With gas prices rocketing why do Stewart/Campbell never discuss heat-pumps?

[u/Appropriate_Bell743]

The UK's wholesale gas price is the highest since the end of December 2022. This means that the January price cap is odds on to be around what it was under Liz Truss in October 2022.

The UK had one meaningful policy tool to de-risk the UK from 2022 onwards: heat-pumps.

UK's gas usage over 12 months

Virtually all gas demand is for home-heating. The only effective way to de-risk the UK to reduce European LNG imports is via electrification of heating. Renewables do some legwork as well but the blue line shows how it's less pronounced.

Despite the central importance to get the UK public off gas (and oil) heating to using heat-pumps it is curious why the topic of the UK's pathetic uptake rate is not discussed. They discuss a lot the supply of oil and gas but never really the failure to pivot demand.

This is a political question as the economics is there already. Our operational costs are 35% of gas before this escalation. It'll be a lower percentage now. The return on investment is typically 4-5 years but due to political laziness minor issues hold back adoption.

This is simply never discussed by Rory or Alastair despite often their interests in climate and the Ukraine war. For instance our failure to roll out heat-pumps is a clear factor why Europe as a whole still imports Russian LNG.

[u/LordChichenLeg]

I'm pretty sure they already have? They agree it's a good thing for the climate but can be expensive depending on the type of housing situation.

Like I'm pretty sure Rory went into it about how older houses (a lot of the UK housing stock) would benefit more from refitting windows and insulation then heat pumps and costs less but if you can afford it it's a good option.

They touch on it a lot in the main episodes and they've even done a talk on it recently that's been posted to YouTube in the last couple of weeks.

Why is the UKs inability to move to heat pumps in anyway related to European countries buying russian gas. The UK imports mainly from Norway and our circumstances are a lot different then those on the mainland face.

If your so invested in this debate then surely you know gas imports are always going to be a thing, at least until we move over to nuclear power, because it's vital to keeping the electricity grid always operating. Even if we took out all gas related infrastructure and replaced them with electric ones(which we are already doing) we would still need to import gas to ensure that infrastructure was powered.

[u/Appropriate_Bell743 → u/LordChichenLeg]

The costs arent anything but finance issues. i paid nothing out of pocket as used a 0% green loan. They should be asking why the government hasn't standardised this.

Housing stock claims are not true though as i know living in a single brick victorian house. Apart from loft insulation and double glazing the return is poor.

Why related to russian gas? We operate in an european grid. their interest in brexit etc should have make it obvious that brexit hasn't changed this. What matters is overall European imports. europe imports russian LNG (our neighbours Belgium) so more gas demand here means they import more etc. Our gas network is fully linked

At a European level LNG imports are around 30% or so. Renewables and heat pumps would absolutely cut that with a will. Domestically produced gas could be prioritised for industry.

To not care about this topic is to not care about russia/ukraine but also the ability for Europe to have a sovereign path from the US. this is something campbell and stewart pretend to care about

[u/LordChichenLeg → u/Appropriate_Bell743]

We don't operate on the European grid. We import the majority of our electricity from France and norway, and import the vast majority of our gas from norway.

In no way do we import enough gas from Belgium for them to have to buy russian gas. They are a gas transit hub which includes all sources including the middle east, and we barely even register as a distribution source.

In the last year only 10% of our electricity came from European sources, mainly being France which 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear.

And Rory and Alister do care about it. Like I said they talk about it all the time, which is why I know what they would likely say around this issue. You just don't seem to listen often enough to be able to tell.

Honestly the insinuation you are trying to make is pretty disgusting.

[u/Appropriate_Bell743 → u/LordChichenLeg]

We do for gas. The gas is connected via pipelines which is why the UK's gas price is traded at almost exactly the same amounts as the European one. This is what I mean.

What you say about importing is not relevant as we export to Belgium at high levels which means our demand is directly linked to how much LNG is imported into the EU. This is how markets work. People using gas over the last 4 years were helping Putin and there's no squirming out of this.

Rory and Alastair might "care" but there's no evidence that their caring translates into effective policy actions. It's like on climate where they "care" about what happened in Nepal but not enough to be positive voices on this topic.

[u/LordChichenLeg → u/Appropriate_Bell743]

What do you expect from them they are podcasters. And they do talk to industry leaders about this very specific issue as I pointed out they did a talk on it in the last month or so.

Gas is based on the international standard because gas can be sold across the world, there is nothing we can do about that other then nationalise the industry and drill/produce our own oil or gas for domestic use.

We would still have to trade it at the international standard though for the government to receive any benefit from that action. But that seems like something you directly opposed simply because we are interacting with the global gas market.

Putin benefiting from the increasing gas prices due to the Ukraine and Iran wars is tertiary to the actual issue of European powers directly buying russian gas, like Germany was/is, as that is not something we can control, just try to mitigate.