The BBC’s Heat Pump Propaganda Backfires Spectacularly
The BBC’s Evan Davis trips himself up and succeeds in showing just why heat pumps are useless in the UK
He writes:
I know that not everybody is interested in the precise form of plumbing by which they heat their home, but it’s a topic I’ve become obsessed with. That’s partly because I have a French husband and we bought a very old, leaky house in northern France some years ago, which already had a heat pump installed.
I had never encountered one before. Quickly, it became apparent that the heat pump didn’t work properly, but fortunately it was under guarantee and once it had been replaced it worked very well indeed. In fact, we went on to buy a second one for our loft extension.
The other reason I’m interested in this topic is because I’m excited by the prospect of witnessing a historic change – a horses-to-cars type moment. Since the stone age, people have typically kept themselves warm by burning things – wood or coal on a fire, or oil or gas in a boiler. A society-wide shift to electric heat pumps would mark a transformation to a whole new way of creating heat in the home.
This government wants Britons to embrace heat pumps (as did the last). But it’s a shift that comes loaded with complicated questions in a country where electricity costs so much. Currently they’re more expensive than a gas boiler to install, and can also end up more expensive to run. As a result, they’re mostly aimed at the environmentally-conscious and better off.
The question is: can the figures ever add up so that it saves the average consumer money? And in a country where gas is so embedded as the norm, are heat pumps really the right technology for a greener future?
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce358gkx9vpo
He goes on to use the experiences of a London couple who spent £17k on a heat pump, including £5k on insulation.
According to them, their annual energy usage has fallen 28,000 kWh to 10,000 kWh. WOW!!
Only one problem, but most of that 28,000 was gas, which costs a quarter as much as electricity. Their new usage of 10,000 works out at about £2700 a year, excluding standing charges. They don’t give the figures, but their pre-heat pump bills would have been about the same.
But it gets worse!
The article admits that their heat pumps don’t heat your house adequately in cold weather, which the UK has it’s fair share of.
If you want to have the same temperature you had with gas central heating, you will need to get some other form of additional heating Davis says.
Well surprise, surprise.
Of course, the real problem according to the BBC is the “crazy high” price of electricity in the UK.
And who has caused that ‘crazy high’ electricity cost? The climate-obsessed government the BBC fawns all over that’s who:
When it comes to whether heat pumps make sense as a wider national strategy, the big challenge comes down to some basic maths.
A really well-configured heat pump might use a quarter of the energy of its gas boiler equivalent. But in the UK, the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour is about four times that of gas. These are broad-brush figures, but how do you make heat pumps pay, given their generally higher up-front cost?
For a mass market in heat pumps to take off, electricity can be more expensive than gas, but not that much more expensive.
Now in France, it is different. At my French home, I pay about 18p per kWh most of the day for electricity (and less by night). In London, on my latest bill, I pay 28p per. That 10p difference is crucial.
Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus – the biggest retail energy supplier in Britain and the biggest vendor of heat pumps too – is enthusiastic about the technology. “[We install] around 1,000 a month, typically,” he says. “There’s still quite a lot of policy barriers, but people who get them are very, very happy.”
But he accepts the “crazy high” price of UK electricity is a problem. “In the UK, currently, electricity is about four and a bit times more expensive than gas. In Germany, it’s three times, in France it’s just over twice as expensive as gas. And in Scandinavia, it’s in places almost at parity,” he says.
Neither Evan Davies or Greg Jackson are prepared to explain to readers that our prices are so high because of the £20 billion a year subsidy bill for ‘renewables’.
Our electricity prices reflect the actual cost. If we had a fleet of 40 year old nuclear plants like France, we would also have lower prices.
There is the usual waffle about ‘net zero’ from the pair of them in a desperate attempt to persuade people to buy heat pumps.
Davis even wheels out this ridiculous graph, suggesting they are popular!
Just under 52,000 out of about 30 million homes. That indicates popularity does it?
But we must thank Mr Davis for pointing out that heat pumps are unaffordable to buy for most people, don’t heat your home as well and won’t save you a penny on running costs.
Nice One, Evan!
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Bold emphasis added
Header image: Superstore
Tom
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Oh, what the heck…with the global warming trend over the last 40 years, who is going to need a heat pump? No mention of the expected life span of one of these things. That might make a difference too when deciding to install a heat pump.
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