The issue of home heating gets a lot of chat in my family ( comprising as it does former energy economist, a former oil industry senior manager, an offshore renewables engineering consultant and a former building energy consultant.)
It's damn tricky. (Best indicator of fuel poverty in Scotland is not being connected to the gas grid.) The big problem is that burning gas inside your home has something like a 80% efficiency rate whereas burning gas to make electricity to heat your home has something like a 20% efficiency rate. So, whilst gas is the dominant price driver of electricity prices electric heating will cost 3-4 times as much as gas central heating/
In terms of the technical possibilities one could run an insulated pipe from Hunterston to Torness through the Central Belt and get usable heat all along the way. So a massive network district heating schemes trading generated or waste heat is possible.
(Or similar lengths of pipe from locations with waste heat.)
But the digging the pipe is expensive. Not so much the big mains heating pipe but the thousands of miles of off-taking pipe that go along streets and in to houses.
Then there is a co-ordination problem. It would be desirable if everyone in a suburb could change to district heating at the same time.
I did some work on this when I was a policy wonk. There doesn't seem to be an elegant solution. What will help are
1) Better building standards for new builds - all new builds should have district heating and should be built to the highest standards of energy efficiency
2) Better insulation standards for rental homes (holiday lets, and rented homes) to be phased in. I'd make HMO licences dependent on meeting better standards.
3) Better standards on insulation whenever a privately owned home has a major refurbishment (building warrants dependent on meeting better standards.)
4) Policy support for all of the alternatives to gas or traditional central heating, for example subsidies for ground or air heat pumps and prioritisation for any planning permission and consents
At some point electricity from solar PV is probably going to be as cheap as burning gas in your own home, perhaps cheaper, even in Scotland, which might help.
But it's a problem for places like Scotland.
(In a way that cooling with solar PV in places like Australia is not as peak generation for solar PV matches reasonably closely with peak demand.)
Burning gas (or, indeed, anything) to generate heat feels like something we should avoid doing. And if you're generating heat from (renewably generated) electricity then it's probably most efficient to do so in the home. Electricity -> heat can be done with 100% efficiency after all. Unless, of course, there's a centralising efficiency to be had from a heat pump point of view. One which is greater than the losses of transmitting heat directly and the costs of maintaining a heat transmission network.
Not sure about domestically produced electricity being the most efficient way of heating your home. I'm in favour of producing close to demand but I think the efficiency depends entirely on the trade off of economies of scale and technical considerations to transmission losses. A single 12MW offshore wind turbine with a capacity factor 60% is probably going to be cheaper per unit of heat than a 10,000 1.2kw units mounted on a house with a capacity factor of 25%.
But I think a heatpump connected to a 2030 priced solar panel on your roof might be cheaper than building other systems. Part of the problem is that different types of housing have different advantages and disadvantages. These were resolvable when the offer was almost free gas with no concerns about climate change. It's a harder issue to co-ordinate when you have different optimal solutions for city centre Victorian flats, and new build rural detached houses.
There is a policy arguement for solving most of the problem as cheaply and quickly as possible, even if this suboptimal for some people and then just compensating those left behind with cash. (But the cash in these situations never arrives.)
I've been wondering about communal heatpumps in Edinburgh tenements with shared drying greens and roofs.
Sorry, I wasn't clear - I don't think we should (mostly) generate the electricity locally, I think we should *use* it locally. Generate it wherever it's most efficient to, but when it comes to turning it into heat just do that in the room you want to be warmer. (Unless you happen to be generating the heat anyway, for a steelworks or similar, of course)
Oh yes. Sorry, that probably ought to have been obvious to me. It's one of those months.
Agreed. If you are using electricity for heating it probably makes sense to have the heating element locally, rather than having the heating element remotely heating some carrying liquid and then exchanging that heat in to a home or office.
