Ban Gas Boilers to Force People to Pay For More Expensive and Less Effective Heat Pumps, Says Government Infrastructure Adviser
The sale of new boilers should be banned to force people to switch to ‘greener’ but more expensive and less effective heat pumps, the Government’s infrastructure chief has said. The Telegraph has the story.
Heat pumps, which draw energy from the air or ground using electricity, can cut carbon emissions by roughly 75%, but currently cost about £10,000 to install.
The National Infrastructure Commission is investigating ways to fund the transition and encourage the take-up of heat pumps and will make recommendations to the Government next year.
However, Sir John Armitt, its Chairman, suggested that a ban on the sale of new gas boilers would have to be part of the answer.
He told the Telegraph: “Why would you move to a heat pump at somewhere between £5-£15,000 as long as you can buy or exchange for a new gas boiler for £1,500? The only way that you can make such a significant shift is by saying, well, ‘from a particular date, you will not be able to buy a new gas boiler’.”
The Government has set an ambition for the sale of new gas boilers to be phased out by the mid-2030s, but has declined to set a date for a ban. …
Sir John dismissed hopes that hydrogen could play a significant role in replacing gas in boilers and said there was little alternative to heat pumps for the U.K. to decarbonise its home heating, which accounts for about 14% of emissions.
However, he said that using them to replace gas boilers in 23 million homes would require a change of attitude to heating, and might require back-up by space heaters because heat pumps work best at lower temperatures, which are maintained throughout the day.
“What we like at the moment is just flicking the thermostat and, bang, we can raise the temperature by three degrees fairly quickly. You can’t do that with an air-source heat pump,” he said.
“If you want instant heat, then you will have to plug something else in to give you that extra boost.”
Or maybe we should just stick with gas boilers and find other things to worry about than the world possibly getting slightly warmer over the coming century – which the U.K. stopping using gas boilers will not, even according to IPCC models, have any material effect on anyway.
Worth reading in full.
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Note to self: Buy new gas boiler soon.
Note to self: leave the UK…
Note to self:leave the planet asap
It is, indeed, getting increasingly hard to believe that this planet is one’s rightful place in the universe!
I feel like I’m in the matrix. Every so often I meet someone else who is awake but that seems to be 1 in 10 🙁
Yes, I’m submitting my name to Elon. A god forsaken red rock is starting to look appealing.
Yes but where to?
Florida and Texas look good but can they hold out for long?
The small, independent countries will be brought to submission once the West has the legislation in place followed by the East taking over the West.
We need the sheeple to awake and say NO to all this BS.
Please do not sack, disemploy, or ‘let go’ this man. He’s exactly the sort of person that would get a job in Australia pushing wind and solar power.
He looks like he is about a million years old. No wonder he doesn’t care about us all freezing from 2030. He will be long gone.
Of all the ways of burning fossil fuels, gas boilers have to be among the cleanest. These people are either lunatics or sadists. Perhaps both.
No, just ignorant.
Not ignorant, I’m afraid. Far from it. They’re all compliant enablers of the globalist New Green Deal. The question is WHY are they all so compliant? They’re all going to be pushed off the cliff eventually, like everyone else…the useful idiots.
Not ignorant, ideological.
The sacrifice of man, as an end in itself, is his goal.
Evil.
Yep, they are insane.
Well I am old enough to remember the days when Jonnie 2 Jags Prescott (the ex ship steward) banned all real grown up gas boilers and replaced them with these wall mounted thingies. It was about the time we were assured diesel cars were better than scored bread and they would save some planet or other from global warming.
Since then our old diesel has clocked up 80000 reliable miles.
Here we go again.
A bunch of unelected “experts” formulating policies in the UK with no regard for the real world.
Armitt wouldn’t know this – and probably wouldn’t care – but many people in the UK would struggle to finance a new boiler, let alone these shitty, extortionate heat pumps (and I wonder who stands to gain from this latest fraud?)
Here’s a simple question for any of these fuckwits:
Even if you installed them in every UK household, how much would that reduce global emissions? Well under 1% I reckon.
So extremist policies which will directly hurt ordinary people to tackle something that is going to make minimal, if any, difference. Now why does that sounds familiar?
“Even if you installed them in every UK household, how much would that reduce global emissions? Well under 1% I reckon.”
Given that the UK’s entire CO2 emissions are under 1% of global total, if we stopped using electricity, gas, oil, coal and nuclear completely tomorrow, the reduction would be less than 1% and we’d all be eating grass and drinking from puddles… this has nothing to do with emissions.
PMSL Absolutely brilliant comment.
If you were down to eating grass and if you managed to cheat death, you’d have to worry about another kind of emissions. The kind the ruminants generate.
First, factor in the energy investment required to mine the metals, transport them, manufacture the heat pumps, transport and install them, as well as removing and recycling the millions of old gas boilers!
