Ross Clark: Heat pumps are becoming a plague on all our houses
By Paul Homewood
From The Telegraph:
Has there ever been a form of mis-government in modern times which will prove so disastrous, reaching into almost every home in Britain, as the Government’s attempt to force heat pumps on us?
I ask, not because a heat pump, if properly installed, cannot be an effective way of heating a home but because ministers still seem blithely unaware of the financial pain they are about to inflict on millions of households – and manufacturing industry, too.
The Government’s plans for net zero involve a target to switch 600,000 homes a year to heat pumps by 2028 – half of which, apparently, are going to be made in Britain, creating wonderful, well-paid “green jobs”. If the Government is going to set such an ambitious target, you might expect it would start by securing the support of UK heat pump manufacturers. Not a bit of it. Boiler and heat pump manufacturer Valliant has just warned that it could halt investment in Britain if the Government ploughs ahead with a threat to fine heating companies heavily if they fail to fulfil set targets for heat pumps. Every “missing” heat pump will cost them a penalty of £5,000.
If the Government cannot keep a company which has just invested £4 million in a heat pump manufacturing facility in Derbyshire on side, then who will it enlist to fulfil its policy? The truth is that the campaign to force heat pumps on us is failing not because of lazy boiler manufacturers who are stuck in their ways, but because heat pumps are not selling themselves to homeowners. At £10,000 for a small home, they are just too expensive, and there are too many misery tales of people who shelled out many thousands of pounds only to find themselves with a device which doesn’t always succeed in keeping them warm.
The total number of heat pumps fitted in the past three months is fewer than 9,000 – and that is in spite of a subsidy scheme which pays bungs of £5,000 a time to homeowners who install one. Somehow, manufacturers and installers are going to have to increase installations tenfold if the target is to be met – and they are going to have to do so without the subsidies. There is, surely, no way that the public purse is going to stretch to a £5,000 handout for all of Britain’s 27 million households – that would cost over £100 billion. The current subsidy scheme involves enough money only for 30,000 households to take advantage.
Unless there is a miracle advance in technology in the next few years which brings down the cost of heat pumps sharply – and there is no sign of that yet – the government is going to miss its target for 600,000 new heat pumps a year by a massive margin. The government will virtually have to send the heavies round to our houses, who then march us to the cashpoint to empty our bank accounts, in order to ensure we install them.
And no, they won’t even be British-made heat pumps – not if the government’s green policy is perversely going to stop companies investing in Britain. The only “green jobs” this disastrous project will create are overpaid officials in quangos who are paid to come up with ever dafter ideas of how to punish and manipulate the public into achieving net zero.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I’m reminded of Stalin’s Kulak who were required to provide a set amount of their grain to the central authorities to ensure the targets for the Five Year Plan were met. It’s the Gulag for you.
Your forebears fought the Battle of Britain for this?
“Britons never will be slaves”.
Whatever happened to “Rule Britannia”?
‘There is, surely, no way that the public purse is going to stretch to a £5,000 handout for all of Britain’s 27 million households’
The ‘public purse’ IS the 27 million households. Subsidies for the people come from same.
There is a limit of £30M for this.
“There is a limit of £30M for this.”
That is £1 per household then. The government allocated the same total sum in a now defunct campaign to entice small businesses to adopt a ‘more digital’ existence. 100,000 businesses were expected to clamour for vouchers for software, worth up to £5,000. Uptake? Less than 1,000. Business men know better than government what computers can and cannot do for them.
The government and civil service can not get it though their heads that their ‘experts’ are basically incompetent.
There has never – never! – been a better time in our history for our people – especially school-children – to be taught about Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. The parallel of forcing people to replace perfectly good gas/oil boilers with horrendously expensive, inefficient and noisy ashps is beyond parody and is a perfect example of chasing green dreams with nightmare outcomes.
I don’t think that is a fallacy, at least not from the point of view of government. The point there is that every point along the break to fix change is taxable so generates income for government to re-distribute (including a fraction going to waste and misspend of course) back into society like filling potholes. It’s the same with GDP – thermodynamically a nonsense, but fiscally okay .