What slightly complicates that is that there are some cases where you have an existing district heating scheme running mostly on waste heat or biomass but you also want to use electricity as either a back up or opportunistically to soak up over generation in a non-despatchable renewables heavy grid. In that situation you might be better off having 1 system inside each house, 1 system to carry heat from the heat sources to the housing and 1 or more systems putting heat in to that heat network.
Heat pump solutions are really prohibitively expensive to retro fit (looks like ideally you switch to warm air rather than radiators; and we'd need a water tank); but they aren't much worse than a gas fired system in new build (at least air source) and we should be be fitting them, along with much better insulation.
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It's damn tricky. (Best indicator of fuel poverty in Scotland is not being connected to the gas grid.) The big problem is that burning gas inside your home has something like a 80% efficiency rate whereas burning gas to make electricity to heat your home has something like a 20% efficiency rate. So, whilst gas is the dominant price driver of electricity prices electric heating will cost 3-4 times as much as gas central heating/
In terms of the technical possibilities one could run an insulated pipe from Hunterston to Torness through the Central Belt and get usable heat all along the way. So a massive network district heating schemes trading generated or waste heat is possible.
(Or similar lengths of pipe from locations with waste heat.)
But the digging the pipe is expensive. Not so much the big mains heating pipe but the thousands of miles of off-taking pipe that go along streets and in to houses.
Then there is a co-ordination problem. It would be desirable if everyone in a suburb could change to district heating at the same time.
I did some work on this when I was a policy wonk. There doesn't seem to be an elegant solution. What will help are
1) Better building standards for new builds - all new builds should have district heating and should be built to the highest standards of energy efficiency
2) Better insulation standards for rental homes (holiday lets, and rented homes) to be phased in. I'd make HMO licences dependent on meeting better standards.
3) Better standards on insulation whenever a privately owned home has a major refurbishment (building warrants dependent on meeting better standards.)
4) Policy support for all of the alternatives to gas or traditional central heating, for example subsidies for ground or air heat pumps and prioritisation for any planning permission and consents
At some point electricity from solar PV is probably going to be as cheap as burning gas in your own home, perhaps cheaper, even in Scotland, which might help.
But it's a problem for places like Scotland.
(In a way that cooling with solar PV in places like Australia is not as peak generation for solar PV matches reasonably closely with peak demand.)
No easy ways forward.
no subject
Unless, of course, there's a centralising efficiency to be had from a heat pump point of view. One which is greater than the losses of transmitting heat directly and the costs of maintaining a heat transmission network.
no subject
But I think a heatpump connected to a 2030 priced solar panel on your roof might be cheaper than building other systems. Part of the problem is that different types of housing have different advantages and disadvantages. These were resolvable when the offer was almost free gas with no concerns about climate change. It's a harder issue to co-ordinate when you have different optimal solutions for city centre Victorian flats, and new build rural detached houses.
There is a policy arguement for solving most of the problem as cheaply and quickly as possible, even if this suboptimal for some people and then just compensating those left behind with cash. (But the cash in these situations never arrives.)
I've been wondering about communal heatpumps in Edinburgh tenements with shared drying greens and roofs.
no subject
Generate it wherever it's most efficient to, but when it comes to turning it into heat just do that in the room you want to be warmer.
(Unless you happen to be generating the heat anyway, for a steelworks or similar, of course)
no subject
Oh yes. Sorry, that probably ought to have been obvious to me. It's one of those months.
Agreed. If you are using electricity for heating it probably makes sense to have the heating element locally, rather than having the heating element remotely heating some carrying liquid and then exchanging that heat in to a home or office.
What slightly complicates that is that there are some cases where you have an existing district heating scheme running mostly on waste heat or biomass but you also want to use electricity as either a back up or opportunistically to soak up over generation in a non-despatchable renewables heavy grid. In that situation you might be better off having 1 system inside each house, 1 system to carry heat from the heat sources to the housing and 1 or more systems putting heat in to that heat network.
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Insulation.
Insulation.
Insulation.