Heat pumps alone won’t save us from freezing in winter-Say Hydrogen Lobby!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
The heat pump lobby say hydrogen is not the answer, and the hydrogen lobby say heat pumps aren’t!
The gas switchover of the 1960s and 1970s from Town Gas to Natural Gas was one of the greatest infrastructure challenges in this country’s history.
At the time, a debate raged over whether to stick with coal-based gas or use the new North Sea resource. Arguments against natural gas ranged from saying it was too expensive, it was difficult to move around and it was more combustible.
Fast forward 50 years and the same talking points are rearing their heads again as we discuss how to heat our homes for a greener future.
The loudest voices will tell you the silver bullet must be heat pumps. They insist that all our homes should be heated and run only on electricity, supplied by renewable means. A no-brainer with no alternative required, they would have you think.
The costs associated with upgrading the grid to accommodate the extra electricity is barely mentioned and the fact that around half of all electricity generated during the recent cold snap was with gas, because there was hardly a breath of wind, is conveniently overlooked.
Proponents of heat pumps are certainly right to say they will have a major role in our future home energy system. But hydrogen also has an important role to play in offering people choice and security of supply.
Heat pump supporters who believe there is no other way should ask themselves: why is the Government so insistent on talking about hydrogen if all our problems are solved by heat pumps? Why are the boiler manufacturers, who also produce heat pumps, welcoming discussion of hydrogen home heating?
The issue with going all in on renewable electricity is that it can be vulnerable to shocks. Something else has to step in when there’s not enough wind. That something else has to be ready and waiting all the time.
We will need to use gas in the future and we should be looking at low-carbon options like hydrogen.
In December, the Government launched a consultation on whether all newly installed boilers – of which an expected 10 million will go into homes over the next decade – should be “hydrogen-ready”.
This means they will be able to run on the natural gas we use today but will also be able to run on the hydrogen gas we could use in the future. They will cost the same, fit in the same spot and run in the same way as your boiler does now.
In the Government’s own words, ensuring all new boilers installed from 2026 are hydrogen-ready is “a low regrets action in terms of impacts to consumers”.
When Town Gas switched to Natural Gas, it took the industry a decade to roll out. Like the switch to HD TV or bringing mobile phone signals to all parts of the country, any mass change takes time.
That is why it’s so important to start the conversation on hydrogen now, even if hydrogen-ready boilers won’t go on sale for a few more years.
The industry is convinced now is the time to start the discussion. That is why we have come together to form the Hello Hydrogen collective because we know we cannot sit on our hands.
We are made up of the UK’s gas networks, boiler and heat pump manufacturers, and energy organisations. All agree that continuing to use natural gas will not be an option if we are to reach our carbon emission targets.
But we also know that we must bring consumers along with us if they are to embrace a future that no longer uses the blue flames we’ve been used to since the 1970s.
We know reaching for the thermostat is virtually reflexive, getting a flame on the hob is expected and running a hot bath is much needed. Hydrogen can help to ensure these everyday activities continue to be as instant as they are now.
However, not all in Westminster agree that hydrogen for home heating has a significant future. A recent report by the Science and Technology committee of MPs gave a more cautious view, saying its use in homes is likely to be “limited rather than widespread”.
The reason it could be limited is because homes that use hydrogen are likely to be in so-called “industrial clusters” – sites where hydrogen will be made and used for high-energy industries. These hubs would cover as much as 40pc of homes connected to the gas network.
So the question remains: what happens to those limited number of homes? Do they get a choice or must they only have a heat pump?
And what do we say to those who cannot fit a heat pump or don’t have a spare £15,000 for the cost of one?
The millions of households living in Georgian terraced homes or city centre flats will struggle to affordably fit a heat pump. Do we tell them to hold tight and a different electricity solution will come along?
What should a landlord do when it comes to upgrading a boiler in their property? Hike rents to cover the cost of a heat pump? Or turn to a practical solution like a hydrogen-ready boiler?
The point is this: we must have a choice. One glove will never fit all. We will need to look at all options and stop telling people they can only have one.
