The idea with hydrogen is actually to store excess energy from the summer (like PV) for the winter. During the "charging" and "discharging" of the hydrogen stored energy the byproduct heat can be used for heating + the electric energy can be used for a heat pump. It is very costly for now to install a hydrogen storage + heat pump but it has to be done if we want to achieve 100% carbon free energy because there are only limited options for storing energy for months in house hold settings
It is not just ineffiency. The requirements in materials of pipes, flange caskets, its maintenance and technical surveillance costs are significant. And you will need some sensors and controls to ensure that hydrogen leakage is detected. Over the last year's the industry tries to throw as much mud against the wall hoping that something sticks.
*ARTEMIS LAUNCH WAS ABORTED YESTERDAY* the reason - a Hydrogen leak - THAT is how leaky Hydrogen is - NASA can not keep it from leaking in a $4 billion rocket there is no way on gods earth that Hydrogen is an option for domestic usage.
Why is NOBODY talking about Ecotricity's Gas from Grass, nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy for gas-heating grids? Requires no huge changes to infrastructure. Keeps £Bns in the British economy, reduces Trade Deficits generates jobs, training for the Green Revolution, , and increases National security through Energy Security? Ironically anti-Science Vegan embarrassments to Veganism, Climate Action and the rest: "Dale Vince, oldskool vegan is a traitorous neoliberal shill enemy of Climate Action because our collective confirmation biased GROUPTHINK says so!" Fossil Fuels Barons: "Thanks for being sterotypes and memes we trade with buddies, Vegan Anarcho-Communists! We're too stupid to see how we can profit from nearly entirely clean nearly perpetual energy and so won't re-arrange our portfolios and this is more reason to not like the imaginary competition and use you as propaganda like we did with undersea Tidal Power!" Far Left: "Horseshoe Theory debunked because Marxists say so! What do you mean Karl Marx was a casually racist anti-semitic homophobe who cheated on his Noble wife with the hired help, and had a secret son, whilst Engels paid his rent?"
And replace the fossil methan with renewable methan from waste- and sewage treatment or the industrial livestock farming. In combination with more efficient heaters and better insulation. The use of fossil methan can be reduced by alot.
@@NewPipeFTW Exactly. Smartly achieved Sustainable Biomethane is absolutely a far lesser evil than digging gas out of the ground where it's been locked away for millions of years! This other idea for processing human 'waste' and other materials is fascinating, from the Undecided with Matt Ferrell channel ua-cam.com/video/p6CF-umWLZg/v-deo.html !!!!!
My issue is the source of hydrogen in the first place. Blue hydrogen is a con trick due to potential methane leakages of 3% and the energy required during steam cracking. I do agree over time the COP from heat pumps will far outweigh the savings from domestic H2 boilers. So I imagine the costs for said gasket and sensors would be included within the £22bn estimate provided earlier. I really should rewatch the vid to reassess that graded list of hydrogen's uses because in time we will have to exploit brine from seawater to isolate various elemental ions like Lithium and sodium. The process releases as a byproduct significant amounts of hydrogen which should not go to waste either.
You missed air pollution. In London gas boilers produce over 20% of Nitrogen Dioxide air pollution. Burning Hydrogen produces 6x as much Nox as natural gas so even with all the work being done with ULEZs and electrification of vehicles it would all be undone if we had hydrogen boilers.
"There are already health issues arising from the high levels of NOx emissions in major cities like London in relation to asthma and respiratory diseases. While much of the NOx emissions come from the exhausts of petrol and diesel engines, it is estimated that up to 22% of NOx emissions in London come from gas boilers used for heating. This proportion is likely to increase as the UK moves away from using internal combustion engines for transport to using electric vehicles. Burning methane in pure oxygen produces CO2 and H2O. However, methane is normally burnt in air (which is 78% nitrogen) and some of the ferociously active oxygen atoms combine with nitrogen in the air to form NOx, while most of the oxygen atoms combine with carbon atoms, which are more reactive than nitrogen, to form CO then CO2. Burning hydrogen in pure oxygen just produces H2O. However, hydrogen would normally be burnt in air and some of the ferociously active oxygen atoms combine with nitrogen in the air to form NOx. There are no carbon atoms for the oxygen atoms to combine with, so a higher proportion combines with nitrogen from the air to form NOx. For this reason burning hydrogen in air produces up to six times as many NOx emissions as burning methane in air. There is therefore a seriously increased health risk of burning hydrogen for heating as compared to burning fossil gas."
Hmm, you might research the "lean" burning of hydrogen. JCB now using hydrogen in modified plant engines and claim they have found how to reduce the nasty emissions. Further research will lead you to similar projects in Japan and China.
@@t1n4444 Lean burn hydrogen produces less power. Catalytic converters can also help but as far as I am aware NOx is still produced in the process. JCB haven’t given any clarity as far as I’m aware. However using hydrogen in homes instead of electricity seems odd as there is already an electrical grid but there isn’t a hydrogen grid and you can’t simply use the natural gas grid as some have stated for multiple reasons. embrittlement and leakage are just two plus the gas boilers will still need gas during any change over period and hydrogen and natural gas can’t share the same pipes. Yes hydrogen up to say 10% can be added to natural gas but that’s not the same as full replacement. Heat pumps when correctly sized and installed do work perfectly well and are a proven technology.
@@johnharvey1786 but they need a well insulated house with out very old houseing stock in the UK can not all be done many Victorian House's can not have cavity insulation
@@gingernutpreacher Not quite true, yes good insulation helps and is very important but there are other things that can help such as a couple of electrical oil filled rads in the centre of the house to supplement the lower output of heat pumps against gas. Also most houses can be insulated. Solid wall houses can have insulation added internally or externally. Also solar on the roof will provide power for much of the year to run these systems plus batteries that can be filled using solar or overnight using lower cost mains electricity. The problem isn’t the difficulty in adding insulation or the clean heating systems it’s the cost as this is all quite expensive and is where Government subsidies should be provided if we hope to achieve the CO2 reduction targets.
Seems that new build regulations in the UK are really poor and outdated. Here in Belgium, you are required to meet a certain energy efficiency wen building a new build house, which you have to prove to an independent company. You can reach this efficiency in different ways but most common is by installing: - Solar panels (mandatory) - Heat pump not mandatory but extremly helpfull for achieving the required hosue efficiency - Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery - And a mandatory rain water tank of minimal 10.000l, for flushing toilets, gardens or washing machine. - and ofcourse proper insulation. If you get to a certain efficiency you don´t have to pay any taxes for owning a house for the first 5 years! Solar panels are still funded foor €300 per kWp aswell as home storage systems. I am happy i´ve done all of this as my energy bill is only €60 a month, which would me normally €120 bit at least half of the consumed energy is produced by the solar panels 👌
Yep Belgium is way ahead of most countries on this with the 'new buildings are passivehaus or near enough' rules. Ireland's building regs are pretty good too. The UK has been totally useless on this subject for many years, and our airtightness spec is apalling. We were promised (last year) some better regs in 2025. Why wait 4 years? Just improve the regs to somewhere near passivehouse, and do it this year.
Just one thing about heat pumps: air exchange pumps like yours only work efficiently down to a certain temperature outside. If you live where it often gets colder than that, you'll want to look at a ground exchange pump. Those pump heat out of your house in summer and put it into the ground through a sort of dry well. In winter they pump it back into your house. It works because the temperature of the ground stays about the same all year below a certain depth, (about two metres I think.) It's more expensive than the air exchange kind, but it works at lower temperatures. There are also water exchange heat pumps, but you'd need to live near a river or lake or ocean or some other large body of water for those.
It is true that most Air Source Heating Pumps lose efficiency between -10 and -15 degrees Celsius, with high end ones losing efficiency between -18 and -25 degrees Celsius. The lowest ever recorded temperatures in the UK vary between -23 and -27.2 degrees Celsius, and they were all last Century. I think even common Air Heating Pumps would lose efficiency very rarely in the UK, as we rarely get such low temperatures.
@@garygcrook Oh, I agree absolutely that air-exchange pumps would be good enough in most parts of the UK, (maybe not the Orkney Islands.) Only this channel has viewers outside the UK. (Canada here) Dave Borlace is a smart guy, he's worth listening to. I just meant to add that for his viewers in other parts. I live in an apartment, myself, so I don't get a say in how it's heated. I wish I did, I'd consider heat pumps a worhtwhile investment
You are correct, but there is a cheaper (if not more efficient) way to deal with this. I installed Fujitsu Halcyon heat pumps which are rated at 100% output down to -15F/-26C. We regularly get nights in the winter that are -35F/-37C. I also had old electric baseboard heaters from the 70s that I replaced with modern versions for $500-ish for the house and I installed thermostats that can be set at 45F/7C vs the standard 50F/10C lowest setting on a regular thermostat. (1) If I am not paying attention and leave the heat pumps on when they can't handle the heating load, the baseboard will kick in to keep the pipes from freezing. (2) If I know it is going to be too cold for the heat pumps I can turn them off and just turn on the baseboard. I've only had 1 winter with heat pumps, but I left them on to see what would happen and the baseboard never kicked in and I wasn't uncomfortable. I think we had about 16 days below -15F and 4 of them were -35F-ish. I can see there being an issue if everyone has to have electric resistance heaters kick on at once in the middle of winter, but I'm sure that's something we can work out.
I've always thought hydrogen was too valuable just to burn. Personally I'd be glad to see the back of the gas infrastructure, no more gas explosions (lower household insurance premiums?), fewer holes in the road, only one standing charge per household instead of two. I would also make PV cells compulsory on new-builds and roof replacements, where practicable, to ease the burden on the electrical infrastructure.
I'd make PV & storage compulsory for new homes too, slightly more than the house is likely to use so it could help older homes and counter falling efficiency over the years. The home owner would be responsible for replacing both, plus the company that builds the houses would benefit from the sale of energy until the homes are sold.
@@williambreen1001 the good thing about having panels on your roof is that you can easily see how much they're producing. Usually looking out the window is sufficient. Get the dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. ready and wait for the sun to come out :) It'd be even better if large appliances (heating especially) were to actually become smart and regulate their power draw according to what's available. People always talk about how we need a lot of storage, but I never hear anything about shaping demand.
One problem we also have is power supply (solar during the day, wind on windy days) to demand (pretty much 24/7) and hydrogen is one way we could store the excess energy on sunny days to use it during the winter.
Not disagreeeing with your main points Roger, but if we are talking about mandating PV etc, I'd like to think that district heating systems were planned int new builds schemes by default. This would though, add, to the holes in the road and the standing charges!
I work as a SAP Assessor, just had one client say that he was going to fit a heat pump and then rip it out after inspection, then put in a gas boiler., 😮 for real.
Where I live, heatpumps are used as a huge cash grab by installers. Price fixing! DIY prices to purchase give a false sense of cost to the customer. Once an installer comes along, and if you're in a MRUB (Multi Residential Unit Building) you have NO choice but to go with an installer, the price for the unit alone is 4-5x the DIY purchase price. I can see double, but 4-5 times? That's just a rip-off! They still have installation costs on top of that. What a scam! Total greed!!!
Maybe only use the "Extra" energy that renewable generate ? since one of the major problem of renewable is always storage.. why not use ONLY the excess energy to make green hydrogen.. with more and more green tech popping up.. there will be huge surplus of electricity.. even if we use it for heating and the efficiency is low.. i still think it is better than turning off the turbine..
Biogas is the drop in replacement for natural gas. It also methane, like natural gas, *but renewable*. In the long term renewable electricity and heat pumps is the solution, but in the short term biogas will help the transition away from natural gas all together.
Until such time that we actually *have* a surfeit green electrons it seems nuts to use them to create protons (hydrogen), compress said protons and, by necessity, cool them. It's all very wasteful of electrons which are easily transported and either used immediately or can be stored very efficiently. Maybe the oil people who are on board with hydrogen realize that if they can consume all the green electrons to make hydrogen then they can control the cost of electricity and pass the costs on to the consumer making it more expensive to use electricity directly (and having to use hydrogen to generate electricity at the consumer end through fuel cells).
Like burning hydrogen is a bad call. But using home hydrogen fuel cells produces about 50% heat, and that is a perfect heating aid while also easing the weight on electrical distribution that comes along side electrification.
Every new house in the southern US has a heat pump, and it’s been the standard for many years. No financial incentives from the government needed. When you want both heating and air conditioning for your home, a heat pump is the choice with the lowest up-front cost as well as the most efficiency.
The only role for green hydrogen is for cryogenic storage of excess electricity from solar and wind and then onsite production of electricity via a fuel cell (using atmospheric oxygen).
28mn homes in the UK x £5000 grants = £140bn + the clients £4k investment. So that must be one hell of a saving over time when considering the 5-6 times loss of electricity via burning green H2 instead of utilising COP 2.5 + heat pumps. Hmm, the cost given by the Gentleman for finishing the job of readying the grid for H2 was put at £22bn. That should still be done IMV. Technology advances as will safety procedures; plus the flexibility of being able to transport the stuff without fuss is of benefit to business and could potentially take thousands of tanker trucks off the roads.
I am a Dipl.-Ing. for thermal engineering and I fully agree in what you say about the inefficiency of hydrogen. Whereever one can make a process with green electricity (heat pump) or including a battery of a reasonable size, it is about 3 to 4 times more efficient, compared to hydrogen, appart from technical problems like corrosion, volatility etc.. Still there a some politicians who like to play with words of innovative technical solution (hydrogen), I think as a result of being pushed by lobbyists of the existing gas industry trying to survive in future. But there will not be any green hydrogen as long as we fire power plants with gas or coal to make electricity. But please tell about your private heat pump. We now pay 4 times more for electricity compared to gas energy (now 32 vs 8 €ct/kWh).As you live in a hundred year old british house, have you at least got relatively new double glas windows with rubber bearings ? How is your electricity bill compared to your gas bill before ? Wilhelm from Germany.
It’s not Electricity either and Heat Pumps cause a little problem with the ground water getting either too cold or to warm. A local province already banned the usage of these as the overall ground heat did go down over 5C..
About 10 years ago we got rid of of gas boiler for two reasons, environmental and cost. The system was ancient and needed totally replacing for about 4 grand at the time. We decided to go with electric radiators. We went for, at the time, sophisticated thermostats and fitted out the house for 2 grand. Whilst undoubtedly cost more to run we have zero service costs and cheaper installation. Heat pumps are more efficient but does the extra cost equates to the high installation cost? Are we trying to fit high tech kit when there is a simple alternative? Enjoy the channel.
It would even out over a few years, imagine your heating bill being cut by a third. Depends on how big your house is but would eventually break even. Heat pumps make more sense when you look at it from a more macro level. For a single household, using 3 times as much power to heat is expensive but manageable. On a country wide level that's a vast amount more power generation required, making decarbonisation harder and more expensive. Might need twice as many power plants as exist currently. Add EV's onto that and the demand for power would be insatiable.
Back in the 70’s a company in the U.K. manufactured an air source heat pump called the ‘Biddle Equator’. Size wise it was designed to fit through a fairly typical square loft hatch and be installed and operated in the loft space. Being installed in the loft it benefited from the heat rising from the house through the ceilings, even when insulated (albeit to the lower standard of the period). I wonder if there is still some mileage in loft insulation?
Before natural gas was available, British homes were supplied with hydrogen in the form of coal gas, of which it was the major constituent (along with carbon monoxide and a few other nasties) so there is no problem from the technical point of view. Hydrogen can be made from methanol as is done in some power stations for alternator cooling supplies to avoid the hydrogen embrittlement in high pressure storage cylinders, but first the methanol has to be manufactured. Economically, it would make no sense at all as even straightforward electric heating from any electrical source, "green" or otherwise, is far more efficient than using the electricity to produce hydrogen (an inefficient process) and then burning with further efficiency loss. Heat pumps are the most efficient solution. If our natural gas supplies in Britain had not been squandered in gas-fired power stations, it would have lasted many more years to come without any reliance on Russian gas. What is a serious problem is the Green Levy and VAT on electricity consumed with the large grants paid out for the installation of solar panels, heat pumps etc to well-off people who can afford the installation cost and who will henceforth pay less Green Levy and VAT (or even none if they can be self-sufficient). This is like Robin Hood in reverse- stealing from the poorest to give to the wealthiest.
@@mfx1 Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4) which is a compound of Carbon and Hydrogen. This is heavier than air and is supplied at a higher pressure than coal gas. Coal gas is a mixture of gases in which the Hydrogen is in its gaseous (H2) form and is 50% or more of the mixture. It is also lighter than air and a balloon filled with it will rise. It was always supplied at low pressure in the mains. It was the carbon monoxide content that made it so lethal if inhaled. It is of course, combustible and rendered harmless by burning.
