I follow Rosenow on twitter. he tried to tell me that Heat Pumps /were/ economic, because the gas/electric ratio would change /in the future/ ! "I'll wait until then, then".
I've been saying the things in this report for years. Nobody I know is particularly attached to gas as a method of heating their home, they simply want to do it at the lowest cost possible. Make heat pumps have an ROI of less than 10 years and it'll change overnight.
The UK government keeps banging the drum of heat pumps, then navel-gazing when the public won't install them. This is not because - outside of a few anti-green nutbars - they don't think they work, it's because they can see no economic case for them to do so. Making comparisons to countries with different unit prices doesn't help. Instead of the wildly complex subsidy scheme (Which merely funds a grant-harvesting installation industry, at the expense of viable systems like air-air), simply moving green tariffs to sit exclusively on gas would make a big difference.
One comparison this report misses is against variable electric tariffs (eg Octopus Agile which has 1/2 hr pricing). I suspect the gap would narrow, but I don't know by how much, and doing that you're taking a bet about the average electric unit cost in the future vs gas. My guess here - and it's the same reason I currently don't think a battery system is investable - is that the difference between 'cheap' periods and 'expensive' periods is going to narrow as time-of-use tariffs encourage the significant extra demand from EVs away from peak-load times.
I've been saying the things in this report for years. Nobody I know is particularly attached to gas as a method of heating their home, they simply want to do it at the lowest cost possible. Make heat pumps have an ROI of less than 10 years and it'll change overnight.
The UK government keeps banging the drum of heat pumps, then navel-gazing when the public won't install them. This is not because - outside of a few anti-green nutbars - they don't think they work, it's because they can see no economic case for them to do so. Making comparisons to countries with different unit prices doesn't help. Instead of the wildly complex subsidy scheme (Which merely funds a grant-harvesting installation industry, at the expense of viable systems like air-air), simply moving green tariffs to sit exclusively on gas would make a big difference.
One comparison this report misses is against variable electric tariffs (eg Octopus Agile which has 1/2 hr pricing). I suspect the gap would narrow, but I don't know by how much, and doing that you're taking a bet about the average electric unit cost in the future vs gas. My guess here - and it's the same reason I currently don't think a battery system is investable - is that the difference between 'cheap' periods and 'expensive' periods is going to narrow as time-of-use tariffs encourage the significant extra demand from EVs away from peak-load times.