Chris Seeks Pragmatism Over Net Zero, Heat Pumps & EVs
Sir Christopher Chope: The precursor to having a heat pump is that you have to have a well-insulated home. Do you think you are giving enough emphasis to the issue of insulation? You have already won the hearts and minds of people on insulation—most people want to have a well-insulated home. But people do not want to buy into having to change their gas boiler for an ineffectual heat pump. You have the same problem with demand there as you do with people trying to sell electric vehicles into the private consumer market: there is a lot of resistance. That is all linked in, isn’t it, with scepticism about whether there is any necessity for having these net zero targets? Aren’t all the problems we are describing largely flowing from having an unrealistic net zero target?
Miatta Fahnbulleh: Maybe I can chunk that up in three parts. First, let me take the question of the net zero target head on. There is a net zero imperative around this, but for me there is also an affordability and a consumer imperative. I say that because the current status quo, where we have over-reliance on fossil fuels as the mechanism for powering the economy and heating our homes, is not working for consumers. If we had any doubt, the energy crisis we have just come out of disabuses us of that. There is a consumer good for people in terms of homes that are warm and cheaper to run, which is driving everything we are trying to do in the warm homes plan. Candidly, that takes primacy over everything else as we do that transition.
Secondly, it is not either/or. Over the history of upgrades, there is either over-emphasis on fabric first or it is about clean heat, but my view is that we have to take the house as it is. Some homes will be energy-efficient enough that you can put in a heat pump and it works, and people will be warm and not having to pay a fortune. For other homes, you will need fabric upgrades. The flexibility we need to create in the scheme is to allow your installer and provider to figure out what works for that particular consumer and what works for that type of home, so that they can put in the right interventions.
Thirdly, if we think about our boiler upgrade scheme, we have had the highest number of applications on record this October. People are clocking on. My problem is that it tends to be consumers with deeper pockets who are benefiting from this. All the surveys suggest that once they get a heat pump, people love it. We need to make sure that it is not just those at the top who can access this, but that it is accessible to everyone, including low-income households. A lot of the thinking now is about how we make this an affordable and desirable proposition. If we get that right, there is genuinely a consumer benefit to this.
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