Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Lord Deben, who recently faced calls to resign over a claimed conflict of interest between his role as chair of the UK Government Committee on Climate Change and his thriving green business interests, wants to ensure all new homes use expensive green electricity like the kind of electricity his businesses supply.
End of the gas hob as government advisers say new homes should be ‘off gas grid’ by 2025
Jillian Ambrose
21 FEBRUARY 2019 • 12:01AMGas hobs could be banned from being installed in new homes within seven years over fears that they are harming the environment.
Under new plans unveiled on Thursday by climate watchdogs no new homes will be connected to the gas grid after 2025 at the latest, in order for the UK to meet its legally binding climate targets.
The proposals, from Government’s official climate advisers, would call time on new gas radiators, boilers and cooking hobs.
The move away from gas hobs is likely to disappoint many home cooks who prefer them to electric as they find the heat is easier to control.
Instead, the Committee on Climate Change has said new homes should rely solely on low-carbon heat sources, such as electric heat pumps or district heating schemes.
…
Heating a home in Britain using electricity can be very expensive, which is why a lot of people prefer gas. No doubt his Lordship will do his best to ensure poor people have adequate access to community heating schemes, like industrial cooling water, so they can heat their homes with the waste heat.
You have to admire his lordship, the way he tirelessly works to save us from the menace of climate change, both through chairing the government climate committee and through his private business efforts to make renewable energy available to everyone in Britain.
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Yes, the world should have their gas supply pipelined in from Russia!
No need to explore and deplete local reserves when you an suckle from someone else.
If the effects of CO2 were actually as dire as he thinks, governments would be building nuclear plants.
I think it is now very obvious, we must test the IQ of all those who put themselves forward for public office or for any position of responsibility. Those below 100 should never be allowed beyond the application stage.
I suspect if such a simple filter was adopted we would be spared the more stupid ideas that get proposed from time to time. I also suspect the AOC type individual that seems to be common among the socialists and Greens, would have to find other ways to express their lunacy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6661513/Climate-Change-chief-John-Gummer-faces-calls-quit-payments-green-businesses.html
Their logic is flawed since if one is concerned about rising CO2 levels between now and 2050 it does not matter wherher CO2 was sequestered 30/50’years ago or many millions of years ago.
Burning biomass is only carbon neutral if one plants a tree today and cuts it down in 50 years time and then burn it.
In fact coal and gas would be carbon neutral simply by planting trees to offset the CO2 emitted when burning gas or coal and never cutting the trees down at all.
After all trees act as a carbon sink.
Further biomass has a lower calorific value than coal or. gas and therefore emits more CO2 per unit of energy produced. GREENS overlook this unfortunate fact as well as the increase in particulate matter.
DRAX now converted to biomass has halved the number of furnaces but still produces as much CO2 as it did when burning coal. Energy down by half but the same CO2 emissions (although these emissions are not counted because of the free pass given to biomass)
And now this scare story on methane, a classic case of follow the money.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/02/21/agri-tech-will-next-boom-industry-climate-warriors-turn-big/
I beleive the Netherlands and Germany already banned gas heating for new homes.
With a programme of insulation – UK homes are very poorly insulated – there’d be a lot less energy used in heating.
and with 33% of UK electricity from renewables in 2018 and prices not rising as a result (gas price is still the major factor in UK electricity prices)…
https://smarterbusiness.co.uk/uk-renewable-energy-percentage-2018/
At the end of 2016, the Dutch government presented its “Energy Agenda” which indicates the policies that should lead to an almost carbon-neutral economy in 2050. With regard to emissions from buildings, the two main policies are better insulation to reduce heat demand and the replacement of natural gas by alternative fuels with lower emissions. Currently every house or residence is still legally entitled to a connection to the gas grid. This law will be annulled and replaced by a “right to a heating connection”. New houses will not be connected to the gas grid anymore in any case. The 7 million existing houses will be gradually disconnected from the gas grid.
https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/netherlands-ban-natural-gas-2050.html
The view of the Engineer is different.
Turning gas into electricity in the UK is about 50% efficient, so heating our home to use less gas needs a heat pump with an efficiency of 200% to break even (in very round figures). We might manage 300% on a good day where the outside temperature is not too low. Sounds good so far, but then reality hits!
Our electricity infrastructure can supply about 50GW when there is no wind or sun, assuming that everything is working at full power, so just about 1.5 kW for each house. But the politicians have already used every bit of this to charge electric vehicles which they are very keen to promote! So they need to build another 50 GW at least, of generation and distribution for each house to reduce its heat load by around 80%, or on a windless night 65 million people will freeze to death! They say insulate more but this is simply not possible unless all the property is rebuilt, most windows removed and any ventilation not permitted. The deaths will mount very quickly in winter as the poorest will suffer most, as they cannot afford the step change.
