm our village hall. The cost of ground source gave a payback time of 20+ years. Air source pumps were even worse, they work well in the summer when no heating is needed, but they hardly work in winter when the air is cold and heat is required.
I’m guessing we aren’t talking about the same “heat pumps” used in American homes. Someone mentioned “digging trenches for heat coils”. My system doesn’t have those. That sounds like a GeoThermal system where you are using ground temperature as part of the system.
Or, we are talking about homes that need a COMPLETE new HVAC system installed including air-handler, ductwork, wiring, and other items.
Replacing our “heat pump” was under $5,000 including labor. I’m guessing zero savings. Going up to a higher SEER rating adds thousands of dollars with a 10-year plus payback in “savings”. (You’d have to convince me that there will be ANY “savings”.)
Another $5,000 for ductwork, etc. would be reasonable.
The questions are:
1. Are the current systems “working” and providing comfortable year-round temperatures?
2. Do the homeowners have PERSONAL resources to do the changeover?
No government has any role in mandating anything. Let’s start there and reduce the size and intrusive nature of current governments (especially “councils” who like the NHS seem to be worthless, petty dictators) and let the INDIVIDUAL have the freedom to make their own choices through FREE market choices.