Does anyone seriously think that would be good for the environment?
I’d like to know how many of the prats (or their immediate families) promoting this have a vested interest in these ‘renewables’!
“you will have to plug something else in”
Something else, eh? What’s the point of hiring an engineer if he’s going to say something as dim as that?
Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant, nor is it an important greenhouse gas. Water vapour, at an average of 20,000 ppm, far outweighs CO2 at 400 ppm – of which man makes maybe 16 ppm. So if man disappeared tomorrow, the two biggest greenhouse gases would go from 20400 ppm to 20384 ppm. WHICH IS TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FFS.
Plants like CO2 as well!
By this point, anyone that still thinks these people are on our side is a lunatic. I am sick and tired of the government using taxes to force people into doing things. The purpose of taxes is as payment towards a service provided by the government. But these fascists are taxing us like mad for doing things they don’t like (driving, smoking, drinking, existing) even though they do not provide a single service related to those things. And yet they still have the audacity to tell us that they need more money so they’ll raise taxes. The entirety of government needs to be in jail for abusing their power. Here’s an idea: Want to stop people burning gas in their boilers? Well, the hotter it is outside, the less gas people burn to keep their houses warm. The solution is more global warming. Put that in your vape and puff on it. And one last thing: I urge everyone reading this that, next time you are talking with someone that wants less CO2 emissions to stop global warming, you ask them how many people are they ready to sacrifice. If global warming could be reversed with a magic wand, all… Read more »
I’ve been looking at these heat pumps and at best you can expect 3kw output per 1kw of electricity put in, though i’d say in our cold damp weather that number is closer to 2kw output per 1 kw input. Doesn’t seem overly impressive to me especially when factoring in the install/repair cost.
Oh and electricity costs 4 times that of gas per kw!.
You do the maths, as they say 😀
And electricity prices can change (ie go up….never seem to go down), in the blink of an eye.
Spot on.
How is it so simple to work this out but you never see it on the media? The way they go go you’d think a heat pump dishes out more energy than unicorns. Everyone knows that unicorn farts require one bale of hay and output 9999999999999999999990999999999999999kw of energy per day for a decade .
That can’t be right. Are you saying they put out three times more heat than they take in?
You put in 1kw of electric and it puts out 3kw .That is what the manufacturers state.
So it has an efficiency of 300%? That is a pretty bold claim on their part.
Also, who has looked at side effects; whole lifecycle carbon footprint etc of making everyone throw away their boilers, have new ones, new radiators, probably manufactured in China using coal fired power stations!
It’s several decades since I did thermodynamics but this is my understanding. You use 1kW of electricity to run the pump and compressor. Compressor compresses the refridgerant fluid back into liquid state, and the latent heat of vaporisation (the energy that was put in to vapourise the fluid) comes out and you can use it to warm your house. It’s the change of phase (gas to liquid via compression) that gives you the heat. Remember latent heats of vapourisation and fusion from O level Physics? Refridgerant then gets pumped again around the energy source extraction circuit (underground pipes for ground source) where the ground temperature puts heat energy into the fluid such that it turns into gas again. You are effectively trying to cool the earth around your house and transfer the heat in the earth to inside your house. Ie transfer heat from a ginormous object at a relatively low temp (the Earth) to raise the temperature of a small object (your house) to a higher temperature. Similar for air source, you have to fan a huge mass of air past the system to extract heat from the air. If the refridgerant fluid has the correct thermodynamic properties, and… Read more »
Then we’ll find when it needs replacement the refrigerant causes cancer and it costs you 10% to get rid of it! Not to mention that there’ll be power cuts because we won’t have enough power for decades to go all electric vehicles. We’ll either be run by the Chinese or have no rare earths for said vehicles because China has taken over Taiwan, Australia and NZ and we are refusing to deal with them.
Idiots running the West no wonder Putin thought he’d grab Ukraine.
If it’s what the manufacturers state we all know it will be a perfect installation, in a perfect house, in perfect environmental conditions.
It’s BS because (dangerous) climate change due to man is uncertain. Yes, we should keep an eye on it but general pollution (not to mention atmospheric experimentation) is more dangerous.
Even a fairly modest heat pump will be rated at 10-12 kwatts and so you will need approx 40 amps of available input capacity on your electric supply. If your house is only rated at 60 or 80 amps input and you have electric cooking and an electric shower you may well struggle with total available capacity. Or you will need some clever switching technology that turns your heat pump off when you want to cook your dinner or have a shower. There are around 300 houses in our village, if we all switch to heat pumps that will require an extra 12,000 amps of input capacity or some fancy switching so that not all houses can have their heat pumps on at the same time. An average sized rural care home will use between 50,000 to 70,000 litres of heating oil per annum to keep its elderly residents warm. The heat pump set-up for such a care home would be colossal and would require a substantial 3 phase supply to operate. There was a car advert a while back that had the catch-phrase ‘you do the maths’ , well it seems to me that even by my simplistic lay-person’s… Read more »
Also with 300 houses having heat pumps chugging away, it could destroy any rural tranquillity you might have today.
