A plan for warmer homes: The Reengineer Monitor #57
EU renewables record, desalination tech - and more!
SPECIAL: The UK’s new Warm Homes Plan
The big news this week, for reengineers anyway, was the long-awaited release of the UK government’s Warm Homes Plan – a raft of new policies intended to improve the fabric of British homes and decarbonise heating.
£15 billion of public money is to be spent on things such as insulation schemes, low and zero interest loans to help homeowners install solar panels, heat pump grants and heat network projects. Support for people who want to install solar panels and batteries is hefty, with fully-funded upgrades available to some. All the new money will have to be spent wisely. The government is already reeling from the fallout of a botched insulation scheme, which has affected thousands of people.
Other policies have been downgraded in terms of their ambition. Most notably, the UK’s heat pump installation target was previously set at reaching 600,000 installations every year by 2028. That’s been reduced to 450,000 installations every year by 2030.
The sale of new gas boilers will no longer be banned from 2035. As Nesta, a charity, notes in their analysis of the plan, in 2021, the previous government’s Heat and Building Strategy had suggested a ban on new gas boiler installations from 2035.
Cold water has been poured on hydrogen for heating. While not completely chucked out, it won’t be prioritised: “As hydrogen is not yet a proven technology for home heating, a role would come later and likely be limited,” the plan reads. Some people have supported hydrogen as an alternative to natural gas since it could be distributed to homes via existing gas grids, in some cases.
Importantly, the detail of the current plan applies only to England. Money is being made available to the devolved nations of the UK for similar schemes but how that cash will be spent exactly remains to be seen. As I’ve noted before, Northern Ireland, for example, is currently the only part of the UK or Ireland that does not have a generally-available grant for heat pump installations. Like some other, less central, parts of the UK, people in Northern Ireland also don’t have smart meters and there are no smart tariffs available from electricity suppliers here.
A key question I have about the Warm Homes Plan, then, is this: how evenly and carefully will it be distributed? Similar to the imperfect rollout of superfast broadband around the UK, there is a big risk of some communities getting left behind in the energy transition.
