School Closes Six Times In Three Months Because Of Net Zero Agenda
By Paul Homewood
h/t glenartney
Now our children’s education is being put at risk in the drive to Net Zero:
A primary school has been forced to close six times in just three months because its brand new £358,000 heat pump system keeps failing.
The ‘green’ energy source was installed at Kingsnorth Primary in Ashford, Kent over the summer as part of a government initiative to help schools cut carbon emissions. Unfortunately best made plans have fallen apart a little. Since pupils returned to school in September, classrooms have been left without power or heating on numerous occasions, which has proven to be a big issue given the particularly harsh winter weather Britain has been enduring.
The school was first forced to close early on November 30 because neither the gas nor electricity was working, meaning no food could be provided for the children. Kingsnorth suffered another power failure on December 6, forcing staff to close the school all day, and then again on January 10, 11, and 12.
Parents have been left frustrated by the issues, explaining that they are being forced to take time out of work to collect their children every time the school closes. One mum, who asked not to be named, said: “As parents, we are getting annoyed now.
"Whenever there is an issue, we get random messages during the day to say come pick your children up. I work full time and I can’t always just leave my job. We keep being told it will get sorted as quickly as possible, but it has been going on for too long now.”
Another mum, who also wanted to remain anonymous, added: “I’ve got two children at the school and I work full time. I’m really worried I’m going to lose my job. I have to rely on friends and family to pick my children up.
"Once I could understand, but for it to happen this many times, they need to get it sorted. One of my children is in Year 6 and we are constantly told how important the SATs are, but they have lost five days of learning.”
An air source heat pump works by absorbing heat from the environment, even when temperatures are below freezing, and transferring it inside. They can be powered using electricity from renewable energy and can be up to 300 times more efficient than traditional gas boilers, as well as far greener.
Aquila Diocese of Canterbury Academies Trust, which runs 16 schools in Kent, commissioned four of the pumps as part of the government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme.
In addition to the £358,000 funding from the government for the pump at Kingsnorth, Brenzett Church of England Primary on Romney Marsh received £243,945, St George’s Church of England Primary in Sheerness received £522,000, and St Nicholas Church of England Primary Academy in New Romney received £256,576.
While they have also had what has been described as “teething problems” with their pumps, it has not been on the same scale as Kingsnorth. A spokesperson for the Trust apologised for the school closures and promised that it is doing everything possible to rectify the situation.
They said: “We apologise for the inconvenience and disruption caused to Kingsnorth Primary School’s pupils and families and we want to assure the community that we have been, and are continuing to, do everything within our power to rectify this situation as quickly as possible.
“Our priority has always been to keep Kingsnorth open, but there have been occasions where we have had no choice but to close due to a complete failure of the heating system, electrical power issues, and the associated wider safety concerns.
“Unfortunately, the response and site attendance by contractors hasn’t been as quick as we have needed it to be, and we have continued to apply pressure and emphasise that the issues need to be addressed urgently.
“We have had electrical and mechanical engineers on-site testing electrical load capacities, as well as finding an alternative option to have a more robust temporary heating solution in place.”
The Trust added that they are planning to install an additional power source as a failsafe from the week commencing January 22.
“We have planned to install an additional power source for part of the new heating system so we can remove some of the electrical load from the school’s electrics and have the system fully operational as intended,” the spokesperson explained.
“These works are planned for the week commencing January 22 while the school remains fully open and operational. Once this has been completed, we will have all specialists on-site to reinstate the air source heat pump system.
“Should there be any additional unforeseen issues, we will have the resources to hand to identify and deal with them immediately.”
According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme supports the aim of reducing emissions from public sector buildings by 75% by 2037. More than £1.4 billion of grant funding was provided in the latest phase of the scheme.
“The overwhelming majority of people who have installed a heat pump are satisfied with their heating, but those who are experiencing issues must contact the installer,” a DESNZ spokesperson said.
“Recipients of Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme funding carry out their own procurement process for heating installations once they have received their grant.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/primary-school-closes-six-times-31932092
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Forget about the electricity issues, these are plainly a red herring.
It is apparent from the report that the power system simply did not have enough to run these heat pumps when it really got cold:
.
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TRANSLATION : The school’s electrical system could not cope with the extra demand from the heat pumps, and consequently tripped out.
As a result, the school will now have to spend money installing a back up heating system, as well as providing a back up power source – in other words, re-installing the original gas boiler and buying a back up diesel generator!
