The government’s Heat and Buildings Strategy is blunt in its assessment of the UK’s heating terrain - to meet net zero by 2050 virtually all heat in buildings will need to be decarbonised. This is the main reason why heat pumps are being heavily promoted as a low-carbon alternative to fossil-fuel heating.
The government has set a target of at least 600,000 hydronic (air-to-water) heat pump systems installed per year by 2028 to keep on track for net zero. At the same time, the Scottish government is targeting a peak of 250,000 renewable heat installations a year in the 2030s, of which the majority are likely to be heat pumps.
Beyond this, the Climate Change Committee says 3.3 million heat pumps need to be installed in existing homes by 2030, rising to 8 million by 2035 to reach net zero targets – that’s a million installs per year in new and existing homes by the turn of the decade.
Urgent need for training
The UK heating sector will need to gear up rapidly to meet this challenge, and the government fervently hopes that the industry can deliver transformative change. Over the next three decades, around 25 million fossil fuel boilers will need to be replaced by low-carbon heating systems.
Government and industry will also need to move quickly to create conditions for training a radically changed sector. There are currently only 3,000 trained heat pump engineers in the UK, according to Nesta, while 27,000 will be needed in the next six years.
And the government target is for a 30-fold increase in heat pumps manufactured and sold within the UK by the end of the decade.
Some heat pumps are designed specifically for bigger buildings, such as office blocks or industrial sites, and other models are suited to communal use, in flats for example, but strategists recognise that heat pump technology can’t be the whole solution.
EPC changes
There will be a need for different forms of low-carbon heating, particularly in some large-scale businesses, and every company and organisation will need to be part of the transformation, not least because, aside from carbon reduction, recent changes to energy performance certification (EPC) increases the risk that some fossil-fuel heated buildings could become illegal to rent.
For now though, and as a priority, there are more than 4 million homes in England using oil, coal, LPG and less efficient electric heating that would benefit from being retrofitted with heat pumps.
But the government will need to do much more to entice people to change. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme clearly isn’t working with just 2,500 vouchers, each covering £5,000 of the costs of heat pump installation, issued so far this year.
The government says it is liaising with industry to reduce the costs of heat pumps by at least 25-50% by 2025 and towards parity with boilers by 2030, with the ambition to phase out installations of natural gas boilers beyond 2035.
But there is understandable resistance to the adoption of heat pump technology, which is not well understood, and which has high up-front costs. The engineering and science is relatively straightforward, being a means of capturing heat in the outside air (or water) and transferring it to heat a water system inside a building.
And heat pumps are four to five times more efficient than gas boilers. An old gas boiler has an efficiency rating of about 60%, a new condensing boiler up to 92%, while a heat pump efficiency rate is around 400% (more efficiently using energy to transfer heat).
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*The views expressed are the author's and not ICAEW's.
