'A campaign built on dishonesty' | Hydrogen heating trial residents accuse gas distributor Cadent of withholding key safety data
Local opposition to UK pilot project grows as affected households say organiser won’t tell them whether H2-fired cookers or room heating appliances would be safe
Hydrogen: hype, hope and the hard truths around its role in the energy transition
None of the home assessors sent by Cadent as part of the trial’s planning process have been able to answer the question either, she says, adding that one even suggested she request an electric cooker if she was worried.
In fact, Grannell and other residents have been told to wait until at least mid-2023 to get answers to key questions around safety, costs and what happens at the end of the trial — after the March 2023 deadline by which Cadent must submit its final proposal to energy regulator Ofgem, which is funding and managing the Hydrogen Village trial on behalf of the UK government.
She adds: “What they’re saying is that they know what the answers are, ‘but we’re not going to tell you until after the bid’.”
‘Not a concern’
However, the manufacturer led-programme has not published the methodology or data behind Clean Burner Systems’ gas fire trials, nor has it made public any data about NOx emissions from gas cookers.
Data wars
Around 85% of UK homes currently use fossil gas for cooking and space heating — in a boiler and sometimes in a gas fire. Gas distribution companies such as Cadent are keen to use hydrogen as a drop-in fuel to replace gas, to prevent their networks becoming stranded assets as the UK tries to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
The UK government is currently considering two Hydrogen Village proposals: Cadent’s Whitby proposal in northwest England, for which the company has recently said it will aim to use green hydrogen made with renewable energy, and Northern Gas Networks’ plan in Redcar, northeast England.
The village trial is intended to give a sense of how a gas distributor might operate a pure-hydrogen network, but residents in Whitby have launched a campaign against the proposal, claiming that at least a quarter of residents are actively against the trial going ahead at all.
In response, Cadent published its own online fact-check of the leaflet’s contents — which it removed over the weekend shortly after it was criticised for containing factual errors, including a false claim that blue hydrogen would require less fossil fuel than burning natural gas.
A recent Cadent survey of residents — which came with a £50 ($60) incentive to respond — was pulled because, the gas distributor says, many respondents were requesting to record the pre-survey telephone interview with the intention of sharing it, violating the code of conduct for market research.
Residents’ groups, meanwhile, said that the pre-survey interview contained specific questions about whether they were opposed to the trial, which they claim was designed to screen opposing voices out of the process and skew the results.
Central to the residents’ objections is the feeling that they are not being consulted on whether or not the trial should go ahead, a position recently picked up by local Member of Parliament Justin Madders, who has called on Cadent to offer an independent poll of residents as well as independent advice on hydrogen heating.
“There will have to be some sort of independent assessment of public support for this,” he told local radio on 23 December. “Because if there isn’t, then that suggests that people don’t want to have this. There needs to be a way that we can all be confident that the public’s view has been taken on board.”
But Marc Clarke, Cadent’s head of hydrogen, told BBC radio on 22 December that there was “no need to consult” residents in a yes/no poll.
“A vote won’t be the real world,” he said. “We’re all going to need to make this choice on a certain day to move to a different type of heating technology. Now this project is bringing this decision to life right now for Whitby, but it’s coming for all of us in the near future.”
“Getting thoughts and views from all residents is very important for the project,” a spokesperson for Cadent says. “We have been working with an independent agency that is also audited to ensure we do this in the right way.”
But Madders, who reveals that Cadent has been discussing the possibility of a poll with him for some time, says he has the assurance of government ministers that the trial should only go ahead with the consent of residents.
“If Cadent don’t want to do it then we will find another way of surveying and assessing public opinion,” he told local radio. “I’ll be making it very clear to government officials that I don’t think that they’ve been very cooperative with us in that respect.”
Independent energy advice has not yet been offered by Cadent, which has instead pointed to the UK government-funded volunteer service Citizens Advice, which residents’ groups complain has no expertise on hydrogen and simply directs concerned householders back to Cadent.
Electric anxiety
Cadent has committed to ensure that householders using hydrogen will pay no more than they would for fossil gas and has said that it would considering reconnecting houses to fossil gas after the trial.
And householders are being offered electric solutions, such as air source heat pumps, induction hobs or electric boilers if they do not wish to opt for hydrogen — but the company has so far refused to commit to matching electricity prices to gas prices, or to convert electric solutions back to gas once the trial is over.
Electricity prices are currently around three times’ the price of gas in the UK, and many residents in the Facebook groups are concerned about being locked in to high electricity prices and falling into fuel poverty — even with a super-efficient heat pump.
Cost parity would be achieved with a heat pump efficiency (known as Seasonal Coefficient of Performance or SCoP) of 2.8 — which delivers 2.8kWh of heat for every 1kWh of power — which Rosenow said is “easily achievable for most heat pump installations”. A SCoP of 3 or higher is “more than achievable”, he adds, which would yield cost savings today versus a gas boiler.
But the efficiency of heat pumps depends on how well they are installed, and such is the lack of trust that residents are cautious of allowing Cadent to take ownership of installations.
During the debate on BBC Radio 5 Live, Needle indicated that Cadent might consider allowing residents to choose their own ASHP installer.
“The very least they can do is let us choose who fits it in our own home,” added one member of the residents’ Facebook group.
Cadent has defended its communication strategy so far, saying that it wouldn’t ask any resident to make a firm decision on which pathway to take until they had all the information they needed.
But Grannell argues that answers to 140 residents’ questions — of which around a third are still unanswered — are critical if Cadent is to give Ofgem the accurate community feedback required as part of its bid submission in March.
Residents need to have a complete package of information about the trial in order to be able to give accurate feedback about whether they want to be part of the trial or not, she says.
“I don’t want to make a decision about my appliances; on whether they should be hydrogen or electric,” she says. “I want [the opportunity] to say no to the whole trial. This is the aspect they are denying us.”