Maybe next time they might be better of spending this money on improving the children’s education?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
This is another green waste of money that makes BEV batteries seem cheap.
Taxpayers facing another £1million bill to keep hybrid eco-ferry running
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/taxpayers-facing-another-1million-bill-31927390
The CONservative Government loves spending other peoples’ money on useless ‘green’ projects. I think more and more people are beginning to realise what a big con NetZero is.
I think you will find this is an SNP ‘green’ project.
“….they can be up to 300 times more efficient than a conventional boiler…”
Well, of course, considering they can use renewable energy that ‘can be nine times cheaper than FF…’ And so efficient they need a second power source to stop them blowing the building’s fuses.
How many more lies?
“300 times”
A couple of “Zero’s” that shouldn’t be there…
Or even zeros
But yes, 3 times or maybe 300% do they mean?
If the heat pumps were that efficient then the amount of current drawn would be tiny. The heat pumps overloading the existing electrical system suggests otherwise.
The whole article is riddled with errors and lies. The suggestion that winter weather in winter is in some way exceptional for instance.
Perhaps there is an educational value in this as it teaches them that heat pumps are a crap idea.
Oh, yeah, this is a great learning experience for the kids. They are learning that government makes a mess out of whatever they touch. If every kid saw this, they would contract government severely once adults.
They would also see how when government makes a mess, they don’t clean it up, they try to spruce it up.
“Lipstick on a pig.” – Sarah Palin
Heat pump a bad idea? NO! We’ll put in another heater and a backup generator!
And if that doesn’t work, they’ll add another patch. Government [with a few tweaks] is good.
Government never says they are sorry.
I sometimes imagine an advanced alien civilisation visiting and asking how we generate useful energy. ‘You mechanically revolve a coil of wire in a magnetic field?’ ‘How quaint!’ ‘And you generate the rotative force, either by boiling water to produce steam, or by falling water or wind?’ ‘Tell us – do you have any physicists on this planet?’
A little bit like legendary US Comedian Bob Newhart’s sketch
“Introducing Tobacco To Civilisation”
Brilliant and timeless!
My favourite…..other than perhaps the driving instructor…..or Gettysburg, or……..
Surely the kids could eat sandwiches for a few days?
It says “The school was first forced to close early on November 30 because neither the gas nor electricity was working, meaning no food could be provided for the children.£
So t’s talking about 1 day when I guess they were preparing food
So I guess in a 1,000 pupil school ..500 usually eat, so you had 500 unfed kids
So they sent them home
Other ways shouldve been possible eg 5 staff drive and buy up sandwiches
The should already have had a backup plan cos they have refrigerators
They must have a generator onsite.
oooo…. generators. How will the head charge their Tesla though?
How much???? Really £350k!!! What ignorant incompetents in what offices were fooled into paying all that? Somebody should be digging deep into that, to me there is a bad smell there.
That it doesn’t work is just not acceptable. This whole think is unimaginable. Heads must roll.
Quill that is probably very cheap by public sector contract rates. Think of a sensible price for a job, double it and then add a nought on the end is genuinely par for the course.
A business associate of mine won a local authority contract doing condition audits/surveys of heating systems in council controlled buildings. Sadly he had a major heart attack and had to convalesce for several months. I and some other friends took on his contract work to keep his business afloat. At the end he paid us all for our time quite handsomely. When I initially declined the very generous amount he offered me, he disclosed the rates he was getting for the contract…double it and add a nought on the end was his pricing calculation!
To be fair, businesses can be just as incompetent. I once blundered badly on a quote for £3,000 worth of signage, I added an extra zero. I was as incompetent as the Quantity Surveyor who accepted the quote.
It wasn’t until we came to bill for the job that I realised what I had done. The QS hadn’t a clue because he knew nothing about sign manufacturing.
I didn’t educate him.
My rationalisation was that someone, somewhere, had mistakenly quoted £300 for a £3,000 job, so I was simply redressing the balance.
@Consumer
You did that accidentally but how many deliberately inflated contracts get put in place? Even those who put in a high quote because they didn’t want that particular job but didn’t want to be left out next time
^^ There was a time in public sector procurement where a tender that varied widely from the “budget cost” or varied widely from the average tender price would be quarantined and investigated.
HS2 took noughts off and added them back later once they had the contract. “Unforseen variations”
A. The journalist was as ignorant as the Trust staff. The 300 times more efficient was almost certainly meant to read 300% more efficient – though that is a considerably overstatement of the average improvement in thermal efficiency.
