With a general election finally called for the UK, we now have a real chance to put the Tory Party out of our misery, and hopefully for a generation. Like most of us though, I look back on the last fourteen years and struggle to come up with a less than book length summary of the damage they’ve done. But I had to try…
Continue reading Fourteen Years: A ReckoningTag Archives: UK Government
Hot Air versus Heat Pumps
Reading the UK government’s announcement that it will be funding heat pump installations suggests that they’re once again managing to turn a good idea into a counterproductive failure, one moreover which will likely prove toxic to our transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
If we take the government’s fund at face value, the promised £490M is sufficient to provide grants of £5,000 to 98,000 homes: a drop in the ocean compared to the 27.8M or so households in the UK (the actual number of discrete properties will of course be lower, as 14.8% of the population live in flats). But to offer to even partially fund heat pump installations without first tackling the issues of effective insulation and the cost of resizing of domestic heating systems needed to make effective use of heat pumps, is a recipe for disaster, huge ongoing costs and ineffective outcomes.