As the heatwave hysteria somewhat subsided, the Telegraph revealed that in the future, use of heat pumps might be rationed at times of energy shortages.
The Guardian, meanwhile, reported
that the Prime Minister’s replacement, Andy Burnham is considering
proposals to “make heat pumps cheaper to run than boilers”. The occupier
of Number 10 may have changed but a profound unreality is still driving
the policy agenda.
The main problem afflicting the green agenda
was always physics. The second was economics. And the third was
democracy. Heat pumps capture this sequence of problems perfectly. Green
technology attempts to convert diffuse, ambient energy into useful
energy – heat, in the case of heat pumps. And it does this in place of
using a dense energy resource such as gas. But the relative density of
these energy sources means that the machine that collects ambient energy
must be so much larger, plus its capacities do not fully overlap with
what it purportedly replaces.
Consequently, a heat pump is at least six times as expensive as a gas combi boiler, occupies a much larger part of a home, responds less effectively to a household’s needs and requires the making of substantial alterations to the home and the behaviour of the occupants in order to function as expected. For those many reasons, most people have rejected them.
And for that reason, successive governments have said that homes will have heat pumps whether they’re wanted or not, because the superior product that they replace will be ‘phased out’....<<<Read More>>>...
