I spent a lot of time working with EPC certificates when I lived in Scotland. The published data is, for lack of a better word, garbage. Huge inconsistency in data entry, IIRC more than 10% of the data is utterly worthless (houses more than 2,500sqm with tiny energy use) it took me weeks to get the 2.5m lines of data clean and, once clean, the only upgrades with a positive investment return on even 2021 electricity prices were lighting upgrades. Which had probably been done.
Know this isn't the main thrust of the article. But, existing government efforts in this space, whether devolved or not, are phenomenally poor.
And the EPC register, at least in Scotland, has data on whether the boiler is condensing or not. If it's not it's an incredibly old one. So, there are good proxies for this data, albeit in very poor quality data...
I thought that when a plumber installed a new boiler they are required to register the installation with the local authority under building regulations, although that is a patchwork of databases and I don't know if the records include anything about the type of boiler installed, like a gas safety certificate does.
Such a simple, obvious suggestion- it’ll never happen 🤪. Who is responsible for procuring the new contract as lobbying them might help. Relatively easy for the supplier to do this as they will have most of the database already to manage booking, billing etc
"For example, if we had a central register, it would mean that the government could specifically target households with the oldest, crappiest boilers with incentives to upgrade." And what happens when it transpires that the houses with the oldest, crappiest boilers are stately homes, London townhouses worth £millions and second-homes based in Newquay (i.e. houses owned by people who don't need support)?
Once targeted and offered the opportunity to apply for help to upgrade, that help can be means-tested? Obviously there will still be those who can game the system, but it should still help to reduce our over emissions, which is the main point (I assume, I haven't read the article yet!)
I think it posits that the (a?) main problem with de-carbonising houses is a lack of data and comes up with an - admittedly clever - solution to that. However, I suspect that the main problem with de-carbonising houses is that at some point homeowners are going to have to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps and that is going to cost money.
A v. quick search suggests that a heat pump for a 4/5 bed house will cost between £13k (for an air source pump) to £35k (for a ground source pump). All the jazzy data in the world is not going to persuade anyone to vote to spend that money themselves. Even assuming installation is easy, which I bet it isn't.
Housing decarbonisation is probably a dead end for meaningful "net zero" since it directly touches on the 'no one actually wants to do the things required for net zero. They want others to do those things without them noticing'-problem.
As someone currently going through this process, I thought I might comment on costs.
My boiler is essentially about to pack in (needs replaced ASAP). Replacement is about £1.5-2K depending on what I go for. I've had a quote from Octopus to install a heat pump, along with all of the associated plumbing gubbins (water tank, replacement radiators etc.) for just under £10K - which, after the £7500 government subsidy that currently exists, will come out to £2.1K.
I probably wouldn't go out and do it if I didn't already have to replace my boiler, but as is it's only going to work out as a couple of hundred quid more expensive it makes a lot of sense. Alongside getting my gas disconnected (bye bye £100+/year standing charge) and my solar panels (free heating and hot water in Spring to Autumn) it's starting to look like a pretty good deal. The trick is going to be having an industry that catches people at that sweetspot - when they need to do a major heating repair anyway, which for most houses is every 10-15 years.
Unfortunately most of the other subsidies and offers out there don't work for me as the vast majority require you to have under £30K household income AND own your own house (a combination which has got to be something of a minority in the UK).
Eventually, yes (on personal ethics grounds), but not in the near term (I couldn't have afforded it without borrowing). So for this boiler replacement I wouldn't have gone for it.
It's not like the solar panels and battery I have which will make their cost back in about 10 years and then generate income going forward.
Heat pump running costs are pretty much cost neutral for the consumer vs gas boilers - even though they're 4* the efficiency (give or take), electricity is 4* the price of gas. Free electricity from the solar in spring to autumn, plus cheaply stored electricity overnight in the battery helps this - the heat pump will be a little cheaper to run for me - but doesn't make it a runaway winner. So it does really all come down to the install costs for now at least.
This may change in the future, if electricity prices decouple from gas due to increased renewable production and distributed storage, but we're not there yet.
