www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54981425
All good stuff, I think.
However, I noticed this comment "The government will bring forward, to 2023, the date by which new homes will need to be warmed without using gas heating."
That seems a dramatic change. Has it been long planned and I missed it?
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Was planned for 2025.
It is the usual case of one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing.
Take two brand new properties, identical in every way apart from the heating system. Property 1 has gas central heating and Property 2 has electric heating.
Property 1 will have an EPC rating of C at worst and possibly B. Property 2 will have an EPC rating of D at best and sometimes E (the minimum standard which permits property to be marketed for sale or let).
The government wants to improve energy performance and eventually will increase the minimum standard to D and then C over the next 20 years. If you don't meet the standard, you need to improve the property.
So how do you improve the electrically heated house?? It's almost impossible to improve a pre-existing property by more than a single grade - maybe two if the gas heated house has no insulation. But how do you improve a brand new house if it already has pretty much all the available features to save energy?
The system is flawed.
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Will they increase the minimum standard for existing homes or just new homes? Why can't the performance of a house with electric heating get past a rating of D?
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It's connected to the cost of running a house, rather than the inherent efficiency...
At the moment the grades outside the acceptable range are F and G. If the cost of improving the rating to E will cost more than the money saving over the next seven years, you can apply for an exemption for a period of five years.
As electric heating is more expensive than gas, the proeprties are naturally in a lower grade. Stupid in a way but perhaps get around the problem of unrealistic cost to upgrade. However they will have to make some changes once gas heated houses are not permitted to be built.
Electric heating is far more efficient than a gas fired wet system. A single convector, individually timed and temperature controlled in each room is pretty much 100% efficient for the given input. There are no losses of heating pipes, under floor voids etc etc.
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The SNP will be banning the sale of a house, as a house unless it meets high insulation standards after 2030.
The house can be sold but can only be occupied when the house has been upgraded.
All very well if you are building new homes but insulating an Aberdeen granite house, a lowland sandstone house is impossible without covering the whole house in a "tea cosy".
Only about 80% of Scottish homes have gas - changing all of them to air source is not easy - getting 4 or 5 x the amount of electricity to every house in the UK is mission impossible in a timescale of a few years.
Real problem is Energy Poverty - 1Kw of electric heat costing 4 x the cost 1Kw gas
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I think we did the gas boiler replacement thing a couple of weeks ago?
Not that I object, more to make sure I'm not imagining it.
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Looking at the list from the link. Is it possible to quadruple wind power in just 10 years? I did read of the issues with lots of wind power is that it lacks rotational mass and by extension makes it difficult to control the frequency of the grid.
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>>I think we did the gas boiler replacement thing a couple of weeks ago?
Rings a bell, actually. I guess I didn't think it through at the time.
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I read that the grid had to fire up a coal power station the other week because forecast demand for a short period was high but forecast renewables (mainly wind) was low, and the grid looked likely to run out of capacity (there are a number of power sources shut own atm due to planned maintenance).
They were also asking customers to shift usage, and my Agile rate went high to discourage use.
In the end there wasn't a problem as forecast demand was lower than thought.
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>> I read that the grid had to fire up a coal power station the other
>> week because forecast demand for a short period was high but forecast renewables (mainly wind)
>> was low, and the grid looked likely to run out of capacity (there are a
>> number of power sources shut own atm due to planned maintenance).
When I went up to Buxton in mid October Ratcliffe Power Station near to East Midlands Airport and which is coal fired was running.
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Electric heating with solar (assuming a roof) and a battery that can be filled with cheap overnight electrons is surely the future (as well as epic insulation).
As well as vehicle-to-grid technology for all the EVs we'll be ripping around in...
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I'm just about to replace my broken solar inverter and I looked long and hard about putting a fairly chunky battery. It is the future however in the present the calculations seem to put the time to recover your costs at about 10 years, so I couldn't be bothered.
I'm not as pessimistic or cynical as many but they are going to have to get a wiggle on to achieve these ambitious targets. They've not even managed to roll out smart meters properly yet, years overdue, and this is a lot more complex.
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>> I'm not as pessimistic or cynical as many but they are going to have to
>> get a wiggle on to achieve these ambitious targets. They've not even managed to roll
>> out smart meters properly yet, years overdue, and this is a lot more complex.
>>
I think a lot of them will turn out to be hopelessly optimistic, I hope I'm wrong though.
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Most new homes being built are a long way from levels of energy efficiency achievable.
Developers dominate the relationship with plannning authorities who could enforce better energy efficiency standards.
Developers are happy to pay for high end legal and professional support to make their case in the knowledge that it directly impacts their profits. Planning bodies get no reward for engaging in a fight, only stress and agggravation - no surprise they often take the line of least resistance.
So new properties are frequently built to a low standard, often without adequate insulation, no solar panels, no rainwater recycling systems, laid out to maximise density rather than take advantage of orientation etc etc.
The goverment need to regulate this - retrofitting is either expensive or impossible. Otherwise we will have to live with the short term decisions for the 60-100 year life of the property!
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Yep it was 14th or thereabouts. 5 out of 16 EDF nuclear power stations were offline. The National Grid tweeted a warnign on 14th twitter.com/ng_eso/status/1316398489363001344 then tweeted that teh problem had passed. twitter.com/ng_eso/status/1316449319877259265
I was wrong about the coal, they were fired up in Aug as well after a 55 day lapse.
I hope they can keep the grid running over winter.
Last edited by: smokie on Wed 18 Nov 20 at 17:52
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>> Yep it was 14th or thereabouts. 5 out of 16 EDF nuclear power stations were
>> offline.
We only have 8 nuclear power stations! The rest are retired and have been for a while!
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>> I read that the grid had to fire up a coal power station the other
>> week because forecast demand for a short period was high but forecast renewables (mainly wind)
>> was low, and the grid looked likely to run out of capacity (there are a
>> number of power sources shut own atm due to planned maintenance).
>>
>
Coal power stations I think have been on 8 days this month so far.
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I was listening to an electrical engineer on the radio today. The infrastructure is creaking as it is.
He likened our system to the old days. The infrastructure was created to supply one 15amp pug in each room and with a lot less devices to feed.
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PM's green plan - Netsur
