Heat Pumps Today

28 April | May 2022 I N D U S T R Y C O MM E N T Residential and district heating With the case for greater industry adoption made, it’s time to focus on increasing domestic use too. We have seen a push in the heat and building strategy from the government to promote heat pumps but it’s not nearly ambitious enough. The Treasury will provide £450m to encourage the installation of electric heat pumps by homeowners over the next three years as part of Britain’s eorts to hit its 2050 Net Zero targets. It amounts to a £5000 grant, awarded to 90,000 households over three years, that’s just 30,000 a year. In our view this is an inadequate incentive to shift use away from gas boilers which heat more than 85% of homes. More should be done to promote the adoption of heat pumps in district heating too. There are already successes in Southwark Council, one in Sterling and there are many more examples whereby instead of the traditional thinking which is supplying a fuel source to an individual building, you’re looking at generating hot water, which is then passed around several buildings from a central system and that oers a number of benefits. Firstly, security of supply is critical to most users and secondly heat pumps oer a much cheaper source of energy and more controlled levels of cost which is exactly what the consumers – whether they’re residential consumers or building owners – are looking to achieve. To really accelerate the uptake of heat pumps, government support is needed. Currently, heat pumps are more expensive than gas boilers and when you’re a consumer, that’s likely to be the first concern. However, heat pumps do generate an immediate return on investment and consumers will get a good payback, therefore governments must embrace more ambitious measures to incentivise or subsidise take up to oset some of the initial outlay. Achieving Net Zero Waste heat recovery is set to become an important part of the UK’s move towards a low carbon economy – it’s already part of government policy. Its Industrial Heat Recovery Support (IHRS) programme, with a budget of £18m, aims to increase industry confidence to invest in technologies that recover heat from industrial processes. Better still is the £1bn Net-Zero Innovation Strategy and Innovation Programme which provides funding for low-carbon innovative technologies and systems. Decreasing the cost of decarbonisation, this funding will help enable the UK to end its contribution to climate change. Heat pumps are already 85% renewable and so if we’re looking at decarbonisation strategies, more still needs to be done to encourage uptake in homes. In simple terms, the greenest energy is the energy that you don’t use, so if you’re preserving 85% of your energy with a heat pump, that’s a no brainer. Government should therefore shift its focus onto heat pumps and incentivise more from a residential consumer perspective, and it must look at more opportunities for funding district heating schemes which would enable the adoption of heat pumps to happen more quickly.