As for whether the subsidy is worth it to the country... then we get into those weird hard to do economic costings. What's the per person £ value in slowing down climate change? There is a value there, relative to the carbon cost externalities of increased insurance, flood remediation, refugee crises, global economic disruptions etc. But who knows what it is, it certainly isn't an easy calculation to make. Is this the best possible value intervention we could make? Maybe? Maybe not? It certainly helps, a bit. And then there's the economic stimulus argument - this is money spent here employing british taxpayers etc.
On balance I think it's good policy to kickstart an industry, but I'm not really qualified to say for sure.
We did do it on personal grounds. We already had a full roof of solar PV and our boiler was less than 5 years old so did not need replacing.
We went for a battery, ASHP and swanky hot water tank. Total cost about 15k and a 5k heat pump subsidy so £10k cost to us.
We've only had it in since July but energy is now pretty much free in the summer and the payments for the excess energy we export then has built up a credit with Octopus that paid for the heating up to Feb. We calculate that net energy costs for us over a full year are around zero.
But it has cost us around 18k (with the solar PV) to get that. That's a lot of money. Many people don't have that spare ad wouldn't want to spend it on this kind of thing if they did. That's where the government needs to step up, with a wider environmental and socio-economic cost/benefit analysis that is well beyond me.
Since the objective is to get to net zero I’m happy to pay to fix the problem in the houses of people who don’t need the support. I’d also prefer the Tories to make the change now rather than delay so Labour can look good. And by the way, I won’t be voting Tory at the next election whatever they do.
And what about the people who can afford it (in the sense of being able to find the money) but really resent being told to pay £thousands by Government diktat? What happens to democratic consent for Net Zero, then?
Just on the Downing St point - seems like there is some spare roof space, south-facing, not overlooked. But it would probably take forever to pay back, and people would squeal about it being a listed building: Westminster council would probably take delight in refusing to allow the installation.
There is a potential downside that this could lead to important safety checks / work getting politicised. The extreme case is someone doesn't get work done because they think the government is spying. It's probably manageable but it needs government to get ahead of the story first.
I spent a lot of time working with EPC certificates when I lived in Scotland. The published data is, for lack of a better word, garbage. Huge inconsistency in data entry, IIRC more than 10% of the data is utterly worthless (houses more than 2,500sqm with tiny energy use) it took me weeks to get the 2.5m lines of data clean and, once clean, the only upgrades with a positive investment return on even 2021 electricity prices were lighting upgrades. Which had probably been done.
Know this isn't the main thrust of the article. But, existing government efforts in this space, whether devolved or not, are phenomenally poor.
And the EPC register, at least in Scotland, has data on whether the boiler is condensing or not. If it's not it's an incredibly old one. So, there are good proxies for this data, albeit in very poor quality data...
I thought that when a plumber installed a new boiler they are required to register the installation with the local authority under building regulations, although that is a patchwork of databases and I don't know if the records include anything about the type of boiler installed, like a gas safety certificate does.
Such a simple, obvious suggestion- it’ll never happen 🤪. Who is responsible for procuring the new contract as lobbying them might help. Relatively easy for the supplier to do this as they will have most of the database already to manage booking, billing etc
"For example, if we had a central register, it would mean that the government could specifically target households with the oldest, crappiest boilers with incentives to upgrade." And what happens when it transpires that the houses with the oldest, crappiest boilers are stately homes, London townhouses worth £millions and second-homes based in Newquay (i.e. houses owned by people who don't need support)?
Once targeted and offered the opportunity to apply for help to upgrade, that help can be means-tested? Obviously there will still be those who can game the system, but it should still help to reduce our over emissions, which is the main point (I assume, I haven't read the article yet!)
I think it posits that the (a?) main problem with de-carbonising houses is a lack of data and comes up with an - admittedly clever - solution to that. However, I suspect that the main problem with de-carbonising houses is that at some point homeowners are going to have to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps and that is going to cost money.
A v. quick search suggests that a heat pump for a 4/5 bed house will cost between £13k (for an air source pump) to £35k (for a ground source pump). All the jazzy data in the world is not going to persuade anyone to vote to spend that money themselves. Even assuming installation is easy, which I bet it isn't.
