Colin Hines of the Green New Deal Group and I made a submission to the Labour Party strategy review in climate issues.
The theme was the need to make every building as thermally efficient as possible.
It can be read here.
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Ed Miliband now has no excuse than to make a green recovery programme you and Colin Hines propose in excellent detail the top priority for the Labour Party as it is clear that the Conservatives have no clue whatsoever how to cope with the climate crisis we face. At the moment Keir Starmer has put climate justice third on his list of pledges, now is the time to put it top of the list.
I hope so
I think Ed thinks so too
May I also suggest – although not totally green except it will reduce travel- for an efficient economy these days what is vital is decent broadband. If you live in rural England it frequently doesn’t exist, driving the divide between town and country and inequalities of education / access etc. It really needs to rise much higher up the agenda.
Agreed….and don’t I know it
Did you see this?
https://twitter.com/henrymance/status/1277529724303048705?s=20
I agree with your proposal. Wasting heat is just inefficient. If you want an efficient economy, you start by not wasting.
I had seen it
Shocking…..
“The vast majority of these will also require their gas heating systems to be replaced predominately by heat pumps”
“The latter is an enormous but unrecognised job generator since there is gas heating in more than 20 million homes”
I disargee with the word “predominantly” for the following resons.
I’ll preface what follows with the following. I used to work for MANWEB — UK DNO — as a power systems engineer. I know what UK electricity distribution systems can and cannot do. In your submission you reference a National Grid report — I like & respect NG — but their perspective in quite different from that of the DNOs. Problem is that almost all of the UK urban/suburban distribution networks are designed to support housing with gas heating — not heat pumps. Over the past year working with a range of interns, I have modeled distribution networks with both heat pumps AND electric vehicles. The modeling was very detailed and based on a single substation feeding a variable number of houses (150 — 250). We modeled on the basis of a one hour sampling over one year driven by a temperature data set from Belgium (frankly not so different from the UK).
What we found is that without a repurposed-for-hydrogen gas network and fuel cells in some homes (circa 40% of homes) you cannot have a large-scale roll-out of heat pumps. Put another way, heat pumps and EVs need hydrogen/fuel cells. These conclusions apply as much in UK as in other counties such as those in the EU where there continues to be a “belief” that somehow, all will be fine. Indeed it will — provided you rebuild the entirety of the EU (or indeed UK) distribution power network.
Much/most/all of the distribution networks (EU or UK) are privatized. My views on this situation are well established. What is left is to ask: who benefits with respect to a move to an “all electric” future.
I could now move into the problem of more renewables and lower wholesale electricity prices (demonstrable across a wide range of EU member states and the UK….but that would require many pages — why is this relevant? — because electrolysers powered by renewable electricity can stabilize wholesale electricity prices……….& this is good because?…….another story.
Tell me more…
I understand that the paper is focused more on economics than the details of making houses more energy efficient, I’d like to point out that keeping heat in is only part of the story. Having just lived through our most recent heatwave in a new-build house with a top thermal efficiency rating, I think there’s another aspect to this. While it is vital that houses be built to not waste their heat, I think we’ll see British householders pay increasing attention to cooling in the next few years, and this could easily wipe out the green gains of improved insulation if there’s a big uptake of air conditioning. In the winter, houses need to trap and retain heat. In the summer, we need ways to prevent heat from building up in the house to begin with, and ways to get rid of it. So I hope that green approaches to the latter will be pursued also.
Noted
“Noted“.. like you are some whizz engineer!! You know feck all about this other than the strap lines. Why would you? Your an accountant
So I had noted it to discuss with others
Having spent a lot of time visiting exhibitions to do with the building industry, this country does have the capacity and the ideas to make something like this work.
But what comes across is a reluctance to embrace new technology because of the industry being risk averse but also path dependent – they like what they know. And what happens is that the new ideas remain niche and not mainstream.
Only a well orchestrated GND could alter that.
Precisely
Have you read Common Weal’s Green New Deal for Scotland report Richard? I know that you rate their work highly. Their GND for Scotland sets out a comprehensive technical and financial programme over a 25 year time frame. I have read the summary report but I believe there is a more detailed technical paper as well. Currently there is a large New housing development at the former John Brown shipyard in Clydebank which will incorporate a district heating system supplying heat to all houses which will be fitted with heat pumps. The system is a water source heat pump system with the heat source being the water of the River Clyde.
I am a big fan….
I will be working with Common Weal again soon