Of Course Heat Pump Use is Going to Be Rationed – What Did You Think a 'Smart Meter' was For?

It's not to save you money!

As the heatwave hysteria somewhat subsided, the Telegraph revealed that in the future, use of heat pumps might be rationed at times of energy shortages. The Guardian, meanwhile, reported that the Prime Minister’s replacement, Andy Burnham is considering proposals to “make heat pumps cheaper to run than boilers”. The occupier of Number 10 may have changed but a profound unreality is still driving the policy agenda.

The main problem afflicting the green agenda was always physics. The second was economics. And the third was democracy. Heat pumps capture this sequence of problems perfectly. Green technology attempts to convert diffuse, ambient energy into useful energy – heat, in the case of heat pumps. And it does this in place of using a dense energy resource such as gas. But the relative density of these energy sources means that the machine that collects ambient energy must be so much larger, plus its capacities do not fully overlap with what it purportedly replaces. Consequently, a heat pump is at least six times as expensive as a gas combi boiler, occupies a much larger part of a home, responds less effectively to a household’s needs and requires the making of substantial alterations to the home and the behaviour of the occupants in order to function as expected. For those many reasons, most people have rejected them. And for that reason, successive governments have said that homes will have heat pumps whether they’re wanted or not, because the superior product that they replace will be ‘phased out’.

Heat pumps have been at the centre of the green policy agenda for a long time now, and the fact that nobody wants them has been a no less well-established fact for nearly the same duration. Rishi Sunak was the first to realise that progressive emissions-reduction targets that required the ‘decarbonisation’ of domestic heat was the political equivalent of that pub game of Jenga. At some point, Westminster’s reckless attempts to balance its ambitions for green policy against what the public will accept would succumb to physical forces, like so many wooden blocks being pulled out of a structure by so many drunken students. Gravity wins every time. Yet discussions about heat pumps have mainly been about their inevitable technical and economic shortcomings, rather than, as the simile demonstrates, a bunch of noisy arseholes.

Sunak’s very slow epiphany was too late, because then there was the General Election, bringing with it the energy of the new government and its green zealotry – and less than zero inclination to understand why the green agenda was already failing. And now that government has collapsed, and is being regenerated with Gen X Madchester pastiches and allusions, as if policy announcements from the set of Shameless, rather than a Downing Street lectern, makes them more credible.