UK Needs Climate Heroes!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
From the Telegraph:
As Ian says, it’s beyond parody!
It actually conjures up images of the Soviet Union’s Heroes of Labour, who exceeded harvest targets in their tractors, or produced record numbers of tanks!
But it does pose real problems for the heat pump rollout. Currently there are only around a quarter of a million heat pumps installed in the UK, with just 27,000 fitted in 2019. I suspect most of these were wither subsidised or installed by local councils with the help of government grants.
The latest government wheeze offers £450 million over three years for boiler upgrades, which is enough for only about 30,000 heat pumps a year. It is hard to see installations going above this level without much greater government subsidies, money which it does not have.
There is therefore little incentive for any qualified heating engineer/plumber to retrain, given there will be virtually no work for them to do. Given that heat pump installers must also be qualified plumbers, you cannot simply train them up from scratch overnight.
Worse still, if the plans to ban new gas boilers from 2035 go ahead, many existing central heating engineers will simply retire before then, or simply live off service work. This will mean the labour pool for retraining will be much smaller by then.
In the meantime, who is going to train to install gas boilers, which will be obsolete soon?
This whole saga shows just what can go wrong when governments try to centrally control economies Soviet style.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Subsidies? Well if the govt were to buy me a heat pump, install it for me, carry out the improved insulation needed, put the pump in a place where it won’t offend my eyes or ears AND somehow found the space in my house for the required water tank as I don’t have an immersion tank, then I would still refuse it.
A colder smaller house dependent on the vagaries of electric from windmills and solar? No thanks.
As an aside, with everything so reliant on electric from our heating to transport to communications to banking to supermarkets, to the internet and computers, what happens if the system is hacked and turned off? Seems a very plausible thing that enemies could do. Can the electric system be made bullet proof against hackers?
You only need to blow up about a dozen critical sub-stations and the whole country will be in the dark for a month. The MoD have modelled it so we know the grid is very vulnerable already.
https://horusscenario.com is one way
Not so fast with the 2035 ban and gas boiler engineers retiring. I reckon if this is carried through a whole new black market for gas boilers (new or old) and gas boiler fitters will open up. I reckon some of the guys will start hoarding the boilers and parts right now and why not? They’ll take cash and charge exhorbitantly but that’ll still be preferable to the alternatives for beleaguered householders. No paperwork – “I’ve had this boiler for 20 years, honest guv”.
Same for ICE cars! Hoard now.
Anyone stupid enough to change their highly efficient gas or oil boiler, and tab off Way over £10k for a HOPELESS heat-pump, will NOT see the installing plumber as a hero! More as a con-artist!
Whoever in their wildest dreams would have expected communism to arrive via the Tory Party? Boris is way beyond a psychotic joke, and must go. But the real problem is that they all must go; all parties have failed miserably.
Nobody would have imagined this before the arrival of Carrie Antoinette and her Watermelon chums in the corridors of power
The rot has been in place since at least the “Climate Change Act” in the UK and of course earlier in almost all of Europe with national governments not putting an immediate stop to forcing “green” and the general obsession with trying to control Mother Nature by inventing and increasing taxes and regulations.
Why does a heat-pump installer first need to be a plumber? They’re pretty basic bits of kit. I do my own plumbing. You may go for different levels of skill so a lesser trained chap can install but a higher qualified chap certifies safe and signs off. This is what happens with electrics. I put in the wiring for my garage but got a sparky to come test and certify which only took 15mins..
Did he not have to certify your whole house wiring, which was, I thought, part of the certification?
No. Its just the ‘new part’, the garage. There is just one new line coming off the house circuit board so you test the RCBO (circuit breaker) at that board connection, then to a mini distribution board in garage and test the 2 new ring circuits and lighting circuit off that board. No need to retest house as its separate and protected by the breaker where you take the current.
As I recall, the ‘Heroes of Labour’ were very adept at producing loads of left-hand boots, one year and right-had boots the next.
But, slightly O/T….just watched the news about the record for production of fusion in Oxford: all of 10 seconds-worth. Rowlatt, of course, was behind the plug saying that freely abundant, carbon-free energy was within reach. Strange really, because he claimed it was carbon-free because of the fact that the reaction was fuelled by hydrogen. I wondered where the hydrogen came from….
I wonder where the ???billion £ came from to build the monolith that gave off enough energy to boil a 1000 kettles while using enough power to run a city. We are a long, long way from a commercial reactor.
Ah ha, Amy Norman of the Social Market Foundation no less, another self aggrandising pressure group a bit light on research and authority.
Not unlike the New Economics Foundation whose spokesman with a qualification in the Economics of Climate Change. Nature Recovery and Inequality was quoted in today’s bulletin from the New Civil Engineer.
This reports that as a result of consent being granted for an extension to Bristol airport “an extremely dangerous precedent has been set” and this has ” left communities across the country feeling devastated”. Who funds this nonsense?
How do hysterics expect to be taken seriously? When they have expended all their superlatives what do they say when something really important has to be dealt with?
‘Plans to install 600,000 heat pumps per year’
First you need the heat pumps, then the buyers, then the fitters. Will any of those exist in the required quantity by the date quoted?
I asked a local plumber who has fitted a large number of heat pumps whether he would install one in his own house. His answer was NO, for the following reasons.
The cost, not just of the heat pump but all the ancillary work such as larger radiators etc.
He considered that the majority of systems being installed at present are in new-build houses as the extras can be installed at the building stage, not at the inconvenience and extra expense involved in converting existing houses.
ASHP systems do not like being turned up or down, they prefer being left in a steady state, so are not very useful in responding to fluctuating temperatures.
A surprising comment he made was that the water temperature had to be run up to 65 degrees once a week using an immersion heater in order to kill off any legionella bacteria in the system. He did this by programming into the controls to do this procedure at 0200 hrs, generally mid-week.
He had in addition removed several installations where their owners had so many problems with poor reliability that they reverted to gas or oil boilers.
Lastly there was the problem of noise produced by the fan, an easy way to upset the neighbours.
So, all in all, I’ll pass on the government’s offer, especially as there seems to have been little thought given to the effect of power outages. In the past we have suffered ones of up to a week in snowy weather and it looks as if they will become more frequent in the not too distant future.
My council’s arranged to get plenty of “volunteers”. It’s building new houses and those for rent WILL have ASPs, no choice. They’re happy, though, for houses to be sold or for commercial rent to have conventional heating.
The Government are still convinced that Renewables are the way to “Energy Security”. They have just announced today 10th February that the CfD’s will be Annual rather than Bi-annual. Info here. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-hits-accelerator-on-low-cost-renewable-power?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications-topic&utm_source=d61bb155-88e9-4e1e-b5e2-fbe3932a4328&utm_content=daily
Ah, the good old Soviet system. Annual production of nails is controlled by weight. So produce one great big effing nail of the right weight and sit back for the rest of the year. It is often overlooked that were it not for food supplies from the west, the Soviet Union would have lost the war on the eastern front such was their ineptitude at food production.
Lenin had to go crawling back to western oil companies after the communists took control of the Baku oil wells and oversaw a huge crash in production. He needed the money from oil exports.