B. Sadly, variants of this story will be so frequent in future that they will be regarded as normal. A fair proportion of the installers are incompetent snake-oil salesmen while the people commissioning such projects are mostly gullible and ignorant. Talk about the blind leading the blind!
The school itself is livid with the situation. The governors’ letter to parents starts with “You may be aware of the extremely challenging and worrying issues we have been experiencing since September with the new heat source pump system that we have been obliged to have installed.”
Download here https://www.kingsnorth.kent.sch.uk/parent-area/latest-newsletters-and-letters/governors-letter-re-heating-issue
Clearly they did not want this change claiming they were “obliged to have installed” i.e. against their own will.
What is also quite clear is that this has been a seriously botched installation.
Schools in common with larger homes, offices, commercial buildings etc would normally have a 3 phase electricity supply. It would be surprising that the heat pump should overload the supply normally available particularly as this school does have a gas supply used for cooking appliances as well as the former heating system. It is equally inconceivable that a reputable supplier would not have tested the supply as adequate prior to installation.
I suspect the contractors involved probably arrived on horseback, toting six guns and clicking their spurs before lobbing in any old system, taking the money and riding off into the sunset.
£350K!!!!!! How?
Seriously teaef see my reply to Quill above. I worked all my life, self employed, in the private sector. When I briefly came into contact with public sector contracts I just could not believe what went on. The overcharging was by an order of magnitude literally.
I once saw a Dover District Council specification for remedial works to surface rusting on bolts on a slide in a swimming pool. It involved draining the pool, abseiling down from the roof (no I am not joking) abrading the surface, applying rust curative paints of several coats on different types at different times, cleaning up and refilling the pool. A cool £28,000.
The successful contractor did NOT have the pool drained, did NOT abseil down from the roof and did NOT apply any coatings. They got an operative to walk down the slide after opening hours, undo the nuts and bolts and replace them with new ones. One hour labour and about £15 worth of materials. The council paid the £28,000 bill being none the wiser of what work was actually done.
The contractor was commended on the end quality of the work!!!!!
The problem being that, in the unlikely event, something happened to the slide and it was found the draining, abseiling, abrading, rust curative applications etc. had not taken place then there would likely be insurance implications.
However, frankly, insurance companies don’t really care assuming the operative was wearing a life jacket and they knew beforehand.
I have a friend who is a senior H&S bod. He’s also mildly Autistic, the very person to be utterly obsessed with H&S nonsense.
Quite the opposite. His view is H&S should make any job easier and cheaper. He would likely have advised your council to give the operative a life jacket, some stainless steel bolts, and have someone with a life saving qualification, like a regular pool attendant, on hand.
Stainless steel can be a problem in swimming pools (stress corrosion, famous fatal collapse of a suspended ceiling in Switzerland years ago) but the right grade, not over-torquing the bolts and regular checks should do it. Going down the slide with a safety harness (abseiling in effect) plus someone in an inflatable dinghy in the pool, if you’re really elfin safety obsessed, would deal with the other issue.
https://bssa.org.uk/bssa_articles/stainless-steel-in-swimming-pool-buildings/
Quite! All branches of local and national gov pay over the top for everything. Not their money, so they don’t care.
Another triumph for our beloved Department of Net Zero Energy Security.
Measure to combat planet warming
cause school to be TOO COLD for teaching
measures
A few more “we are getting annoyed now” should do the trick. Everything is OK with NetZero until it start immediately impacting the people then it isn’t.
Will Ofcom make it better?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12989711/Ministers-Ofcom-powers-regulate-BBCs-online-news-coverage-bid-tackle-concerns-perceived-bias-corporation-improve-audience-confidence.html
They’ll need to hire a small army to start with.
COUNTRYFILE Minute 9 to past minute 21 was a anti-local ONSHORE oil/gas extraction CAMPAIGN by Tom Heap
Most of it was activist talk with pro oil getting 3 mins
1 min each from Egdon exec, villagers happy with oil site, government statement
The anti Biscathorpe oil people got a chunk near the beginning then the final say too
The CPRE guy was on then court protesters, then CPRE guy
.. I have a lot more notes
Thank you for your service sir, so I’m not forced to watch that crap!
They had the BBC on at the gym yesterday while I was having my post swim coffee. No sound so you have to watch the subtitles. Apparently about a third of teenagers think that climate change is exaggerated. Of course the discussion was about what can be done to get these deluded miscreants back on message but they did have one mildly sceptical guest who was pointing out that there is a wide range of opinion among scientists on the subject. Still, I think that it is encouraging that a pretty significant minority of young people are starting to doubt the climate narrative.
