secretary of state for energy security and net zero

secretary of state for energy security, net zero and hot air

Just trying to work out which Led Zeppelin album to put on. Not sure why, but something has brought that to front of mind.

Easy...

Volume 4. Hydrogen is a sure 'fire' way for more people to take their own 'Stairway to Heaven'.

Hydrogen in any shape or form leaks. Because it is the smallest sized atom making perfect seals that work year in, year out is next to impossible.

You are gonna need a 'Whole Lotta Love" to make it viable. The slighest 'Communication Breakdown' can be catastrophic. Then the 'Levee will break' and there will be tears all around.

The only thing the UK has net zero in is intelligence in government.

Unfortunately, they're hardly alone.

Says it'll have its Portugal through Spain, France and onto Germany Hydrogen pipe up flowing by 2030. Meanwhile in a "world class" enclave in Whitehall a cabinet minister bullshits.

The EU says a lot of things. Different flag, same scoundrels.

It should also be noted that the vast majority of homes in cities in the UK cannot use individual heat pumps due to lack of space and/or noise from the fan units. If you live in a terraced street with no garden, where do you put your heat pipes? There are hand-wavy vague and untested plans for utility companies to install street-wide pipe networks under roads and pavements but so far nothing concrete (no pun intended) about how this would function nor how much it would cost. To meet the 2050 deadline they would need to be converting 20,000 properties a *week* to heatpumps. I suspect the current conversion rate is more likely closer to 20 a week than 20,000!

Also there's different use cases - I don't have my heating on to maintain a temp (infact I don't even have a thermostat on the heating), when it gets too cold I turn it on for a while. I can measure my heating use in a year in a few tens of hours. This is also almost the worse case for a heat pump.

So if I switched to a heat pump, I'd have to change how I use my heating to a model that will use a massively larger amount of energy then I do now.

It sounds like you DO have a thermostat. It's YOU. And you've got it set very low.

Personally I'm shivering when my office gets below 19 deg C. When it hits 21 I take off the 2nd jumper.

Either way, neither of us want a heat hump.

I close the windows when it gets to 16C...

Funnily, my house was marked down on it's energy report when I had my PV system installed for not having a smart thermostat. Seems having your heating maintain a temp/etc is more energy efficient then having the heating turned off. You'd think not having it on would be the more efficient option...

19? It's 19 at work and I find it unbearable.

It's currently 12C in my bedroom and about 7C in the kitchen. That's good enough for winter.

At about 5C in the kitchen, it's time to put on a light jacket or maybe upgrade the sweater to a wooly one. The main problem is I cook with a butane camping stove (the main cooker needs new pipes and pressure regulator and stuff and for the amount that I fry stuff I really can't be arsed to sort all that out) and butane doesn't cope as well with the cold as I do.

This week, it's been a bit rainy but 10 outside. Perfectly pleasant to go for walks along the edges of the fields. I can even open the kitchen window for a while, let the warm in. ;)

I'm literally sitting here with the alarm clock saying it's 20.2 and I'm wearing a vest, long sleeved top, cardigan + thick jumper. That's on top. Got nothing on the bottom half, perhaps that's why I'm still cold. ;-)

Sorry, I'll get the mind bleach.

This reminds me of the great Cambridge Office Heating Wars of 2013 (you all know who you are) where a few people would sit in a short sleeved shirt with a desk fan blowing (I'm looking at you Other Steve), and the rest would have a hat, coat and scarf. A more innocent time. No Trump. No Brexit. No Covid. No Culture Wars.

We've had our Office Heating Wars in London too, but the fans were not for cooling, they were for deflecting the air con draught towards other coworkers.

My internal thermostat is completely broken. I had the heating turned up to 23°C the other day and was still all "bloody hell, it's brass monkeys in here"; I seem to have warmed up a bit since, but I'm also reminded of days working in London where what passed for summer could still be unbearable and I'd go and lurk in the computer room to cool off. By "lurk" I mean lie on the floor and not care if anyone is looking.

"...It's currently 12C in my bedroom and about 7C in the kitchen. That's good enough for winter. ..."

You obviously don't have a wife.

