DESNZ Heat Network Disinformation

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

More lies from Labour:

Families are set to save on their energy bills as more than 750,000 homes will benefit from cheaper, cleaner heating. 

Heat networks are a way of heating multiple buildings from a central source – such as taking excess heat generated from a data centre, or from a factory – via a network of pipes carrying hot water which provide communities with low-cost and efficient heat.  

Residents will benefit from cheaper heating and improved efficiency through brand new low-carbon heating and repairs to faulty pipes, backed by £90 million in government funding, creating more than 2,000 jobs across all projects. 

In London, a mega heat project under and alongside the River Thames will supply 650,000 homes with clean heat, with the potential to benefit over a million residents.  

Backed by £41 million, it will initially transport hot water 25 kilometres each day by electric barges down the River Thames and then via a specially constructed tunnel underneath the river, heating homes and businesses across the city along the route.  

The project, subject to planning consent, will help unlock around £5 billion of investment in London’s local heat networks and support skilled jobs in tunnelling, engineering and river transport. 

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/families-set-to-save-money-through-new-and-upgraded-heat-networks

Paul Burgess has an excellent analysis here. Just download his pdf:

https://paulburgess3.substack.com/p/london-thermal-barges-an-exercise

As Paul points out, the amount of heat stored in those barges won’t be enough to heat 650,000 homes. He calculates the true figure is between 12000 and 25000. That would equate to a cost of up to £3400 per home.

The £41 million only pays half of the capital cost and does not include the cost of the tunnel. It also does not pay for the heat interface units, internal pipework etc, needed at point of use.

As Paul points out “The £41 million is a first payment on a much larger carbon-reduction programme. The headlines treat it as the cost of heating 650,000 homes. That is not what the figure is.”

There is no business case which pulls together all costs, including, crucially, operating costs. Without such an analysis, there is no evidence there will be any saving at all for the homes supplied.

Paul’s full conclusions are:

An honest government statement would be this. In order to follow a policy of cutting carbon, ministers are giving £41 million to a scheme that will not deliver what the announcement describes. The grant buys barges and tanks. It does not buy heat in 650,000 homes. The tunnels are unconsented and unpriced. There is no published path, even a rough one, from Belvedere to a radiator that includes barge running costs, heat lost in storage and pipes, heat interface units in each building, internal pipework, meters, or the local networks. Delivery to the home has been left off the page.

The work has been announced as if costing were optional. The picture comes first: boats, a home-count, a date. The engineering and the bill come later, or not at all. That is how a school project is run, not how a capital scheme is run. Ministers are spending public money with no published whole-life cost, no operating budget for the barges, and no price for putting heat into the building. They are doing it with borrowed money. The 10-year gilt yield was about 5.3% in the days before this announcement, higher than a year earlier. Every unpriced tunnel and every heat interface unit will be paid for by taxpayers and bill-payers already carrying a heavier interest charge. This is not a spare-cash experiment. It is more debt, taken on for a scheme whose delivery costs have not been written down.

What the public case does achieve is higher-cost heating. Gas already heats these buildings, at about 9 pence per useful kilowatt-hour with a modern boiler. This scheme adds transport, storage, several heat exchanges and a network charge. Heating will cost more. That is the certain result. The uncertain result is the carbon saving. There is no independently checked account that covers the incinerator, the electricity used by the barges, the losses, or the gas boilers kept as backup. The press release assumes a carbon cut. It does not prove one.

Even if that cut were real, it would not change the climate. UK household heat is a small part of world emissions. Four barges on the Thames are a rounding error. The honest sentence is therefore: London homes will pay more to heat their rooms, in the name of a carbon policy whose effect on the world is too small to measure. The £41 million is the first public instalment of that policy. The rest of the bill has not been written down.