600,000 heat pump target ‘won’t be met’

The government won’t meet its annual target of installing 600,000 heat pumps by 2028, partly thanks to the government’s more generous low carbon home heating grants, MPs have been warned.

The aim to install 600,000 heat pumps per annum by 2028 was set out in the government’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution, published when Boris Johnson was prime minister in November 2020.

But giving evidence to the House of Commons energy security and net zero committee, Energy and Utilities Alliance chief executive Mike Foster said “it won’t be met”.

He said the 200,000 heat pumps due to be installed in new dwellings “might be fine” thanks the Future Homes Standard update of the building regulations published this week, which bans gas boilers from all new homes from 2025.

But it would be more difficult to deliver the remaining 400,000 heat pumps, which will have to be retrofitted into existing homes, Foster said.

This is partly due to decisions by prime minister Rishi Sunak to push back low carbon heating requirements for off-gas grid homes and increase the cap on individual Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) grants from £5,000 to £7,500 without raising the overall size of the budget.

Foster said: “The prime minister’s announcement suggests that 80,000 heat pumps that would have been fitted post 2026 (in off gas grid homes) will no longer be fitted and increase of Boiler Upgrade Scheme subsidy has reduced the number of units that can be subsidised by 10,000.

“That’s why those numbers won’t be met. Even if the trend suggested it was an upward trajectory, it isn’t.”

He also said that while the “acknowledgment” in Sunak’s announcement that 20% of homes will be suitable for heat pumps was “welcome”, it is still unclear which dwellings would fall into this category.

“The prime minister’s announcement probably leads to the conclusion that there will be large scale need for hydrogen in people’s homes.”

If this included all homes requiring “expensive” solid wall insulation, this proportion could be as much as 40% of total housing stock, he said: “This leads to the obvious conclusion that there will be a requirement for a gas-based network.”

Foster also told the committee that the electricity grid would currently be unable to cope with a repeat of 2018’s Beast from the East, when the UK was gripped by several days of freezing temperatures, if home heating was fully switched to heat pumps.

“If you converted all properties to heat pumps tomorrow, there is no way the current grid would be able to cope,” he said. “The Beast from the East challenged everyone, but the advantage of gas is you can linepack energy and it gives you the ability to deal with those peak demands.”

Charlotte Lee, chief executive of the Heat Pump Association, said that the PM’s announcement on home heating had sent out “mixed messages” which were “unhelpful” for the transition to decarbonised heating.

But continuing increases in the number of trained heat pump installers mean the 600,000 target can be achieved, she said: “We’ve seen significant increase in number of trained heat pump installers over last year and it is now 9,000.”

If this year’s growth in the number of trained heat pump installers continued, it will be “easy” to ensure the 36,000 qualified individuals are trained, Lee added.

Foster also warned the committee that shifting environment and social levies from electricity to gas bills, which the government is exploring in order to encourage switching to heat pumps, would be “regressive”.

It would concentrate the cost of those levies onto the 85% of consumers who use gas rather than the 100% of those using electricity, which would entrench fuel poverty, he said.

This would “lock in” fuel poverty for those households reliant on gas, who would end up subsidising more affluent counterparts able to buy heat pumps, he said: “The only people able to afford heat pumps are those who are relatively well off. If they are going to get lower electricity costs on the back of people who can’t afford a heat pump, it is not a progressive way of structuring bills in the UK.”