Far Left being halfway correct: "Renewable Energy was suppressed and oppressed by fossil fuel barons" Also them: "Dale Vince and Ecotricity's Gas from Grass providing nearly entirely clean nearly infinite energy means he's a neoliberal traitorous capitalist shill and he's an enemy of the people for not being a Vegan Anarcho-Communist!" Climate Tech channels: NEVER talk about Ecotricity's Sustainable Biomethane which is actually workable unlike many variations of the concept. Far Left: treat me like a fascist 24/7 for calling our their groupthink, confirmation bias, other cognitive biases and logical fallacies, whilst they have no idea Karl Marx was a casually racist anti-semite, womanising homophobe who had cheated on his Noble wife and had an 'illegitimate' son. Lenin GASSED PEASANTS in the Tambov Rebellion. "Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great" - Sir Clement Attlee, Labour Prime Minister who got more done for the working-class, Britain, and the world, than any Marxist-Maoist-Leninist-Stalinist ever, ever will.
@@MervynPartin Methane is lighter than air, it's only slightly denser than town gas (methane 0.5567, Town gas approx 0.44) Town gas was only supplied at 4mBar to the customer premises (the upstream network also worked at relatively low pressures) but 25mBar for natural gas. As a percentage town gas contained at most 50% Hydrogen BUT as it was supplied at much lower pressures Hydrogen embrittlement wasn't so much of an issue, also Hydrogen would need to be supplied at significantly higher pressure. Using the Hydrogen content of Town gas as justification for using the current network to carry pure Hydrogen isn't scientifically sound, for a start how do you operate a mixed network with some people on 100% Hydrogen and some on natural gas? Do you convert everyone's appliances to Hydrogen first (how can you be 100% sure everyone has been converted) and then switch over the network how long will that take and what do people that have been converted do for heating etc. In the meantime? Do you set up temporary local supply depots fed from tankers? It MAY be possible to gradually increase the amount of Hydrogen over time and do incremental conversions but how long will that take and what cost? There's all sorts of reasons why 100% Hydrogen is a REALLY bad idea and TBH anyone buying a so called "Hydrogen ready' boiler now is wasting their money as there is no way there is going to be any sort of 100% Hydrogen network within the likely lifespan of that boiler.
@@mfx1 My mistake regarding the densities of methane and air, however the switch from coal gas to natural gas was carried out mostly using the same mains and the gas boards may have had a tremendous task, but the change was carried out successfully, area by area.
What about using the hydrogen that has been generated using excess PV energy from summer in a boiler during winter? On vaillant website they say this: Heat pumps and hydrogen boilers will most likely be the devices that will heat and produce domestic hot water for our homes and offices for decades to come. These two technologies will coexist because both will offer their best assets under very specific conditions of use, with their specific limits and advantages.
I agree completely, but the only thing I'm missing here is the cost for the electric net. You say its expensive to overhaul the gas networks, but is that being compared to the cost expand and overhaul the electric grid? If the gas overhaul can be done quicker then the electric grid then i can still see a point to push that instead, after all every year counts rightnow to reduce co2
4:42 If you're gonna do blue hydrogen, at least do something useful with the CO2 (eg passing it through potassium-hydrate powder to make soap and other products) rather than just burying it...
I've just seen a piece, which although admittedly didn't seem always object... said heat pumps are not very effective in homes which are not well insulated?
I suppose you could not convert the natural gas network to hydrogen until every Nat gas boiler has been replaced or converted. Otherwise you would have to run two networks side by side or some people would be left without heating.
It doesn't normally embrittle copper below 150C, and that's what most metallic domestic gas piping is in the UK. It is more dangerous than methane in that the ignition energy is lower and the mix explodes over a much higher mixture range.
@@jamesbrown99991 It was, in streets, not houses. But a huge amount of it has been replaced, at least round here (East Anglia). Not sure how much is left.
@@xxwookey I think it's generally worse when the gas mains explode than when there's a gas leak in a house. There's still lead pipe being used for water, so I wouldn't be surprised what other archaic pipes are used elsewhere.
If an air source heat pump takes low grade heat and ‘multiplies’ that heat could you not have a second stage compressor that multiplies that first stage heat again?
I have often wondered if Hydrogen was a viable form of energy storage. What are the large scale challenges to using Hydrogen like a battery? Making it during times of excess energy and using it during peak hours? Interested also in knowing the heat pump challenges in North America where boilers are rare and most homes are heated with natural gas and oil furnaces or electricity.
Compared to pumped hydro, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, and other emerging grid scale battery tech, I suspect hydrogen won't be able to compete at scale. It's too inefficient to produce (including compressing it) and difficult (i.e., expensive) to store.
@@Lord.Kiltridge But I didn't compare it to curtailment. Where did you get that notion? I compared it to pumped hydro, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, and other emerging grid scale battery tech.
Thanks again for an interesting channel.The heat pump idea is elegant but a friend recently converted their house (think its circa 100 years old). They had to rip out every internal wall and ceiling in the house, replace all the windows (and doors I think) as well as insulate under the floor. This was so they could keep the house warm on the 12 Kw the heat pump output as opposed to the 35kw (or similar) boiler they used to have. They opted for under floor heating the output temperature is to low for normal radiators although I gather forced air convection radiators might have been ok (and cheaper). I looked at it for my house (similar age) but couldn't bare the idea of living in a building site for months or moving out of the house so just opted for another boiler unfortunately for now. On the other hand my parents house is more modern and it looks like it will work ok so is not all doom and gloom. It looks to me like if were not going to use gas /oil then we are very unlikely to get the heat pump 3:1 coefficient of performance (any where near Carnot efficiency) because we will have to top up with what is basically an electric element to bring the power and temperature up to whats needed for the milions of older houses like mine where people wont rip them completely apart. Upsot ... we are going to need a awful lot of carbon free electricity which is available when we need it not just when wind blows / sun shines.
What about hydrogen as an energy storage method around the 1MW level for rural or even off grid communities? Of course heat pumps are fantastically efficient and ideal for macro scale adaptation but diversifying the energy storage methods and decentralising their locations will surely make the most adaptive and robust energy networks that can also provide solutions to every kind of community.
@@edc1569 ×4 the cost is crazy, no point at all for that. I was thinking more that the H2 storage system could easily be configured so that the gas it collects for it's network can be harnessed with the excess electricty (standard) but also to push the gas back into the electolyser membrane with Oxygen to resupply that network with power when their renewables don't meet the demand.
You can't really know the full risk rate except you're a professional, Reason I settled for advisory & guide from a digital guru, Never been the same again with my holdings.
Ze Tcherman strategy still rules, namely "nicht verbrauchter Strom ist nach wie vor der billigste" or "unused power is cheapest" . In that train of thought, government programs to improve isolation is still the most sane strategy
true, gov's should also remove the tax from isolation products and things like pv's heat pumps. but all the gov cares about is taking bribes from oil companies
In the US PV industry, we used to call this the "nega-watt." It still stuns me how just a small amount of money paid upfront with building practices can save so much money in the long run, in addition to providing such better living and working conditions. Yet owners often are not educated as to the long term benefits.
You've missed one fundemental point thst none of the hydrogen lobby groups will answer. Hydrogen has a calorific value of about 13.4 mj and natural gas 39 mj. You need to get 3 x the volume down the pipework than it currently carries. We have spent the last 40 years downsizing the network. It qill cost more than 20 billion to upsize it all again and take 40 years of digging up evety road. Turn the gas off and use the pipework as ducts for upgrading the electric network.
A little off topic, but everyone always seems to forget the thousands of users, mainly in the countryside, away from the gas grid, who have to use oil-fired heating systems. A cheap, easily installed, effective heat pump based, heating system, would not only be great news for city dwellers, but would also liberate the off-(gas)-grid users from the tyranny of oil prices and delivery charges. Anyone who has an electricity supply (pretty much everyone) would be able to heat their house 100% carbon-free, wherever they lived.
Indeed, my own house is oil heated, I am enjoying it right now. Nothing beats oil for thermal capacity, ease of storage etc. Main alternative is bio oil or synthetic Diesel.
@@jimgraham6722 friends of ours had a leak they were unaware of, went away for a week and game back to find an empty tank, and an oil-soaked garden. This was many years ago and their tank was just sitting on top of some sleepers, with no sump or anything under it, so maybe these days they're installed in such a way as to stop this happening.
@@paulhaynes8045 Yes tanks need to be properly installed. The tanks I use have an integrated stand and are about a 1.5 metre above a concrete pad. It is possible to inspect them all over for leaks. Mine (2*750ltr) are made of treated steel but these days stainless steel is probably a better material.
@@nicktreleaven4119 - the Great Smog of 1952 killed about 4000 people… the air pollution of London, today, is vastly improved in comparison to past decades, with far more ICE cars on the road.
The only time hydrogen really makes sense is for storing excess energy for electricity during long periods of no sun. Medium term heat storage is much more cheaply done using plain hot water. Use a heat pump during the day when the sun is out to put it into a 2000l storage tank and you'll be good for a few days in a well insulated home.
Where can we find out more about systems like this. I've often thought that storage of water at hot and cold temps is a great way to regulate temperature ... but how?
@@williambreen1001 a DIY approach has been done quite often on UA-cam. One particularly neat tank was done a few years ago by DavidPoz with a low pressure tank with a coil heat exchanger to in his basement. Edit: I don't know anyone who used a heat pump as the source, but it really shouldn't be difficult to set up.
Not having that hydrogen stuff in my house. I’ve bought a heat pump, despite the massive hit job that the media and the fossil barons have done on them and tried to put us off. I’m also an ex electricity distribution engineer too, and the power network has been changing and evolving ever since it was conceived over 100 years ago, it will continue to do so, and it will cope. Remember 10 years ago, when most UK homes has 20 or so 60-100W light bulbs, that’s up to 2KW of power that we’ve all replaced by LED lighting.
@Gazr Gazr You don’t have to buy them. I’ve always bought the most energy efficient devices I can afford, I’m not going to start buying steam anything now.
Brilliant, we install heat pumps all the time, trying to change the policy/regulations is like pulling Hens teeth. Jan is also a great guy, Jan and his colleagues are trying hard to change the industry.
The biggest thing that frustrates me, and has blocked me getting a heat pump, is that I need a new EPC and I've been told that I'll need to increase my roof insulation. But my loft is full of the accumulations of 15 years. It's not badly insulated, just 50mm short of the current regs, but the EPC will 'fail' for the Heat Pump grant because of that (according to Octopus). It's annoying that for the sake of 50mm of loft insulation, I can't get a heat pump in an otherwise suitable property.
@@kenbone4535 basically the Octopus surveyor finessed the numbers where they needed to be for the rest of the property, but he said the loft was too lossy and I need two rads upgraded. It only has a standard joist depth of insulation, where it should be higher (apparently). Their report says I need 14000kWh pa but doesn't mention losses. I don't object to skipping the grant, but I am less keen to lose the opportunity when it's there, when what stands between me and a few thousands is the contents of my loft.
It's a national disgrace in the UK that we are allowing the big house builders to continue churning out such poor housing stock that's tied to the gas grid. There's hardly any renewables, poor insulation and the cost in the future to bring them up to standard is going to be eye watering
I agree. Adding green tech at the time of building is so much easier and cheaper than later retrofits. Why install PV on top of tiles - just install something waterproof underneath (I used sheet metal like on a factory roof). You are not going to see it and it will last much longer than tiles. MVHR, thermal stores (water tanks) and air-tightness are much easier during the build. Larger groups of new build houses could also share costs such as rain water collection, district heating or ground source heat pumps. Then just add the costs to the mortgage and pay it back over many years.
Think they should also be built with ground source heat pumps on estate/district basis. Ground source heat it expensive but must be far far cheaper per house if built at same time as foundations for all houses. Did read a while back that the government watered down requirements for new builders, no doubt some money was exchanged 😉
Thanks, great video. I agree, certainly the efficiency of heating with hydrogen is bad. In the Netherlands, there are very strict rules about insulation in new houses. Also, since July 1 2018, natural gas is no longer allowed in new houses, though exceptions could be made. The vast majority of houses can be heated with heat pumps or heat networks, but for a very small minority, like historic buildings these might just not do the trick and maybe green gas or green hydrogen will be the only possibility. Working for a distribution grid operator myself, I know we want to be ready by 2028, in case the market demands us to distribute green hydrogen. But again, it should absolutely be the last resort, also heating in this way will be very expensive.
Hydrogen should be used as fuel in small power station very close to residential areas where it could deliver power and heat combined. That way it could be used with up to 80% efficiency during winter months. Because hydrogen power stations do not emit any polluting gasses they could be very close to residential areas
Anywhere unreliable power generation (like solar or wind) exists, hydrogen should be generated or used to provide energy not supplied when the wind dies down or the Sun has set. H2 should be generated by excess unreliable power and turned to electricity when power is needed.
@@listohan - “batteries… pumped hydro” The amount of energy pumped hydro provides is relatively small. It makes a good short term battery store, but the quantity of energy stored is small for a relatively large amount of water 💦 and water evaporates. A system lasts about 50 years. Batteries 🪫 have a much shorter life expectancy, require large inverters, and the cost for disposal & possible recycle ♻️ is high… high degrees of energy are required to create the battery 🔋 & recycle ♻️ the battery 🪫 Green creation & storage of hydrogen is a terrific way to store energy, until it is needed. South Korea is using locally stored hydrogen at gas ⛽️ stations to meet the high power requirements for charging EV’s, is absolutely genius… removing the burden on central power generation & offering options for distributed power generation. Honestly, the South Korean 🇰🇷 plan to distribute power generation & EV charging across the nation using gas stations & hydrogen is absolutely genius.
I'm keen to get a heat pump (my combi boiler being over 20 years old). But the cost of living crisis stops me instantly. £8 or £2k.... Simple maths (at least short term). It doesn't help with my home being timber framed with no way of insulating the walls without removing either all inside or outside cladding/plasterboard. Had the roof.done some time ago but was told back then that the walls were impossible. New housing (UK) is just a joke IMHO. combi boilers, inadequate insulation, limited triple glasing, and worst of all no solar! 🤯 How can we hope to retrofit old housing when we can't get new housing right?
Another LED We used blown in insulation because we have a similar construction. It is blown into the open space betwixt the inside and outside walls. It was time intensive but well worth it. We are all wondering how are we going to get our old homes up to snuff, when things are so expensive!
It is very sad that new housing is still so bad in the UK. Heat pumps don't have to cost a fortune. I bought a (small) GSHP on ebay for £1500. I'll be digging up the garden to fit it next year. My next door neighbour built his own (3kW) and the whole project: pump, pipe, digging, cost under £2000. It works well. What is your cladding? Panels/planks of some sort? Is it really that hard to take them off, add some insulation (woodfibre or EPS) and put them back on? I finished the EWI on my (brick) house 2 years ago and it's amazing how little heat it needs now. Doing the insulation first means you need a much smaller heat pump, which does save some cost too.
Safety alone is a reason to avoid hydrogen. Unlike gas there are no great odorants that would allow you to smell leaks. And hydrogen slowly leaks through steel pipes and needs different steels than gas. Take a steel pipe used for hydrogen and steam clean it then put it in a plastic bag and hydrogen comes out of the steel. The explosive range of hydrogen mixtures is much wider than gas. Flame speed is much higher too. Hydrogen burns hotter and thus makes more NOx so combustion equipment needs to be designed for hydrogen from the start.
On the farm we burnt firewood in a combustion cooker that also provided space-heating and hot water for over 40 years. On my retirement I moved into town and replaced the wood-burner space heater with a reverse-cycle heat pump. I’ve had it for 18 months now and it was surprisingly inexpensive to purchase and run. They work really well here in the coolest part of Australia (Tasmania). The best part is not having to cut and split firewood!
Fuel cells may be less electrically efficient than electric batteries, but they do produce water and heat. It's not a bad choice if you make good use of that water and heat in the winter. In Korea, in every house, water is heated with a boiler to warm the floor of the room. The hot water is also used for showering. Although there is no hydrogen boiler yet, it would be good to provide not only electricity but also warm water for heating to each home from a huge fuel cell system in each region. In fact, we already have a similar system.
Or, you know, you could just use the electricity directly and not waste it on the two conversions to/from hydrogen. And in case you're talking about storing hydrogen in summer based off solar and using it in winter, when there is less/little solar available - long term hydrogen storage is a big problem. If you add additional steps( like ammonia conversion) it adds to the complexity of the system, the cost and it lowers efficiency even more. Another issue I've not seen anyone mention - if you put in hydrogen electrolysis on a large scale, what happens to our water supply? Water shortages have already been a growing issue as is... Edit: Oh and AFAIK fuel cells use some rare/expensive materials, so they cost A LOT.
Good point, but fuel cell is rather expensive and complicated, though. The good news is that existing natural gas distribution and storage system will handle H2 just fine with some minor modifications. This is not going to be a problem. The speed of sound in H2 is 3 times the speed of sound in natural gas, meaning that H2 can be flowed 3 times faster to make up for the lower energy density of H2. Furthermore, H2 is not too valuable to burn when green H2 is going to cost $1.50 USD per kg, in 2020 dollar value. In fact, when green H2 will cost low enough, then burning H2 for heating can be cheaper than the amortization cost of the heat pump + the electricity cost, PLUS the cost of battery for storage of surplus solar and wind electricity. Adding up the 3 costs mentioned can make it a lot more expensive for using heat pump vs the future low-cost green H2. Now, if we want higher efficiency, we can use H2 to run a combustion engine to power a heat pump, then the waste heat from the engine can be added to the lower-temperature heat of the heat pump to make the room warmer and more comfortable. Upgrading the electric grid to accommodate electric heat pump will be far more expensive than using H2 in existing natural gas distribution system to each home.