” Still, I think that it is encouraging that a pretty significant minority of young people are starting to doubt the climate narrative. ”
Would be interesting to know what they are taught at school by their “elders and betters” .
I watched that piece from Dung Heap, Stew. My wife had to restrain me from doing serious damage to the TV. Mind you, a bit of unintended humour later when a young female vet had her arm right up the back passage if a cow and came out covered in all the stuff that Heap talks.
I’ll summarise : Actual oilfield is fine, Yet activists claim that proposed oilfield on similar land will bring pollution, mass traffic, zero economic benefits to UK and will make a huge Global Warming difference
Those actual villagers (in my region and friends of my friends, so I trust) said they have had no problem with the oil extraction site a mile down the road, cos you’d hardly even notice it, and they monitor pollution and there has been nothing.
– Yet the the start and end of the item was anti-oil activists talking about a proposed oil well which happens to be in a Natural Landscape (ex-AONB) which is actually similar farmland like the first oilfield ..yet they claim this oilfield will bring all these negatives I listed
The BBC item omitted to mention landspace comparison to wind/solar
MZ has quoted David Mackay shale gas comparison saying the 25 year production figure for the local well is about the same
ie, it’d need ~1,400 ha of space for wind turbines or ~900ha for solar panels!
The BBC item also omitted to mention the oil corp pay a community grant of £100K per year
‘People’ have brought this upon themselves. They have gone along blindly accepting the global warming mantra. But they won’t change, serve them right.
Constant psychologically constructed propaganda instilled by the media over many years has “internalised” the meme. “Of course its climate change, look at the weather”. Any conversion therapy back to the truth will have to come from the same sources.
August 2006. https://www.ippr.org/publications/warm-wordshow-are-we-telling-the-climate-story-and-can-we-tell-it-better
“To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.”
It’s been an effective strategy.
“Global Warming: The Social Construction of a Quasi-Reality?”
https://web.archive.org/web/20170508224510/http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/science-papers/reprint/social-construction
” This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, ”
We must never forget that climate change does exist and it is real.
Kingsnorth power station ran for about 40 years, coal-fired and also oil-fired; closed around 2010. There were plans to replace with another coal-fired station, but believers’ protests prevailed and so nothing was built.
Greenpeace vandals who climbed the chimney to protest were let off because they were saving the planet. No more ‘Chimney conspic’, a handy waymark in the good old days.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-kent-43503116
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/sep/11/activists.kingsnorthclimatecamp
The farce is of course that they achieved no such thing. The Kingsnorth site now hosts the UK end of the BritNed interconnector – which connects to Dutch coal fired power stations at the other end. It must grate to have been so ineffectual.
Different Kingsnorth.
From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/sep/10/activists.carbonemissions
” It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a “lawful excuse” defence in court. It is now expected to be used widely by environment groups.”
How does this pass the “proof” test required in a crminal court?
Too cryptic, please explain, where is this other Kingnorth? I think you mean that the vandals were protesting against a newer, cleaner, more efficient replacement for units 1-4, Kingsnorth units 5 and 6.
Ah, got it, just a geographical comment. I think the eco-lunacy connection is strong enough to justify the link to Kingsnorth power station. Perhaps the original farm on Hoo Peninsular was named after the village near Ashford?
As I recall, Kingsnorth power station used to get confused with Grain power station.
D.Mirror: the particularly harsh winter weather Britain has been enduring
Are Mirror journos based in some isolated corner of the UK these days?
It does not say where this statement came from:-
“An air source heat pump works by absorbing heat from the environment, even when temperatures are below freezing, and transferring it inside. They can be powered using electricity from renewable energy and can be up to 300 times more efficient than traditional gas boilers, as well as far greener.”
Misinformation, every word of it, except for the ‘may be powered by renewable electrcity’, except that is very unlikely in the U.K., but similar statements are regularly made and that is not how a heat pump works nor is it 300% efficient, far from it.
My view is that an air source heat pump is less efficient than a gas boiler given a ground source heat pump is approximately 40% more efficient and no device can be 100% efficient (Basic science).
358,000 quid for 4 heat pumps? They made of gold then?
Be interesting if they were sold the air heat pump on the grounds that it was 300 times as efficient as gas.
