Home heating for net zero - no regrets?
A recent letter from BEIS to The Green Edge got us thinking about how much homeowners really understand about their net zero options.
Image credit: Engie
In response to a recent enquiry from The Green Edge, we’ve just received this letter from BEIS. Aside from the usual slogans and palimpsests, the letter tells us much of what we already know but one or two things we didn’t, and we thank the member of the BEIS Correspondence Unit for their reply.
We were particularly interested in the development of the Low Carbon Heating Technician apprenticeship - so much so that we dropped the IfATE relationship manager a line and received the reply that “This is still at a relatively early stage of development so the content is still being discussed and decided. The hope is that it will be available for use by the end of the year, though these things are always difficult to predict”. Given the number of heat pump installations being targeted, The Green Edge thinks they really need to be cracking on with that one. We also feel there must be plenty of precedents from countries like Denmark, for example.
We also noted the near-ubiquitous reference to the upcoming Green Jobs Delivery Group. We continue to hold our breath and are daily scouring cyberspace for further clues on its appearance, membership, and terms of reference.
But we were particularly struck - in para 4 of the letter - by the reference to ‘no regrets’ action. Not a new term, of course, particularly in the context of climate change, where it has - along with ‘low regret’ and ‘win-win’ - a reasonably widely-accepted meaning. The online Oxford Reference defines a no regrets policy as ‘an approach to management that involves erring on the side of caution and planning well in advance’.
The reason for our interest in the use of the ‘no regrets’ term is that this was the reason for our enquiry to BEIS in the first place. As we pointed out a recent post, depending on where someone lives, being an early mover to retrofit a heat pump in one’s home may not be the best ‘no regret’ thing to do right now, given the options on heat networks and even hydrogen that may be coming down the pipe (please pardon the pun). As the letter from BEIS says:
‘Given the diversity of heat demand, no single solution can provide the best option for everyone - a mix of technologies and customer options will need to be available to decarbonise heat at scale’.
Thinking about heat networks
We get the sense that heat networks, also known as - and somewhat tarred by the soviet implications of - district heating, are something that the Government is playing a game of catch-up with. Not mentioned at all in November 2020 in the Ten Point Plan, the Government shifted to a major announcement in December 2021 to regulate and expand the UK’s heat networks. We learn from the recent BEIS Decarbonising Heat in Homes report that the locations of heat networks in the UK were not even recorded by government until 2014, yet this briefing note to MPs from September 2020 estimates there are something like 14,000 of them. Certainly, the Climate Change Commission’s (CCC) June 2021 Progress Report to Parliament points out that Government commitment to low-carbon heat networks was only worth in the range of 2 TWh by 2030, as opposed to the CCC’s own recommended pathway of 25 TWh - although, it has to be said that almost everything else, including heat pumps themselves, fell short of the CCC’s pathways too.
Before steaming ahead with heat networks though (again, pardon the pun), the need for market regulation is clear. Starting in February 2020 and extended through the pandemic, the Government conducted an open consultation on building a market framework for heat networks and published its response in December 2021. This included appointing Ofgem as heat networks regulator. The need for regulation seems pretty urgent too, particularly in the light of Ofgem’s price cap rise and the lack of protection for existing heat network consumers against disproportionate knock-on price hikes from landlords and network providers. The Green Edge hopes that Ofgem will be addressing this soon, if it is not doing so already.
The heat networks pipeline
Image credit: BEIS / Bristol City Council (adaptation BMI)
And yet, while Number 10 doesn’t seem to have been talking much about them, BEIS at least has been working on heat networks for quite a while. It set up its Heat Network Delivery Unit (HNDU) in 2017 and under various funding schemes has brought together a pipeline of around 80 active heat networks projects across England and Wales1. Also - and of particular interest to The Green Edge - BEIS published in June 2020 what we consider to be an excellent Heat Network Skills Review, containing (as an appendix) a detailed skills mapping of the key occupations that will be needed to plan, build and operate heat networks2. We especially note that the appendix includes highly-skilled occupations like Heat Network Development Managers and Energy Master Planners, while our letter from BEIS - which we feel reflects DfE’s rather siloed-visioned focus on apprenticeships and bootcamps - doesn’t really look beyond the installing of heat pumps.
But this brings us to the main point of this post: while heat networks may emerge as more widespread solutions for new builds (gas boilers will not be fitted from 2023), how many existing homeowners are looking into this patchwork quilt of information to make ‘no regret’ decisions about how they should be getting their homes ready for net zero? Answers on the back of a new 95p first-class postage stamp, please. And we haven’t even mentioned the potential hydrogen option for home heating. That’s another whole thing in and of itself, of course, as well as another point in the Ten Point Plan.
At least some parts of government are recognising this. The Net Zero Buildings Council (NZBC) - interestingly, a joint initiative between BEIS and the Department of Levelling Up - was formed in late 2021 and had its first meeting in December. The minutes from that meeting record that David Capper, the Director for Clean Heat at BEIS, told the council ‘there is currently low consumer awareness of the options to decarbonise buildings and the changes that will impact different segments’. Further, in the ensuing roundtable discussion, ‘participants underlined the challenge of getting the country on board with the idea that the housing energy efficiency upgrade is at the forefront of the Net Zero agenda. It has sometimes tended to be seen as secondary to power, vehicles and other areas. Raising the national profile of this issue should therefore be an important objective of this council’.
Since the heating sector in the UK accounts for almost one third of the UK’s annual carbon footprint, with 17% coming from homes (which is around the same as coming from all petrol and diesel cars)3, The Green Edge tends to agree with the newly-formed NZBC on that one.
But how will this be done? Well, one way suggested by The Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE) in its September 2020 publication Getting (retro) fit for net zero: an approach for existing homes is that ‘household-level advice is provided by trained professionals in the form of a long-term renovation plan, underpinned by a robust quality assurance regime, and connected to the local area energy plan’. Good idea, but that’s a lot of households (something like 29 million of them needing to be upgraded to low carbon heating systems by 2050, according to the CCC) and a whole bunch of professionals, trained and tuned in to their local area plans. BEIS, Levelling Up, DfE and everyone else had better start thinking about finding those people now. The skillsets described for Heat Network Development Managers and Energy Master Planners in the aforementioned BEIS Heat Network Skills Review might be a good place to start.
Now, that would be a real no regrets thing to do4.
Endnote
While researching this post, we became interested in where the BEIS HNDU-supported heat network projects are taking place. So we took the pipeline document and ran it up into a spreadsheet. We can’t guarantee absolute accuracy in cutting-and-pasting from the original PDF and won’t be maintaining this spreadsheet, but we though some of you might be interested in seeing it, purely for illustration purposes. It’s available here.
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For this article, we admit we’ve focused on the HM Gov information for England and Wales and haven’t looked closely at how the devolved responsibilities are working in relation to heat networks. We do note however that Scotland appears to be ahead of the game and has a draft delivery plan in place.
While we note that, as owner of the Net Zero transition, BEIS should be taking a lead in all things related to technologies like heat networks - including the occupations affected and skills needed - we do wonder why we never appear to see anything like this from DfE
Source: Decarbonising heat in homes, BEIS, January 2022.
Update 7 April 2022: while we wait for this post to be released, we’re reading the new Energy Strategy and note it includes the the following: ‘By summer we will launch a comprehensive energy advice service on GOV.UK which will help consumers navigate what can be unknown territory to improve the energy performance of their homes. We will launch additional support for homeowners through telephone support and specific local area advice for energy consumers’. It will be interesting to see if this service includes heating as well as energy advice.