Only problem is that would provide very little amount of water. From 1 kg of H2 you will get 5kg of H20 (exactly 5l at 25C and 1025kPa). From 1kg of H2 one could produce about 20-25kWh of electricity plus almost same amount of heat energy with HFC efficiency of about 50%. How much energy do you use daily in you house? 30-60kWh? Then you will get about 7.5 to 15litres of water per day. That is whooping amount. ;)
@@martingorbush2944 You already have water (at the faucet) in your house. What the house needs is electricity and heat from a hydrogen fuel cell. So, a large (large area) or rather small (small town, factory, or building) CHP might be a good option. To make your home warm, you can add a layer of plumbing about 10 cm to the floor and connect it to the externally supplied hot water pipe. Motorhomes, on the other hand, use a lot of electricity, so you can get a pretty decent amount of water.
The fact that new builds arent built to standard is ridiculous, would like to see some more of your amazing work on this. I am currently applying to graduate schemes with all the top UK housing developers, the investment cost is tiny for them and right now to point to a new house and say, that house will half your energy bills, there is huge potential to change the general view on the poor quality of new builds.
My old communist era apartment in România is built to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The internal heating system is good for drying the washing in winter. Sunshine does most of the work, and a cross draft does the rest. 18~30 degrees inside temperatures through the year.
Developers know this but fight to maintain profit margins, and as the current generation of gas boilers are going to be phased out soon, they can negotiate a better price. Short-termism by developers and politicians is the enemy.
It would be dumb to burn hydrogen, but would there be benefit to putting fuel cells in the home, and using hydrogen to produce both electricity and heat? Thoughts on that? Maybe not worth the infrastructure costs. BUT it would provide grid balancing on cold days, since the increased use of heat pumps or resistive heat would be counteracted by increased fuel cell heating. Though a better system might be to centralize the fuel cell and pipe the heat itself around, like conventional combined heat and power
Co-incidentally, the very first video I watched on this channel was titled "Hydrogen For Heating Our Homes" (June 2019); it contained a dire warning about Russia and Ukraine...
Good video. However when it comes to heating or any use of Green hydrogen,,and your not going understand this immediately ,,,,efficiency is not an use ,,why? because the sun imparts more energy in one hour then we humans use in 1 year. So even If the conversion efficiency was only 1% we would still be ahead. The use of Hydrogen is not a why question but rather a how question. We have to stop costing Hydrogen with an efficiency metric. We don’t have time to save the planet because we have to find it cheap to do. Hydrogen adoption should be all the way now no matter what the cost. BTW This same economist believes in trickle down economics. Right! Let’s just have a think of the cost difference between expensive Hydrogen and a dead planet. Ok not dead but severely droughted , if that is a word but soon will be, or severely flooded . And don’t listen to me,,,just listen to Nick Hanauer he will explain what a true economy that benefits all is all about. Hydrogen does that and I can explain it in about 2 hrs. Cheers. Dave.
Hydrogen especially Blue is all hype and switching to Green Hydrogen is only useful for hard to abate sectors which is only about 8% of our energy transition. That contradicts what is being pushed in the media by unscrupulous self interest. Thanks for some balance
Great Channel and some very interesting content, however an issue you seemed to miss is that ASHP only work down to 5°C without backup from either a bivalent system( Gas Boiler) or Electric Immersion Heaters, which no one seems to take any account of, I work for a Consultant that is working on the Decarbonisation of the Public Sector and have been designing installations ASHP ‘s for almost a couple of years now, we have designed both multi small units ( domestic type) mainly in schools and large (chiller type 300kW plus) for Buildings such as Town Halls, Leisure Centres etc, we have used the latest CO2 ASHP to get the lowest possible working temperatures, as yet we haven’t had enough cold weather to get a firm focus on wether these bivalent systems are working as designed, but the 1st couple of installations are complaining already of Electrical Energy Bills of 200% increase, obviously some of this can be attributed to the large increase in Energy costs, but I can see these going the same way as Wind Turbines and CHP units installed several years ago, that are now redundant due mainly to the cost of maintenance of the units. We are now on The 3rd phase and the criteria have changed to exclude bivalent systems . Design of these is proving increasingly difficult . Keep up the good work
Did you mean -5°C? Good air-water heat pumps still retain a cop of 3 at A-7/W35 (en14511). They don't need additional direct heating in most of Europe.
2050? Who thinks we'll even survive till 2030? Where I live in the SW US, I am seeing changes that have taken place in the last 20 years that people don't believe, even when seeing it with their very eyes. Wildlife and their habitat is disappearing to human growth to the point the animals are constantly on the run with nowhere left to go.
Not where I live. Sorry you're such a doomster. Maybe you should plan to move out of the southwest. If you lived somewhere where it rained every now and then, you'd probably be a lot happier.
Great video, Dave! Definitely food for thought. Good to see as well, that you heat your house with a heat pump. I've been told, I can't heat our house from the 90's with a heat pump! So, I'll seek a second opinion. Keep up the good work!
I am heating my house from the 70's with a self installed air source minisplit heat pump. Cheap, quite, and easy to deal with. While I did insulate the attic, and installed new windows, I did this to use a smaller unit and to improve the house. The city also required a Heat Recovery Ventilator, but that has also been nice for fresh air at all times. The space calculations are very easy to do, as one specifies the size of the house, the type of insulation, the type, size, and the way the windows face, and the zipcode of your home. This gives one a ballpark size of the unit needed, and it doesn't need to be exact. A whole house energy inspection will help with finding the cheapest solutions, and tell one the BTU loads for heating and cooling to get more precise system sizing information.
You can heat just about any house with a heat pump - it just gets very expensive if the load is really high. 1990s should at least have a cavity wall and thus not be too terrible, although it may be of the 'plasterboard tent' variety beloved of builders at that time. Those do have appalling airtightness, which leads to large heat losses.
@@xxwookey I have a plasterboard tent. (this is a bit disrespectful of tents BTW). I've got 2 air to air heat pumps, but running just one keeps the place toasty when it's zero C outside.
IN SUMMER: elecrticity from renewables =(electrolyzer)=> Hydrogen (in safe low temp metal hydride) IN WINTER: =(Fulel cell)=> Electricity =(Heat pump)=> Heat. Still not terribly efficient, yes, but waay better than the 100% loss from summer to winter that we have now.
Heating by burning hydrogen would be insane though. And I'd take that is what was looked at. Two big issues are that: ★ high power electrolyzer for home usage are not on the market yet and ★ green hydrogen in public gas network will inevitably be burnt by the fact that it comes within the pipes connected to the burners
Wikipedia says "Stadtgas" is already 51% hydrogen. Why not replace burners with electrolyzers? Not using the other gasses does not block hydrogen flow btw (physics 101). But those other gasses including CO might poison the electrolyzer. Bigger issue.
As a Canadian, I would say that Hydrogen is a good option because it can store summer sunlight from solar panels as fuel for winter. In my winters I would say also that ground or water source heat pumps are the way to go rather than air source heat pumps. The differential here can be 60 C in winter, too much for air source heat pumps unless there is another heat source like wood to fill in for the cold of winter. The very best fuel though is insulation insulation insulation
Because of hydrogens 30% round trip efficiency, and complicated and expensive storage and distribution, and could be much simpler to use heated sand to store the energy for months at grid scale. Even with a round trip efficiency under 50%, it appears to be a simpler solution than chemical batteries, or gas storage. Unfortunately the technology for sand batteries isn't mature yet.
If you use hydrogen for heating, importing it from elsewhere (for example sunny regions in the south), might be more cost effective since they can produce hydrogen all year round, lowering costs per kW energy. You migt ofcourse store a reserve amount of hydrogen that gets filled over the year, to allow for a steady supply instead of a delivery spike during the winter, which helps reduce costs and more importantly gives a buffer if something goes wrong.
A couple days after this video, there was an announcement that there's been a breakthrough with green hydrogen that can create it at room temperature by using aluminum-gallium composite with a higher percentage of gallium than what has been tested in the past. Apparently the hydrogen gas just bubbles off the metal. We'll see if that changes anything going forward.
So glad there are ways for research to be posted on the internet for companies who have their eyes open and ears to the ground to hear the newest rumblings and discoveries of factual science. And a thanks to the eloquence and articluation of the speaker on this site. Had his name in my mind at one time, simply recognize him when I hear/see his notice of a new post. Great stuff!
A 20 to 30% tax band for high consumpution would force the wealthy to adopt air source heat pump and other fixes to reduce their costs. The VAT can be recycled for energy efficiency measures in poorer homes. Such a measure would create economies of scale for air source heat pumps and other measures.
Thanks Dave for enabling this voice of reason in the overhype of ubiquitous hydrogen as a major decarbonization component. Hydrogen will be a niche component to net zero in the long run. Informed engineers have been discussing this for several years. You highlight most of the reasons why, and I see others are noted already in the comments. Investing in CO2 pipeline networks to properly dispose or utilize captured CO2 is a far cheaper and more effective investment. Making H2 from CH4 is far too inefficient, producing even more CO2 to dispose of.
Rubbish! Why not research before you post? Hydrogen being generated from wind (turbines) is green. Generated by solar ( panels) is yellow hydrogen. Now a global industry, plenty of info online had you bothered to research the topics first. You perhaps aren't aware of a process we call "research and development"? It continues apace 24/365 somewhere on the planet. Hang your head in shame young man.
Hydrogen is absolutely critical in decarbonizing the world, just not for electricity. We can use green hydrogen to replace methane in chemical processes such as ammonia for fertilizer. So long as we need ammonia, we need hydrogen. And in the long run it'll need to be made without methane
@@t1n4444 I am in the energy industry, and have thoroughly researched the topic. If you are so informed, tell me how much green hydrogen is produced today and how do you transport the hydrogen created? There is plenty of money being spent on hydrogen R&D, and no doubt we will be able to burn it in existing gas turbines with some small modifications. The problem is the amount needed and the cost of transport. So hydrogen from solar is yellow? I learned something new here.
@@danburnes722 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 Sounds as if you're not quite the "expert" after all. Had you researched the topic instead of presuming you completely understood "your industry" then you wouldn't be asking such silly questions, would you? As for having an epiphany ref yellow hydrogen you would have been shrewd to have Googled up the "rainbow" of hydrogen colours before admitting your ignorance. Even if only for "cerebral self protection". Suggest you refrain from posting further until you have worn your fingerprints off at your keyboard. You may believe me or not as you wish but you'll be sitting at your keyboard for months reading up on what you evidently don't know. Kindly don't presume to argue or protest, simply concentrate on catching up.
I know I'm old-fashioned and hopelessly out of touch in heating and energy terms (I'm skint and live on a budget of under £1,000 per year [one thousand] in an old terraced house that has no form of heating whatsoever), but I can't help thinking that the Sun's already making the best possible use of hydrogen, blasting out millions of times more energy than the Earth will ever be able to use and will continue to do so for several more weeks at least, so it's a pity that we can't find better ways of harnessing what's already there. So what if solar power is inefficient; if we waste 99.95% of it, it still doesn't cost a penny. But... I suppose there are no juicy profits to be made out of mere limitless sunshine. Sigh. There's a whole new wave of businessmen desperate to become hydrogen barons to match the oil barons and billionaires of yesteryear. As someone living in the grey, gloomy north of England I'm pretty sure that the Sun is actually a myth - I've never seen it - but there has to be a better way to meet energy needs than mucking about with hydrogen.
I think having heat pumps makes good sense combined with rooftop solar and cheap over night electric home owners can make big savings over gas heating. plus the more of us that have them the more of them wind turbines can be left running instead of wind turbines turned out of the wind. I think all new homes need heat pumps as standard with good insulation and some kind of solar installed by law
Problem is heat pumps dont work for everyone. Im in a flat & there is nowhere 2 put the fan coil where it wont be next 2 a neighbours window. Also heat pumps only make sense if u can get a cop of at least 3-4, which isnt alwaya the case, particularly in a cold winter. District heating or communal heating, possibly running of hydrogen might b a solution. That way the h2 pipe only needs to connect 2 1 plant & t heat is transported via insulated water pipes into homes
The wind turbines make a lot of noise to keep near the house. The wind turbines break often. When I tour lighthouses, I ask about the panels & turbines set up, and the turbines are almost always broken. Wind turbines kill a lot of birds, better to keep them far away from the land. The solar produces power in the day time, to the point where the electric company will not buy it, when electricity is over produced in the day, which is the issue that US California has due to it’s solar mandates. The reality is that Hydrogen can be produced, off-shore on commercial turbines, where providers can handle the maintenance requirements 24x7, the water can broken down into hydrogen, the hydrogen pipes to the mainland (where the brackish water is diluted by the sea), and hydrogen can be mixed with natural gas & stored, and used whenever needed. Oxygen can be pumped back to the mainland & used for combustion, eliminating the nitrogen issues since atmosphere is not needed for combustion. The off-shore wind turbines can also send surplus power to the land, and any hydrogen not sent out or in the lines from back pressure of the mainland, can be used to generate power at the turbines, so turbines can generate base power (via burning or fuel cell) Similar schemes can be done with hydrogen from solar, to generate base power from that unreliable source. For places like the UK being on an island, surrounded by water; there is no excuse for not using hydrogen. Sure, some H2 will leak out, but electricity leaks out of the power lines today. No one talks about it, but the longer the lines & the higher the loss. Hydrogen is easier to carry than electricity in large batteries, since hydrogen tanks can be manufactured & recycled locally, without dependence on any external nation: Hydrogen is safer than lithium ion batteries, since a leak dissipates into the atmosphere quickly, while lithium ion can name a lithium fire.
@@DavidHalko I don't mean you need to put a wind turbine up. There is loads of wind turbines in open fields alway from homes. There power is not in demand all the time. At low demand time the power is very cheap. Not to mention that wind turbines are the cheapest form of energy despite all the maintenance needed to run them. The facts speak for themselves if you bother to read them.
@@adus123 - with enough land, wind turbines can be helpful, indeed. But when they stop spinning & you are too dependent upon their power output, you have a massive blackout like Texas experienced when their wind turbines froze over. Storage of temporary energy must always be in the equation with renewables. Anything less is a deceiving fiction. This is what makes Carbon fuels so helpful, it is energy when we need it, stored from the Sun, which is only visible for a period of the day.
It seems to me that the only way green hydrogen *might* be useful is for grid-scale energy storage. Maybe the numbers work, maybe not, but that's about as good as it gets.
It's the only practical 'green' fuel for huge freight ships. Unless you want the powers that be to go down the extremely disturbing road of nuclear-fission powered cargo ships, hydrogen is a much lesser evil. I believe there's a hydrogen-powered shipping ship that ships hydrogen now? Heh
Green Hydrogen ight be the answer for difficult to electrify systems such as iron smelting, planes and long distance cargo ships. Lots of promising storage systems such as e-Zinc, Hydrostore , heat storage, pumped hydro and green hydrogen. Probably all may be needed.
Hydrogen gas as domestic heating seems unlikely not just on the efficiency of it is bad, but on the case of safety standards required when dealing with flammable gases in domestic and commercial settings. Natural Gas has a additive added to it for the smell so people can tell a leak has occurred as safety standard, where as hydrogen gas doesn't have a additive that can be used for said smell so domestic use isn't going to happen.
Heat pumps are not viable for most existing housing stock because the heat produced is too low at 40c. This will mean radiators have to be twice the size, taking up valuable room space. Heating will need to be turned on in advance of need and left on as warming up takes too long. Hot water for washing has to be heated directly by expensive electricity. The fan box will take a lot of space on an outside wall, preferably south facing, and all the pipework on the inside will again take up valuable space from a living area. Efficiency declines with the outside temperature, and the noise of the fans will increase as they wear over time, causing a nightly noise issue with closely spaced properties. Add in all the extra copper piping and the wastage by scrapping existing boilers and central heating equipment it would be downright criminal to vandalise our housing and waste valuable resources in this way.
We could have Sustainable Biomethane - gas from grass, as Ecotricity and Dale Vince keep pushing for. Absurdly ironically it's pinned between vegan anarcho-communists being anti-science memes about nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy for heating grids. It could also be part of a District Heating system using run-off heat from power plants and industry. To which Big Oil and Big Coal use them as memes. Just like Tidal Hydropower has been sat on for decades partly due to that same niche within vegans being 'aw what about the fishies every life is sacred' about 1,000,000,000,000,000 marine animals. Big Oil and Big Coal thanks vegan AnComs for their service to petrol plastic pollution profits.
@@michaelchildish Yep, adding to that; there are thousands of oil rigs in the US, out of use, emanating methane gas to the atmosphere, and that is another one that could have a better use.