Especially one who comes from Russia where they seal up their houses for the winter and heat them to 25C+.

The occupants will not be seen dead in a jumper or other wooly top inside the house.

My SWIMBO who hails from Siberia is slowly starting to become used to the damp, cold UK after 30+ years.

You cold-hearted bastard. Shame on you for imposing UK weather on a poor Siberian woman !

In top of which, installing a heat pump, due to the way they're being used, would require replacing all of the existing central heating pipework with larger diameter pipes and all of the existing rads with much bulkier ones, in order to compensate for the much cooler temperatures that the system will operate at.

What is always glossed over, in this push for heat pumps, is that they can't be a drop-in replacement for a hot water boiler; using them as such is a very poor use of the technology. Why are we proposing to use hot air to warm up water, which then heats up the air again, when we could just use the air directly? But then, that would require the admission that a "heat pump" is just a crippled HVAC system, which would then require them to explain why HVAC is bad for the environment until you're using it to make tepid water, at which point it's suddenly good.

>> in order to compensate for the much cooler temperatures that the system will operate at.

That's weird... LG make an air source heat pump that has a flow temp of 75°C (at an outside air temp of -15°C whilst still maintaing a COP of 5; ok so it falls to 2 at -30°C but you can't have everything) which is around the design flow temperature for normal heating systems (much hotter than that and you have a real issue with burning yourself if you accidentally touch a hot rad). It is about £5k list price.

Still I guess other manufacturers exist who make inferior products whilst charging the government (via the grant schemes) more, which by default are the machines the majority of people will install...

The boiler also produced domestic hot water without need for a storage cylinder and header tanks. Does the LG heat pump. If it does, fine. If not then it's going to involve some reinstatement in older properties like mine - the cylinder was taken out along with some of the pipework but the original cupboard and header tanks remain. In newer properties it would to involve quite a lot of work to retro-fit these or else the addition of supplementary electric heaters.

for 5k, I could refurbish the entire heating system in my house, with a brand new boiler, and I wouldn't be saddled with a huge, noisy compressor and a great big storage tank taking up space after the fact. The heat pump itself also doesn't supply that temperature alone; it requires a booster heater, which is a heating element in the tank. If it's the one I'm thinking off, then it will only get up to about 57°C without the booster running.

So, to recap: You pay more, you get less, and you have to spend a premium on electricity in order to get the same heating performance as the gas boiler you're replacing.

"But then, that would require the admission that a "heat pump" is just a crippled HVAC system"

Yes, exactly. Heat pumps = environmental champion, air conditioning = destructive ogre.

where do you put your heat pipes?

Who cares? The most important part are subsidies and that you flog the stock of heat pumps.

The gravy train must go on.

I suspect the current conversion rate is more likely closer to 20 a week than 20,000!

First they probably need to do something with unregulated industry. If they let cowboys install those heat pumps, what can go wrong?

> where do you put your heat pipes?

Could they not be attached to an external wall, like people do today with air con units?

Agree we will never meet the 2050 deadline though.

For most of the houses in my area, that would have to be on the front wall, over hanging the pavement, as there's no front yard/garden. And yeah, you're not meant to put things that overhang the public space, it has to be on your land.

An Air Con unit is a heat pump.

If you run the refrigerant through an air con unit in reverse, you have a heater.

The reason people are talking about needing garden space or under street pipes is due to the fact that heat pumps get less efficient as the outside air gets colder. Modern air heat pumps work well below freezing, so most of (e.g.) the UK is fine with a wall-mounted device.

According to the Met Office, the mean minimum temperature for England sits around the 1.5-2.7 between December and March, which is below the minimum optimum temperature for heat pump heating efficiency (about 5 degrees), but well above the point where the heat pumps are less efficient than burning gas.

Therefore, most of the time, a wall-mounted reversible air-conditioning unit would replace a gas boiler for the purposes of heating a UK home, and would do a fine job of acting as air conditioning in the summer.

On the days where it's coldest, when the need for heating is greatest, wall-mounted heat pumps would be working at their least optimal efficiencies, which is why ground-pipe heat pumps are a preferable solution since once you get about 2-3 feet down, the temperature is extremely consistent all year round.

