Here's a story about our biggest challenge as we seek to eliminate emissions. Not cars, not fossil fuel power, but something else. Something that'll cost more than HS2, be more disruptive yet govt has no plan to resolve it. The story begins on the banks of the Thames in London...
Just opposite Battersea Power Station in Pimlico you might spot this. Looks like what someone thought the future might look like in the 1950s. Which is kind of what it is. It's the most visible remnant of something called the Pimlico District Heating Undertaking. 
In '40s London people were dying from smog from coal fires in homes. So this project used the excess heat from Battersea Power Station to heat water, pump it under the Thames and into radiators and taps in the Churchill Gardens estate.
westminster.gov.uk/yourhousing/si…
westminster.gov.uk/yourhousing/si…
Pimlico wasn't the first district heat system but it was among the most advanced. Some thought most towns and cities in the UK would eventually have such systems where heat is piped into your home. Instead we went for gas. District/communal heating schemes provide less than 2%
While today's boilers are far more efficient than their forebears, they nonetheless pumped out more greenhouse gases (707MtC02e) than passenger cars (695MtC02e) over the past decade. In 2018 pretty much every other sector cut emissions. Home heating emissions rose 4%.
Why aren't more people talking about this? Extinction Rebellion & the govt prefer to talk abt cars & power stations. But while we know broadly how to cut car emissions & fossil fuel power, there's no plan for what to do about our radiators. And no easy solution...
You've probably heard some people talking abt hydrogen as the solution. Burn hydrogen and the only waste product is water. Amazing! But there are a couple of catches. First, replacing everyone's boilers will cost up to £100bn, and that's before the cost of upgrading the network.
More worrying is the fact that the main method we have for creating hydrogen gas in large quantities generates, guess what, greenhouse gases. Scientists say once we've cracked carbon capture & storage then that worry goes away. But CCS is still years, maybe decades away.
Why don't we just replace our gas boilers with electric ones? Short answer: electric boilers are hideously inefficient & expensive to run. Far better are air or ground source heat pumps. Indeed these are surely a large part of the solution, esp in rural areas. But there's a catch
Heat pumps output at far lower temperatures than the 75 degrees or so that comes from gas boilers. More like 35 degrees. That's fine if you have underfloor heating but not if you have conventional radiators. Even more importantly, your house needs to be v v well insulated.
Which brings us to a bigger problem. UK homes are terrifically drafty and poorly insulated. Our housing stock is the oldest in Europe acc to Eurostat. This Tado study today provides a useful illustration of the problem.
You see where we're heading: we need a massive upgrading not just of our boilers but of our homes. Good news: it's doable. Bad news: it'll be expensive & our planning system, which makes it v difficult to retrofit triple-glazing on listed/protected properties, won't help.
Think about how hard the govt has found it to get people to install smart meters. Now imagine an upgrade scheme that will involve far more disruption and far more cost. Now you're getting a sense of how tough this task will be.
Part of the problem comes back to that water tower in Pimlico, which stored hot water for the neighbourhood. If like Copenhagen we'd gone for district heating in our towns/cities we could simply slot a greener boiler into the middle.
As it is, turning our cities into district heating networks will cost far, far more. One report put together for the @CCC implies costs of around £79bn to get a fifth of Britain's homes onto district heating networks. theccc.org.uk/publication/el…
Tot it all up and future-proofing our heating will cost far, far more than HS2 or upgrading our broadband. Yet there is NO STRATEGY in govt to deal with this - at least not yet. Much more on this in my @thetimes column this week:
thetimes.co.uk/article/4c2a12…
thetimes.co.uk/article/4c2a12…