“Chain” not “change”
Insisting on expensive and unimpressive heat pumps is a sound recipe for political disaster.
Just about every idea this Government comes up with is unreliable and ridiculously expensive. We seem to be controlled by a thick headed bunch of morons who have no idea of simple scientific facts and certainly not the laws of physics.
We need to change the system whereby MPs are selected on their experience of business, finance, scientific facts and plain common sense.
Common sense – good luck with that one!
I would suggest that it is mostly fear and ignorance in dealing with the Climate Change Committee, there are few votes to be had (as yet) in challenging it. The ideas come from the CCC, with rubber stamping from The Science.
If you start with a wholly impossible and pointless target, then make it law that you reach it, you are going to get stupidity, insanity, waste and corruption. This is exactly the lesson of Communism and its 5 Year Plans. Net Zero is an absurdly arbitrary target with an absurdly arbitrary date. It’s clear that we can’t even measure the target remotely accurately. And even if we could and even if we should, achieving it via government planning is by far the worst way to go about it, virtually guaranting failure at the highest possible cost. Much of the West is gripped by delusions on delusions.
Great comment. The total idiocy succinctly put!
” The problem with common sense is that it is not very common.” Mark Twain.
Although there seems to be extensive scientific analysis that CO2 and other man made emissions have no or very little effect on global warming there are thousands, millions of educated, scientists, people, some with no financial incentives, willing to be made fools, idiots, laughing stocks etc. in the future. Well, they probably don’t want that so they must be sure they have a watertight case, those being usually susceptible to puncturing but not this time- spooky or what?
James O’Brian this morning on LBC said that the Arctic ice sheets are definitely melting away- he didn’t mention it is now summer so I don’t know his time frame – he didn’t mention it.
The one or two times I tried to probe the mind of a believer, I found that they have no real concept of Arctic seasons. They think it is always cold. But is at risk of becoming always warm (in some mysterious Gaian way).
It is possible that some people are vaguely remembering the old-hat news that the multi-year sea-ice has been flushed away (true) and that without this ‘seed’ no sea-ice can grow (nonsense).
It seems that a lot of sea ice is being blown out of the Fram Strait again this year.
Although it’s had an up and down year Greenland is pretty much n average for mass gain
At the moment , in nearly the middle of summer , the Artic sea temperatures are around minus 10 C . And the middle of Greenland is around minus 25 C to minus 30 C .
But the Artic ice all gone has been one of their most repeated lies for the last 30 years or more .
Artic?
“Artic?”
Looks like the word is melting, anyway!
“Arctic” comes from “Arkticos” the Greek for “of the bear (constellation)” since this always seems to lie to the North in the sky.
The global warming troughing industry used to be valued at $1.5tr and has been increased since then. That is a lot to fight against but at least they are few in number and done right only need a bullet each.
Feeling good and virtuous about yourself and also the feeling that other folk think the same about you is clearly a high value commodity which amply compensates for the lunacy.
If heat pumps were good for us we’d all buy them without prompting. Therefore they are not. QED.
“Unless there is a miracle advance in technology in the next few years which brings down the cost of heat pumps sharply – and there is no sign of that yet”
The limit here for current technologies is the 2nd law of thermodynamics ( 2LoT), and that’s somewhat difficult to get around. There’s also the problem of the cold side icing up, which gives you a limit on how much heat you can extract from the cold side and transfer to the hot side when the cold side is close to the freezing-point of water. Ice build-up needs to be removed to get good heat transfer. When the air (or other fluid) is above freezing-point you can wait for it to melt, but below freezing-point you need to heat it to get rid of the ice or have some mechanical scraper.
