Weekend press: Hydrogen will ‘not play a major role’ in home heating

In our latest round-up of the weekend’s national news coverage, energy minister Lord Callanan has suggested the government is going cold on hydrogen for home heating, while one city council is planning to ban gas hobs and boilers in new homes from 2025. Elsewhere, Labour has denied claims it could further water down its flagship green prosperity plan and the boss of Rolls-Royce is expected to urge the government to throw its full weight behind British nuclear technology developed by the engineering giant.

Energy minister says hydrogen will ‘not play a major role’ in heating homes in the UK

The government has given one of its strongest indications yet that it is going cold on hydrogen for home heating.

The energy minister Lord Callanan told The Climate Show with Tom Heap: “It will not play a major role in home heating.

“There’s no way that could be practically achieved”.

When hydrogen burns, it gives off no carbon dioxide as it is pure h2 – there is no carbon in the molecule.

This has led to considerable interest in using it as a domestic fuel for home heating and cooking to replace natural gas which is methane, a fossil fuel that worsens climate change when it burns.

Natural gas is still the workhorse of domestic energy with roughly three-quarters of UK homes on the gas grid and many supply companies are hoping hydrogen might be close to a ‘drop-in replacement’ for their current fuel.

But opposition has been mounting.

Many scientists point out that it takes enormous amounts of electricity to make clean green hydrogen, and it would be much more efficient to use that electricity directly in our homes to run heat pumps.

The National Infrastructure Commission, the body created by the government to advise on critical fabric for the nation’s economy, has said there is “no public policy case for hydrogen” in domestic heating.

Lord Martin Callanan said: “It is clear that the vast majority of decarbonisation of home heating in the UK will be electrification.

“If we have hydrogen production locally it might play a small role in some localised areas”.

One of those areas could be the Yorkshire coastal town of Redcar, where a pilot project is proposed to swap natural gas for hydrogen and force people to choose between that or a heat pump.

But there is considerable local opposition, with residents questioning the safety of hydrogen and resenting the imposition of a change to their home heating.

Locals have already rejected a similar hydrogen village idea close to Ellesmere Port in Cheshire.

However, some gas companies are still insisting there is a role for hydrogen.

Tim Harwood is Hydrogen Programme Director for the supply company Northern Gas, and they are backing the Redcar trial.

“We’re doing this project to demonstrate we can convert the gas network over to hydrogen.

“We can do it safely and we can provide resilience…and customers like it as it doesn’t change their lifestyle very much as it is similar to using natural gas.”

Sky News

Oxford City Council plans to ban gas hobs and boilers in all new homes

A council aims to ban gas hobs and boilers in new homes from 2025 in a bid to be more environmentally friendly.

Oxford City Council plans to hit net zero by 2040 and said this ban would tackle the “existential threat of climate change”.

The Climate Change Act requires that the UK achieves net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Home Builders Federation (HBF) has criticised councillors for diverging from the national timetable.

The plan to ban gas hobs and boilers is part of a larger ambition for all new homes and buildings in Oxford to be constructed as net zero carbon by 2025.

Oxford City Council has set itself a local target of being a net zero carbon city by 2040.

Oxford’s Labour Council also wants to bring forward their 2036 ban on oil and gas in newbuilds.

Cabinet member for planning and healthier communities, councillor Louise Upton said: “We want zero carbon buildings so that future occupants have very low energy bills and won’t need to retrofit, and even more importantly it is the kind of concrete step we have to take to get the city to net zero by 2040.”

BBC News

Labour denies abandoning £28bn green pledge

Labour has denied claims it could further water down its flagship green prosperity plan.

A senior source had suggested to the BBC that the level of investment previously promised – of £28bn a year – might never be reached.

But a party spokesman said, if elected, Labour would “ramp up investment in jobs and energy independence” to a “total of £28bn a year as planned” in the second half of their Parliamentary term.

Labour announced the policy in 2021.

It originally promised to spend £28bn a year until 2030 on the flagship green project, funded by borrowing.

However, in June shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves watered the pledge down, saying the party would invest over time from a 2024 election win, reaching £28bn a year after 2027.

A senior source in the Labour leader’s office said that was because of the state of the public finances. They stressed that Labour’s fiscal rules were more important than any policy.

The Conservatives have previously warned of the alleged dangers of the policy – claiming extra borrowing could increase interest rates and mortgage costs.

During the Labour party conference in Brighton two years ago, Ms Reeves announced her ambition to be the UK’s first “green” chancellor.

She unveiled Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan, explaining money would go on offshore wind farms, planting trees and developing batteries. She added it would be funded by borrowing.

But in June Ms Reeves said she took the decision to scale back the Green Prosperity Plan as a result of the poor state of the economy.

“No plan can be built that is not a rock of economic and fiscal responsibility,” Ms Reeves told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme at the time.

