The great green bait and switch
Director's column
18 Jul 2024
Written By Andrew Montford
One of the great problems facing the policy – proposed by both Labour and Conservative –to decarbonise domestic heat by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps is that it’s fundamentally uneconomic. As I pointed out in a recent paper for GWPF, while air-source heat pumps are, on average, three times as efficient as gas boilers, electricity is four times the price of gas, so unless your installation is much more efficient than the norm, you will not see operating cost reductions from a heat pump, let alone pay back the extra capital cost.
One of the wheezes dreamt up to address this issue is to remove all the renewables subsidy costs from electricity bills. This has been suggested by the Climate Change Committee today, and the simultaneous picking up of the idea by the BBC and others suggests a fully fledged Green Blob campaign in support of the idea is under way.
Given that the subsidies are for…well…electricity generation, the policy would further divorce consumer bills from the underlying economic realities, and it would therefore be expected to cause harm to the public at large, but it’s interesting to consider just how much harm.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/heat-pump-bait-and-switch