There may be a way round this, and a friend and I have been working on an idea of his for the last year that rather sneakily has a cycle of equilibria that conflict with each other (always moving towards equilibrium but never reaching it), and using a strong field to change the momentum vectors of the molecules involved. Initial designs looked like they would produce a few degrees of delta-T for very little input work, but we found a way to improve that using different working fluids that may just do the job. Still more experimentation needed to find the right set of parameters to optimise the process, but it looks like it should work, though delta-T of maybe only 20°C or so. Might get a patent applied for early next year, if the tests work OK (currently under provisional patent).
Thus might be a that advance, if it turns out we’re right and the cycle works in practice. The device should also be cheap to make (simple engineering), de-ices naturally, and should use much less power than standard heat-pumps.
There’s also the obvious strategy of using the same principle as a solar cell, but using a semiconductor with a small-enough band-gap (of around the 24meV range) that LWIR photons will be converted to electricity output.
Thus might be that miracle advance in future. Maybe even in a few years.
I remember the cartoon, many years ago, in which a professor , in front of a blackboard which he had filled with mathematical symbols, was asked what a particular squiggle meant:
“Oh, that’s where the miracle must happen!”
“The limit here for current technologies is the 2nd law of thermodynamics ( 2LoT)”
Minor detail Simon, Fishy Rishy will just repeal it and get one of his “think tanks” to re-write it to suit Nut Zero!
Have you been following this one Cat?
https://www.universetoday.com/160516/the-first-all-electrical-thruster-the-ivo-quantum-drive-is-headed-to-space/
Should launch in 2 days time though no idea when the testing starts.
Yes, Ray!
The reactionless drive, about time too, let’s hope it works.
“Let’s hope it works.”
I am always up for a bit of “suspension of disbelief.”
Campbell, the influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction,
pushed two ideas as real possibilities. One was the reactionless drive (evading Newton’s Laws) and the other was “psi” encompassing things like telepathy (evading the Law that no man can know what is in a woman’s head).
Ray – this is actually one of three different techniques to get an electric space-drive that doesn’t need to eject mass to produce thrust. I’m not counting the EMDrive in this, since the thrust to power ratio is so low. Range of available thrusts are currently around 50-200mN. Space test of Gravitec Inc’s drive fairly soon, but AFAIK no space-tests of Richard Banduric’s Electric Space Drive planned.
With ground-based tests, even in vacuum, it’s hard to eliminate the possibility of a thrust against the container or the environment, so the test in space is a critical next step. If the IVO test doesn’t function up there, the satellite’s orbit will decay pretty fast, so if it stays up there more than a couple of weeks that’s success.
Any of these drives, if proven, will also logically enable us to produce more energy than they consume. Maybe an obvious thing to test, for me, but no-one so far has been crazy enough to try it.
Surely Simon the “problem” only affects air source heat pumps. A conventional ground source heat pump is unaffected by freezing (except in utmost extreme) and also typically has a much better CoP. If (only “if”) heat pumps are the “solution” then it should be to promote GSHP with deep bore systems where ground area is limited. Where these are not practical (dense urban housing) then community systems would be more appropriate.
Regarding scientific breakthroughs I am more inclined to see major advances in thermo-electric generation using new carbon allotropes as the future though reactionless propulsion/quantised inertia et alia looks rather promising.
p.s. Can I have a bottle of wine!
Ray – even ground-sourced heat-pumps will cool the ground over time. Thermal resistance in the subsurface material means that the heat is replenished from the core at a few hundred mW per m² if I recall that figure correctly. OK where houses are far apart, pretty lousy in a city where boreholes need to be close, and more of a problem still with large blocks of flats. Same problem with community-based systems of not being able to draw enough ground-source heat on a long-term basis, unless the geology is conducive. OK if you have a volcano close enough…. Might be enough to have an underground water flow that increases the effective collection area.
The scientific bit is that kinetic energy can only exist (or be measured) when it is carried by something with a momentum vector (particle or photon). It is thus not precisely a scalar, and we can affect that momentum vector using the correct field in order to de-randomise the directions of those momentum vectors when dealing with heat. By definition you can’t change the direction of a scalar, since it doesn’t have one, and thermodynamics treats heat as being a pure scalar. This is thus the flaw in the derivation of thermodynamics we can exploit, by using a strong-enough field. Simple in principle, somewhat harder in practice, since you need to choose the particle that carries the heat and the field that redirects that particle. Still, once you realise this is actually possible, it becomes a soluble problem. We think it’s impossible because of a fundamental definition problem, treating kinetic energy as a pure scalar when it has a vector part.
