The heat pump fantasy is dead – only our blinkered elites haven’t noticed
Has there ever been a more pernicious lie spread by government and lobbyists than the claim that net zero will save us money? Heat pumps, for example, weren’t just supposed to decarbonise home heating and thereby save the planet; they were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips renewable energy from wind and solar farms.
The narrative was always flawed: if heat pumps really did promise to save us money the government would hardly need to push them at us, offering grants of £7500 through its Boiler Upgrade Scheme. The government has good reason to bribe, as heat pump installations last year reached only 55,000 – far short of the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028.
As today’s National Audit Office report all but confirms, people are not falling for the bait. The Boiler Upgrade scheme has been an expensive failure, with consumers seeing through the guff and working out that dumping their gas boiler for a heat pump is not going to save them a bean; on the contrary, it will cost them more to install and more to run.
Remember how government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? That’s not quite going according to plan. The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices). It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.
True, there are those aforementioned £7500 grants available for early-adopters, so it might be possible if you have a small property to fit a heat pump at no greater cost than a gas boiler. But grants are not free money: we are all paying for them through our taxes and energy bills. If the government ended up having to bung all 30 million UK households grants of £7500 to fit a heat pump, it would add over £200 billion to annual public spending.
Electricity prices are so much higher than gas prices that you can’t count on saving money when it comes to running costs – even if your heat pump works as intended, and pumps at least three times as much heat energy into your home than it consumes in electrical energy. In any case, field trials have repeatedly shown many heat pumps failing to reach this benchmark, with the coefficient of performance (the ratio of heat energy out to electrical energy in) achieving a median of 2.80, falling to a mean of 2.44 when the outside temperature falls below 2 Celsius – exactly when you need your heating the most.
Bizarrely, given this tale of serial under-performance in both cost and effectiveness, the green lobby wants the government to double down in pushing heat pumps on consumers. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit preposterously blames low take up of heat pumps on government ‘dithering’ over hydrogen boilers. The government has said that it will make a decision by 2026 as to whether the existing gas network might be repurposed for hydrogen in future.
Predictably enough, the heat pump industry doesn’t like hydrogen and wants it ruled out sooner, saying that it will turn out to be too expensive. Maybe it will, but the inescapable truth is that a switch to heat pumps, too, will cost the country a fortune – and that the bill is going to fall on the heads of us all, in one way or another.
