Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; Heating Bills are set to quadruple under Boris Johnson’s latest climate brainstorm. Many people in Britain cannot afford heating bills of this magnitude. Around 10% of Britons already cannot afford their heating bills, even with government handouts and low cost gas heating.
The lie of the ‘green industrial revolution’
Boris Johnson’s plans to ban gas boilers and rely on hydrogen are beyond crazy.
BEN PILE
9th December 2020Following Boris Johnson’s 10-point plan to advance the UK’s ‘green industrial revolution’, the government is bringing forward its proposed ban on gas boilers in new homes from 2025 to 2023. The 10-point plan also requires replacement gas boilers to be phased out by 2035.
This leaves a huge question hanging over each and every home in Britain: how will they be kept warm? The fact that this question has no answer reveals the lie at the heart of Johnson’s green industrial revolution. It is an anti-industrial revolution, and it is going to create great hardship.
Some 84 per cent of Britain’s homes are connected to the gas network. It sounds obvious to say that they should just switch over to electricity. But the retail price of gas is less than a quarter the price of electricity per kWh. Heating a home with electricity is therefore currently four times more expensive than heating a home with gas. Moreover, switching simply defers the question of where Britain’s energy is going to come from.
…
Point two of the plan is ‘to generate 5GW of low-carbon hydrogen-production capacity by 2030 for industry, transport, power and homes, and aiming to develop the first town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade’. Unlike natural gas, hydrogen is not an energy source – it has to be produced. There are two ways to produce hydrogen: electrolysis and steam reforming of natural gas.
Electrolysis at grid scale is simply uneconomic – a highly conservative estimate of the requirements and costs of replacing natural gas with hydrogen produced by electrolysis and powered by wind energy would say that Britain would need 20 times as many wind farms, and the wholesale cost of electricity would increase tenfold.
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Read more: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/09/the-lie-of-the-green-industrial-revolution/
When my family lived in Britain, in our idyllic but rather elderly house, we didn’t have gas heating because our home was too far from the nearest available mains gas pipe. Even with the help of our wood burner, our home electric heating bills used to peak at £600 / month (US $800 / month) in February.
Boris Johnson has no problem paying his energy bills. If people complain about the new costs perhaps he thinks they are just not making enough of an effort to save the planet, they’re just not pitching in and doing their bit. In any case the inconvenience will be short term, right? The MET predicts the UK will have a warm Mediterranean climate by 2050.
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Unreal… https://www.centralmaine.com/2020/12/10/maine-signs-wind-focused-clean-energy-accord-with-united-kingdom/
” and aiming to develop the first town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade’. ”
If it catches fire due to a hydrogen leak igniting and burns the town down , was the town heated by hydrogen ?
😉
I can see it now, the modern day Hindenburg
Check the green’s bank account.
Government is for the benefit of the population except where bribes and treason are concerned.
Johnson may well turn out to be among the worst PM in UK history
All that promise . . . for nothing.
Boris appears to have been Californicated.
Or Carriefornicated.
Boris reminds me a lot of Hillary Clinton.
When it was pointed out to her that many businesses couldn’t afford all the new taxes and regulations that she supported, her response was:
“I’m not responsible for every under capitalized company in the country.”
In other words, if you can’t afford the new taxes, it’s your fault.
The original article is extremely poorly conceived and written.
There is no equivalency between electrical kwh and natural gas hearing power. There’s a reason natural gas is a lot better for cooking/heating – it isn’t just price.
Boris Johnson was supposed to be the Tory leader who would lead Brexit, but has he seriously thought of the effects of converting from natural gas to hydrogen as an energy source?
As the article states, the two main methods of obtaining hydrogen are steam-methane reforming and electrolysis. Steam-methane reforming is frequently used in petroleum refineries to generate hydrogen for desulfurization of kerosene, diesel, and heavier petroleum fractions, which is normally consumed onsite. The reaction proceeds in two steps, but the overall reaction is
CH4 (methane) + 2 H2O (steam) –> CO2 + 4 H2
If the hydrogen generated is then burned to produce energy, the reaction would be
4 H2 + 2 O2 –> 4 H2O
Combining these two reactions, the net steam-methane reforming and hydrogen combustion reaction would be
CH4 + 2 O2 –> CO2 + 2 H2O
which is the exact same reaction as the direct combustion of natural gas, with exactly the same emission of CO2 per unit methane consumed. The steam-methane reforming reaction takes place only at high temperature in the presence of catalyst, which requires heat input, and not all of the waste heat can be recovered, due to that pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics.
So, if direct combustion of natural gas is replaced by steam-methane reforming followed by burning of hydrogen, the net energy output is lower, for the same emission rate of CO2. Boris Johnson would not reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, he would only make the process less efficient.
Electrolysis consumes the same amount of energy in generating hydrogen as the energy obtained by burning it (First Law of Thermodynamics), so there is no energy advantage to this process. The problem would be using existing natural gas pipes to deliver hydrogen. At equal temperature and pressure, burning natural gas yields 3.3 times more heat per unit volume than hydrogen. In order to deliver the same amount of heat to a furnace using hydrogen, the hydrogen would have to be at 3.3 times the absolute pressure as natural gas, which would increase compression costs for the supplier of hydrogen or natural gas.
Are there any scientists or engineers in Boris Johnson’s cabinet, to explain to him the abject stupidity of his hydrogen policy?
….”aiming to develop the first town heated entirely by hydrogen by the end of the decade’.
If the hydrogen leaks and catches on fire and burns the town down will they say the town was heated by hydrogen ?
😉
What has happened, I’m from Sweden and obviously not privy to the finer point of British politics but Boris didn’t strike me as an alarmist. Did something change or did I misread him from the start?
Fredrik B.
December 11, 2020 at 1:17 pm
You’re right…he was sensible at first then he met his new wife who is a much younger and rabid green alarmist. She pulls the strings…just like wacky Nancy Regan did with Ronald.
The pandemic didn’t work as expected. Back to time proven population control by freezing winters.
Attached are some interesting fact from the Breitbart article which shows how ridiculous the UK zero carbon plan is.
The Climate Emergency is just called an ‘emergency’
Because the word ‘emergency’ gives the government fascism power, to force people to do idiotic, ridiculous, things that do not make engineering, environmental, or economic sense and will make zero difference to Climate Change.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/10/great-reset-bojo-wants-to-quadruple-your-heating-bill/
The abundance of gas, and the ease with which it can be stored, transported and used, makes it the cheaper and more convenient form of energy compared with electricity. Hence Britain’s gas network transports nearly three times as much energy as the electricity grid (876 TWh vs 324 TWh).
Furthermore, nearly 40 per cent of electricity is produced by gas-fired power stations. To replace gas with electricity implies scaling up the grid and generating capacity by more than five times.
This, and many other implications of Johnson’s incautious 10-point plan, make it perhaps the most absurdly expensive political folly ever to have been inflicted on a population.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-55276769, UK to stop supporting overseas fossil fuel based projects.
Now guarantee fuel poverty continues.
I thought that hydrogen could leak through ANY material, being such a small molecule. With losses being up to 2% a day from pressurised tanks.
How in that case, do they propose to keep hydrogen under pressure within thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles of small pipework?
R
Dear Borris,
If you are going to condemn an entire nation to energy poverty to impress a click (or bird as you say in the UK), could you at least choose a hot chick?