Thus the future of thermo-electric should include converting that heat directly to electricity using a single heat-sink, rather than needing two heat-sinks with one hotter than the other. We know the principle works, as we have solar cells. Just needs a low band-gap semiconductor. Interestingly, pure (perfect lattice) Graphene has zero band-gap, and the band-gap increases as the structure gets more holes. Looks like 24meV should be possible. There is also an alloy of Antimony and Bismuth that should work if I can find a dopant to make it P-type.
Wine comes free to visitors, but I prefer a red, and it’s cheap here.
Over half a century ago our chemistry master recounted how an acquaintance of his had installed a ground source system by burying pipes in his garden.
The first year or two it worked fine, then the heat pumped started to reduce, his house got colder and colder, his garden plants withered and after five years or so his garden had turned to permafrost.
That little anecdote put me off heat pump systems for life!
“using a strong field to change the momentum vectors of the molecules involved. ” You what?
Dearime – a conservative field changes the momentum vector without changing the sum of potential and kinetic energy, and without needing to supply energy to the field. Thus make sure the heat is carried by the right particles, and use a field that affects them, and you de-randomise the directions of those particles. Maybe not totally, but now you have a wind rather than a group of random direction particles. Bit more in the answer to Ray.
Put the heat into electrons in the middle of a strong electric field, and the electrons go in one direction rather than random. It’s the basis of the solar cell. It’s just not seen as being manipulation of heat energy, though it is. Input random direction photons => random-direction photoelectrons in the middle of a strong electric field => all electrons going in one direction to the electrode => electrical power out.
The whole Net Zero nonsense which seems to have the government by the goolies is unbelievable. Heat pumps are both costly and ineffective unless your property is insulated to Scandinavian standards instead of a 1930s semi. Battery cars are equally disastrous according to Rowan Atkinson in todayâs mail and if they werenât-whereâs the power coming from? And this is all to save our 1% of total global emissions, whilst China and India are busy building coal-fired power stations. Why isnât the government pressing ahead with RR snrs-a technology proven for years in submarines? And the ban on fracking is a huge sacrifice to a relatively small number of howling Greenies who donât seem to mind importing energy from abroad as long as itâs not coming from within UK. I despair!
This is virtue-signalling at the lunatic end of the scale.
Cordially
Ian Harris
Hotham Park House
Bognor Regis
PO21 1HW
Not totally convinced about snr’s as they surely share some of the downsides of renewables. Obviously not the intermittency ones but other issues that are excluded from “levelized” costings arising from grid management impacts from a multiplicity of sources and connection. Whopping great nr’s are best.
Max what on earth are you talking about? A Rolls Royce SMR is 475MWe output…by comparison the reactors at Chapel Cross were just 60MWe. The term SMR stands for Small Modular Reactors i.e. they they are small modules built in factories, transportable by conventional road, rail , sea etc and then assembled on site. This allows for production line economies of scale, rapid on site build times and faster return on capital invested.
“Whopping great” nuclear reactors such as the EPRs (1600MWe) at Hinkley Pint C are absurdly expensive, individually site specific and take decades to build. Conversely RR are projecting just 18 months on site construction time at under £2billion. Which do you really think is the more attractive option?
And if you want more MWe, you can put several on the same site within a comparable timescale too, Ray.
What’s not to like?
“A Rolls Royce SMR is 475MWe output…”
Amazing! Are they pink? (There is no such thing as “A Rolls Royce SMR.”
Oh come on GC obviously the 475MWe unit is currently a design (mostly based on existing production parts) but you get the point.