@@youxkio Didn't know that. That's tragic. One of my more unusual ideas is: Use cow manure to try terraform barren sandy deserts. Have someone follow the cows around and plant coprophilic fungi into every large dropping of dung. Fungi then tranform some of the methane into carbon dioxide whilst doing other useful things. CO2 being a lesser evil than methane. Also one intriguing idea is to feed cattle seaweed. This is believed to be better for their health whilst reducing how much methane they produce. Meanwhile for the rockiest desert regions, nothing to be done for those except perhaps the extreme of transporting ok quality soil there and hoping for the best. In the meantime, just absolutely cover them in solar panels? The way to speak to 'the right' who are skeptical about climate tech, though not those who are truly delusional: "National security via energy security and energy independence, keeps billions within the national economy, and reduces trade deficits whilst keeping us away from unnecessary relationships with gas and oil-producing dictatorships"
@@youxkio 😂😂😂 You're a bit behind the times, young person of an undeclared gender, the Arabs have been plastering solar panels over just about every inch of desert they can find. All that sort of thing was designed and engineered years ago. Simply do the Google thing. In fact it's a shrewd notion to do the Google thing before you post ... if you follow.
Nailed it. Heat pumps or thermal storage for the win. With the summer Britain has just had then maybe you all should be looking at reverse cycle heat pumps or as we Aussies call them - air conditioners.
The UK style heat pumps wouldn't work for cooling the way they're installed. Unlike in Aus where most of our reverse cycle air conditioners are ducted or splits, the heat pumps in the UK dump the heat into a water loop for radiators and hot water. Works fine for heating, but these systems aren't designed to be reversed for cooling in summer. You'd get condensation on all your radiators if they worked at all, and you'd no longer have hot water. If they wanted cooling theyd have to move away from a water loop and go to ducted or split systems.
I can deny that heat pumps are not cheap to buy. 1000 pounds gets you a good air to air heat pump. People are talking about spending that much on gas per month.
F-AR24TXHYCWK1 is just one example of a 240V heat pump that provides 7 kW of heat, while drawing 2 kW of electricity. Cost is 1699 AUD, almost exactly 1000 pounds.
It’s interesting as a resident of the American South to see how some across the pond view heat pumps as a bit of a novelty. I’m in my 40s and I’ve lived in heat pumped air my whole life. Newer ones are better, but they have a reputation for being mediocre at heating. The problem is they don’t heat very quickly. You can’t gather round a heat pump register to thaw your bones after playing outside in the (increasingly rare) snow we get. In the 80’s and 90’s natural gas companies hired actor Jim Varney to promote gas heating and try to move people in the south away from heat pumps and resistive heaters. He played the character “Old buddy Ernest” from the Ernest goes to ______ series of movies. I can still remember some of the slogans. “Gas heat is hot ….. let me rephrase that …. gas heat is hot”. Another one was “Heat pump schmeet pump”
I can categorically say that my modern air source mini-split heat pump keeps the house nice and toasty warm even on below freezing days. Nothing like the old systems at all. I can barely tell that it is on.
@@GoCoyote that’s awesome. The older ones were sold with supplementary resistive heaters that would suck up a lot of juice but could warm the house up fast.
@@jmpattillo I remember the old one running during a cold snap when it got down to about 20ºF. Very loud, and used exorbitant amounts of power. My mini split doesn't even have resistive elements, and has kept the place toasty warm when outside air was 25ºF. The only time I had an issue was when I forgot to clean the inside unit filters, and it stopped heating the house. Felt like a major fool for that service call.
That's because unlike timber homes in the US, the average British home is made out of 1 or 2 layers of brick very often with little to no insulation at all - that happened because of various post WW2 housing booms where the UK built cheap low quality housing. A high thermal mass (brick) building plus no insulation means heat pumps historically just didn't work here in the UK as it requires huge pumps and an insulation retrofit which were far too expensive until economy of scale started to pull the price down.
@@hijackstudios That’s interesting. I would say that over here people think of brick construction as being superior, but I didn’t consider the insulation aspect. Brick veneers are pretty common here but solid brick construction is rare. A focus on insulation here is not recent, but it is also not that old. Plenty of houses were built in the south with little insulation up through the 70s in some areas.
I moved to North West Tasmania from Melbourne in late 1991. My first winters of the early to mid 1990s was marred not by cold but by terrible Smoke Pollution emitted from Wood Fires (most households had wood fires boxes to heat homes as it was cheap to acquire wood for burning). Launceston (Tasmania's second biggest urban town of about 90,000) was particularly bad especially for asthmatics and was likened as an average resident to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. A massive buy back scheme was introduced to swap wood heater to heat pumps. Wood fires are still popular but all new ones have maximum allowable emissions. Glad to say that the smoke pollution is not nearly as bad and the only real annoyance of winter is the temperature.
i live in 130 year old mid terrace ridiculously expensive to even approach improving the insulation,, evin if it was possible it's directly on the public street so don't even know if several inches of external insulation would be something i'd be allowed to instal even if I could afford to. the front of the house is south facing but on the street so no heat pump there, the back of the house is in near constant shade because the house is in the way so no decent place to put a heat pump there either. I hope that the government does cave and start giving decent incentives and i really hope that that they're not hyper focussed solely on heat pumps and result in people like me falling through the cracks
@@incognitotorpedo42 far less efficiently especially in colder weather which is when you need the heating the most and results is a far longer pay back period. it makes it a possible option but an unattractive one.
I've been looking into the question of how to solve climate change for about 20 years, and in my view there's one outstanding solution everyone is studiously ignoring; the earth is a big ball of molten rock! In 1982, NASA proved the viability of drawing limitless heat energy directly from molten rock. (see: Status of the Magma Energy Project) NASA estimated a minimum of 50,000 quadrillion btu (quads) of magma energy just from the US alone. Global energy demand is currently around 600 quads. Worldwide, the magma energy resource is effectively limitless, and in my view, this is what's necessary to secure a prosperous sustainable future. Harnessing magma energy at temperatures over 500'C would allow for thermal water fracturing, to produce hydrogen directly, but even temperatures of 3-400'C could generate base load electrical power for industrial scale electrolysis; where clean energy is stored and distributed as liquefied hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen can be shipped around the world, and burnt in power stations, such that entire electricity grids - and all downstream energy use would be turned 'green' at a stroke! Produced from magma energy, the efficiency issue with hydrogen is entirely moot. Hydrogen is the natural storage medium for magma energy because it's produced from water, burns clean, and because LHG contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per tonne, is relatively easy and efficient to transport. Used to meet all our energy needs carbon free, plus desalinate water to irrigate land for agriculture and habitation - this would allow us to develop wastelands rather than burn the forests and abuse natural water sources to produce food. We'd also have the energy to strip carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground. Plus, we'd have the energy to recycle and process all our waste back into useful products. But the main reason magma energy is attractive is that it's a global solution to climate change; as opposed to spending massively in the West on wind and solar, while China and India in particular, develop economically using coal, and from a very low base. Between them, China and India have 3bn people with a long way to go to reach Western levels of energy use - and if that's not magma energy use, then climate catastrophe will happen anyway!
true, geothermal is the way :) if the government invested in geothermal power everyone could have cheap electricy like people in iceland and cheap electricity allowe for economic growth and better lives. The only downside for now is that you need to dig pretty deep and the up front cost is expensive, but with gov money we could research cheaper methods for digging
@@faustinpippin9208 Correct, but we have to make a distinction between geothermal - and magma-thermal, because most of the geothermal referred to in the literature is hydro-geothermal; tapping into underground bodies of hot water. Hydro-geothermal is okay, but has a 'replacement rate' problem. You can only draw a limited amount of energy from an underground body of hot water over time before it cools; and then it takes a random amount of time to replace that energy. It could take decades. Magma-geothermal is far more powerful and reliable. It does not require digging the deepest hole on earth to access magma energy. At particular geographic locations, there are magma pockets in the earth's crust at depths as shallow as 1-2km. The drilling technology for this already exists. Further, there are magma pockets beneath volcanoes, and subduction zones where continental plates meet, and one is pushed under the other. In the Pacific Ring of Fire there are 450 volcanoes; and 1500 worldwide! But still, liquid hydrogen gas transport would be necessary to distribute magma energy worldwide.
Thanks for another great video! I...uh, I'm just going to take your word for what those research reports say. Thank you for providing the links, though! No doubt some viewers are going through them carefully. The idea of heating homes with hydrogen, using pre-existing natural gas lines, seems ridiculous to me. You didn't say it out loud, but it's obvious that those leaky, embrittled pipes misting hydrogen all over the place would be a massive fire hazard. Every time the furnace breaks down (which would be often) the poor repairman would need danger pay to go down into the basement and start knocking around with metal tools. It's never going to happen, and the companies selling "hydrogen ready" boilers are well aware of that. If we're going to electrify everything, then we should just electrify everything and skip the middle steps. Heat pumps are clearly the way to go with home heating (although we may have to use the ground source variety in my country). You're a pioneer in this. But like you say in the video, cost is a problem and there's a huge role for governments to play in providing grants. First provide grants for insulation to get as close to the "passive house" standard as possible, then a grant for the heat pump. Oh yeah, and legislate proper insulation for all new homes!
Hi, Those old leaky pipes used to carry coal gas many years ago, which contained a higher % of Hydrogen, and was very much more explosive, and that was part of the reason albeit a small part, we changed to Nat Gas.
I think heat pumps are the way to go, and definitely super insulated homes can reduce demand to as low as 1/10th of the original heating needs, making electric bills affordable and manageable for electric grids and green energy sources. 🌱 🌇. I've done the upgrades, they're a bit fussy but we'll worth it!
Super efficient buildings have been with us for decades. Japan did some excellent designs/work over fifty years ago with covering buildings in earth and soil and planting thereon. Heated by solar radiation through "green house type atriums". Schools, hotels, public buildings and private homes ... just Google. "Your" Bob Vila built one for his TV show perhaps thirty plus years ago. A London university built something similar and installed many sensors to measure efficiency. Again all online. It might be of interest too that Yemenis built multi storey mud building hundreds of years ago, as did your indigenous pueblo indians who built stone and adobe buildings. The modern take might be rammed earth in old truck tyres, again many, many illustrations online if arsed.
Not sure about the 'super insulation' comment, a no brainer on paper, it quickly hits a brick wall (no pun intended) when we look at the state of the UKs old housing stock, retrofitting all old homes to make them extremely well insulated and air tight isn't cheap or simple.
Live in Canada, 12 years ago installed a ground source heat pump, $350CDN to heat for the winter, AC is $0.25CDN a day. The pay back was 7 years, great heat source.
Thank you for the crystal clear detailed explanation. I see a big difference between air air heat pumps and air water heat pumps. The former I can install myself , for instance one outside unit and 4 inside units. This system can cool and heat. Given the likelyhood of hotter and hotter summers, I like this approach! Also the inside units filter the air. Now, in Germany, emphasis is on air water units. Much costlier. They heatvthe water that circulates in the central heating system. When it is cold outside and much heat is needed, the efficiency drops and heating costs rise. For those with floor heating it is easier, but few have floor heating. I am convinced that energy will become very expensive and that we cannot heat all rooms in a house or apartment anymore to 20 degrees C. But I am inclined to use air air with the cooling option, low cost, easy installation, air filtering, remote controls for each room. From my my enjoyable vacations and work visits in GB my best guess is that air air solutions are very often optimal.
Hi, Air to air misses the ‘decarbonisation’ goal as you will be using more energy in summer to cool the property , negating any gains from installing the heat pump
@@steveblack728 in that case one would refrain from cooling... it is an option. Moreover, we will have too much electricity in summer because Bill Gares builts robots that will make PV panel production dirt cheap.
They'll never use hydrogen, it'll all be electric because the suppliers can monitor every households usage using smart meters!!!! Residential gas boilers will be a thing of the past!!!!
Thank you, excellent and very honest documentary. Hydrogen is not suitable for home heating. Hydrogen is very expensive and inefficient. It also brings huge safety concerns in domestic environments. I will not have hydrogen for heating or cooking in my house.
Heating homes with only green energy seems very hard. I was thinking about a not very big windmill in the garden producing warm water for the house, converting rotation to heat, perhaps through friction. It wouldn't be enough to warm much. But instead now first make electricity, split water and then burn the hydrogen in the house. I guess that way would heat only half now. And yet somehow people seem to think there is more energy that way.
When you see the words COSTS AND SAVING THE PLANET in the same sentence you should read it like this : OUR GOVERNMENTS HAVE THE MONEY AND TECHNOLOGY BUT WHO REALLY RUNS EVERYTHING SAYS NO!
One further barrier for hydrogen i stumbled over recently is storage. Germany has 270TWh of geological storage for methane. The Methane is simply kept at 40-50 and not chilled. At 50 bar, at 21C, methane has 3.7x more energy content per liter than hydrogen. So if we stop burning gas, we could either use the storage for biomethane and get the full 270TWh, which is more than enough to cover any dunkelflaute. Or we could expensively create hydrogen, and store only 73TWh, which is not enough to cover dunkelflaute in 2045 when everything is electrified and double the yearly production will be needed. Btw, germany produced only 10TWh in 2020, but germany produced a further 90TWh of biogas which was burned directly to provide electricity baseload. And that's just a fraction of the available organic waste that's being used there. So we should stop burning methane for direct heat, and instead use it for electricity generation when renewables have not delivered much for over a week (there are several weeks like that every year), aka "dunkelflaute".
Great video and excellent points about heat pumps..just a couple of comments on hydrogen. 1. The IPCC says the 0.04% of CO2 causes heating of the 4% H2I in the atmosphere. What would injecting hot H2O, after burning hydrogen do? 2. Moving the flow of atmospheric water has been shown to be issues in the past -- the creation of the sandy Sahara and the massive problems with rain, rivers and aquifers in California. What will relocating water on this scale do to ghs ecosystem? BTW bury CO2 and the anaerobic bacteria that make oil and natural gas will make methane. So more natural gas.
The idea with hydrogen is actually to store excess energy from the summer (like PV) for the winter. During the "charging" and "discharging" of the hydrogen stored energy the byproduct heat can be used for heating + the electric energy can be used for a heat pump. It is very costly for now to install a hydrogen storage + heat pump but it has to be done if we want to achieve 100% carbon free energy because there are only limited options for storing energy for months in house hold settings
It is not just ineffiency. The requirements in materials of pipes, flange caskets, its maintenance and technical surveillance costs are significant. And you will need some sensors and controls to ensure that hydrogen leakage is detected. Over the last year's the industry tries to throw as much mud against the wall hoping that something sticks.
*ARTEMIS LAUNCH WAS ABORTED YESTERDAY* the reason - a Hydrogen leak - THAT is how leaky Hydrogen is - NASA can not keep it from leaking in a $4 billion rocket
there is no way on gods earth that Hydrogen is an option for domestic usage.
Why is NOBODY talking about Ecotricity's Gas from Grass, nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy for gas-heating grids? Requires no huge changes to infrastructure.
Keeps £Bns in the British economy, reduces Trade Deficits generates jobs, training for the Green Revolution, , and increases National security through Energy Security?
Ironically anti-Science Vegan embarrassments to Veganism, Climate Action and the rest: "Dale Vince, oldskool vegan is a traitorous neoliberal shill enemy of Climate Action because our collective confirmation biased GROUPTHINK says so!"
Fossil Fuels Barons: "Thanks for being sterotypes and memes we trade with buddies, Vegan Anarcho-Communists! We're too stupid to see how we can profit from nearly entirely clean nearly perpetual energy and so won't re-arrange our portfolios and this is more reason to not like the imaginary competition and use you as propaganda like we did with undersea Tidal Power!"
Far Left: "Horseshoe Theory debunked because Marxists say so! What do you mean Karl Marx was a casually racist anti-semitic homophobe who cheated on his Noble wife with the hired help, and had a secret son, whilst Engels paid his rent?"
And replace the fossil methan with renewable methan from waste- and sewage treatment or the industrial livestock farming.
In combination with more efficient heaters and better insulation.
The use of fossil methan can be reduced by alot.
@@NewPipeFTW Exactly. Smartly achieved Sustainable Biomethane is absolutely a far lesser evil than digging gas out of the ground where it's been locked away for millions of years! This other idea for processing human 'waste' and other materials is fascinating, from the Undecided with Matt Ferrell channel
ua-cam.com/video/p6CF-umWLZg/v-deo.html
!!!!!
My issue is the source of hydrogen in the first place. Blue hydrogen is a con trick due to potential methane leakages of 3% and the energy required during steam cracking. I do agree over time the COP from heat pumps will far outweigh the savings from domestic H2 boilers. So I imagine the costs for said gasket and sensors would be included within the £22bn estimate provided earlier. I really should rewatch the vid to reassess that graded list of hydrogen's uses because in time we will have to exploit brine from seawater to isolate various elemental ions like Lithium and sodium. The process releases as a byproduct significant amounts of hydrogen which should not go to waste either.
Thank you for mentioning ammonia, in my opinion it doesn't get enough attention.
