3 Key Barriers to the Decarbonisation of Heat in the UK
The climate crisis.
With currently an estimated 85% of our housing stock on the gas grid, heating the places we live accounted for 22% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the UK.
The need to decarbonise our heating systems is of pressing importance.
It’s a pretty staggering challenge, and it’s hard not to feel powerless when looking at the numbers. As the UK Government strategise (and put into action) on how to meet their 2050 climate targets of net zero — lets consider the challenges that we must overcome.
- Public Awareness
- Old Buildings
- Cheap Gas
Public awareness
While a small proportion of home-owners are driven by “green” arguments, the vast majority of end users are comfortable with a gas boiler, unaware of alternatives or even of the effect their boiler is having on the planet. There remains a lack of trust in alternatives too, despite technologies such as heat pumps being a mature technology in use for decades.
This is particularly true in a country like the UK — the biggest gas boiler market in Europe — where less than three customers in ten have heard of heat pumps.
The majority of people know that driving a petrol or diesel car is bad, but seemingly very few are even aware that using their boiler also contributes to climate change. A key challenge we face is in raising public awareness of the impact of existing heating systems, and of the alternative (renewable) technologies that are available.
This needs to be focused on society at all levels, introducing climate change and solutions as subject matter in schools but not stopping at the age of public education — utilising and maximising the potential reach that is available via social media to include and target the population everywhere possible.
Old buildings
Building regulations are changing and being updated. From 2025 it is set that no new homes will be built connected to gas. The obvious choice here is to use a heat pump as the alternative solution for the heating and hot water systems.
But what happens with the existing building stock?
The government aim to install 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028. A big portion of this will go into the 300,000 new homes that the government has committed to delivering every year — but how do improve/ reduce the carbon footprint of our existing homes?
A lot of existing homes are poorly insulated and in many cases are even listed, meaning there are real limitations as to what adaptations or improvements can be made to the property make-up.
Gas boilers are very forgiving in these old homes. They are often greatly oversized and deliver high flow temperatures which allow, for example, water temperatures in radiators to be significantly increased to increase output and to mask any design issues of the system and/ or of the poor thermal performance of the building itself.
Many architects, consultants and developers are working with the Government and various product/ system suppliers to find sustainable and scalable solutions.
This undoubtedly will remain to be, one of the more challenging technical aspects to overcome if we wish to reach net zero — it is quite likely that carbon capture technology will play a vital role in helping us tackle these emissions.
Cheap Gas
Put simply, the cost of gas is too cheap — or conversely, the cost of electricity is too high.
In 1990, the UK’s regional electricity boards were privatised. We don’t therefore own much of our energy, individually or collectively.
The UK is rich in offshore wind, but only 7% is owned by UK entities.
Since energy was privatised we’ve watched prices rise, burning of fossil fuels and a lack of investment in the clean energy infrastructure we need.
A very simple demonstration of why this poses such a contentious issue is because of the discussion around efficiency.
Often boilers get called ‘new and efficient’ but in reality, they’re only ever at best 95% efficient (you get out less than you put in) — whereas for a heat pump (I’ll focus on air-source heat pumps for this example) this would range from 2 to 4 (200 to 400%) (efficiency in heat pumps is measured as coefficient of performance, or COP, is a ratio expressible as ‘heat output’ divided by ‘electrical energy input’).
Unfortunately, even though heat pumps are vastly more efficient than boilers — the cost that end users pay for their energy is so greatly skewed to favour gas, that they rarely see any financial benefits from making this change.