I’m going for a massive legal payout for people that were sold heat pumps on misleading information .
And you kinda have to wonder what all those heat pumps will do to the ground? I bet that they will lower ground temperature considerably.
It’s been well thought through hasn’t it?
The cynical among us might think the objective is to destroy the West.
“The National Infrastructure Commission is investigating ways to fund the transition and encourage the take-up of heat pumps and will make recommendations to the Government next year.”
Interesting that having decided that we are going to ‘transition’ to a green new future and committed us to a start date, they are now apparently just beginning to think about how we are going to fund and achieve it… I suppose it’s a good thing that someone’s finally going to do this but isn’t that known as putting the cart before the horse?
“If you want instant heat, then you will have to plug something else in to give you that extra boost.”
So the solution is to throw away our perfectly good and efficient heating, spend £10k on a new heat source, and then have other heat sources available for when you need some heat..?
What kind of loon have we put into positions where they have this level of influence on Government policy.?
The same ones that keep building windmills (you know, if you actually want electricity 24x7x365 then you’ll have to build something else).
Where will the electricity come from to power these inefficient heat pumps? Oh yeah, we’ll cover the entire country in solar panels and windmills, but wait we’ll still need fossil fuels to back up the hugely expensive renewables and balance the grid. And with the nationalisation of the grid, what could possibly go wrong 😱
One unicorn could power the lot;)
Don’t forget all the electric vehicles we have to have!
Is he invested in a heat pump company?
Good question.
Is he another one-trick-pony? – I recall the Covid ‘sages’ stated it wasn’t their job to worry about the economy. So the climate expert / zealots do not need to worry how granny will keep warm in winter.
Don’t worry folks, the government plan on mismanaging the economy so much that come 2035 £10,000 won’t buy you a pint of milk…so get your heat pumps ore-ordered while you still can!
How about we set a climate goal like limiting temperature rise in say 10 years time to a certain level and see how it goes. Then, if the deadly limit hasn’t been reached, we don’t need to wory.
Oh, I forgot. They have been doing that for the last 30 years and we are still waiting for armageddon.
Yeah they’re giving up on that. We can start fracking and use nuclear because they’ll have started WW3 before it comes online and there’ll only be a million of us still alive.
But in practical terms they don’t work. You need a highly insulated house, for a start. In the coldest months it’s like using an immersion heater to heat the house. The first wave of installations only took place due to the RHI bribes, ie a payment to reward the greedy and gullible. Heat pumps break, frequently. Heat pumps need maintenance and correct set up. Replacement parts (circuit boards) cost several hundred pounds. As to the cost – heat pumps cost at least 10 times more than traditional boilers. Unaffordable on a typical salary. The oafs coming out with these ridiculous edicts clearly cannot do basic maths, do not understand physics and have no empathy for others.
They have no empathy because they are trousering vast sums of taxpayers’ money for their obscene salaries and gold plated pension so can easily afford heat pumps, in addition to their virtue signaling EV as their second car.
What’s not to like about that; if you’re in the business that is.
I’ll be buying a new gas boiler a year before the date the f’wits announce they are banning them.
And I won’t be voting for any Party that advocates Net Zero.
We are on oil here. I have considered buying another boiler now and storing it until needed – our current boiler is only a few years old. Meanwhile, thank goodness for the multi fuel stove. I bet the sale of these is soaring.
All TPTB have to do to ensure compliance is make gas unaffordable or limit, cut off supply. We are at their mercy, there’s no escape. Unfortunately it won’t matter who you vote for as these policies are already embedded into the system of Global Public Private Partnerships. Haven’t you noticed we’re already to a large extent under global governance, such as the United Nations, World Health Organisation, World Economic Forum and their young global leaders .
The only escape is for the sheeple to awaken.
Whilst they are corrupt, sadistic and possibly psychopathic they are not f’wits. You won’t get any gas to power the boiler at a price that you can afford.
Johnson is only interested in climbing the greasy global pole
Where to? Johnson King of the World? I can’t see him being successful. Someone will step out of the shadows and even then the real power will be behind the throne.
I really cannot understand where the religion of heat pumps comes from. So, in short, to preserve the planet, we are going to produce the least efficient type of energy that electricity is, and use it to harvest “heat” from air in WINTERS, which is mostly when you need your heating to work. Only problem is the air in winter happens to be cold… Even without being a physicist that should scream “nonsense”, or we just invented something even better than perpetuum mobile. Not to mention, couple of years ago we couldn’t buy hoovers stronger than 2 kWt, (can we now, I don’t even know), but now in totally countering move we are going to power cars, airplanes and heat homes of whole population with electricity… palmface ten times.
