Lack of choice fuelled backlash to Cadent’s hydrogen village

Opposition to Cadent’s aborted hydrogen village trial was chiefly driven by residents feeling that the alternative gas was being imposed on them, one of the company’s directors has claimed.

In July this year, the government pulled the plug on Cadent’s bid to run the UK’s first whole village scale hydrogen trial in Whitby, Cheshire.

It came following a widespread backlash by local residents against the concept.

However, Tony Ballance, Cadent director of regulation and strategy, told a meeting at the Conservative Party Conference that the opposition was not to hydrogen itself but because residents felt like they were being “forced to do something”.

Under Cadent’s initial proposals, Whitby residents would not have been able to remain on natural gas and would have had to opt for hydrogen or electric heating.

Earlier this year, the gas network modified its proposal by making it possible for residents to retain their gas heating and cooking appliances. However, by that point opposition to the scheme had grown beyond repair, Balance said.

Ballance told the meeting, which was sponsored by Cadent, that a survey it had recently conducted found that residents “would have participated in the trial and would have probably chosen hydrogen” if given the choice from the get-go.

A key lesson was that while demonstration projects are needed for net zero technologies, they cannot be imposed, he said: “We have to be really, really careful about customer choice: we cannot simply determine outcomes and expect to impose them.

“While you can nudge behaviour, you can’t really make systematic change without really thinking long and hard about it.”

Ballance also called for a cooling in the increasingly bitter disagreement between advocates of hydrogen and heat pumps about the best option for home heating.

“We’ve got a temper this debate about energy vectors. This heat pump versus hydrogen debate is not helping, it just creates confusion and distrust amongst people because they’re not really sure what to decide to do.”

Northern Gas Networks’ Redcar village trial is now the only feasible proposed village trial in the running. The trial would see 2,000 homes converted to hydrogen.

Government has committed to making a decision on the Redcar trial before the end of the year.

Last month (September 2023), the government also launched a consultation with the view to take a strategic policy decision before the end of the year on whether it should support blending of up to 20% hydrogen by volume into the gas distribution networks.