You missed air pollution. In London gas boilers produce over 20% of Nitrogen Dioxide air pollution. Burning Hydrogen produces 6x as much Nox as natural gas so even with all the work being done with ULEZs and electrification of vehicles it would all be undone if we had hydrogen boilers.
"There are already health issues arising from the high levels of NOx emissions in major cities like London in relation to asthma and respiratory diseases. While much of the NOx emissions come from the exhausts of petrol and diesel engines, it is estimated that up to 22% of NOx emissions in London come from gas boilers used for heating. This proportion is likely to increase as the UK moves away from using internal combustion engines for transport to using electric vehicles.
Burning methane in pure oxygen produces CO2 and H2O. However, methane is normally burnt in air (which is 78% nitrogen) and some of the ferociously active oxygen atoms combine with nitrogen in the air to form NOx, while most of the oxygen atoms combine with carbon atoms, which are more reactive than nitrogen, to form CO then CO2.
Burning hydrogen in pure oxygen just produces H2O. However, hydrogen would normally be burnt in air and some of the ferociously active oxygen atoms combine with nitrogen in the air to form NOx. There are no carbon atoms for the oxygen atoms to combine with, so a higher proportion combines with nitrogen from the air to form NOx. For this reason burning hydrogen in air produces up to six times as many NOx emissions as burning methane in air. There is therefore a seriously increased health risk of burning hydrogen for heating as compared to burning fossil gas."
Hmm, you might research the "lean" burning of hydrogen.
JCB now using hydrogen in modified plant engines and claim they have found how to reduce the nasty emissions.
Further research will lead you to similar projects in Japan and China.
@@t1n4444 Lean burn hydrogen produces less power. Catalytic converters can also help but as far as I am aware NOx is still produced in the process. JCB haven’t given any clarity as far as I’m aware. However using hydrogen in homes instead of electricity seems odd as there is already an electrical grid but there isn’t a hydrogen grid and you can’t simply use the natural gas grid as some have stated for multiple reasons. embrittlement and leakage are just two plus the gas boilers will still need gas during any change over period and hydrogen and natural gas can’t share the same pipes. Yes hydrogen up to say 10% can be added to natural gas but that’s not the same as full replacement. Heat pumps when correctly sized and installed do work perfectly well and are a proven technology.
@@johnharvey1786 but they need a well insulated house with out very old houseing stock in the UK can not all be done many Victorian House's can not have cavity insulation
@@gingernutpreacher Not quite true, yes good insulation helps and is very important but there are other things that can help such as a couple of electrical oil filled rads in the centre of the house to supplement the lower output of heat pumps against gas. Also most houses can be insulated. Solid wall houses can have insulation added internally or externally. Also solar on the roof will provide power for much of the year to run these systems plus batteries that can be filled using solar or overnight using lower cost mains electricity. The problem isn’t the difficulty in adding insulation or the clean heating systems it’s the cost as this is all quite expensive and is where Government subsidies should be provided if we hope to achieve the CO2 reduction targets.
Seems that new build regulations in the UK are really poor and outdated.
Here in Belgium, you are required to meet a certain energy efficiency wen building a new build house, which you have to prove to an independent company.
You can reach this efficiency in different ways but most common is by installing:
- Solar panels (mandatory)
- Heat pump not mandatory but extremly helpfull for achieving the required hosue efficiency
- Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery
- And a mandatory rain water tank of minimal 10.000l, for flushing toilets, gardens or washing machine.
- and ofcourse proper insulation.
If you get to a certain efficiency you don´t have to pay any taxes for owning a house for the first 5 years!
Solar panels are still funded foor €300 per kWp aswell as home storage systems.
I am happy i´ve done all of this as my energy bill is only €60 a month, which would me normally €120 bit at least half of the consumed energy is produced by the solar panels 👌
You've got to remember that pretty much everything in the UK is poor and outdated.
Yep Belgium is way ahead of most countries on this with the 'new buildings are passivehaus or near enough' rules. Ireland's building regs are pretty good too. The UK has been totally useless on this subject for many years, and our airtightness spec is apalling. We were promised (last year) some better regs in 2025. Why wait 4 years? Just improve the regs to somewhere near passivehouse, and do it this year.
@@englishcitystone1663 🤣🤣🤣
Just one thing about heat pumps: air exchange pumps like yours only work efficiently down to a certain temperature outside. If you live where it often gets colder than that, you'll want to look at a ground exchange pump. Those pump heat out of your house in summer and put it into the ground through a sort of dry well. In winter they pump it back into your house. It works because the temperature of the ground stays about the same all year below a certain depth, (about two metres I think.) It's more expensive than the air exchange kind, but it works at lower temperatures. There are also water exchange heat pumps, but you'd need to live near a river or lake or ocean or some other large body of water for those.
It is true that most Air Source Heating Pumps lose efficiency between -10 and -15 degrees Celsius, with high end ones losing efficiency between -18 and -25 degrees Celsius.
The lowest ever recorded temperatures in the UK vary between -23 and -27.2 degrees Celsius, and they were all last Century.
I think even common Air Heating Pumps would lose efficiency very rarely in the UK, as we rarely get such low temperatures.
@@garygcrook Oh, I agree absolutely that air-exchange pumps would be good enough in most parts of the UK, (maybe not the Orkney Islands.) Only this channel has viewers outside the UK. (Canada here) Dave Borlace is a smart guy, he's worth listening to. I just meant to add that for his viewers in other parts.
I live in an apartment, myself, so I don't get a say in how it's heated. I wish I did, I'd consider heat pumps a worhtwhile investment
You are correct, but there is a cheaper (if not more efficient) way to deal with this. I installed Fujitsu Halcyon heat pumps which are rated at 100% output down to -15F/-26C. We regularly get nights in the winter that are -35F/-37C. I also had old electric baseboard heaters from the 70s that I replaced with modern versions for $500-ish for the house and I installed thermostats that can be set at 45F/7C vs the standard 50F/10C lowest setting on a regular thermostat.
(1) If I am not paying attention and leave the heat pumps on when they can't handle the heating load, the baseboard will kick in to keep the pipes from freezing.
(2) If I know it is going to be too cold for the heat pumps I can turn them off and just turn on the baseboard.
I've only had 1 winter with heat pumps, but I left them on to see what would happen and the baseboard never kicked in and I wasn't uncomfortable. I think we had about 16 days below -15F and 4 of them were -35F-ish.
I can see there being an issue if everyone has to have electric resistance heaters kick on at once in the middle of winter, but I'm sure that's something we can work out.
I've always thought hydrogen was too valuable just to burn. Personally I'd be glad to see the back of the gas infrastructure, no more gas explosions (lower household insurance premiums?), fewer holes in the road, only one standing charge per household instead of two.
I would also make PV cells compulsory on new-builds and roof replacements, where practicable, to ease the burden on the electrical infrastructure.
I'd make PV & storage compulsory for new homes too, slightly more than the house is likely to use so it could help older homes and counter falling efficiency over the years. The home owner would be responsible for replacing both, plus the company that builds the houses would benefit from the sale of energy until the homes are sold.
@@tiepup Indeed.
@@williambreen1001 the good thing about having panels on your roof is that you can easily see how much they're producing. Usually looking out the window is sufficient. Get the dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, etc. ready and wait for the sun to come out :)
It'd be even better if large appliances (heating especially) were to actually become smart and regulate their power draw according to what's available. People always talk about how we need a lot of storage, but I never hear anything about shaping demand.
One problem we also have is power supply (solar during the day, wind on windy days) to demand (pretty much 24/7)
and hydrogen is one way we could store the excess energy on sunny days to use it during the winter.
Not disagreeeing with your main points Roger, but if we are talking about mandating PV etc, I'd like to think that district heating systems were planned int new builds schemes by default. This would though, add, to the holes in the road and the standing charges!
I work as a SAP Assessor, just had one client say that he was going to fit a heat pump and then rip it out after inspection, then put in a gas boiler., 😮 for real.
Where I live, heatpumps are used as a huge cash grab by installers. Price fixing! DIY prices to purchase give a false sense of cost to the customer. Once an installer comes along, and if you're in a MRUB (Multi Residential Unit Building) you have NO choice but to go with an installer, the price for the unit alone is 4-5x the DIY purchase price. I can see double, but 4-5 times? That's just a rip-off! They still have installation costs on top of that. What a scam! Total greed!!!
I keep missing these uploads due to the change in branding of “Just Have A Think" I am glad I caught this video in my subscriptions though!
Maybe only use the "Extra" energy that renewable generate ? since one of the major problem of renewable is always storage..
why not use ONLY the excess energy to make green hydrogen.. with more and more green tech popping up.. there will be huge surplus of electricity.. even if we use it for heating and the efficiency is low.. i still think it is better than turning off the turbine..
There are more efficient ways to store that excess energy. The use case for hydrogen as an energy storage mechanism is quite small.
Biogas is the drop in replacement for natural gas. It also methane, like natural gas, *but renewable*. In the long term renewable electricity and heat pumps is the solution, but in the short term biogas will help the transition away from natural gas all together.
Until such time that we actually *have* a surfeit green electrons it seems nuts to use them to create protons (hydrogen), compress said protons and, by necessity, cool them. It's all very wasteful of electrons which are easily transported and either used immediately or can be stored very efficiently. Maybe the oil people who are on board with hydrogen realize that if they can consume all the green electrons to make hydrogen then they can control the cost of electricity and pass the costs on to the consumer making it more expensive to use electricity directly (and having to use hydrogen to generate electricity at the consumer end through fuel cells).
Thank you so much for challenging my assumptions on this topic!
Like burning hydrogen is a bad call. But using home hydrogen fuel cells produces about 50% heat, and that is a perfect heating aid while also easing the weight on electrical distribution that comes along side electrification.
Every new house in the southern US has a heat pump, and it’s been the standard for many years. No financial incentives from the government needed. When you want both heating and air conditioning for your home, a heat pump is the choice with the lowest up-front cost as well as the most efficiency.
The only role for green hydrogen is for cryogenic storage of excess electricity from solar and wind and then onsite production of electricity via a fuel cell (using atmospheric oxygen).
0:31 My Dogberryism heard "some of the more enthusiastic propellants . . . " . . . BOOM!
28mn homes in the UK x £5000 grants = £140bn + the clients £4k investment. So that must be one hell of a saving over time when considering the 5-6 times loss of electricity via burning green H2 instead of utilising COP 2.5 + heat pumps. Hmm, the cost given by the Gentleman for finishing the job of readying the grid for H2 was put at £22bn. That should still be done IMV. Technology advances as will safety procedures; plus the flexibility of being able to transport the stuff without fuss is of benefit to business and could potentially take thousands of tanker trucks off the roads.
I am a Dipl.-Ing. for thermal engineering and I fully agree in what you say about the inefficiency of hydrogen. Whereever one can make a process with green electricity (heat pump) or including a battery of a reasonable size, it is about 3 to 4 times more efficient, compared to hydrogen, appart from technical problems like corrosion, volatility etc.. Still there a some politicians who like to play with words of innovative technical solution (hydrogen), I think as a result of being pushed by lobbyists of the existing gas industry trying to survive in future. But there will not be any green hydrogen as long as we fire power plants with gas or coal to make electricity.
But please tell about your private heat pump. We now pay 4 times more for electricity compared to gas energy (now 32 vs 8 €ct/kWh).As you live in a hundred year old british house, have you at least got relatively new double glas windows with rubber bearings ?
How is your electricity bill compared to your gas bill before ?
Wilhelm from Germany.
It’s not Electricity either and Heat Pumps cause a little problem with the ground water getting either too cold or to warm.
A local province already banned the usage of these as the overall ground heat did go down over 5C..
About 10 years ago we got rid of of gas boiler for two reasons, environmental and cost. The system was ancient and needed totally replacing for about 4 grand at the time. We decided to go with electric radiators. We went for, at the time, sophisticated thermostats and fitted out the house for 2 grand. Whilst undoubtedly cost more to run we have zero service costs and cheaper installation. Heat pumps are more efficient but does the extra cost equates to the high installation cost? Are we trying to fit high tech kit when there is a simple alternative?
Enjoy the channel.
It would even out over a few years, imagine your heating bill being cut by a third. Depends on how big your house is but would eventually break even.
Heat pumps make more sense when you look at it from a more macro level. For a single household, using 3 times as much power to heat is expensive but manageable. On a country wide level that's a vast amount more power generation required, making decarbonisation harder and more expensive. Might need twice as many power plants as exist currently. Add EV's onto that and the demand for power would be insatiable.
Back in the 70’s a company in the U.K. manufactured an air source heat pump called the ‘Biddle Equator’. Size wise it was designed to fit through a fairly typical square loft hatch and be installed and operated in the loft space.
Being installed in the loft it benefited from the heat rising from the house through the ceilings, even when insulated (albeit to the lower standard of the period).
I wonder if there is still some mileage in loft insulation?
Thank you for doing this episode!
Excellent analysis as always…..
Before natural gas was available, British homes were supplied with hydrogen in the form of coal gas, of which it was the major constituent (along with carbon monoxide and a few other nasties) so there is no problem from the technical point of view.
Hydrogen can be made from methanol as is done in some power stations for alternator cooling supplies to avoid the hydrogen embrittlement in high pressure storage cylinders, but first the methanol has to be manufactured.
Economically, it would make no sense at all as even straightforward electric heating from any electrical source, "green" or otherwise, is far more efficient than using the electricity to produce hydrogen (an inefficient process) and then burning with further efficiency loss. Heat pumps are the most efficient solution.
If our natural gas supplies in Britain had not been squandered in gas-fired power stations, it would have lasted many more years to come without any reliance on Russian gas.
What is a serious problem is the Green Levy and VAT on electricity consumed with the large grants paid out for the installation of solar panels, heat pumps etc to well-off people who can afford the installation cost and who will henceforth pay less Green Levy and VAT (or even none if they can be self-sufficient).
This is like Robin Hood in reverse- stealing from the poorest to give to the wealthiest.
Er rubbish, Hydrogen is also the major constituent of natural gas that we use now but using 100% Hydrogen causes major technical problems.
@@mfx1 Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4) which is a compound of Carbon and Hydrogen. This is heavier than air and is supplied at a higher pressure than coal gas.
Coal gas is a mixture of gases in which the Hydrogen is in its gaseous (H2) form and is 50% or more of the mixture. It is also lighter than air and a balloon filled with it will rise. It was always supplied at low pressure in the mains. It was the carbon monoxide content that made it so lethal if inhaled. It is of course, combustible and rendered harmless by burning.
Far Left being halfway correct: "Renewable Energy was suppressed and oppressed by fossil fuel barons"
Also them: "Dale Vince and Ecotricity's Gas from Grass providing nearly entirely clean nearly infinite energy means he's a neoliberal traitorous capitalist shill and he's an enemy of the people for not being a Vegan Anarcho-Communist!"
Climate Tech channels: NEVER talk about Ecotricity's Sustainable Biomethane which is actually workable unlike many variations of the concept.
Far Left: treat me like a fascist 24/7 for calling our their groupthink, confirmation bias, other cognitive biases and logical fallacies, whilst they have no idea Karl Marx was a casually racist anti-semite, womanising homophobe who had cheated on his Noble wife and had an 'illegitimate' son.
Lenin GASSED PEASANTS in the Tambov Rebellion.
"Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great" - Sir Clement Attlee, Labour Prime Minister who got more done for the working-class, Britain, and the world, than any Marxist-Maoist-Leninist-Stalinist ever, ever will.
@@MervynPartin Methane is lighter than air, it's only slightly denser than town gas (methane 0.5567, Town gas approx 0.44) Town gas was only supplied at 4mBar to the customer premises (the upstream network also worked at relatively low pressures) but 25mBar for natural gas. As a percentage town gas contained at most 50% Hydrogen BUT as it was supplied at much lower pressures Hydrogen embrittlement wasn't so much of an issue, also Hydrogen would need to be supplied at significantly higher pressure. Using the Hydrogen content of Town gas as justification for using the current network to carry pure Hydrogen isn't scientifically sound, for a start how do you operate a mixed network with some people on 100% Hydrogen and some on natural gas? Do you convert everyone's appliances to Hydrogen first (how can you be 100% sure everyone has been converted) and then switch over the network how long will that take and what do people that have been converted do for heating etc. In the meantime? Do you set up temporary local supply depots fed from tankers? It MAY be possible to gradually increase the amount of Hydrogen over time and do incremental conversions but how long will that take and what cost? There's all sorts of reasons why 100% Hydrogen is a REALLY bad idea and TBH anyone buying a so called "Hydrogen ready' boiler now is wasting their money as there is no way there is going to be any sort of 100% Hydrogen network within the likely lifespan of that boiler.
@@mfx1 My mistake regarding the densities of methane and air, however the switch from coal gas to natural gas was carried out mostly using the same mains and the gas boards may have had a tremendous task, but the change was carried out successfully, area by area.
What about using the hydrogen that has been generated using excess PV energy from summer in a boiler during winter? On vaillant website they say this:
Heat pumps and hydrogen boilers will most likely be the devices that will heat and produce domestic hot water for our homes and offices for decades to come.
These two technologies will coexist because both will offer their best assets under very specific conditions of use, with their specific limits and advantages.