It costs about £16 billion to build a new nuclear power station of 4GW output, and even then everyone is cancelling them now, so lets round this to £200 billion overall. Another £200 billion on distribution infrastructure and we are still freezing to death!
Is this policy in any way capable of working? The greens think so, and the government here (UK) appears to be unable to do the simple arithmetic above, and the MSM is completely obsessed with “climate change”!
No one here listens to the electrical engineers any more! Even Lord Monckton is having trouble.
David (CEng, PE)
Are you assuming that there is no improvement in insulation?
Because houses which are built to use heat pumps will have very good insulation, may even be to ‘passivehaus’ standards
https://www.thegreenage.co.uk/consider-insulating-home-installing-heat-pump/
(My local lord of the manor has put in a heat pump system and his house is warm for the first time since the mid 19th century!)
David, your figures are way off.
Gas use is about 6 to 7 times as much Energy as Electricity.
Gas Boilers are about 85% efficient compared to Gas>Electricity generation of 40-50%.
see
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/why-lord-oxburgh-ruled-out-electrification-of-heat/
I know what you are saying David . It is a long long time since I qualified to be an A M I Mech E,
& I have forgotten more than I can remember .
But if I try to explain that you cannot run a grid on nonsynchronous generation , [ wind & solar ] , without 100% conventional generation backup , then most people do not understand , or do not want to understand .
This idea of electric heating for houses was worked out previously ,
http://www.ccsassociation.org/news-and-events/reports-and-publications/parliamentary-advisory-group-on-ccs-report/,
and was concluded to be totally unworkable .
Even with houses insulated up to the standard of Austria , it would need an extra 200 GW of capacity .
That would need another 60 Hinckly C power stations .
About £1000 Billion plus the same again for upgrading the grid , & that is without electric vehicles , which is probably about half that again just for cars .
If it makes anyone feels better, this Lord Deben, which is the name of a local river and an area in Suffolk , although then do not have any solar panels or wind power at his rather nice house. Does have a backup diesel generator, in case the power goes down.
UK Brethren, I really feel sorry for all of you. Your combined nation has become a caricature of “1984″, “Fahrenheit 451” and “An Inconvenient Truth”. Isn’t being on camera 24/7 a bit over the top? There has never been a bigger globalist (communist ) scam than “climate change” You have so many in a position of power that worship Gaia fervently and are willing to put all of you at risk to save the earth and it’s done with such certainty.
Globalists have identified the hobgoblin that they say will destroy earth—carbon dioxide. They have declared humanity as the greatest emitter of this killer gas and we must be punished. By their own admission humanity is accountable for 5% of annual CO2 emissions—95% belongs to nature. But in case you haven’t noticed CO2 cannot be banished or reduced it is an insoluble problem that doesn’t need solving.
[John Selwyn] Gumboot is an old school crook and nothing more.
I recall the hamburger incident during the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy thing in the 1980s.
A dodgy used car salesman.
UK trying to out-kook AOC’s new greenie deal?
The other day in our local plumbers merchants I was saying the sooner that the UK’s climate change act is repealed the better, one of the people there asked why and I replied that it would remove domestic gas from supply once it had worked it’s way from coal.
James Bull
This proposal advocates all new houses to be built to the highest insulation standard and use air source heat pumps for heating. That would mean that all new houses built would be for the very well off, because the middle income middle class are already struggling to afford house purchase. Also those heat pumps really do not work well in the UK for technical reasons. The UK has a cold and damp climate which causes their heat exchangers to rapidly ice up and render the device inoperative. However the device has a way to deal with this by sucking warm air out of the house to thaw out the heat exchanger. The system compensates by drawing hot water from an electrically heated tank. Many people who bought new houses fitted with these systems found themselves faced with astronomical electricity bills. I should mention heat pumps work perfectly in California and save owners a lot of money for heating. The other alternative to gas heating is electric heating. Currently electricity costs 3 times as much as gas per kWh, and is due to rise to 4 tames as much by 2025 as more expensive renewable energy is added to the Grid.
I expect firms like “Calorgas” and other purveyors of LP gas will do rather well out of this. (I wonder where I could get shares?)
In 3rd world countries, and other countries that lack a gas grid, domestic gas is obtained/delivered this way and the gas cylinder home delivery companies are often very efficient.