"Modern air heat pumps work well below freezing"

How do they cope with the air flow being blocked with snow and ice?

"How do they cope with the air flow being blocked with snow and ice"

Commonly the heat pump runs in reverse occasionally (and only briefly) to defrost frosted-up heat exchangers. Possibly a bit like your fridge/freezer, although designs vary.

Commonly heat exchangers are sheltered so that rain and snow don't land on them.

It's definitely not rocket science.

It should be obvious to all that hydrogen-based heating is (edge cases aside) uneconomical.

We're really going to take our renewable electricity, turn it into hydrogen, then set fire to it, giving you maybe half of the original energy back as heat? Or we could, you know, run a heatpump which returns *3 times* the orignal energy as heat.

Yes, we need fatter pipes and larger radiators, and somewhere outside for the gubbins to live. The fact that new houses today are still being installed with microbore pipes that cannot be used by heatpumps should be a scandal.

Where's the popcorn icon. We need a popcorn icon. I can't wait for the replies to this.

The points you make are good, but it is complicated.

Heat pumps only cover heating needs as opposed to other uses for fossil fuels (lookin' at you, transportation), so if renewable hydrogen production really takes off and economies of scale kick in, then it may end up being cheaper to do exactly that, with a low cost of hydrogen. (Yes, it's probably better to burn the hydrogen at an all up power station to power individual home's heat pumps, but air-based pumps are at their worst when people need them the most and ground-based pumps are so much more expensive to install).

In the event that we go the simplest route as a society and just change burning coal/oil/gas for electricity and petrol/diesel/kerosene etc for transport to renewable-generated hydrogen, which itself is an inelegant but functional way to deal with the biggest weakness of solar and wind (there isn't necessarily enough sun or wind when we need the power), it wouldn't surprise me if homes really would be built with Hydrogen boilers/furnaces rather than heat pumps, to keep the house costs down. Not saying that's a good idea, just saying that it wouldn't be surprising.

If the grid can guarantee to deliver all that electricity all the time, fine. We have had quite a number of power cuts of varying duration and, given the fact that our road's underground cable were installed in the age of aluminium I expect more, and that's without considering the wider area failures.

Now it's true that when the electricity fails so does gas-fired central heating. However we have two gas fires. We also have a gas hob so that it's possible to make hot drinks and hot food even when the electric kettle and oven aren't working.

Decarbonising energy supply makes electricity a common point of failure for domestic heating, cooking and, soon, telecommunications. Do any of the plans make provision for improving resilience?

"we could, you know, run a heatpump which returns *3 times* the orignal energy as heat"

Well, closer to 2 times if the household wants use the heat pump for stored hot water above the temperature to kill off legionella. Or you could stick with low temp and use top up direct heating or UV treatment, both increasing the electricity demand.

Let's go with 3x, sounds good, although as you observe it requires a complete makeover of the house heating system - new extra large rads, new piping, new control gear and pumps. Say an all in price of £15k for the heat pump and full system retrofit and make-good. Then we've got to look at the insulation - upgrading a house to the necessary standard for a heat pump is costly, a ballpark figure based on my experience planning such schemes, say £12k per property if done at scale. For say 18m properties that's £480 billion, and ignores supply chain constraints that would inevitably increase the costs of a national programme. Then we've got to find the electricity. In a winter peak we've already got no worthwhile spare generating capacity, nor would adjacent countries as peak demand is invariable a winter anticyclone affecting much of north west Europe. So we need additional despatchable generation that'll provide 170 GW of heat* Factor in electricity system losses of around 11%, say 15% planning contingency, and that's 215 GW of capacity that is needed and able to provide that for up to about 12 days. Wind power won't cut it because winter anticylconic conditions are usually calm, clear and still, and solar is a poor asset in winter in the upper northern hemisphere. Eight to ten nuclear power stations could do it, at a cash cost of say £200 billion, but wouldn't be well utilised across the year so the power would be hugely expensive. To transfer that volume of power would need a tripling of the electricity transmission and distribution system capacity, as a benchmark based on some brief analysis done when I worked in the industry you're looking at a trillion quid. Or we could use some mythical surplus of renewables and some similarly mythical form of energy storage, which would cost even more.