She added: “I will never play fast and loose with the public finances.”

The party’s fiscal rules – which include a promise to get debt falling within five years – are viewed as the “North Star”; more important than any policy, according to the senior Labour source who spoke to the BBC.

Labour sources also denied a report in the Daily Telegraph, that Sir Keir Starmer had asked for the funding pledge to be watered down.

Labour is determined to paint itself as the party of economic credibility – even if it means tempering one of the central planks of its programme for government.

BBC News

‘It’s like buying an iPhone and not having a cable’: UK’s bid for net zero in the balance due to grid ‘blind spot’

As well as more clean energy, Britain needs miles of extra cable to carry it. But a global shortage of components and skills means efforts to meet climate targets will go down to the wire

From next year, engineers will need to roll out more than 100km (62 miles) of electric cabling every day until 2040 if the government hopes to power the UK towards its climate goals, according to new data.

Analysis of Britain’s existing power grids and the country’s predicted electricity demand reveals that within the next 17 years, more than 600,000km of electric lines will need to be either added or upgraded across the UK.

The research, carried out by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and shared with the Observer, lays bare the scale of Britain’s infrastructure challenge, even as energy companies prepare to speed up the building of pylons, power lines and undersea cables.

This surge in electrical infrastructure will be a critical step in the government’s plan to wean the economy off fossil fuels and create a net zero nation by 2050. Challenges will include overhauling government policy and securing supplies of the high-voltage cables needed.

Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, has urged governments worldwide to “open their eyes” to the scale of the task facing them.

Advanced economies will need to lay at least 23 million kilometres of power lines by 2040 to meet their renewable energy goals, according to a recent report, and on a global level, 80m km of cable will be needed.

“If we want clean electricity, we need not only clean methods of generation, but we need to build grids. It has been a blind spot of governments’ clean energy transition programmes of,” said Birol.

Global demand for components such as high-voltage cables, pylons and converter station equipment threatens to outstrip manufacturing capacity, pushing British energy companies into an international race to secure supplies.

The owners of Britain’s high-voltage transmission lines – National Grid, SSE and Scottish Power – have warned that this “blind spot” needs urgent action if the grid is to be rewired in time to meet green energy targets.

Keith Anderson, boss of Scottish Power, has warned that power companies and ministers will have their work cut out getting households to accept what will be a “colossal” increase in visible electricity infrastructure.

“This is a massive infrastructure roll-out,” he told the Observer. “We need to be open about what we’re planning, and why we need to do it, so that as a country we can face up to the reality of this challenge.”

The Observer

Rolls-Royce boss Tufan Erginbilgic: Britain must win nuclear race

The boss of Rolls-Royce is this week expected to urge the Government to throw its full weight behind ground-breaking British nuclear technology developed by the country’s flagship engineering giant.

Chief executive Tufan Erginbilgic is pushing through a whirlwind transformation of the company. He will on Tuesday unveil his blueprint for restoring Rolls to its former glory.

The firm, which is synonymous with Britain’s manufacturing prowess, went through years in the doldrums under previous bosses and came close to bankruptcy during the pandemic.

‘Turbo-Tufan’ will be highlighting his company’s mini nuclear power plants – known as SMRs, standing for small modular reactors.

Erginbilgic is a big believer in the SMR project, which is based on technology honed for use in submarines over the last three decades.

The mini-reactors are greener, cheaper and quicker to construct than conventional power plants and can be sited in a much wider range of locations.

Rolls-Royce, which has so far benefited from about £200 million of Government backing for its work, is ahead of other companies in the UK and abroad. But Erginbilgic is understood to be concerned that competitors will catch up if the Government does not give its full-throated support.

There are also fears that potential overseas buyers of the technology are hesitant because of the British Government’s apparently lukewarm attitude towards Rolls-Royce’s technology.

Instead of backing Rolls outright, the Government launched a competition to select an SMR provider, pitting the company against foreign rivals.

Six firms were selected for the next phase of the competition last month, including EDF of France and a joint venture between the US’s GE and Hitachi of Japan.

Erginbilgic is likely to argue that the process should be speeded up. Sir John Rose, a former boss of Rolls, spoke out in The Mail on Sunday in the summer, warning that Ministers were risking a valuable stream of export income and the chance to create thousands of highly skilled jobs.

Rolls has said in the past that if it won the contract to supply SMRs to the UK, it could create 40,000 jobs by 2050 and boost the economy by £50 billion, as well as helping in the drive to net zero emissions.

Shares in Rolls-Royce have been among the best performers on the stock market this year, rising by 145 per cent so far as the City has been impressed with Erginbilgic’s verve. However, they are still 18 per cent lower than they were five years ago.

At the capital markets day on Tuesday, when he meets top City analysts, Erginbilgic will set out medium-term financial ambitions and also talk about his long-term strategy.

This Is Money

Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.