Can we have some honesty about the cost of Net Zero?

With rising energy costs, heating bills are on everyone's minds right now, are we being honest about the costs of the technology that is being pushed?

We get all kinds of information thrown around about the need to drive towards net zero.  But how much of it actually looks at what that will mean for the average family, living in the average home trying to cook and keep warm?  Not much it seems to me.  So I thought it would be time to at least try and look at this from an objective viewpoint.

For sure, humans have always wanted, indeed needed, heat, and undoubtedly the earliest form of this would have been a simple campfire, and perhaps that need for heat is so built into our psyche, is why many of us find a campfire so mesmerizingly cosy, it’s been ingrained into our species over the last 1.5 million years.  Later that campfire was moved indoors into huts and tents with a simple opening in the roof for the smoke to escape.  As is the drive of the Human Race we strive to improve things and around 2500 BC the Greeks were building central hearths to heat their buildings.  The Egyptians introduced bellows to fan flames and make a hotter fire.  We have the Romans to thank for Central Heating, and the Koreans for Under Floor Heating.

Enough of the history lesson but suffice to say that since the dawn of man, we have always looked to find cleaner and more efficient ways of keeping ourselves warm.  Skipping forward to more modern times, the standard in the UK for many years has been Gas Central Heating, and while many properties still do retain solid fuel stoves and fireplaces, the dominant fuel for home heating is Gas.  Even that has undergone many evolutions from older “back boilers” which used existing coal fire chimneys to deal with the undesirable products of combustion, to the modern Condensing Combi and System boilers with proprietary flue systems.

So it stands to reason that as technology progresses with new innovations, so does the way we heat our homes progress to cleaner and more efficient methods, it is a natural progression.  But with heating being key to any property, it’s essential that properties are designed to work with their heating system.  Back in the days of a simple indoor fire, and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, it’s probably fair to say a hut didn’t last for a hundred years or more and modern economics certainly did not come into play.  Now we have properties lasting well over 100 years which is far too long to allow for design considerations of heating systems that have not been invented yet.  Retrofitting older properties was less of a consideration, and in the first example, cutting a hole in the roof of your hut probably didn’t take all that much work.

So when you look to replace an old gas boiler with a new one, of course, you consider the cost of the boiler, but there is usually very little other work to consider.  This just isn’t the case with Heat Pumps, and this is where I feel the conversation needs a little more honesty.

Where a Boiler or even a CampFire works by burning fuel to produce heat, heat pumps work very differently, moving heat from one place to another.  In exactly the same way as your fridge and freezer move heat from the inside to the outside, a Heat Pump moves heat from the outside to inside your home.  Heat is absorbed into a liquid, then compressed to a higher temperature before being released into your home.  It’s an energy-efficient process, roughly 4x more efficient on a Kilowatt by Kilowatt basis against Gas heating, but provides heat at a much lower temperature compared to Gas.

Without wanting to delve too deeply into Heating System Design, this lower temperature is a big deal.  When working out sizes for radiators, part of the calculation depends on the temperature of the radiators.  It also effects how big the pipework has to be.  So changing from a heat source that can get to 70c to one that gets to 40c potentially means that the radiators and the pipework feeding them needs to be replaced.  Lower system temperatures also mean that a space will heat up slower, in short, that means more insulation is required to hold the heat for longer in order to get a room to a desired temperature.

In the case of Air Source heat pumps, they will work (albeit at lower efficiency as the temperature drops) down to around -15c, but we do at times get weather colder than that, what if our only heat source stops working?  As much as Matt Hancock cast doom and gloom by suggesting a hug might “Kill Granny” because of Covid, this drive towards net zero might be what he should have been more concerned about, that “killer hug” might be all Granny has to keep her warm!

So in practical terms, to look at switching say a 1930’s semi, from a Combi Boiler to Air Source, the costs soon spiral.  After you swap out the boiler for a heat pump, you’re then adding a hot water tank and possibly a buffer tank too.  You’re changing your radiators for larger sizes and possibly re-piping the whole system too, or into a major renovation to add underfloor heating, which is far more compatible with heat pumps anyway.  Then there is probably extra insulation to add because 200mm of fiberglass just isn’t going to cut it anymore.  After you have done all that, there is probably some making good to do, so redecoration costs could be a factor too.  Without the redecoration costs, I recently costed this scenario for a client and the cost came back at approx. £22k ex VAT!   The hardest pill to swallow was at the time there was close to ZERO cost saving on heating bills.  Yes, the heat pump is 4x more efficient, but the cost of the Electricity it runs on is 3-4x more expensive than the Gas the boiler runs on.

Now I suspect that there will be moves to make Gas more expensive to wipe out this issue, and there have already been murmurs about this from the government.  But is that really the right way to go about it?  In my opinion, there is far too much stick waving to get people to change their habits, and it doesn’t matter for those that just don’t have the money to throw at it, they are priced out of change and forced into higher living costs, much in the same way we are seeing with cars and the costs of fuel and congestion charges even though many cannot afford an electric car.

What’s the answer to all this then?  Well, it’s been resisted for so long, but it’s been staring us in the face the whole time.  Nuclear Power.  It’s clean (carbon wise) and efficient, with further development such as the small modular reactors by Rolls Royce, it will be able to produce clean, cheap, electricity in abundance.  Further along and with investment and innovation, we could see Thorium and Molten Salt reactors that could literally eat the nuclear waste from conventional Uranium reactors, solving that issue.  The icing on the cake will be if we can harness nuclear fusion.  With cheap clean electricity Air Source Heat Pumps, with small Electric Boilers to pick up any slack would probably suit most properties.

I am also certain Hydrogen will play a part too, perhaps not as a replacement to natural gas boilers, but certainly, it is an answer to the range, payload, and refuel time issues with electric vehicles.

I am all for a clean environment, I don’t know anyone who isn’t.  But I feel that there needs to be far more honesty about what all this is going to cost, not just to governments, but to the average person.  The impact on life needs to be considered, and that means looking at the problem from both sides, both the environmental AND the economic costs.  The one thing that we absolutely MUST do is “drop the drama” of the fancy slogans like “Build Back Better” and “Code Red Climate Emergency” and start having honest and frank conversations about the implications of where we are heading and how we are going to get there.  Doing things for the sake of looking like we are doing something is NOT going to get us anywhere, and will create more problems than it could possibly solve.