Speaking at InstallerSHOW, three heat pump heads address claims that heat pumps are expensive, stating that while the industry is ready for action, government needs to do more to support the transition to decarbonisation technologies.
There’s a major misconception around heat pumps, says Bean Beanland, Director for Growth and External Affairs at Heat Pump Federation: “It’s not that they are expensive – the overall cost of heat pumps is falling. It’s that the overall transition to heat pumps is expensive,” he says.
Speaking at InstallerSHOW’s panel session, ‘Heat Pumps are Cheap!’, Beanland was joined by Carl Arntzen, CEO at Bosch Thermotechnology Ltd, and Ian Rose, Sales & Strategy Director at Passiv UK, to discuss pathways forward for the decarbonisation technology.
The bigger picture
“There’s a lot of focus on the merits and drawbacks of specific technologies right now,” Arntzen tells session host Phillippa Forrester. “This is resulting in a very polarising narrative, which is taking us down the wrong avenue and leads to misleading headlines around heat pumps. Instead, we need to be focusing on the transition overall.”
As Rose says, there’s no silver bullet solution to decarbonisation: “We need a working blend of solutions that allows us to take incremental steps in the right direction. People are spending too long on the ‘perfect’ solution, when in reality we don’t know where tech and innovation will lead us. The solutions we’ll be using in 2050 probably don’t even exist yet.”
One such incremental step – and an underrepresented technology – Arntzen says, is hybrid heat pumps. “These heat pumps are around 80% electrified, which enables consumers to obtain heat pump benefits while delaying having to make fabric improvements to the building. Once they do this at a later date, they can go for 100%.”
Central to this incremental approach is a long-term strategy, says Beanland. “Hybrid heat pumps, for example, are a viable solution as long as they come with an exit strategy. We don’t want to leave consumers with an undersized heat pump when they make the final jump to all-electric. We need to sell them a long-term vision.”
Looking long-term
However, there are key barriers to the implementation of this long-term vision – namely, politicians’ inclination to think in five-year cycles. “I really feel that we have an industry now that’s close to saying [to government] ‘we would like your involvement, but we’re going to do it ourselves regardless’. However, there are some things we can’t do ourselves, such as addressing the spark gap and outdated standing charges.”
According to Beanland, getting government to move the needle on this requires industry-wide collaboration to help civil servants put together programs for policy that ministers can say yes to. “We have a responsibility to encourage and support action, and I’d say to the government that we just need to get on and do it now. Sure, we can expect some mistakes to be made but that’s how we learn the answers to get to end game.”
Arntzen has a more intrepid solution: “If I were Prime Minister, I’d actually take decarbonisation away from politicians entirely and create an independent authority, perhaps like the Olympic Authority. The Olympic Games in 2012 were the only piece of infrastructure we’ve delivered on time in the last 30 years because it was so critical. Decarbonisation is actually so important I’d take it away from government entirely.”
Beanland agrees that at the very least, government needs to be having “grown-up conversations” with consumers and industry alike, because the situation is so urgent. “We’ve got around 26 million homes to decarbonise, and around 26 years to do it,” he says. “That’s a million homes a year. That should be keeping someone up at night. It certainly keeps me up at night.”