Blue hydrogen is just BLACK HYDROGEN. Is an offence to named it blue like the sky.
Hydrogen has maybe a future only in airplanes or ships.
I agree completely, but the only thing I'm missing here is the cost for the electric net. You say its expensive to overhaul the gas networks, but is that being compared to the cost expand and overhaul the electric grid? If the gas overhaul can be done quicker then the electric grid then i can still see a point to push that instead, after all every year counts rightnow to reduce co2
A heat pump heater can also cool your home.
4:42 If you're gonna do blue hydrogen, at least do something useful with the CO2 (eg passing it through potassium-hydrate powder to make soap and other products) rather than just burying it...
Look up Hazer Process.
I've just seen a piece, which although admittedly didn't seem always object... said heat pumps are not very effective in homes which are not well insulated?
Hydrogen could be used as a storage medium of electrical energy for a heat pump. It should not be burned to heat homes.
I would just go for a battery, way more efficient.
@@cg986 Batteries are only suitable for short term storage. Hydrogen (and ammonia, methane derived from hydrogen) work for long term storage.
I suppose you could not convert the natural gas network to hydrogen until every Nat gas boiler has been replaced or converted. Otherwise you would have to run two networks side by side or some people would be left without heating.
No its not, its electricity generated by many modular thorium reactors, n’est pas
See My Efficient Electric Home. 65,000 members using heat pumps, getting their homes off fossil gas.
Hydrogen reacts with most metals (i.e. pipework), is odourless, colourless, etc. Can be rather dangerous if (when) it leaks...
It doesn't normally embrittle copper below 150C, and that's what most metallic domestic gas piping is in the UK. It is more dangerous than methane in that the ignition energy is lower and the mix explodes over a much higher mixture range.
@@xxwookey Galvanised and black steel pipe is common for gas mains, isn't it?
@@jamesbrown99991 It was, in streets, not houses. But a huge amount of it has been replaced, at least round here (East Anglia). Not sure how much is left.
@@xxwookey I think it's generally worse when the gas mains explode than when there's a gas leak in a house. There's still lead pipe being used for water, so I wouldn't be surprised what other archaic pipes are used elsewhere.
@@xxwookey and a much smaller molecule so will far more readily find the gaps...
If an air source heat pump takes low grade heat and ‘multiplies’ that heat could you not have a second stage compressor that multiplies that first stage heat again?
Heat pumps VS natural gas central home heating. I have both witch is less costly to use here in Los Angeles in the one cool month of winter??
I thought there would be a big boom in hydrogen home heating.
Its useful for industry and food but should not be used for bulk energy, the losses are just to high.
I have often wondered if Hydrogen was a viable form of energy storage. What are the large scale challenges to using Hydrogen like a battery? Making it during times of excess energy and using it during peak hours? Interested also in knowing the heat pump challenges in North America where boilers are rare and most homes are heated with natural gas and oil furnaces or electricity.
Compared to pumped hydro, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, and other emerging grid scale battery tech, I suspect hydrogen won't be able to compete at scale. It's too inefficient to produce (including compressing it) and difficult (i.e., expensive) to store.
@@Lord.Kiltridge But I didn't compare it to curtailment. Where did you get that notion? I compared it to pumped hydro, flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, and other emerging grid scale battery tech.
@@ps.2 Yes. You are right. I had to re read my own question. I apologise.
Thanks again for an interesting channel.The heat pump idea is elegant but a friend recently converted their house (think its circa 100 years old). They had to rip out every internal wall and ceiling in the house, replace all the windows (and doors I think) as well as insulate under the floor. This was so they could keep the house warm on the 12 Kw the heat pump output as opposed to the 35kw (or similar) boiler they used to have. They opted for under floor heating the output temperature is to low for normal radiators although I gather forced air convection radiators might have been ok (and cheaper). I looked at it for my house (similar age) but couldn't bare the idea of living in a building site for months or moving out of the house so just opted for another boiler unfortunately for now. On the other hand my parents house is more modern and it looks like it will work ok so is not all doom and gloom. It looks to me like if were not going to use gas /oil then we are very unlikely to get the heat pump 3:1 coefficient of performance (any where near Carnot efficiency) because we will have to top up with what is basically an electric element to bring the power and temperature up to whats needed for the milions of older houses like mine where people wont rip them completely apart. Upsot ... we are going to need a awful lot of carbon free electricity which is available when we need it not just when wind blows / sun shines.
the government should invest into geothermal power, but naaaah lets build HS2 for over 100 BILLION so people from london can save 30min...
Loft ‘installation’ not insulation.
What about hydrogen as an energy storage method around the 1MW level for rural or even off grid communities? Of course heat pumps are fantastically efficient and ideal for macro scale adaptation but diversifying the energy storage methods and decentralising their locations will surely make the most adaptive and robust energy networks that can also provide solutions to every kind of community.
Do you want to pay 4x for space heating though? For some maybe it’s worthwhile.
@@edc1569 ×4 the cost is crazy, no point at all for that. I was thinking more that the H2 storage system could easily be configured so that the gas it collects for it's network can be harnessed with the excess electricty (standard) but also to push the gas back into the electolyser membrane with Oxygen to resupply that network with power when their renewables don't meet the demand.
@@edc1569 also what are you basing x4 for heating on?
Would love to hear your thoughts on infrared heating panels - starting to investigate replacing my heating system and they seem like a strong choice
Unfortunately, most people don't get this, the majority is after chasing tops/bottoms where they fail & get out of the game.
You can't really know the full risk rate except you're a professional, Reason I settled for advisory & guide from a digital guru, Never been the same again with my holdings.
十𝟭𝟱𝟳𝟯𝟰𝟬𝟮𝟯𝟭𝟰𝟬
He's active on what's *Apk*👆👆👆
That's why we should only invest just a part of our savings, say 10-15-20%
Be smart not greedy!
Ze Tcherman strategy still rules, namely "nicht verbrauchter Strom ist nach wie vor der billigste" or "unused power is cheapest" . In that train of thought, government programs to improve isolation is still the most sane strategy
We had something like this going in Bulgaria, and however prone to corruption, it still changed the lives of millions
true, gov's should also remove the tax from isolation products and things like pv's heat pumps. but all the gov cares about is taking bribes from oil companies
In the US PV industry, we used to call this the "nega-watt." It still stuns me how just a small amount of money paid upfront with building practices can save so much money in the long run, in addition to providing such better living and working conditions. Yet owners often are not educated as to the long term benefits.
You've missed one fundemental point thst none of the hydrogen lobby groups will answer. Hydrogen has a calorific value of about 13.4 mj and natural gas 39 mj. You need to get 3 x the volume down the pipework than it currently carries. We have spent the last 40 years downsizing the network. It qill cost more than 20 billion to upsize it all again and take 40 years of digging up evety road. Turn the gas off and use the pipework as ducts for upgrading the electric network.
Intelligent useful addition. Good idea about using it for upgrading the electric network too.
Bingo. Exactly this.
A little off topic, but everyone always seems to forget the thousands of users, mainly in the countryside, away from the gas grid, who have to use oil-fired heating systems. A cheap, easily installed, effective heat pump based, heating system, would not only be great news for city dwellers, but would also liberate the off-(gas)-grid users from the tyranny of oil prices and delivery charges. Anyone who has an electricity supply (pretty much everyone) would be able to heat their house 100% carbon-free, wherever they lived.
Indeed, my own house is oil heated, I am enjoying it right now.
Nothing beats oil for thermal capacity, ease of storage etc.
Main alternative is bio oil or synthetic Diesel.
@@jimgraham6722 not forgetting late deliveries, price hikes, spillages and leakages!
@@paulhaynes8045 Thankfully havent experienced any of that.
@@jimgraham6722 friends of ours had a leak they were unaware of, went away for a week and game back to find an empty tank, and an oil-soaked garden. This was many years ago and their tank was just sitting on top of some sleepers, with no sump or anything under it, so maybe these days they're installed in such a way as to stop this happening.
@@paulhaynes8045 Yes tanks need to be properly installed. The tanks I use have an integrated stand and are about a 1.5 metre above a concrete pad. It is possible to inspect them all over for leaks.
Mine (2*750ltr) are made of treated steel but these days stainless steel is probably a better material.
I remember the scientists in the 90s telling us about the NOX problem of Diesel engines, the industry got its way and Diesel engines were pushed.
Don't blame the industry; it is the government that pushed Diesel engines in the name of higher efficiency.
It was not that big of a problem, in the end.
@@DavidHalko air pollution in London got massively worse as diesel cars became more popular
@@nicktreleaven4119 - the Great Smog of 1952 killed about 4000 people… the air pollution of London, today, is vastly improved in comparison to past decades, with far more ICE cars on the road.
The only time hydrogen really makes sense is for storing excess energy for electricity during long periods of no sun. Medium term heat storage is much more cheaply done using plain hot water. Use a heat pump during the day when the sun is out to put it into a 2000l storage tank and you'll be good for a few days in a well insulated home.
@@williambreen1001 true, I use this method myself and im very happy with it :)
And in cramped cities, phase change materials let you store the same heat in a smaller space!
@@ThomasBomb45 ...which seems to be being ignored by all but long-term sailing vessels for cooling fridges.
Where can we find out more about systems like this. I've often thought that storage of water at hot and cold temps is a great way to regulate temperature ... but how?
@@williambreen1001 a DIY approach has been done quite often on UA-cam. One particularly neat tank was done a few years ago by DavidPoz with a low pressure tank with a coil heat exchanger to in his basement.
Edit: I don't know anyone who used a heat pump as the source, but it really shouldn't be difficult to set up.
Not having that hydrogen stuff in my house. I’ve bought a heat pump, despite the massive hit job that the media and the fossil barons have done on them and tried to put us off. I’m also an ex electricity distribution engineer too, and the power network has been changing and evolving ever since it was conceived over 100 years ago, it will continue to do so, and it will cope. Remember 10 years ago, when most UK homes has 20 or so 60-100W light bulbs, that’s up to 2KW of power that we’ve all replaced by LED lighting.
@Gazr Gazr You don’t have to buy them. I’ve always bought the most energy efficient devices I can afford, I’m not going to start buying steam anything now.
Another brilliant summary and conclusion on an important topic Dave, well done!
Brilliant, we install heat pumps all the time, trying to change the policy/regulations is like pulling Hens teeth. Jan is also a great guy, Jan and his colleagues are trying hard to change the industry.
The biggest thing that frustrates me, and has blocked me getting a heat pump, is that I need a new EPC and I've been told that I'll need to increase my roof insulation. But my loft is full of the accumulations of 15 years. It's not badly insulated, just 50mm short of the current regs, but the EPC will 'fail' for the Heat Pump grant because of that (according to Octopus).
It's annoying that for the sake of 50mm of loft insulation, I can't get a heat pump in an otherwise suitable property.
@@BobHannent octopus are not the company that installs heat pumps. Plus I've installed many without the Grant. What's your heatloss.
@@kenbone4535 basically the Octopus surveyor finessed the numbers where they needed to be for the rest of the property, but he said the loft was too lossy and I need two rads upgraded. It only has a standard joist depth of insulation, where it should be higher (apparently). Their report says I need 14000kWh pa but doesn't mention losses.
I don't object to skipping the grant, but I am less keen to lose the opportunity when it's there, when what stands between me and a few thousands is the contents of my loft.
@@kenbone4535 also planning on getting 4kW of PV
@@BobHannent yes you are close to the line. Easy get the loft done.
It's a national disgrace in the UK that we are allowing the big house builders to continue churning out such poor housing stock that's tied to the gas grid. There's hardly any renewables, poor insulation and the cost in the future to bring them up to standard is going to be eye watering
I agree. Adding green tech at the time of building is so much easier and cheaper than later retrofits. Why install PV on top of tiles - just install something waterproof underneath (I used sheet metal like on a factory roof). You are not going to see it and it will last much longer than tiles. MVHR, thermal stores (water tanks) and air-tightness are much easier during the build. Larger groups of new build houses could also share costs such as rain water collection, district heating or ground source heat pumps. Then just add the costs to the mortgage and pay it back over many years.
Think they should also be built with ground source heat pumps on estate/district basis. Ground source heat it expensive but must be far far cheaper per house if built at same time as foundations for all houses. Did read a while back that the government watered down requirements for new builders, no doubt some money was exchanged 😉
Thanks, great video. I agree, certainly the efficiency of heating with hydrogen is bad. In the Netherlands, there are very strict rules about insulation in new houses. Also, since July 1 2018, natural gas is no longer allowed in new houses, though exceptions could be made. The vast majority of houses can be heated with heat pumps or heat networks, but for a very small minority, like historic buildings these might just not do the trick and maybe green gas or green hydrogen will be the only possibility. Working for a distribution grid operator myself, I know we want to be ready by 2028, in case the market demands us to distribute green hydrogen. But again, it should absolutely be the last resort, also heating in this way will be very expensive.
Hydrogen should be used as fuel in small power station very close to residential areas where it could deliver power and heat combined. That way it could be used with up to 80% efficiency during winter months. Because hydrogen power stations do not emit any polluting gasses they could be very close to residential areas
Anywhere unreliable power generation (like solar or wind) exists, hydrogen should be generated or used to provide energy not supplied when the wind dies down or the Sun has set.
H2 should be generated by excess unreliable power and turned to electricity when power is needed.
@@DavidHalko No/ That is where batteries and pumped hydro fill the gaps in generation.
@@listohan - “batteries… pumped hydro”
The amount of energy pumped hydro provides is relatively small. It makes a good short term battery store, but the quantity of energy stored is small for a relatively large amount of water 💦 and water evaporates. A system lasts about 50 years.
Batteries 🪫 have a much shorter life expectancy, require large inverters, and the cost for disposal & possible recycle ♻️ is high… high degrees of energy are required to create the battery 🔋 & recycle ♻️ the battery 🪫
Green creation & storage of hydrogen is a terrific way to store energy, until it is needed. South Korea is using locally stored hydrogen at gas ⛽️ stations to meet the high power requirements for charging EV’s, is absolutely genius… removing the burden on central power generation & offering options for distributed power generation.
Honestly, the South Korean 🇰🇷 plan to distribute power generation & EV charging across the nation using gas stations & hydrogen is absolutely genius.
I'm keen to get a heat pump (my combi boiler being over 20 years old). But the cost of living crisis stops me instantly. £8 or £2k.... Simple maths (at least short term).
It doesn't help with my home being timber framed with no way of insulating the walls without removing either all inside or outside cladding/plasterboard. Had the roof.done some time ago but was told back then that the walls were impossible.
New housing (UK) is just a joke IMHO. combi boilers, inadequate insulation, limited triple glasing, and worst of all no solar! 🤯 How can we hope to retrofit old housing when we can't get new housing right?
Another LED We used blown in insulation because we have a similar construction. It is blown into the open space betwixt the inside and outside walls. It was time intensive but well worth it. We are all wondering how are we going to get our old homes up to snuff, when things are so expensive!
Another thing all new builds should have is heat recovery ventilation. It really makes a difference to air quality and humidity
Is that with the £5K boiler upgrade grant?
It is very sad that new housing is still so bad in the UK. Heat pumps don't have to cost a fortune. I bought a (small) GSHP on ebay for £1500. I'll be digging up the garden to fit it next year. My next door neighbour built his own (3kW) and the whole project: pump, pipe, digging, cost under £2000. It works well.
What is your cladding? Panels/planks of some sort? Is it really that hard to take them off, add some insulation (woodfibre or EPS) and put them back on? I finished the EWI on my (brick) house 2 years ago and it's amazing how little heat it needs now. Doing the insulation first means you need a much smaller heat pump, which does save some cost too.
Agreed
Safety alone is a reason to avoid hydrogen. Unlike gas there are no great odorants that would allow you to smell leaks. And hydrogen slowly leaks through steel pipes and needs different steels than gas. Take a steel pipe used for hydrogen and steam clean it then put it in a plastic bag and hydrogen comes out of the steel. The explosive range of hydrogen mixtures is much wider than gas. Flame speed is much higher too. Hydrogen burns hotter and thus makes more NOx so combustion equipment needs to be designed for hydrogen from the start.
On the farm we burnt firewood in a combustion cooker that also provided space-heating and hot water for over 40 years. On my retirement I moved into town and replaced the wood-burner space heater with a reverse-cycle heat pump. I’ve had it for 18 months now and it was surprisingly inexpensive to purchase and run. They work really well here in the coolest part of Australia (Tasmania). The best part is not having to cut and split firewood!
Fuel cells may be less electrically efficient than electric batteries, but they do produce water and heat. It's not a bad choice if you make good use of that water and heat in the winter. In Korea, in every house, water is heated with a boiler to warm the floor of the room. The hot water is also used for showering. Although there is no hydrogen boiler yet, it would be good to provide not only electricity but also warm water for heating to each home from a huge fuel cell system in each region. In fact, we already have a similar system.
