Energy minister expresses scepticism over hydrogen home heating

An energy minister has described himself as a “hydrogen sceptic” and said the costs of producing the gas mean it is “pretty much impossible” to see it being used in mass home heating.

At a fringe meeting on home heating at the Conservative party conference on Sunday night (3 October) organised by the thinktank Bright Blue and Citizens Advice, Lord Callanan outlined his thinking on the main heat decarbonisation options.

The peer, who is overseeing the government’s heat and buildings strategy in his role as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS, said: “I’m a little bit of a hydrogen sceptic. It has great potential but at the moment, it is quite expensive to produce.”

He said the role of hydrogen will be “significant but we don’t know yet how significant.”

“The jury is out on how much the cost will fall but the idea that we could produce enough hydrogen at reasonable cost to displace mains gas is pretty much impossible.

“It is more likely that will be used for trains or heavy goods vehicles rather than home heating, but the official policy is that we will take a view on whether it will have a significant role to play in home heating.”

Another fringe meeting this morning heard that officials at BEIS are taking a “heat pump first” approach to the heat and buildings strategy.

Asked to identify one measure that would promote the decarbonisation of home heating, Lord Callanan pointed to a harmonisation of the policy costs on gas and electricity.

“Rebalancing gas and electricity costs is quite important,” he said. Last week, the Financial Times reported that the government is examining moves to strip renewable energy subsidies from electricity bills in a bid to spur the uptake of heat pumps.

On heat pumps, Lord Callanan said they are currently “expensive” to install but pointed to UK’s “good track record” in cutting the cost of solar panels and wind power over the past decade as an example of how the devices could come down in price.

Making smart meters compulsory would be a “retrograde step”, he said: “My post bags are full enough of people complaining about them without making them compulsory.”

On energy efficiency, Lord Callanan described the Insulate Britain campaign as “idiots”.

He said: “We are fundamentally doing a huge amount in this space to help the poorest people in society to do precisely that by insulating their homes. By all means challenge us to spend more, but they can’t say we are doing nothing.”

Challenged on the failure of the government’s cancelled Green Homes Grants, the peer admitted that the government’s initial six-month timescale for rolling out the energy efficiency scheme had been “naive”.

He said: “The timescales fixed were over ambitious. The idea we could roll out a £1.5 billion scheme in a few months and the supply chain could scale up was probably naive.”

On hydrogen, Lord Callanan’s scepticism was backed up by Bim Afolami MP, the Conservative chair of PRASEG (All-Party Parliamentary Group for Renewable and Sustainability Energy).

He said: “Hydrogen’s instability as a gas makes it potentially difficult to do in a mass market way in residential homes.”