The industry has a choice: continue to fit gas boilers or fit hydrogen-ready ones. We think doing the latter is a win-win situation and have already committed to the new boilers remaining the same price as current ones.
I completely understand that change can be difficult for many. We are generally cautious of the new. We ask questions and want to gather information. We want ease and convenience.
But without change, we would still be using Town Gas. And if we are ever to reduce the carbon emissions of the future – of which residential properties make up 26pc of all the UK’s emissions – we need to be open to debate, willing to work together and recognise that a future with choice is the only rational way forward.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/12/27/heat-pumps-alone-wont-save-us-freezing-winter/
The comparison with the switch from town gas to North Sea gas is ridiculous. The latter was much, much cheaper than producing town gas, so consequently the cost of conversion was easily affordable.
Maybe we should just keep gas instead, until something better comes along!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I would vote to keep natural gas and get fracking, but I don’t expect we will get a vote unless a new credible political party comes along. Any alternatives will be much more expensive. Nigel, where are you?
“Nigel, where are you?”
Currently chairman of the Reform party, which according to the polls is gaining support nicely.
Don Quixote, where are you?
“The heat pump lobby say hydrogen is not the answer, and the hydrogen lobby say heat pumps aren’t!”
Well, technically they are both correct. Apart from the fact that there isn’t any actual problem that needs an answer that is.
This piece was written by a spokesperson for the boiler industry. Actually I think it is a quite clever ploy by this industry to enable them to continue to make natural gas boilers – just say they are easily convertible to hydrogen and you then hope the Govt will back off trying to ban boilers in favour of heat pumps.
Multi-gas compatibility: “Actually I think it is a quite clever ploy by this industry …”
Not so, just fact.
Most gas appliances suitable for natural gas can easily be ‘converted’ to run on other gasses such as propane.
Manufacturers are capable of producing hydrogen-ready appliances that will be convertible for H2. Exactly as many appliances were converted from Town’s Gas which was typically 50% H2, to run on Nat Gas.
The main need is to replace the burners. The rate of gas diffusion through a smal orifice is inversely proportional to the square root of molecular weight (Graham’s Law). The orifices must be smaller for hydrogen, else the flame risks becoming unseated, with potentially explosive consequences. A more technical version looks at the Wobbe index which takes account of the molar energy of the gas. Meters too need to be adapted or replaced.
And that was an enormous undertaking prerformed by Humphreys and Glasgow whose bright yellow vans were known as the Yellow Peril because so many chip shops went on fire! And that was just for cookers – we didn’t have gas boilers back then.
I wonder if boilers could be run on vaporised politicians?
Martin B:
“I wonder if boilers could be run on vaporised politicians?”
Boilers are unlikely to run on them, but that doesn’t mean that vaporised politicians can’t be of use for heating needs ….
Yes of course the boiler manufacturers know that it is easy to convert a natural gas boiler to burn hydrogen. But our scientifically illiterate politicians don’t understand that and, up to now, have been all for banning boilers completely and forcing the use of heat pumps. I see boiler manufacturers pointing out the ease of conversion as a move to stop the politicians banning boilers. I don’t think hydrogen will ever be a realistic domestic fuel, but saying it could be will maybe stop the politicians’ stupid ideas!
Are you going to pay for re-piping the gas delivery system of entire cities and towns? Some claim existing nat-gas distribution pipes can be repurposed to carry H, but these utilities have already stated no, and mixing of H with nat-gas is limited to a whopping 2%. Using H for home heating is a pipedream.
At least it’s a sensible alternative for once. If a hydrogen ready boiler can be offered for the same price as a gas only boiler, then why not?
One benefit would be to have an entire industry sector lobbying the government at no cost to the rest of us. At least it would shut the government up until it realises how much it cost’s to produce hydrogen in the first place and the problems with transporting the stuff through a dodgy old pipe network.
A heat pump supplier told me he wouldn’t fit one to our Victorian cottage as it wouldn’t work and his business is worried about potential legal issues with homeowners down the line.
The legal proffesion will have a field day on miss-sold heat pumps/heat exhangers.
