British Gas has thrown a large spanner into the Government’s Net Zero ambitions by stating that it will refuse to install heat pumps in millions of homes where they won’t make it warm enough. Ross Clark writes about the intervention in the Telegraph.
British Gas has come out this week and stated what has doubtless been obvious for a long time to some homeowners who did take the plunge: that a standard heat pump runs at water temperatures which are too low to heat many properties. From now on, says the company, it will only agree to install a heat pump if it is convinced that it will succeed in getting the property up to a target temperature on the coldest days. If any of the heat pumps it installs fail this test, it says it will refund the money.
Fair enough, but that will mean millions of homes cannot have a heat pump installed by British Gas. There are eight million homes in Britain which have solid walls and which, as a result, are hard to bring up to required insulation standards at a reasonable cost. If other companies follow British Gas’s example, the Government will have no hope of achieving its target of retro-fitting 600,000 homes a year with a heat pump by the end of this decade. British Gas has just thrown a very large spanner into the Government’s Net Zero ambitions.