There is no “religion” involved. A setup in which a power plant centrally burns gas to produce electricity and you use that very electricity to transfer heat from outside to heat up your living space can be physically 4-5x more efficient than you burning that gas yourself (or using the electricity for direct heating). Even cheap heat pumps work well in temperatures down to -10C. Yes, that means you can raise your room temperature to 20C (or more) even if there is -10C outside, using significantly less energy than you would require by using an electric heater. It is neither nonsense nor perpetuum mobile – unless you want to convince someone that a refrigerator/freezer (which uses the same principle and “somehow” is able to keep <0C temperature despite room temperature everywhere around it) is a perpetuum mobile as well or that HVAC in summer is impossible. Your comment only speaks of your own ignorance of pretty basic science. The real problem with mandating heat pumps along with regulations that forbid you from installing them in your home yourself is that this will artificially drive up prices and create an opportunity for installers to rip off consumers (eating up all the… Read more »
Even if the whole of the UK shut down, with everybody dead, and nothing happening and no CO2 or smoke being produced… China would happily continue building more coal-fired power stations and pumping out any old poisonous fumes into the atmosphere.
Arnold Schwazenegger owns 7 Hummer cars – one for every day of the week.
This is a war on our lives which we need fighting back against. The utter nonesense of this is plain to see. It’s beyond me why we aren’t organising already.
I agree. I can’t understand why people are just nodding along with all that is happening. What I find even more frightening is if you question the narrative you are treated so oddly. No such thing as a sensible discussion is possible, you just get pursed lips and anger directed at you. I have become even more vocal just lately to try and provoke discussion, but so far I have just had dagger looks and horrified reactions. Actually it is very wearing, and I can quite see it is easier to keep your opinions to yourself, but we can’t just stay silent, can we?
Give these Climate bedwetters both barrels whenever you get the chance, plenty around at the moment for the local elections.
You’re not allowed to object, that’s heresy, just start your coarse of jabs and go watch a woke netflix movie.
So this clever bloke says we have to “plug something else in” does he?
Erm, would that “something” be powered by electricity then? And, if it is, how is that electricity being produced?
And, I bet this idiot has never had to pay to run storage radiators or electric fires! I’d guarantee that most people would struggle to do so, let alone being also forced to fork out for an utterly useless “heat” pump..
Yet another unelected “expert” whose head is firmly inserted in his posterior.
We needed a new boiler back in 2010, when we had an extension built. The architect was a huge advocate for heat pumps. I looked into it extensively.
It seemed like lunacy. You could not get bath water hot enough, and we would have had to replace all radiators with giant things (in a 400 year old cottage…not much scope for that). It cost £10k back then, excluding radiator changes, would have needed extra electricity top ups all winter, and a new oil fired boiler was £5k for the thing itself and installation.
Our oil fired boiler is doing great, 12 years later.
How rational is carbon-phobia? Carbon dioxide is a natural part of the ecosystem – it makes plants grow through photosynthesis. In pre-history levels are estimated to have been between 2000 and 6000 ppm – currently a little above 400 ppm !
You’re absolutely right.This is the fundamental bogus premise upon which all the lies of Climate change rest. That Carbon dioxide is harmful. It’s essential plant food and we would all benefit from a lot more of it.
Okay Sir John, and where do you, in your great expert wisdom, intend to get all the extra megawatts of electricity from for heat pumps?
And I ask you, as a self-confessed infrastructure expert, where is the National Grid infrastructure to deliver this extra power?
No, didn’t think you’d thought of that! Pathetic!
Another thing with replacing the average gas combi boiler is that you then need some DHW storage as heat pumps are not capable of quickly delivering hot water. Many homes do not have the space.
These ideas are dreamt up by ignorant fools who live in 4 bed detached houses and not a 3rd floor, 1 bed flat in Bermondsey .
Our 22 year old Vokera Linea 28 combi boiler is doing just fine, touch wood.
The diverter valve needs a little drop of oil on the solenoid plunger every so often, and I replaced the domestic heat exchanger six months back.
You can stick your heat pumps up your aged bottom, Sir Whatever Your Name Is.
Yet another example of the planetary insanity infesting this good Earth.
I can only see a tax-payers revolt as a non-violent means of putting an end to this assault upon humanity.
He’s creating far more hot air than these heat pumps ever could. Let’s plug the likes of him into the grid, then we’ll all be nice and toasty!
Yet another dickhead in a position of influence in the UK. Hands up those who voted for him?
Appointed by no less than Osborne and Hammond