Rolls Royce have, however, designed and built nearly 40 small pressurised water reactors over the years with the first going critical in 1965 so their experience and projected units are fully credible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_PWR
No, Ray. Not credible. They are almost ten years into this and have produced DOUBLE-OUGHT NOTHING.
The actual path to increasing nuclear electricity production is to slay the regulation dragon. The cost and delay in nuclear is 100% idiotic regulation.
SMRs are subject to the EXACT SAME STUPID REGULATION. “Small” changes not a GD thing.
That which cannot happen, will not happen.
Even some in the industry think the target of 600,000 installations a year is ridiculous. In a recent ad Fischer who manufacture heat pumps and other heating equipment noted
“The Government aims to give out 30,000 vouchers annually but only managed 9888 between the schemes launch in May and the end of last year. So far annual air source heat pump installation is under 40,000. As it stands the government’s target to install 600,000 a year by 2028 seems a long way off”
I note that they only give their own equipment a 5 year warranty!
And as with EVs I suspect take-up will.slow down rather than speed up. There’s a fairly large contingent of well-off Gree s who will buy whatever they are told they should, and a fair few well-off followers who like to show their virtue, but after that people are very reluctant to invest substantial sums on things that don’t work as well as what they have. I wouldn’t ne buying shares in the hear pump manufacturers quite yet.
The concept of heat pumps is an attempt to get around the Laws of Thermodynamics! Flanders and Swann had it when they sang:
“You can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter
You can try it if you like but you’d far better notta!”
A successful attempt 🙂
“The concept of heat pumps is an attempt to get around the Laws of Thermodynamics!”
A large cold body contains more heat energy than a small hot body and so a transfer of some of that heat energy will not contravene the conservation of energy principle.
As for the Second Law:
Flanders and Swann have it wrong with, “You can’t pass heat from the cooler to the hotter.”
The correct statement** is:
Heat energy can not pass DIRECTLY* from a cold body to a hot body, nor can heat energy be transferred from a cold body to a hot body by any means WITHOUT COMPENSATION***.
With a heat pump, the heat energy does not pass directly, because working fluid is used in a cycle. The cycle is an instance of ‘by any means;’ and the required entropy compensation mainly occurs in the stations which generate the electric power for the pump.
* i.e. by conduction
** W.S. Franklin and B. MacNutt, Professors of Physics at MIT and Lehigh
University, respectively, “Heat, A Textbook for Colleges” page 138.
*** The ‘compensation’ is not an equivalent amount of heat energy (which
would make the pump futile) but an increase of entropy outside of the
system to balance the decrease of entropy in the system. Entropy is to do
with the temperatures at which heat energy flows between systems. It is
nothing more fancy than that.
No one in their right mind would go from concept to full-on installation without going through a pilot installation. And as this is to be a nationwide, Europe-leading, showcase vanity project for Sunak and his WEF mates they believe you can just order it and it will happen. Rather like banning new ICE cars and replacing them with BEV. We’ll, that’s going well, isn’t it?
From limited knowledge, I think one of the biggest issues with heat pumps in the homes of UK folks is the type and age of the houses and related living quarters. Sounds similar to fitting a horse and buggy with regenerative breaking.
Ross Clark is spot on.
In order to make 600,000 heat pumps per year, somebody is going to have to figure out how to make just over 68 heat pumps per hour, 24 hours per day, seven days a week without a break in production anywhere. You don’t have to be an engineer to see that this is insanity.
And after you’ve accomplished that, you’re going to need the plumbing technicians to install them, joiners and builders to deal with the extra insulation and other modifications to the structure and last but not least the modifications to the Grid to handle the increased capacity necessary to replace the amount of energy presently provided by the natural gas.