Anyone who who has a poorly insulted property ( by that I mean doesn’t have a high level of insulation in floors, walls and ceilings and who has not been fully informed of the, work/disruption and cost required, to bring the property up to standard for the system to work properly) will almost certainly have been miss-sold.
A Boiler Manufacture (sorry can’t remember the name, sample was run in Hull) wanted to test the market and offered FREE Heat Exchange installation to a significant number of property owners, who pretty well all backed out once the realised what disruption the work entailed.
There are a number of other issues, the main one being cold bridging around existing closed masonry openings. (windows doors and lintels)
I have a dream today (MLK)
There is NO climate emergency, so just stay with natural gas for urban home heating for at least the next 50 years, go back to coal for electricity, modern coal plants are efficient and only emit CO2, the elixir of life for this Planet. We have plenty of coal and fracking gas should be evaluated in scientific way. We are never going to successfully (economically) decarbonise transport so just stick with petrol and Diesel. Stop building wind and solar unless there is at least 7 days of storage at rated capacity included, that makes them totally uneconomic. Forget hydrogen, it is so inefficient to make from electricity, and has such low energy density, that it needs high pressure or cryogenic storage.
Really what you are saying is bring in free market capitalism. Its a novel idea abandoned in the UK and most of the world decades ago for State socialism. Thus with no subsidies, no carbon and other puntive taxes, leave all on a free and even playing field.
Result: natural gas stays with fracking ramping up; coal is dug where economic and coal power stations return; oil for transport; large solar and wind building stop dead as they are uneconomic in a free market, though they stay for niche uses such as factory & house rooves where the power is largely consumed by the building: likewise small (up to 11kw) wind turbines supply factories and farms and remote locations that consume what they generate, but they are not economic for principally grid supply. And of course with this radical new idea of free market capitalism energy costs to consumers plummet. Alas our control-freak political aristocrats will never adopt anything as radical and consumer friendly as capitalism or free markets.
Another piece of drivel churned out by the Hydrogen lobby. – This was in the Telegraph yesterday and had plenty of comments from subscribers and 95% of them were negative. People are staring to see the drawback in Hydrogen and the damage caused by the green agenda and drive for net zero.
It does seem a ‘putting all your eggs on one basket’ idea to have everyone’s Energy supplied by one method: Electricity, and one National Grid.
Apart from fallen pylons, in the middle of Winter, there is also the small, but real, threat of an ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP), or even a HEMP (a High-Altitude EMP), from an enemy.
In addition, there is the real risk of an EMP from our own Sun, just like the Carrington Event, in 1859:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
As it could easily destroy most electrical power lines and, likely, continue into appliances at both ends, devastation would be worse with an All Electric Economy.
In addition, as the Earth’s Magnetic Field has been weakening, any EMP would create a worse situation than on that occasion when there were very few electrical installations.
The last powerful solar electromagnetic storm was May 1921 and another such event would cause a lot of damage to electrical power grids
and telecommunications infrastructure ….. Moreover research the historical and meteorological records to see what happened to the worlds weather afterwards : the sweltering heatwaves and droughts and abnormally warm Arctic temperatures ….. 1921 is the peak fatalities year in the EM DAT climate related deaths chart
Agreed about this article – it should have been entitled “Advertisement Feature”! No mention of sources of hydrogen or the efficiency of electrolysis. That needs electricity, and we are chronically short of it now – and it will be 1000 times worse when we are all driving EVs – 32 million private vehicles in the UK!
Then add the cost of replacing all the metal pipes currently used to supply gas – about 25% of the network.
Then how does one switch from natural gas to hydrogen? Do the boilers work on both? If not, you need an instant switch over for at least some large districts…
Those compatible ones take 30′ to convert, so, if the workers worked 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks a year, to convert the 20 million houses with gas boilers, it would need 5,000 man years to do it. That is quite a big workforce or a very long time – and it makes no allowance for moving from one house to the next…All figures a bit approximate, but I hope the point is clear… Don’t mention it to the Daily Telegraph, though. Why spoil a good story with a few facts?