Housing decarbonisation is probably a dead end for meaningful "net zero" since it directly touches on the 'no one actually wants to do the things required for net zero. They want others to do those things without them noticing'-problem.
As someone currently going through this process, I thought I might comment on costs.
My boiler is essentially about to pack in (needs replaced ASAP). Replacement is about £1.5-2K depending on what I go for. I've had a quote from Octopus to install a heat pump, along with all of the associated plumbing gubbins (water tank, replacement radiators etc.) for just under £10K - which, after the £7500 government subsidy that currently exists, will come out to £2.1K.
I probably wouldn't go out and do it if I didn't already have to replace my boiler, but as is it's only going to work out as a couple of hundred quid more expensive it makes a lot of sense. Alongside getting my gas disconnected (bye bye £100+/year standing charge) and my solar panels (free heating and hot water in Spring to Autumn) it's starting to look like a pretty good deal. The trick is going to be having an industry that catches people at that sweetspot - when they need to do a major heating repair anyway, which for most houses is every 10-15 years.
Unfortunately most of the other subsidies and offers out there don't work for me as the vast majority require you to have under £30K household income AND own your own house (a combination which has got to be something of a minority in the UK).
Would you have put the pump in without the subsidy, i.e. if the choice was gas boiler for £2k or heat pump for £10k?
I'm thinking £7500 subsidy multiplied by 60 million(?) houses is a lot of public money and a large opportunity cost of things not done elsewhere
Eventually, yes (on personal ethics grounds), but not in the near term (I couldn't have afforded it without borrowing). So for this boiler replacement I wouldn't have gone for it.
It's not like the solar panels and battery I have which will make their cost back in about 10 years and then generate income going forward.
Heat pump running costs are pretty much cost neutral for the consumer vs gas boilers - even though they're 4* the efficiency (give or take), electricity is 4* the price of gas. Free electricity from the solar in spring to autumn, plus cheaply stored electricity overnight in the battery helps this - the heat pump will be a little cheaper to run for me - but doesn't make it a runaway winner. So it does really all come down to the install costs for now at least.
This may change in the future, if electricity prices decouple from gas due to increased renewable production and distributed storage, but we're not there yet.
As for whether the subsidy is worth it to the country... then we get into those weird hard to do economic costings. What's the per person £ value in slowing down climate change? There is a value there, relative to the carbon cost externalities of increased insurance, flood remediation, refugee crises, global economic disruptions etc. But who knows what it is, it certainly isn't an easy calculation to make. Is this the best possible value intervention we could make? Maybe? Maybe not? It certainly helps, a bit. And then there's the economic stimulus argument - this is money spent here employing british taxpayers etc.
On balance I think it's good policy to kickstart an industry, but I'm not really qualified to say for sure.
We did do it on personal grounds. We already had a full roof of solar PV and our boiler was less than 5 years old so did not need replacing.
We went for a battery, ASHP and swanky hot water tank. Total cost about 15k and a 5k heat pump subsidy so £10k cost to us.
We've only had it in since July but energy is now pretty much free in the summer and the payments for the excess energy we export then has built up a credit with Octopus that paid for the heating up to Feb. We calculate that net energy costs for us over a full year are around zero.
But it has cost us around 18k (with the solar PV) to get that. That's a lot of money. Many people don't have that spare ad wouldn't want to spend it on this kind of thing if they did. That's where the government needs to step up, with a wider environmental and socio-economic cost/benefit analysis that is well beyond me.
Since the objective is to get to net zero I’m happy to pay to fix the problem in the houses of people who don’t need the support. I’d also prefer the Tories to make the change now rather than delay so Labour can look good. And by the way, I won’t be voting Tory at the next election whatever they do.
And what about the people who can afford it (in the sense of being able to find the money) but really resent being told to pay £thousands by Government diktat? What happens to democratic consent for Net Zero, then?
Just on the Downing St point - seems like there is some spare roof space, south-facing, not overlooked. But it would probably take forever to pay back, and people would squeal about it being a listed building: Westminster council would probably take delight in refusing to allow the installation.
There is a potential downside that this could lead to important safety checks / work getting politicised. The extreme case is someone doesn't get work done because they think the government is spying. It's probably manageable but it needs government to get ahead of the story first.