Or, you know, you could just use the electricity directly and not waste it on the two conversions to/from hydrogen. And in case you're talking about storing hydrogen in summer based off solar and using it in winter, when there is less/little solar available - long term hydrogen storage is a big problem. If you add additional steps( like ammonia conversion) it adds to the complexity of the system, the cost and it lowers efficiency even more. Another issue I've not seen anyone mention - if you put in hydrogen electrolysis on a large scale, what happens to our water supply? Water shortages have already been a growing issue as is...
Edit: Oh and AFAIK fuel cells use some rare/expensive materials, so they cost A LOT.
Good point, but fuel cell is rather expensive and complicated, though. The good news is that existing natural gas distribution and storage system will handle H2 just fine with some minor modifications. This is not going to be a problem. The speed of sound in H2 is 3 times the speed of sound in natural gas, meaning that H2 can be flowed 3 times faster to make up for the lower energy density of H2. Furthermore, H2 is not too valuable to burn when green H2 is going to cost $1.50 USD per kg, in 2020 dollar value. In fact, when green H2 will cost low enough, then burning H2 for heating can be cheaper than the amortization cost of the heat pump + the electricity cost, PLUS the cost of battery for storage of surplus solar and wind electricity. Adding up the 3 costs mentioned can make it a lot more expensive for using heat pump vs the future low-cost green H2.
Now, if we want higher efficiency, we can use H2 to run a combustion engine to power a heat pump, then the waste heat from the engine can be added to the lower-temperature heat of the heat pump to make the room warmer and more comfortable. Upgrading the electric grid to accommodate electric heat pump will be far more expensive than using H2 in existing natural gas distribution system to each home.
Only problem is that would provide very little amount of water. From 1 kg of H2 you will get 5kg of H20 (exactly 5l at 25C and 1025kPa). From 1kg of H2 one could produce about 20-25kWh of electricity plus almost same amount of heat energy with HFC efficiency of about 50%. How much energy do you use daily in you house? 30-60kWh? Then you will get about 7.5 to 15litres of water per day. That is whooping amount. ;)
Please educate yourself instead of posting embarrassing material like this. Cheaper to use raw electricity than wasting 45% is lost during transition.
@@martingorbush2944 You already have water (at the faucet) in your house. What the house needs is electricity and heat from a hydrogen fuel cell. So, a large (large area) or rather small (small town, factory, or building) CHP might be a good option. To make your home warm, you can add a layer of plumbing about 10 cm to the floor and connect it to the externally supplied hot water pipe. Motorhomes, on the other hand, use a lot of electricity, so you can get a pretty decent amount of water.
New construction definitely needs more regulation to push it toward efficient building technologies and heating systems.
The fact that new builds arent built to standard is ridiculous, would like to see some more of your amazing work on this. I am currently applying to graduate schemes with all the top UK housing developers, the investment cost is tiny for them and right now to point to a new house and say, that house will half your energy bills, there is huge potential to change the general view on the poor quality of new builds.
My old communist era apartment in România is built to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The internal heating system is good for drying the washing in winter. Sunshine does most of the work, and a cross draft does the rest.
18~30 degrees inside temperatures through the year.
Agreed.
No, the new buildings are built to standard. Lobbyists fight (and pay) to keep the old standards from changing.
Developers know this but fight to maintain profit margins, and as the current generation of gas boilers are going to be phased out soon, they can negotiate a better price. Short-termism by developers and politicians is the enemy.
It would be dumb to burn hydrogen, but would there be benefit to putting fuel cells in the home, and using hydrogen to produce both electricity and heat? Thoughts on that?
Maybe not worth the infrastructure costs. BUT it would provide grid balancing on cold days, since the increased use of heat pumps or resistive heat would be counteracted by increased fuel cell heating.
Though a better system might be to centralize the fuel cell and pipe the heat itself around, like conventional combined heat and power
Co-incidentally, the very first video I watched on this channel was titled "Hydrogen For Heating Our Homes" (June 2019); it contained a dire warning about Russia and Ukraine...
Good video. However when it comes to heating or any use of Green hydrogen,,and your not going understand this immediately ,,,,efficiency is not an use ,,why? because the sun imparts more energy in one hour then we humans use in 1 year. So even If the conversion efficiency was only 1% we would still be ahead. The use of Hydrogen is not a why question but rather a how question. We have to stop costing Hydrogen with an efficiency metric. We don’t have time to save the planet because we have to find it cheap to do. Hydrogen adoption should be all the way now no matter what the cost. BTW This same economist believes in trickle down economics. Right! Let’s just have a think of the cost difference between expensive Hydrogen and a dead planet. Ok not dead but severely droughted , if that is a word but soon will be, or severely flooded . And don’t listen to me,,,just listen to Nick Hanauer he will explain what a true economy that benefits all is all about. Hydrogen does that and I can explain it in about 2 hrs. Cheers. Dave.
Hydrogen especially Blue is all hype and switching to Green Hydrogen is only useful for hard to abate sectors which is only about 8% of our energy transition. That contradicts what is being pushed in the media by unscrupulous self interest. Thanks for some balance
Great Channel and some very interesting content, however an issue you seemed to miss is that ASHP only work down to 5°C without backup from either a bivalent system( Gas Boiler) or Electric Immersion Heaters, which no one seems to take any account of, I work for a Consultant that is working on the Decarbonisation of the Public Sector and have been designing installations ASHP ‘s for almost a couple of years now, we have designed both multi small units ( domestic type) mainly in schools and large (chiller type 300kW plus) for Buildings such as Town Halls, Leisure Centres etc, we have used the latest CO2 ASHP to get the lowest possible working temperatures, as yet we haven’t had enough cold weather to get a firm focus on wether these bivalent systems are working as designed, but the 1st couple of installations are complaining already of Electrical Energy Bills of 200% increase, obviously some of this can be attributed to the large increase in Energy costs, but I can see these going the same way as Wind Turbines and CHP units installed several years ago, that are now redundant due mainly to the cost of maintenance of the units. We are now on The 3rd phase and the criteria have changed to exclude bivalent systems . Design of these is proving increasingly difficult . Keep up the good work
Did you mean -5°C? Good air-water heat pumps still retain a cop of 3 at A-7/W35 (en14511). They don't need additional direct heating in most of Europe.
@@Psi-Storm Not according to the Daikin Commissioning Engineer we’ve had commissioning on several of our sites
2050? Who thinks we'll even survive till 2030? Where I live in the SW US, I am seeing changes that have taken place in the last 20 years that people don't believe, even when seeing it with their very eyes. Wildlife and their habitat is disappearing to human growth to the point the animals are constantly on the run with nowhere left to go.
Not where I live. Sorry you're such a doomster. Maybe you should plan to move out of the southwest. If you lived somewhere where it rained every now and then, you'd probably be a lot happier.
@@incognitotorpedo42 Like Pakistan? Eastern Australia? Germany? France? The Iberian penninsualy?etcbluddycetera?
Great video, Dave! Definitely food for thought. Good to see as well, that you heat your house with a heat pump. I've been told, I can't heat our house from the 90's with a heat pump! So, I'll seek a second opinion. Keep up the good work!
I am heating my house from the 70's with a self installed air source minisplit heat pump. Cheap, quite, and easy to deal with. While I did insulate the attic, and installed new windows, I did this to use a smaller unit and to improve the house. The city also required a Heat Recovery Ventilator, but that has also been nice for fresh air at all times. The space calculations are very easy to do, as one specifies the size of the house, the type of insulation, the type, size, and the way the windows face, and the zipcode of your home. This gives one a ballpark size of the unit needed, and it doesn't need to be exact. A whole house energy inspection will help with finding the cheapest solutions, and tell one the BTU loads for heating and cooling to get more precise system sizing information.
You can heat just about any house with a heat pump - it just gets very expensive if the load is really high. 1990s should at least have a cavity wall and thus not be too terrible, although it may be of the 'plasterboard tent' variety beloved of builders at that time. Those do have appalling airtightness, which leads to large heat losses.
@@xxwookey I have a plasterboard tent. (this is a bit disrespectful of tents BTW). I've got 2 air to air heat pumps, but running just one keeps the place toasty when it's zero C outside.
IN SUMMER:
elecrticity from renewables
=(electrolyzer)=>
Hydrogen (in safe low temp metal hydride)
IN WINTER:
=(Fulel cell)=>
Electricity
=(Heat pump)=>
Heat.
Still not terribly efficient, yes, but waay better than the 100% loss from summer to winter that we have now.
Heating by burning hydrogen would be insane though. And I'd take that is what was looked at.
Two big issues are that:
★ high power electrolyzer for home usage are not on the market yet and
★ green hydrogen in public gas network will inevitably be burnt by the fact that it comes within the pipes connected to the burners
Wikipedia says "Stadtgas" is already 51% hydrogen. Why not replace burners with electrolyzers? Not using the other gasses does not block hydrogen flow btw
(physics 101). But those other gasses including CO might poison the electrolyzer. Bigger issue.
Convinced to looking into a heat pump. The changeover will be much more in reach if I can get some of my tax money back as a subsidy.
As a Canadian, I would say that Hydrogen is a good option because it can store summer sunlight from solar panels as fuel for winter. In my winters I would say also that ground or water source heat pumps are the way to go rather than air source heat pumps. The differential here can be 60 C in winter, too much for air source heat pumps unless there is another heat source like wood to fill in for the cold of winter. The very best fuel though is insulation insulation insulation
How would you store H2 from summer to use in the winter...?!
Electrolyzers are very expensive, you're going to be burning money if you are only running it 20% or the time
Because of hydrogens 30% round trip efficiency, and complicated and expensive storage and distribution, and could be much simpler to use heated sand to store the energy for months at grid scale. Even with a round trip efficiency under 50%, it appears to be a simpler solution than chemical batteries, or gas storage. Unfortunately the technology for sand batteries isn't mature yet.
@@andrewradford3953 Chemical batteries are good enough
If you use hydrogen for heating, importing it from elsewhere (for example sunny regions in the south), might be more cost effective since they can produce hydrogen all year round, lowering costs per kW energy. You migt ofcourse store a reserve amount of hydrogen that gets filled over the year, to allow for a steady supply instead of a delivery spike during the winter, which helps reduce costs and more importantly gives a buffer if something goes wrong.
A couple days after this video, there was an announcement that there's been a breakthrough with green hydrogen that can create it at room temperature by using aluminum-gallium composite with a higher percentage of gallium than what has been tested in the past. Apparently the hydrogen gas just bubbles off the metal. We'll see if that changes anything going forward.
So glad there are ways for research to be posted on the internet for companies who have their eyes open and ears to the ground to hear the newest rumblings and discoveries of factual science. And a thanks to the eloquence and articluation of the speaker on this site. Had his name in my mind at one time, simply recognize him when I hear/see his notice of a new post. Great stuff!
A 20 to 30% tax band for high consumpution would force the wealthy to adopt air source heat pump and other fixes to reduce their costs. The VAT can be recycled for energy efficiency measures in poorer homes. Such a measure would create economies of scale for air source heat pumps and other measures.
Someone should turn off the sun! It's wasting so much hydrogen!
Thanks Dave for enabling this voice of reason in the overhype of ubiquitous hydrogen as a major decarbonization component. Hydrogen will be a niche component to net zero in the long run. Informed engineers have been discussing this for several years. You highlight most of the reasons why, and I see others are noted already in the comments. Investing in CO2 pipeline networks to properly dispose or utilize captured CO2 is a far cheaper and more effective investment. Making H2 from CH4 is far too inefficient, producing even more CO2 to dispose of.
Rubbish!
Why not research before you post?
Hydrogen being generated from wind (turbines) is green. Generated by solar ( panels) is yellow hydrogen.
Now a global industry, plenty of info online had you bothered to research the topics first.
You perhaps aren't aware of a process we call "research and development"?
It continues apace 24/365 somewhere on the planet.
Hang your head in shame young man.
Hydrogen is absolutely critical in decarbonizing the world, just not for electricity. We can use green hydrogen to replace methane in chemical processes such as ammonia for fertilizer. So long as we need ammonia, we need hydrogen. And in the long run it'll need to be made without methane
@@t1n4444 I am in the energy industry, and have thoroughly researched the topic. If you are so informed, tell me how much green hydrogen is produced today and how do you transport the hydrogen created? There is plenty of money being spent on hydrogen R&D, and no doubt we will be able to burn it in existing gas turbines with some small modifications. The problem is the amount needed and the cost of transport. So hydrogen from solar is yellow? I learned something new here.
@@danburnes722
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Sounds as if you're not quite the "expert" after all.
Had you researched the topic instead of presuming you completely understood "your industry" then you wouldn't be asking such silly questions, would you?
As for having an epiphany ref yellow hydrogen you would have been shrewd to have Googled up the "rainbow" of hydrogen colours before admitting your ignorance.
Even if only for "cerebral self protection".
Suggest you refrain from posting further until you have worn your fingerprints off at your keyboard.
You may believe me or not as you wish but you'll be sitting at your keyboard for months reading up on what you evidently don't know.
Kindly don't presume to argue or protest, simply concentrate on catching up.
@@t1n4444 This probably is not the site for you. You seem more focused on insults and not the technical arguments or having any constructive dialogue.
I know I'm old-fashioned and hopelessly out of touch in heating and energy terms (I'm skint and live on a budget of under £1,000 per year [one thousand] in an old terraced house that has no form of heating whatsoever), but I can't help thinking that the Sun's already making the best possible use of hydrogen, blasting out millions of times more energy than the Earth will ever be able to use and will continue to do so for several more weeks at least, so it's a pity that we can't find better ways of harnessing what's already there.
So what if solar power is inefficient; if we waste 99.95% of it, it still doesn't cost a penny.
But... I suppose there are no juicy profits to be made out of mere limitless sunshine. Sigh. There's a whole new wave of businessmen desperate to become hydrogen barons to match the oil barons and billionaires of yesteryear.
As someone living in the grey, gloomy north of England I'm pretty sure that the Sun is actually a myth - I've never seen it - but there has to be a better way to meet energy needs than mucking about with hydrogen.
I think having heat pumps makes good sense combined with rooftop solar and cheap over night electric home owners can make big savings over gas heating. plus the more of us that have them the more of them wind turbines can be left running instead of wind turbines turned out of the wind. I think all new homes need heat pumps as standard with good insulation and some kind of solar installed by law
Problem is heat pumps dont work for everyone. Im in a flat & there is nowhere 2 put the fan coil where it wont be next 2 a neighbours window. Also heat pumps only make sense if u can get a cop of at least 3-4, which isnt alwaya the case, particularly in a cold winter. District heating or communal heating, possibly running of hydrogen might b a solution. That way the h2 pipe only needs to connect 2 1 plant & t heat is transported via insulated water pipes into homes
The wind turbines make a lot of noise to keep near the house.
The wind turbines break often. When I tour lighthouses, I ask about the panels & turbines set up, and the turbines are almost always broken.
Wind turbines kill a lot of birds, better to keep them far away from the land.
The solar produces power in the day time, to the point where the electric company will not buy it, when electricity is over produced in the day, which is the issue that US California has due to it’s solar mandates.
The reality is that Hydrogen can be produced, off-shore on commercial turbines, where providers can handle the maintenance requirements 24x7, the water can broken down into hydrogen, the hydrogen pipes to the mainland (where the brackish water is diluted by the sea), and hydrogen can be mixed with natural gas & stored, and used whenever needed. Oxygen can be pumped back to the mainland & used for combustion, eliminating the nitrogen issues since atmosphere is not needed for combustion.
The off-shore wind turbines can also send surplus power to the land, and any hydrogen not sent out or in the lines from back pressure of the mainland, can be used to generate power at the turbines, so turbines can generate base power (via burning or fuel cell)
Similar schemes can be done with hydrogen from solar, to generate base power from that unreliable source.
For places like the UK being on an island, surrounded by water; there is no excuse for not using hydrogen.
Sure, some H2 will leak out, but electricity leaks out of the power lines today. No one talks about it, but the longer the lines & the higher the loss.
Hydrogen is easier to carry than electricity in large batteries, since hydrogen tanks can be manufactured & recycled locally, without dependence on any external nation:
Hydrogen is safer than lithium ion batteries, since a leak dissipates into the atmosphere quickly, while lithium ion can name a lithium fire.
@@DavidHalko I don't mean you need to put a wind turbine up. There is loads of wind turbines in open fields alway from homes. There power is not in demand all the time. At low demand time the power is very cheap. Not to mention that wind turbines are the cheapest form of energy despite all the maintenance needed to run them. The facts speak for themselves if you bother to read them.
@@ytcensorhack1876 Go look at the tepeo's zero emission boiler it can run on cheap electricity overnight and heat the house and water in the day time.
@@adus123 - with enough land, wind turbines can be helpful, indeed. But when they stop spinning & you are too dependent upon their power output, you have a massive blackout like Texas experienced when their wind turbines froze over.
Storage of temporary energy must always be in the equation with renewables. Anything less is a deceiving fiction.
This is what makes Carbon fuels so helpful, it is energy when we need it, stored from the Sun, which is only visible for a period of the day.
It seems to me that the only way green hydrogen *might* be useful is for grid-scale energy storage. Maybe the numbers work, maybe not, but that's about as good as it gets.
