Just before Christmas, the UK government department responsible for hydrogen policy, made a pledge on a LinkedIn post that “no-one will have a gas boiler ripped out of their home”.
The government has an official policy of banning the sale of natural-gas boilers from 2035 — and a controversial bill is working its way through Parliament that would allow gas suppliers to force entry into private homes in order to safely disconnect gas boilers in Hydrogen Village pilot project zones.
So the official government post suggested that that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was ruling out a switch from natural gas to hydrogen in Britain’s gas distribution networks, as most of the 23 million gas boilers installed in the UK would not be able to run on pure H2.
But when Hydrogen Insight approached BEIS for clarification, BEIS walked back the statement, explaining: “No-one will have to have their existing natural gas boiler replaced as a result of the proposals on boiler standards we’ve recently announced.” [our italics]
The government has proposed to require that from 2026, all new gas boilers must be “hydrogen-ready”, which critics say would make it harder for the UK to rule out the use of H2 in the home. It is not due to make a final decision on the domestic use of hydrogen until 2026, but if thousands of hydrogen-ready gas boilers are installed in the coming years, the homeowners that bought them would expect to be able to use them indefinitely.
BEIS also made it clear that all homes in a Hydrogen Village — planned for either Whitby or Redcar in northern England — would not be able to continue using their gas boilers, as the methane supplied to those properties would be replaced with green hydrogen.
Heating homes with green hydrogen would require five to six times more renewable energy than if green electricity was used directly in heat pumps.
This would not only make green H2 a far more expensive zero-carbon option than electric heat pumps, but would almost certainly slow down the decarbonisation of the electricity grid, which also requires huge amounts of new wind and solar power.
Gas distributors and boiler makers argue that UK electricity grids would never be able to cope if all heating in the country goes electric, but the required grid upgrades — which would probably be needed anyway due to increased power demand from electric vehicles — are certainly possible over the next 27 years as Britain attempts to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Gas grids would also need expensive upgrades in order to be safely converted to pure hydrogen, while residential solar panels, vehicle-to-grid technology and local energy storage could all alleviate pressure on the electricity grid.
At least 32 independent studies have examined the use of hydrogen for domestic heating and each of them concluded that H2 heating is not a cost-effective decarbonisation solution.