The econanists at COP28 might think they've saved the world, hopefully they've made contact with an alien race who will be willing to pay for all this.

* Watson et al, 2021, "How will heat pumps alter national half-hourly heat demands? Empirical modelling based on GB field trials."

"... who will be willing to pay for all this."

You have to balance your braod-brush costings with the broad-brush costings of NOT doing it.

You might start, for example, with the cost of submerging the eastern seabord of the USA to a depth of, say, 50 metres.

That's what will happen when all that polar ice melts.

And who said that was bad thing ?

You might start, for example, with the cost of submerging the eastern seabord of the USA to a depth of, say, 50 metres.

Have you thought of starting a GoFundMe page?

"secretary of state for energy security and net zero"

The severe oxymoron of that title sounds like it should come from a sketch.

"Another Johnson era fantasy fails to survive its encounter with science, engineering and economics"

Net zero is a fantasy that fails to survive its encounter with science, engineering and economics. Doesnt matter which fool who fell for it is the reality still stands.

Hey! Some people are doing very well out of it!

Cameron's relatives, for instance.

And oh look, he's back in government again, just in time for another round of pre-election looting.

What exactly this government is in a position to supply. The give new meaning to the word 'useless' every day.

Just wait until next year.

Then we can have an equally useless government. Perhaps they'll even surpass this one? The new lot are definitely more in favour of Net Zero fantasies, so let's wait and see how that pans out.

" What exactly this government is in a position to supply. "

Bullshit? Lies? Subterfuge? Bluster? Terrible laws suitable for a police state? All your data are belong to Palantir?

Did I miss anything?

Yes, of course you missed some momentous achievements over the past fourteen years, who

The plastic bag tax,

mandatory cat-chipping,

the bonfire of the quangos,

selling champagne in pint bottles,

HS2,

five prime ministers,

seven chancellors,

And somewhere around about 1,054 ministerial appointments up until April of this year. That includes junior minister appointments, and is based on parliamentary data. What a shower of dishonest, incompetent shit.

I categorically do not want a hydrogen pipe into my house. That stuff is extremely dangerous and most lay people just don't understand just HOW dangerous that gas is. It's not "just a different gas". It's extremely wide explosion band, extremely small molecular size and extremely low ignition energy means it's an entirely different beast. I trust most spanner wielding monkeys to be able to fit a gas pipe to an appliance. I DO NOT trust the average spanning wielding monkey to be able to install and more importantly leaktest a hydrogen system. I've felt the pain of trying to make co-workers understand how to do vacuum leak testing and hydrogen sniffer tests and with some people it's like pulling teeth. Trying to explain why even tiny leaks were actually a big deal to non-technical managers and project leads equally painful

I also do not want heat network connections. You'll be locked into an extremely expensive contract with an energy company that has basically no checks or balances against them just raising the price year on year on year (inflation and rising energy cost, just trust us). And if you don't like it you can just freeze to death without heating as they'll just cut you off. This is already the case in the Netherlands anywhere such systems exist and heating there already costs about double to triple what it would have cost for most of those houses to heat using natural gas.

While I agree in principle, I don't remember houses exploding with any sort of high frequency or regularity back when most of the UK used "town gas", largely consisting of hydrogen, which surely must have had the same propensity to leak back then as it does now. Physics hasn't changed.

https://publications.iafss.org/publications/frn/813/-1/view/frn_813.pdf

They did explode. So do houses with natural gas. That paper isn't a comparison.

"largely consisting of hydrogen"

Apparently, about 50% hydrogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas#:~:text=Town%20gas%20is%20a%20more,roughly%20equal%20quantities%20by%20volume.

Houses are a lot more leak tight now than they were back then, even that little bit of draft makes a lot of difference when dealing with very light gas like hydrogen. There was also plenty of kabooms.

I don't remember houses exploding with any sort of high frequency or regularity back when most of the UK used "town gas"

It did give so-inclined school-boys opportunities to do interesting explodey things with balloons and fuses... We were also quite keen on the possibilities of sodium chlorate.