GREEN GUIDE PART TWO
Heating is cool too
Chris Higgs, sales director at Freedom Heat Pumps looks at why air conditioning engineers should add heating and hot water to their portfolios.
T
here is no getting away from the fact that we need to be moving towards a more sustainable form of domestic
heating and hot water sooner rather than later. To not take scientific advice seriously now, could mean that we, or our children, or even our children’s children face a bleak future. We’ve seen this year, the lengths that the government will go to to ensure lives are saved. Let’s not underestimate that the changes we need to make may be taken out of our hands if we do not take serious action ourselves. Decarbonising the heating in our homes is
considered to be one of the main focuses and challenges facing the UK over the next decade. Aside from taking a fabric first approach to reducing our energy usage (Rob Berridge talks us of having an energy wastage crisis as
opposed to an energy usage crisis), the main two technologies which are being seriously considered as the next generation of heating systems are hydrogen boilers and heat pumps. Here I will delve into the green numbers and the opportunities available from heat pumps. The Committee on Climate Change states that “Emissions from fossil-based heating systems and stoves were 85 Metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2015, or 17% of the UK total”. This 85MtCO2
e is then spread
over the 27million households in the UK, leaving us with an average rate of CO2
e per
household of 3.15 tonnes! What do these apparently large numbers actually mean? For the sake of simplicity, I’ve broken 3.15 tonnes of CO2
three comparisons: road miles, rail miles and air miles in the table.
So, this is where we are from an
environmental perspective, but where are we headed in a heat pump future? As I write this on a nice April day, the carbon
intensity for electricity in the UK is 136 grams of CO2
per kWh. It’s sunny outside, so it’s not
a true reflection of the UK’s actual carbon intensity. For a truer reflection we can turn to the 2019 Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors from BEIS. According to BEIS, the average grams of CO2
stands at 275 gCO2/kWh – this allows for a 0.022 transmission and distribution loss. Within the scope of this article, if we
equivalent down into
concentrate on air source heat pumps, the accepted efficiency across the board is around 350%, which means we can take the 275 figure, and divide it by 3.5 to get to a more accurate heat pump usage figure of 78gCO2
/ kWh.
This sounds brilliant but how does this compare against our current options? Let us review:
Electric Oil
LPG
= 275gCO2 = 245gCO2 = 214gCO2
Natural Gas = 185gCO2
/kWh /kWh /kWh /kWh
30 July 2020 per kWh for electricity generation
www.acr-news.com
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