There might be a use case for some transport, but containing it is so flipping hard.
@@JohnR31415 They can turn into Ammonia or Hydrates, then use it in Hydrogen Cells to make electricity instead of burning it.
It's the only practical 'green' fuel for huge freight ships. Unless you want the powers that be to go down the extremely disturbing road of nuclear-fission powered cargo ships, hydrogen is a much lesser evil. I believe there's a hydrogen-powered shipping ship that ships hydrogen now? Heh
Green Hydrogen ight be the answer for difficult to electrify systems such as iron smelting, planes and long distance cargo ships. Lots of promising storage systems such as e-Zinc, Hydrostore , heat storage, pumped hydro and green hydrogen. Probably all may be needed.
Hydrogen gas as domestic heating seems unlikely not just on the efficiency of it is bad, but on the case of safety standards required when dealing with flammable gases in domestic and commercial settings. Natural Gas has a additive added to it for the smell so people can tell a leak has occurred as safety standard, where as hydrogen gas doesn't have a additive that can be used for said smell so domestic use isn't going to happen.
Heat pumps are not viable for most existing housing stock because the heat produced is too low at 40c. This will mean radiators have to be twice the size, taking up valuable room space. Heating will need to be turned on in advance of need and left on as warming up takes too long. Hot water for washing has to be heated directly by expensive electricity. The fan box will take a lot of space on an outside wall, preferably south facing, and all the pipework on the inside will again take up valuable space from a living area. Efficiency declines with the outside temperature, and the noise of the fans will increase as they wear over time, causing a nightly noise issue with closely spaced properties. Add in all the extra copper piping and the wastage by scrapping existing boilers and central heating equipment it would be downright criminal to vandalise our housing and waste valuable resources in this way.
Air to air heat pumps solve this issue. 40C is plenty for room heating.
Great clarity on these options about green/blue hydrogen, Dave. Excellent perspective.
We could have Sustainable Biomethane - gas from grass, as Ecotricity and Dale Vince keep pushing for. Absurdly ironically it's pinned between vegan anarcho-communists being anti-science memes about nearly entirely clean, nearly perpetual energy for heating grids. It could also be part of a District Heating system using run-off heat from power plants and industry. To which Big Oil and Big Coal use them as memes.
Just like Tidal Hydropower has been sat on for decades partly due to that same niche within vegans being 'aw what about the fishies every life is sacred' about 1,000,000,000,000,000 marine animals. Big Oil and Big Coal thanks vegan AnComs for their service to petrol plastic pollution profits.
@@michaelchildish Yep, adding to that; there are thousands of oil rigs in the US, out of use, emanating methane gas to the atmosphere, and that is another one that could have a better use.
@@youxkio Didn't know that. That's tragic. One of my more unusual ideas is: Use cow manure to try terraform barren sandy deserts. Have someone follow the cows around and plant coprophilic fungi into every large dropping of dung. Fungi then tranform some of the methane into carbon dioxide whilst doing other useful things. CO2 being a lesser evil than methane. Also one intriguing idea is to feed cattle seaweed. This is believed to be better for their health whilst reducing how much methane they produce.
Meanwhile for the rockiest desert regions, nothing to be done for those except perhaps the extreme of transporting ok quality soil there and hoping for the best. In the meantime, just absolutely cover them in solar panels?
The way to speak to 'the right' who are skeptical about climate tech, though not those who are truly delusional:
"National security via energy security and energy independence, keeps billions within the national economy, and reduces trade deficits whilst keeping us away from unnecessary relationships with gas and oil-producing dictatorships"
@@michaelchildish I love your second paragraph! I totally advocate for it! Huge hug!😀
@@youxkio
😂😂😂
You're a bit behind the times, young person of an undeclared gender, the Arabs have been plastering solar panels over just about every inch of desert they can find.
All that sort of thing was designed and engineered years ago.
Simply do the Google thing.
In fact it's a shrewd notion to do the Google thing before you post ... if you follow.
Nailed it. Heat pumps or thermal storage for the win. With the summer Britain has just had then maybe you all should be looking at reverse cycle heat pumps or as we Aussies call them - air conditioners.
The UK style heat pumps wouldn't work for cooling the way they're installed. Unlike in Aus where most of our reverse cycle air conditioners are ducted or splits, the heat pumps in the UK dump the heat into a water loop for radiators and hot water.
Works fine for heating, but these systems aren't designed to be reversed for cooling in summer. You'd get condensation on all your radiators if they worked at all, and you'd no longer have hot water.
If they wanted cooling theyd have to move away from a water loop and go to ducted or split systems.
I can deny that heat pumps are not cheap to buy. 1000 pounds gets you a good air to air heat pump. People are talking about spending that much on gas per month.
F-AR24TXHYCWK1 is just one example of a 240V heat pump that provides 7 kW of heat, while drawing 2 kW of electricity. Cost is 1699 AUD, almost exactly 1000 pounds.
It’s interesting as a resident of the American South to see how some across the pond view heat pumps as a bit of a novelty. I’m in my 40s and I’ve lived in heat pumped air my whole life. Newer ones are better, but they have a reputation for being mediocre at heating. The problem is they don’t heat very quickly. You can’t gather round a heat pump register to thaw your bones after playing outside in the (increasingly rare) snow we get. In the 80’s and 90’s natural gas companies hired actor Jim Varney to promote gas heating and try to move people in the south away from heat pumps and resistive heaters. He played the character “Old buddy Ernest” from the Ernest goes to ______ series of movies. I can still remember some of the slogans. “Gas heat is hot ….. let me rephrase that …. gas heat is hot”. Another one was “Heat pump schmeet pump”
I can categorically say that my modern air source mini-split heat pump keeps the house nice and toasty warm even on below freezing days. Nothing like the old systems at all. I can barely tell that it is on.
@@GoCoyote that’s awesome. The older ones were sold with supplementary resistive heaters that would suck up a lot of juice but could warm the house up fast.
@@jmpattillo
I remember the old one running during a cold snap when it got down to about 20ºF. Very loud, and used exorbitant amounts of power. My mini split doesn't even have resistive elements, and has kept the place toasty warm when outside air was 25ºF. The only time I had an issue was when I forgot to clean the inside unit filters, and it stopped heating the house. Felt like a major fool for that service call.
That's because unlike timber homes in the US, the average British home is made out of 1 or 2 layers of brick very often with little to no insulation at all - that happened because of various post WW2 housing booms where the UK built cheap low quality housing. A high thermal mass (brick) building plus no insulation means heat pumps historically just didn't work here in the UK as it requires huge pumps and an insulation retrofit which were far too expensive until economy of scale started to pull the price down.
@@hijackstudios That’s interesting. I would say that over here people think of brick construction as being superior, but I didn’t consider the insulation aspect. Brick veneers are pretty common here but solid brick construction is rare. A focus on insulation here is not recent, but it is also not that old. Plenty of houses were built in the south with little insulation up through the 70s in some areas.
I moved to North West Tasmania from Melbourne in late 1991. My first winters of the early to mid 1990s was marred not by cold but by terrible Smoke Pollution emitted from Wood Fires (most households had wood fires boxes to heat homes as it was cheap to acquire wood for burning). Launceston (Tasmania's second biggest urban town of about 90,000) was particularly bad especially for asthmatics and was likened as an average resident to smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. A massive buy back scheme was introduced to swap wood heater to heat pumps. Wood fires are still popular but all new ones have maximum allowable emissions. Glad to say that the smoke pollution is not nearly as bad and the only real annoyance of winter is the temperature.
i live in 130 year old mid terrace ridiculously expensive to even approach improving the insulation,, evin if it was possible it's directly on the public street so don't even know if several inches of external insulation would be something i'd be allowed to instal even if I could afford to. the front of the house is south facing but on the street so no heat pump there, the back of the house is in near constant shade because the house is in the way so no decent place to put a heat pump there either. I hope that the government does cave and start giving decent incentives and i really hope that that they're not hyper focussed solely on heat pumps and result in people like me falling through the cracks
Heat pumps work fine in the shade.
@@incognitotorpedo42 far less efficiently especially in colder weather which is when you need the heating the most and results is a far longer pay back period. it makes it a possible option but an unattractive one.
I've been looking into the question of how to solve climate change for about 20 years, and in my view there's one outstanding solution everyone is studiously ignoring; the earth is a big ball of molten rock! In 1982, NASA proved the viability of drawing limitless heat energy directly from molten rock. (see: Status of the Magma Energy Project)
NASA estimated a minimum of 50,000 quadrillion btu (quads) of magma energy just from the US alone. Global energy demand is currently around 600 quads. Worldwide, the magma energy resource is effectively limitless, and in my view, this is what's necessary to secure a prosperous sustainable future.
Harnessing magma energy at temperatures over 500'C would allow for thermal water fracturing, to produce hydrogen directly, but even temperatures of 3-400'C could generate base load electrical power for industrial scale electrolysis; where clean energy is stored and distributed as liquefied hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen can be shipped around the world, and burnt in power stations, such that entire electricity grids - and all downstream energy use would be turned 'green' at a stroke! Produced from magma energy, the efficiency issue with hydrogen is entirely moot. Hydrogen is the natural storage medium for magma energy because it's produced from water, burns clean, and because LHG contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per tonne, is relatively easy and efficient to transport.
Used to meet all our energy needs carbon free, plus desalinate water to irrigate land for agriculture and habitation - this would allow us to develop wastelands rather than burn the forests and abuse natural water sources to produce food. We'd also have the energy to strip carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the ground. Plus, we'd have the energy to recycle and process all our waste back into useful products.
But the main reason magma energy is attractive is that it's a global solution to climate change; as opposed to spending massively in the West on wind and solar, while China and India in particular, develop economically using coal, and from a very low base. Between them, China and India have 3bn people with a long way to go to reach Western levels of energy use - and if that's not magma energy use, then climate catastrophe will happen anyway!
true, geothermal is the way :) if the government invested in geothermal power everyone could have cheap electricy like people in iceland and cheap electricity allowe for economic growth and better lives. The only downside for now is that you need to dig pretty deep and the up front cost is expensive, but with gov money we could research cheaper methods for digging
@@faustinpippin9208 Correct, but we have to make a distinction between geothermal - and magma-thermal, because most of the geothermal referred to in the literature is hydro-geothermal; tapping into underground bodies of hot water. Hydro-geothermal is okay, but has a 'replacement rate' problem. You can only draw a limited amount of energy from an underground body of hot water over time before it cools; and then it takes a random amount of time to replace that energy. It could take decades. Magma-geothermal is far more powerful and reliable.
It does not require digging the deepest hole on earth to access magma energy. At particular geographic locations, there are magma pockets in the earth's crust at depths as shallow as 1-2km. The drilling technology for this already exists. Further, there are magma pockets beneath volcanoes, and subduction zones where continental plates meet, and one is pushed under the other. In the Pacific Ring of Fire there are 450 volcanoes; and 1500 worldwide! But still, liquid hydrogen gas transport would be necessary to distribute magma energy worldwide.
Thanks for another great video! I...uh, I'm just going to take your word for what those research reports say. Thank you for providing the links, though! No doubt some viewers are going through them carefully.
The idea of heating homes with hydrogen, using pre-existing natural gas lines, seems ridiculous to me. You didn't say it out loud, but it's obvious that those leaky, embrittled pipes misting hydrogen all over the place would be a massive fire hazard. Every time the furnace breaks down (which would be often) the poor repairman would need danger pay to go down into the basement and start knocking around with metal tools. It's never going to happen, and the companies selling "hydrogen ready" boilers are well aware of that.
If we're going to electrify everything, then we should just electrify everything and skip the middle steps. Heat pumps are clearly the way to go with home heating (although we may have to use the ground source variety in my country). You're a pioneer in this. But like you say in the video, cost is a problem and there's a huge role for governments to play in providing grants. First provide grants for insulation to get as close to the "passive house" standard as possible, then a grant for the heat pump. Oh yeah, and legislate proper insulation for all new homes!
Hi, Those old leaky pipes used to carry coal gas many years ago, which contained a higher % of Hydrogen, and was very much more explosive, and that was part of the reason albeit a small part, we changed to Nat Gas.
And they were probably in better shape back then.
I think heat pumps are the way to go, and definitely super insulated homes can reduce demand to as low as 1/10th of the original heating needs, making electric bills affordable and manageable for electric grids and green energy sources. 🌱 🌇. I've done the upgrades, they're a bit fussy but we'll worth it!
Super efficient buildings have been with us for decades.
Japan did some excellent designs/work over fifty years ago with covering buildings in earth and soil and planting thereon.
Heated by solar radiation through "green house type atriums".
Schools, hotels, public buildings and private homes ... just Google.
"Your" Bob Vila built one for his TV show perhaps thirty plus years ago.
A London university built something similar and installed many sensors to measure efficiency. Again all online.
It might be of interest too that Yemenis built multi storey mud building hundreds of years ago, as did your indigenous pueblo indians who built stone and adobe buildings.
The modern take might be rammed earth in old truck tyres, again many, many illustrations online if arsed.
Not sure about the 'super insulation' comment, a no brainer on paper, it quickly hits a brick wall (no pun intended) when we look at the state of the UKs old housing stock, retrofitting all old homes to make them extremely well insulated and air tight isn't cheap or simple.
@@progtom7585
True ... Regrettably.
Live in Canada, 12 years ago installed a ground source heat pump, $350CDN to heat for the winter, AC is $0.25CDN a day.
The pay back was 7 years, great heat source.
Thank you for the crystal clear detailed explanation. I see a big difference between air air heat pumps and air water heat pumps. The former I can install myself , for instance one outside unit and 4 inside units. This system can cool and heat. Given the likelyhood of hotter and hotter summers, I like this approach! Also the inside units filter the air. Now, in Germany, emphasis is on air water units. Much costlier. They heatvthe water that circulates in the central heating system. When it is cold outside and much heat is needed, the efficiency drops and heating costs rise. For those with floor heating it is easier, but few have floor heating. I am convinced that energy will become very expensive and that we cannot heat all rooms in a house or apartment anymore to 20 degrees C. But I am inclined to use air air with the cooling option, low cost, easy installation, air filtering, remote controls for each room. From my my enjoyable vacations and work visits in GB my best guess is that air air solutions are very often optimal.
Hi, Air to air misses the ‘decarbonisation’ goal as you will be using more energy in summer to cool the property , negating any gains from installing the heat pump
@@steveblack728 in that case one would refrain from cooling... it is an option. Moreover, we will have too much electricity in summer because Bill Gares builts robots that will make PV panel production dirt cheap.
Ground source to air heat pumps are much more efficient, but come with a higher initial cost than air to air heat pumps.
@@steveblack728 that depends on how the electricity is generated.
True but in The UK it’s all smoke and mirrors
They'll never use hydrogen, it'll all be electric because the suppliers can monitor every households usage using smart meters!!!! Residential gas boilers will be a thing of the past!!!!
Thank you, excellent and very honest documentary. Hydrogen is not suitable for home heating. Hydrogen is very expensive and inefficient. It also brings huge safety concerns in domestic environments. I will not have hydrogen for heating or cooking in my house.
Heating homes with only green energy seems very hard. I was thinking about a not very big windmill in the garden producing warm water for the house, converting rotation to heat, perhaps through friction. It wouldn't be enough to warm much. But instead now first make electricity, split water and then burn the hydrogen in the house. I guess that way would heat only half now. And yet somehow people seem to think there is more energy that way.
When you see the words COSTS AND SAVING THE PLANET in the same sentence you should read it like this : OUR GOVERNMENTS HAVE THE MONEY AND TECHNOLOGY BUT WHO REALLY RUNS EVERYTHING SAYS NO!
One further barrier for hydrogen i stumbled over recently is storage. Germany has 270TWh of geological storage for methane. The Methane is simply kept at 40-50 and not chilled. At 50 bar, at 21C, methane has 3.7x more energy content per liter than hydrogen. So if we stop burning gas, we could either use the storage for biomethane and get the full 270TWh, which is more than enough to cover any dunkelflaute. Or we could expensively create hydrogen, and store only 73TWh, which is not enough to cover dunkelflaute in 2045 when everything is electrified and double the yearly production will be needed.
Btw, germany produced only 10TWh in 2020, but germany produced a further 90TWh of biogas which was burned directly to provide electricity baseload. And that's just a fraction of the available organic waste that's being used there. So we should stop burning methane for direct heat, and instead use it for electricity generation when renewables have not delivered much for over a week (there are several weeks like that every year), aka "dunkelflaute".
Great video and excellent points about heat pumps..just a couple of comments on hydrogen.
1. The IPCC says the 0.04% of CO2 causes heating of the 4% H2I in the atmosphere. What would injecting hot H2O, after burning hydrogen do?
2. Moving the flow of atmospheric water has been shown to be issues in the past -- the creation of the sandy Sahara and the massive problems with rain, rivers and aquifers in California. What will relocating water on this scale do to ghs ecosystem?
BTW bury CO2 and the anaerobic bacteria that make oil and natural gas will make methane. So more natural gas.