Looks like oil industry astroturfing [1] to me. The group that published this (GWPF) is basically an anthropogenic climate change denying lobby group that refuses to reveal its funding sources [2].<p>Yeah, color me skeptical about their publication that is essentially saying gas systems are better than electric heat pumps for the environment.<p>- [1](<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOi05zDO4yw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOi05zDO4yw</a>)<p>- [2](<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...</a>)
All these comparisons depend on so much context. Price of gas, price of electricity, possibility for home generation, climate, access to gas lines, building design, and so on.<p>Literally every country, or every region, will have different constraints and parameters. What's best for me, may or may not be good for you.<p>For me the bottom line is this; I can generate my own electricity, I can't drill for my own gas.<p>I'm not an absolutist, I still use gas for cooking (for stove, oven is electric), and for some heating, but since I can generate electricity [1], I tend to want to use that first.<p>[1] solar, and yes I have the roof, and sun available. Residential wind can be tricky, if you're really lucky a small stream is nearby and personal hydro is fantastic.
I think the lede is missing. Arguing they are uneconomic with Solar and PV reducing electricity costs against gas is counterfactual. So, assuming its both counterfactual and true, what alternative is proposed, which is not "keep gas"<p>If the alternative is direct electric heating, electric hot water storage systems and electrically heated radiators and sub-floor heating say so.<p>(unless I have completely misread the article it demolishes some myths about heat pumps but winds up saying their LCOE may be good compared to gas but capital cost kills them economically)
I don't know enough about heat pumps to comment about the substance of this report, but looking at the list of their other reports at the end,it seems worth pointing out the heavily ideological, global warming denying biases of the group that wrote this.
> <i>In the UK, the electricity:gas price ratio has been increasing for many years, as increasing penetration of renewable energy makes the grid progressively less efficient.</i><p>Does anyone know any more context on this? I found this surprising. I would have assumed renewables would be cheaper than fossil fuels. This feels like fossil fuel industry misinformation, but I don't have the facts here.<p>Regardless, I agree that in some places a heat pump is just not economical. I have a natural gas furnace, and gas usage is pretty cheap in California, at least when compared to electricity.<p>My original plan was to get solar panels installed, and then switch to a heat pump once the furnace needs replacing. Ditto for my now-gas water heater. Then the electricity powering the heat pump would be "free". An added bonus is that I would get air conditioning along with it, which I currently do not have, and that would essentially be "free" pulling from the solar panels as well. (Sadly, the solar panel install didn't work out, but that's another story.)<p>I wasn't planning on switching to a heat pump because of cost (though with solar panels, it would presumably end up being cheaper than burning gas), but because I think burning fuel in a closet in my house isn't a great idea health-wise, and burning fuel in general isn't great for the planet. Although I'd find it really hard to give up my gas stove...
Heat pumps work well if you have net metering, less so if you don't but assuming that you're trying to reduce your overall bills insulation comes first, then you can heat with far less power and that in turn may get you within range of being able to use solar+heatpump for heating and supplement with gas for when that isn't enough. This should drastically cut your heating bill.
Here's an analysis I did a few years back when evaluating whether to install an air-to-air pump:
<a href="https://observablehq.com/@robinl/retrofitting-air-source-heat-pumps" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://observablehq.com/@robinl/retrofitting-air-source-hea...</a><p>I installed it at a cost of around £1,500, and it's been great. It probably is a relatively expensive method of carbon abatement, however.<p>At the time, I was comparing against an electric car, and I concluded it was a significantly cheaper way of reducing my carbon impact (we only drive around 10k miles a year)<p>For reference, it reduced my gas usage from around 10k KWh to 5k KWh, resulting in a reduction in emissions of around 500kg a year
Not much to say about geothermal heat pumps. And the whole discussion about electric vs gas cost is a perfect example of why we need plentiful and cheap nuclear energy. Electricity should be so cheap that everybody wants a heat pump because of the economic benefit.
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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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, <i>and</i> 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.