The burning of hydrogen is best left to high school science teachers who perform electrolysis experiments in lab class. Other than the “pop” the teacher ignites at the end of the demonstration, hydrogen as a heating fuel is a chimera at best. It is upside down thermodynamicly speaking, difficult and dangerous the transport, and basically falls under the heading of, Expensive Masturbation. Heat pumps might work for highly insulated new construction dwellings, but are useless to heat homes originally designed to use gas and oil fired boilers. The existing radiation is designed to work at 170 to 190 degree F, and heat pumps produce about 120 degree water–never gonna work. Face it, people, nat gas and oil are here for a long time to come, and wishes and magic unicorns will change nothing in the mean time.
Of course, they’re both right.
Both “solutions” are worthless.
The main difference in the hydrogen ready boiler is the flame detection system. In a conventional gas boiler, a charge is passed from one of the two ignition electrodes to the other. The carbon in the flame partly rectifies the current to DC and this passes to Earth via the mains earthing system where the neutral connects to earth at the sub station. (This is largely why you can’t run a gas boiler off a floating earth portable generator nor a battery inverter system without modifying your earthing system.)
Obviously burning hydrogen has no carbon so a different flame detection system has to be used. The new hydrogen ready systems have an optical system that sits in place of the present system. The rest is just minor changes to the jets etc.
Interesting Ray.
We have a gas Rayburn, I was contemplating fitting it with an Uninterruptible Power Supply with sufficient power to run the circulating pump, the programmer and the electrics in the stove, an averagely powerful computer UPS should suffice according to my calculations.
Can you see a problem with that?
Hi Cat, I would double check with Rayburn but I think you may well hit the same problem. For safety’s sake the gas supply must close in the event of flame failure so as not to have a permanent gas “leak” should the flame extinguish. The regulations relating to just solely ovens are different to boilers as the flames is generally regarded as visible and only in use for controlled periods i.e. cooking, whereas boilers are used automatically and for extended periods.
If you do have a problem you can connect the USP neutral across the earth and down to an individual ground but only if you are just running the one appliance from it. A good sparky can set it up for you.
Thanks Ray!
Isn’t there an issue with NOx emissions?
Aiui, hydrogen burns with a much higher flame temperature than natural gas which results in greater production of NOx.
Sometime back I read an article (can’t remember where, of course!) which claimed that H2 boilers would need to be fitted with extra kit to mitigate NOx, analogous to the systems used in diesel vehicles. said kit would, of course, add cost, complexity and servicing requirements.
Correct, Mike!
Here is a 2013 report on converting the UK gas distribution network to run on hydrogen. Well worth a read. It just ain’t gonna happen.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319913006800
It’s dated 2013, so we would need it updated, with the current status of the network, before a Hydrogen Economy could be taken seriously.
Well, I would have hoped so! 🙂
Ray: Thanks, an excellent reference. Says it all and I agree – it ain’t gonna happen. In all this debate it is necessary to recognise that gas usage has risen between 1970 and 2021 from 10% to 45% of our total energy usage – its a whole new ball game.
Mr Christopher: You are correct, it will have to be up-dated and the labour cost, which they indicate is the largest part of the total, will have to be at least doubled. Not only that, though, where will these vast numbers of qualified gas fittters come from? We don’t have those kindof skills anymore.
But we have plenty of Lesbian Dance Study and Gender Fluidity grads out there. Can they swing a wrench?
Not to worry the ultimate eco fascist dictator has whipped his naked buttocks and genitals with fresh nettles, repented his sins and declared that wood burners will henceforth be illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-burning-stove-environment-home-toxins
And there was me wondering why his picture was on this article!
Poor Moonbat!
Oh dear…how sad…never mind!
For those who may of missed what is really being planned for our near future:-
“The truth about eco-fascism – UnHerd” https://unherd.com/2022/11/the-truth-about-eco-fascism/
Interestingly, major investors such as Blackrock and Vanguard are pulling out of Environmental, Social and Governance schemes, in some cases as a result of legislation at State level.
https://www.thestreet.com/investors/blackrock-vanguard-esg-policies-get-political-pushback
The fight back has commenced, this is a severe blow to all the right people!