Anderson brands hydrogen home heating a fairy tale

Using hydrogen for heating and relying on Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) style exercises to cut energy demand have both been branded “nonsense” by Keith Anderson.

In a breakout session at consultancy Aurora Energy’s annual Spring Forum in Oxford last Wednesday, the Scottish Power chief executive said he is not at all convinced about the use of hydrogen as a heating source, except perhaps in small, isolated cases.

Anderson said talk of blending hydrogen into the gas system is “absolutely bonkers” and “total, make believe nonsense”.

Instead, the way to kickstart uptake of hydrogen is in areas like manufacturing and transport, which are otherwise hard to decarbonise, he said: “The biggest challenge for hydrogen in the UK right now is where do you site it.

“That will be the key to us because as you start to transport the hydrogen around the system, the cost equation goes out completely. What you need to do is to start to locate big hydrogen hubs, where you have concentrations of big, energy intensive, carbon intensive manufacturing processes and production facilities.”

He added: “There maybe one or two local specific areas where you use hydrogen for other purposes as well but that shouldn’t be the driver of the hydrogen economy: the driver should be the decarbonisation of intensive production facilities at this point in time.”

Anderson’s scepticism about hydrogen in heat was backed up by Robert Hewitt, deputy director of energy security at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

“Using hydrogen effectively for baseload heating is probably not a good use of hydrogen in the merit order,” he said, adding that power peaking plants is probably a better use of the low carbon gas.

Anderson also poured cold water on the effectiveness of exercises to persuade customers to turn their power down to limit strains on the grid, like the recently introduced DFS.

While describing the exercise as “quite good fun” for those interested in energy, he said: “If you think we’re going to manage demand by asking people at six o’clock on Monday night to switch the lights off and get £1.25 back, it’s just total nonsense.”

He said that the key to meaningful reductions in demand would be using technology via the distribution networks to shift demand, such as charging electric vehicles.

Hewitt also told the break out session that the government has been “a bit slower to get going on” rolling out flexibility solutions, which need to be looked at “fairly urgently” to avoid intermittency problems when the grid is more reliant on renewable power.