I looked for other guys who mix up
“300 times more efficient” with “300% more efficient”
See how this idiot sneers
“I think Rishi needs to send you guys for extra maths lessons”
.. https://twitter.com/CoedYGo/status/1618530530093592579
Apparently he likes beavers and was born when atmospheric C02 was 325ppm!Oh Ex Cop!
My older brother refused to do jobs for the federal government (US).
He did one, and they played all sorts of stupid games to keep from paying him.
Had he actually decided to continue doing business with them, he would have had to charge them way more to cover the cost of doing business with them.
To wit, Kingsnorth Primary might have had to pay a high price just to get someone to install the heat pump.
‘Unfortunately, the response and site attendance by contractors hasn’t been as quick as we have needed it to be, and we have continued to apply pressure and emphasise that the issues need to be addressed urgently.’
Oh, yeah, it’s the contractors fault.
“We have had electrical and mechanical engineers on-site testing electrical load capacities, as well as finding an alternative option to have a more robust temporary heating solution in place.”
Are these the same engineers who specced the job in the first place? I suspect talking with technicians would be more effective.
^^
In the UK, “engineer” can have the same meaning as “technician” , which can have the same meaning as “mechanic” , which can have the same meaning as “fitter” .
Thx.
How much does CO2 affect the weather?
I’m in the USA. Over here heat pump systems are almost all air sourced and air delivered. They all have some kind of back up. Usually it’s a resistive coil in the output airflow of the air handler. When the temperature drops so low that the heat pump can’t keep up or the outside heat exchanger becomes ice covered, the resistive heating comes on – and the meter spins like crazy. I had such a system when I lived in Pennsylvania.
The system can use gas as a back up by installing a gas furnace in the output air flow of the heat pump. This reduces the heavy electric requirement in favor of gas. I now have such a system at my house in Florida although the “heat pump” is only an air conditioner and is not used for heating at all.
Heating the school entirely with electricity (heat pump and resistive) is foolish. Local backup would require a large generating unit. Heating, either full time or as backup, would require only a small electric generating unit to run the controls of the gas furnace. Of course such a small generator wouldn’t supply the lighting etc but it would keep everyone warm while repairs were made.
libmob often sneer “that’s a conspiracy theory”
Yet here we have Harra pushing an UNEVIDENCED conspiracy theory about Heat Pumps
OK as I unpick it. Of course the idea that actual fossil fuel companies like Shell/BP are funding anti heatpump PR is ridiculous
but tweeters point to Desmog’s article from JULY claiming they have a leak from the Energy and Utilities Association
same day the Guardian had an article “Gas boiler lobby trying to delay UK’s heat pump plans,”
So It’s not a new claim
At that time Installer online rebutted the story saying of course the industry put out their own PR and said the Guardian was misleading by using hyperbolic language
“Is it because the actual story – that there’s publicly-voiced opposition to something – simply isn’t weighty enough to generate the desired reaction?
And what of the scorpion? Is it the EUA and its chief exec, Mike Foster, attempting to scuttle the heat pump armada?
Or is it rather a succession of governments that have failed to deliver an effective policy
thereby created the cauldron of opinion”
https://www.installeronline.co.uk/heat-pumps-and-hydrogen-a-sting-in-the-tail/
So it’s the same guy Tom Heap describes on his SkyNews show
https://news.sky.com/story/campaigns-of-misinformation-around-heat-pumps-says-energy-minister-amid-record-number-of-installations-13052428
“Mike Foster from the Energy and Utilities Alliance – a trade body which represents gas and boiler companies and lobbies on their behalf. He says the higher upfront cost is a huge barrier.”(for heat pumps)
“He rejected accusations that the industry has been spreading misinformation.
“Far from it. Our members make heat pumps. They make boilers…”
….
The energy minister, Lord Callanan, has accused “vested interests” of “funding campaigns of misinformation” about heat pumps.
“I’m not going to mention names but people have a vested interest in maintaining our current supplies of gas boilers and the like”, he told
….
“A report for the MCS, the body which certifies the technology, found that 80% of people were either satisfied or very satisfied with their heat pump, which is higher than for gas boilers.”
FFS a 20% customer fail rate is UNSUSTAINABLE
Lord Callanan’s idea abou anti heat pump lobbying isnt new
Here’s his Oct 9th Tweet sneering at a Telegraph article
The Telegraph has been Community notes by The Energy Saving Trust
such notes can be gamedby getting your mates to vote.
.. https://twitter.com/MartinCallanan/status/1711423177950191767