SUSTAINABILITY
“The market is, in effect, capped by some or all of these barriers. Of the 1.5m gas boilers sold last year, about 80% are distress purchases, so when a gas boiler is broken you need heating and hot water, a direct replacement is the easiest, least painful option.”
OVERCOMING THE OBSTACLES TO NET ZERO
There are some major barriers to the take-up of heat-pumps in the UK which need to be overcome if the country is to get anywhere near its decarbonisation targets, as Fiona Russell Horne finds out.
H
eating and hot water accounts for about 14% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, according to Conor Evans, Worcester Bosch director of
product development, who explains that, with around 20million fossil fuel boilers in use in the UK today, in terms of trying to get further on the decarbonisation route, this sector is pretty key. “If we are to get to net zero by 2050 the government has suggested that we need a heat pump market of 600,000 by 2028, - that’s a tenfold increase in the next four years. That’s a massive leap,” he says.
“Heat pumps are incredible technology when they are installed correctly, in the right place, and as such they are the government preferred mechanism to get us to net zero. At the current rate of market development, it will take 400 years to achieve 600,000 rather than four years. So, we need to be realistic about how this is going to develop,” he continues. There are a number of barriers to the increasing up-take of heat pumps, Evans explains. “They are, compared with gas boiler, much more expensive as a piece of equipment,
even with government subsidies and grants. Heat pumps are sensitive, they need to be designed and installed properly, and they can also have higher running costs, and, in many cases so far, aren’t performing at the level they were designed to, compared with the benchmark of a gas boiler.”
There is also the disruption element to take into account. Evans says: “If you change your gas boiler, it takes a matter of hours and you have a new boiler. If you install a heat pump, you are likely to have to change pipework, fittings, and find space for a hot water tank if you’ve been used to living without one. All that comes at a cost, and disruption. So, a customer really needs to want it rather than being encouraged solely via incentives. For me this is the biggest concrete resistance we are going to find - which room would you like to give up 2sq m of in order to install a huge hot water cylinder?” He adds that the National Grid currently isn’t really equipped to cope with the increased level of electrification that heat pumps will require. Another real challenge is how to activate the 180,000 gas boiler installers out there, plus it’s a longer installation time.
June 2024 A supplement to builders merchants journal
Evans says that none of barriers to heat pump take-up are insurmountable, though, Worcester Bosch has a potential solution that the company believes could be the way forward in the interim. “According to our research, hybrid heat pumps have the potential to deliver 80% of the coverage that a standalone heat pump could deliver for as little as 20% of the total installation cost, as well as over-coming many of the practical barriers. It brings the appliance cost down massively, you don’t need to change your system necessarily, so the pipework and stay the same, you don’t need to find space for an airing cupboard, it can all pretty much be bolted onto the existing system removing the disruption. They are robust in terms of performance, as there is a gas boiler still there to pick up the slack if things get really cold.
“This is a much smaller step for the installer base - and for their customers. Importantly, it enables a distress purchase as well. If the gas boiler breaks, you can replace it, and then weeks later add the hybrid heat pump on. Increasingly, we see hybrid heat pumps as potentially the answer to decarbonising the heating market much faster than a single-track route straight to heat pumps.”
Evans says that the company believes that hybrid heat pumps can deliver 80% of the total decarbonisation benefits of a full heat pump for as little as 20% of the total installation costs. In order to get hybrids rolled out in any meaningful numbers though, what’s required is what he calls a ‘Get Real Moment’.
“The government needs to understand that 80% of many, is far better than 100% of a few, we need strong definitions, we need safeguards for performance and misuse; we don’t want hybrids to be installed en-masse in the marketplace, only for the boilers to continue to operate all the time.
“However, ultimately the main disincentive for consumers to make the switch away from gas boilers today is the difference between the electricity price and the gas price, that differential is just too high. To break even, you need your heat pump to be running at 400% efficiency all the time. There is a tonne of green levy piled onto electricity tariffs at the moment, we firmly believe that that should be removed for rebalanced, to make organic incentives to move across, and of course we need to create a demand as an industry, to generate that pull away from fossil fuels, rather than the push dynamics that we have had thus far. n
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