Ross Clark: Heat pumps are becoming a plague on all our houses
JUNE 8, 2023
By Paul Homewood
From The Telegraph:
Has there ever been a form of mis-government in modern times which will prove so disastrous, reaching into almost every home in Britain, as the Government’s attempt to force heat pumps on us?
I ask, not because a heat pump, if properly installed, cannot be an effective way of heating a home but because ministers still seem blithely unaware of the financial pain they are about to inflict on millions of households – and manufacturing industry, too.
The Government’s plans for net zero involve a target to switch 600,000 homes a year to heat pumps by 2028 – half of which, apparently, are going to be made in Britain, creating wonderful, well-paid “green jobs”. If the Government is going to set such an ambitious target, you might expect it would start by securing the support of UK heat pump manufacturers. Not a bit of it. Boiler and heat pump manufacturer Valliant has just warned that it could halt investment in Britain if the Government ploughs ahead with a threat to fine heating companies heavily if they fail to fulfil set targets for heat pumps. Every “missing” heat pump will cost them a penalty of £5,000.
If the Government cannot keep a company which has just invested £4 million in a heat pump manufacturing facility in Derbyshire on side, then who will it enlist to fulfil its policy? The truth is that the campaign to force heat pumps on us is failing not because of lazy boiler manufacturers who are stuck in their ways, but because heat pumps are not selling themselves to homeowners. At £10,000 for a small home, they are just too expensive, and there are too many misery tales of people who shelled out many thousands of pounds only to find themselves with a device which doesn’t always succeed in keeping them warm.
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