Cadent slams ‘flippant’ NIC comments about gas decommissioning

A senior Cadent director has hit out at “flippant statements” made by the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) about decommissioning the gas network.

Cadent director of strategy Angie Needle told Utility Week that the NIC’s recommendation to “begin planning for the process of decommissioning or repurposing the gas network and disconnecting customers” was unhelpful for everyone.

The NIC made the recommendation within its latest infrastructure progress report, published earlier this week. The infrastructure advisory body also said ministers should end new connections to the gas network from 2025 and rule out government support for hydrogen for heat.

However, Needle said that planning to decommission the gas network was premature and cannot be seriously considered until there has been much more thinking about how to ramp up electrification.

“I don’t think these flippant statements about decommissioning are very helpful,” Needle said. “Unless we can see a credible plan, of which there is not one, to show how the full electrification of heat, EVs (electric vehicles) and all those things will work, we cannot plan decommissioning.

“We don’t have a plan for the full electrification of everything that currently uses gas. We cannot plan to decommission anything until there are people not using gas anymore,” she said, adding that this included other gas users such as hospitals, factories and power stations as well as domestic customers.

“If you don’t know the full cost of electrification because you haven’t got a plan, how can you say that is the only solution,” Needle said, adding that the NIC’s analysis of future heating has got “quite a lot of holes in it”.

She also said it is unfair to blame the slow growth in heat pump uptake on the government not ruling out hydrogen for home heating as many advocates of electrified heat argue.

The government has given “plenty of signals” to encourage electrification of heating, such as its annual target of 600,000 heat pumps by 2028 and the increased grants awarded through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, Needle said: “It’s nonsense using hydrogen as a scapegoat for the lack of delivery of electrification.

“We talk about all the infrastructure challenges of which there are many across water and rail and the one bit of infrastructure that works really well is gas infrastructure, which is world class and not something that needs meddling with right now.”

Energy efficiency minister Lord Callanan said that hydrogen will play at most a “very tiny” role in home heating, at a House of Lords hearing earlier this week.

Instead, Lord Callanan said heat pumps and heat networks will be the “primary means of decarbonisation for the foreseeable future”.

It comes after the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero decided to pause work on hydrogen town pilots until it has made a strategic decision on the role of hydrogen in decarbonising heat, which is due in 2026.

Lord Callanan said: “Electrification will be by far the vast majority of the decarbonisation of home heating in the UK. If hydrogen plays any role at all, it will be only a very tiny one.

“All the evidence and reports show that, even if it were technically possible to pipe hydrogen into domestic homes, electrification is a much more efficient option.”

But there is “absolutely… a case” for a strategic hydrogen distribution network in the UK, not for home heating but for industrial and other uses, he said.

These include decarbonisation of some rail transport and heavy goods vehicles, particularly for non-road mobile machinery, where there are “no real electrification options”.

Last year, Utility Week examined the different options for decommissioning a gas network. Click here to read the analysis in full.