As we speak, the dominant type of heating within the UK is gasoline boilers. We’re very conscious of this, a lot in order that we’re at the moment one of many nation’s largest suppliers of pure gasoline. And as an organization who loves our clients we do the very best job for them.
We additionally know that we should get carbon emissions out of our system quickly. House heating is chargeable for 13% of all our emissions. The one approach to decarbonise heating is to maneuver away from burning pure gasoline in boilers.
Given we’re one of many largest gasoline suppliers, we’ve an enormous duty to supply a viable different. And there’s a unbelievable one: 3-4x extra environment friendly than one of the best boiler; powered by electrical energy; tried, examined and broadly used world wide in all climates. The warmth pump.
In fact, we might simply sit round and wait to see if hydrogen for heating turns into the norm. It’s much more costly, so we’d earn more money than we do promoting gasoline – however we don’t assume customers ought to need to pay a lot extra. It’s unlikely it’d be environmentally worthwhile, and it’d be extremely costly to do the engineering mandatory. Virtually each impartial research agrees (certainly, we expect 43 impartial research agree and none disagree).
However while warmth pumps are cheaper to run than gasoline boilers (at the very least on Octopus’ tariffs), and cheaper to keep up, they’re at the moment costlier to put in.
We predict that each authorities and firms may help change this.
For instance:
Over time, improve the variety of warmth grants accessible while decreasing the worth. When the Boiler Improve Scheme elevated from £5,000 to £7,500, our enquiries shot up 500%.
As we speak, cheaper warmth pumps are extremely popular – and that is great- however infinite excessive subsidies are costly for the general public purse so we consider that over time the worth of the grant ought to lower to place the onus on firms like us to innovate and drive prices down.
So typically, authorities has kick-started markets like this with nice success (wind, photo voltaic, and so forth). As we get to a much bigger market, economies of scale and improvements can drive down prices and guarantee worth for cash.
Octopus’s typical set up is already round £7500-8000 earlier than the federal government grant, and set to return down a lot additional as we scale up our personal manufacture. We count on different firms are set to do the identical.
Eradicating inexperienced levies from electrical energy. Just a few a long time in the past, gasoline was cleaner than electrical energy as a result of coal dominated our gas combine. Electrical energy started to be taxed with a inexperienced levy to pay for social funds and renewables, which have been then costly, and to discourage electrical energy use.
Now coal is sort of gone, and renewables present greater than 40% of all energy, electrical energy is vastly cleaner than gasoline. But it nonetheless bears further taxes.
We’re open minded about the place this price strikes – whether or not onto normal taxation or onto gasoline (which might be balanced by electrical energy price reductions – so households would see comparatively little impression). However we should transfer on from a world the place the most affordable, cleanest gas will get taxed essentially the most.
We don’t advocate growing the worth of gasoline boilers – however we should maintain driving the price of warmth pumps, and electrical heating, down, and driving to make warmth pumps one of the best resolution for households of all kinds.
Except for supporting the coverage instructions above, right here’s a few of the issues Octopus Power is doing to make that occur.
Constructing our personal warmth pumps. Final month we launched the Cosy 6: cheaper, smaller, and tremendous user-friendly. It’s received easy controls in the identical app the place clients handle their Octopus Power account, and repair and upkeep from the identical award-winning Octopus staff.
The primary gadgets have rolled off the productions line and we’ll quickly be manufacturing hundreds each month from our manufacturing facility in Belfast.
Creating game-changing good warmth controls. Our good controls intelligently optimise warmth pumps to work at most cost- and energy- effectivity, take advantage of renewables within the system and keep away from stress on the grid (at instances of excessive fossil fuels).
Taking it a step additional: our controls allow a warmth pump to work inside a Zero Payments house. We’re working with housing builders to construct Zero Payments houses of their hundreds, fitted with the best mixture of photo voltaic panels, battery storage and inexperienced warmth to imply that the home-owner merely by no means pays an power invoice.
Streamlining warmth pump set up processes – growing high quality while decreasing price. We’ve invested £10,000,000 into our inexperienced warmth R&D Centre in Slough, the place groups of engineers are integrating ‘F1 pitstop’ fashion operations to reinvent the set up, so it’s a lot faster to get warmth pumps into houses. In the identical centre, we’re…Coaching hundreds of latest warmth pump engineers to satisfy the rising demand, serving to transfer individuals right into a inexperienced profession match for the long run.
Decarbonising heating might not seem like it’ll be straightforward, but when we get it proper – it may be lots cheaper than many people assume – and ship an improve to hundreds of thousands of houses. In any case, what individuals need is snug houses, affordably – and while gasoline boilers have been okay – they’re typically clunky and unreliable. A lot so {that a} typical boiler insurance coverage coverage prices greater than typical house insurance coverage.
Warmth pumps couldn’t solely lower carbon and cut back the native air pollution which contributes to 30,000 deaths a yr within the UK – however they may additionally herald extra dependable, higher worth heating methods.