Government in chaos over planned gas boiler ban

The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) today urged Boris Johnson to pause the poorly designed green home heating policies before they collapse into a humiliating fiasco.

In recent days the government’s intention to ban gas boilers and force households to switch to very expensive and less-effective Heat Pumps has produced a wave of well-founded public concern at the impracticality and cost.

It is now being reported that some homeowners may be able to continue to use natural gas for home heating - provided that they install new dual-fuel boilers so that they can burn hydrogen.

This scheme is a misunderstanding of existing government policy which plans that as many homes as possible would have to install both heat pumps and hydrogen capable boilers.

This is because heat pumps are expected by government to under-perform in very cold weather, compelling households to resort to electric bar fires (or similar resistive heating) resulting a gigantic 100 GW spike on the electricity system (as predicted by the Committee on Climate Change).

Holding sufficient electricity generation to meet this spike for only a few hours a year would be utterly unaffordable. Therefore, government is planning for householders to install a hydrogen boiler as a backup to a heat pump.

Having two expensive systems, Heat pumps, and hydrogen boilers, instead of one cheap and reliable natural gas system is obviously uneconomic and unwise. Nevertheless that is what civil servants currently plan to enforce.

Dr John Constable, GWPF’s energy editor, and author of Hydrogen: The once and future fuel?, which explains the role of hydrogen in propping up heat pumps, said:

It is now clear to all that the UK civil service plans for green heat are a ludicrously expensive and unsustainable pipe dream. The Prime Minister needs to put a stop to this rush into an inevitable political fiasco and allow households to make their own decisions about what heating system is cheapest and works best for them. Home heating is far too important to get wrong.”