And then there’s the EVs to take into account…
We used to call them wall-bangers back in the 1980’s in Egypt… you’ll get used to it… they are air conditioners that blow out warm or or cold air simply by diverting the air flow from one side of the heat exchanger to the other. Useless in the cold…. and heavy on electricity…. You’ll be warming one room only like in the days before gas central heating and burning coal… only now you will be burning more coal to power this junk… Anyway CO2 is the gas of life… liberal arts fantasies…
An example of the practicalities involved with heat pumps. I live in a split level bungalow individually built in 1974. It has cavity walls (filled on construction) and solid floors. The current gas heating system is run in the floor and walls in in 8 and 10mm microbore. Apart from rebuilding a room to house the huge hot water tanks et alia (combi boiler at present) the entire radiator system would have to be rebuilt from scratch with surface mounted pipe runs to 12 new oversized radiators.
Forget any additional insulation costs as these are not required here (EPC band C nearly B) just the equipment and installation costs would easily hit £25,000 +
Not going to happen is it?
I live in a house not unlike many others in our village built round an 18th c core but appended to over the last 300 years. Space and water heating is by gas boiler with very occasional local up or down boost by plugging is a portable radiator or fan. No cavity walls. Rooms not large enough for radiators any larger than what’s there already. I honestly wouldn’t know where to start with a heat pump as garden arrangement doesn’t provide for a good ground source area and I don’t fancy a noisy external air pump machine disturbing its peace. There must be millions or at least hundreds of thousands in this small old crowded country in such a situation. Costs would surely stretch into the 6 figures for what would be required to convert for this cohort – 5-figure costings quoted for most dwellings would come nowhere close for the level of rebuild entailed by the envisaged “upgrade”.
Government committing YOUR capital for THEIR purposes.
You need a CONSTITUTION that says the government can’t make you buy something. They now have the power to make you buy anything. Heat Pumps to Save the Planet is just a start. If they get away with it, they’ll find more that you have to buy. Cos reasons.
Then you’d need to ensure that they cannot ban anything either. Wont buy an EV? Fine, we will just ban petrol and diesel. No heat pump? Fine, we will ban natural gas. Government always progresses from.education, through incentive to banning to coercion to get what it wants.
The whole thing is madness, of course. But if I were going to advance the idea I’d want a dual cycle heat pump: one to raise the first working fluid to (say) 35C and the second, with a different working fluid presumably, to draw heat from that and raise it to the temperature required for your hot water tank e.g. 65C. Nobody seems to suggest that but it would surely be one way to avoid replacing all the radiators and pipes.
This idea must be old as the hills: does anyone know an application?
I’ve just googled and the first neat elaboration of a heat pump I found is this.
Click to access 46558721.pdf
Beware! “The exhaust from a gas burner powers a small-scale Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) system using hexane as the working fluid”. What could possibly go wrong in installing a gas burner next to a heat pump using a petrol-like working fluid?
Why hexane? I don’t know. Has an earlier generation of eco-nuts banned more attractive working fluids?
Answer = Scrap the NetZero pipedream and all the non-jobs that go with it?
Conservation is the best answer. I have a heat pump and I had the house I live in designed with efficency in the forefront of my mind, not luxuriant roof applications, or anything extra fancy for looks yet it is a nice enough looking ranch style structure. 6″ thick R-25 walls, R-42 attic, Efficent windows and doors, No attic application of said heat pump like some people in the southern US natives do. To me, that is like making icecream in an oven. I have a 36′ square structure that I had set to a compass to perfectly ( as possible) face N,S,E,W. This makes it to where the sun’s rays do not concentrate too long upon any one spot of the structure thus no overheating by summer. For example, ( Like I grew up in) an East-West rectangular structure the sun focuses heavily on the structure heating it up by summer. I have a wind break of trees on all sides, but the South, a safe distance from the structure to block summer rays, encourage winter rays and block bitter winter winds. On the south side as the sun rises and sets ( visibly) in the SE and SW so the winter solar concentration is great. The AC aspect of my heat pump rarely kicks on until later in the afternoon on 90+ degree days. Thermomstat is at 72° to 74°F even with that. Shutting the doors quickly helps with keeping the pump off. The heating aspect is not so great, but we like it cold anyhow with 65° being a common setting. My energy bills are not really bad compared to some people’s bill I read about online. The spring and fall months my bills drop to around 75 dollars and I am all electric with manual emergency backups.