The way we heat our homes is changing.
As the #world moves away from #fossil #fuels, we will be saying #goodbye to our gas fires and boilers - and instead electrifying the heating systems in our homes.
Extinguishing the fires in our homes is a big change, human beings evolved around the comfort of a #campfire.
So, what will this mean for you - and the systems that deliver the energy we depend upon?
In just 12 years' time you probably won't be able to buy a gas boiler any more.
The government's ambition is to ban sales of new ones from #2035.
Heating our homes accounts for as much as 16% of the UK's planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
The front-runner in the race to replace our boilers is undoubtedly the heat pump.
There is a very simple reason why - they are extraordinarily efficient.
They cost more than #gas #boilers, but for every unit of energy you put in, you can get about three units of heat out.
Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, it is not quite as simple as that.
Heat pumps produce hot water at lower temperatures than gas boilers.
That means to get the heat into your home, it is a good idea to have bigger radiators.
And you will keep more of the heat in if your home is well-insulated and has double glazing. But doing that additional work can massively add to your costs.
Typically it costs £10,000 to buy and install a heat pump.
And there is another issue.
Unit for unit, electricity typically costs three times as much as gas.
That means even though your new heat pump is three times as efficient as your gas boiler it costs about the same to run.
There's a £5,000 #grant to help householders with the costs in England and Wales. Scotland is more generous, it offers £7,500.
Critics say this #support is not enough and that people need more help if the government is going to get anywhere near its target of 600,000 new heat pump installations every year by 2028.
At the moment it is way below that.
#Government green heating plan 'seriously failing'
There were just 60,000 heat pumps installed in the #UK last year, making it one of the slowest adopters of this new #technology in #Europe.
At current rates of installation, it will take more than 400 years before every British home has a heat pump.
So far fewer than 12,000 grants have been cashed - perhaps because it only covers the cost of the pump itself, and not the installation.
And even if households are able to pay, there is another barrier to hitting the government's heat pump targets.
There are other electric heating systems - immersion boilers, electric fires, fan heaters and infra-red radiators, for example - but none of these is as efficient as #heat #pumps.
An alternative could be hydrogen-powered boilers.
They are just like your existing gas boiler - so no need for a new set of radiators - except that they burn hydrogen instead of natural gas.
But using #hydrogen has its problems - for a start, where would it all come from?
The cleanest and greenest way to produce it would be to use electricity, through a process called electrolysis - but most of the time it would be more efficient just to use that electricity to heat our homes with heat pumps.
We could produce hydrogen from the natural gas we currently use, but we would then have to find a way to stop all the #carbon #dioxide (CO2) the process produces from going into the atmosphere.
The #CO2 could be captured and pumped underground - but that is expensive and has never been done at scale before.
What is more, hydrogen boilers have not proved popular with the public.
A trial scheme in #Ellesmere Port has just been cancelled after residents refused to have new boilers installed in their homes.
Whatever choices we make about how we heat our homes in future one thing is certain, we are going to need a lot more electricity.
And it all needs to be green.
Right now, at peak times, the #National #Grid requires 60GW of #electricity.
By 2050, some estimates suggest it will need to double to at least 120GW.
At the moment about 40% of our electricity is generated by burning gas - so that's going to have to be phased out.
Courtesy to BBC news article
"The truth about heat pumps and the power needed to run them" By Justin Rowlatt
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