Isra-Mart srl news:
While the debate focuses on electricity and transport, the use of energy to provide heat remains largely ignored. Nuclear power, wind energy and other renewables rouse high passions. Fierce rows break out over air travel and car use, airports and motorways. But nobody, it seems, gets heated about heat.
And yet it is far more important than either of its two controversial cousins. It alone accounts for almost half of Britain’s entire use of energy and carbon dioxide emissions — and is responsible for 60 per cent of a typical family’s energy bill.
It is a basic commodity and one we can’t do without — as last winter sharply testified — but it tends to be taken for granted.
No more. For it is becoming increasingly clear that, if Britain is to decarbonise its energy supplies and achieve energy security, it is going to have to revolutionise the way it keeps warm.
At present 69 per cent of our heat comes from burning gas, 11 per cent from oil, three per cent from solid fuels such as coal, and 14 per cent from electricity, mainly generated from these same three fossil fuels. Only one per cent is provided by renewable sources. If Britain is to meet its clean energy targets, this will have to increase twelvefold in just a decade.
And the revolution will clearly have to start at home, because the country’s dwellings currently provide more than half of the total demand — almost entirely for hot water and central heating.
Yet renewable heat technologies such as solar water heaters, ground-source and air-source heat pumps and wood-burning stoves, though relatively common in some other European countries, have hardly begun to get going here.
British homes do outstrip those in neighbouring countries in one respect, but that only makes things worse. They are worse insulated, more wasteful, draughtier and less energy efficient. And though building standards are gradually improving, they have a long way to go, and are being outpaced by increased consumption: average indoor temperatures have risen by half, from 12 to 18 degrees centigrade, since the 1970s.
And even if new homes did dramatically improve — and they should, since all are supposed to be zero carbon by 2016 — this will make little impact, for so few are being built compared to the size of the existing housing stock. Its state is shocking.
An official review has found that 6.1 million homes have inadequately lagged lofts, 8.5 million have uninsulated cavity walls and 7.5 million dwellings with solid walls would benefit from better insulation.
Almost all these buildings, moreover, will still be in use in 2050, by which time Britain is supposed to have reduced its carbon emissions by 80 per cent. If the country is to get anywhere near this target, those existing homes are going to have to be heavily insulated to reduce demand, and then supplied with renewable heat.
The Coalition Government, to its credit, is about to address the first of these tasks. Its new Energy Bill, to be introduced by the end of the year, is to bring in a Green Deal, embarking on a “comprehensive refit of Britain’s housing stock” through energy companies and high street stores paying upfront to insulate homes, allowing householders to pay the sum back over the years out of the savings they make on their energy bills.
And, indeed, this Government’s ministers are the first fully to understand that lowering demand, through increased efficiency, is even more important than providing new supplies (though their officials have yet to catch on).
But they are dithering, and worse, over the second. One of the Government’s first actions — in George Osborne’s emergency budget — was to scrap the grant given to householders to help them install renewables, and it has now cast severe doubt over whether it will fulfil the last government’s promise to introduce a more effective Renewable Heat Incentive in the spring.
Without something of the sort, there is no way that Britain’s main use of energy will be made more sustainable. Indeed so many people and firms will feel betrayed that ministers will at least have succeeded in making heat controversial.
Posts
