Lord Callanan Parliamentary Under Secretary of State BEIS, Philippe Commaret EDF, Clayton Browne CB Heating and Patrick Crombez Daikin GM for Heating and Renewables Europe.
elemental spoke to Lord Callanan at the launch of a new heat pump training academy, to find out how the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is progressing.
EDF, CB Heating and Daikin opened a new heat pump training academy to drive the upskilling of heat pump installers.
The launch event was attended by Philippe Commaret, Managing Director for Customers at EDF, plus Business and Energy Minister Lord Callanan, who spoke to us about heat pumps, retrofit and the need to train more installers in low-carbon technologies.
Are you pleased with the progress of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme?
It’s been good so far we’ve we’ve issued almost 9000 vouchers, and about 4000 have been redeemed. I’m told that the vouchers are issued, on average, within about a week. And payments are issued on average at about 10 days. So all the feedback that I’ve been getting from OFGEM and more importantly from installers in the field is that it’s going well, but always interested to hear from any of your readers if it’s not, but I’m told that it is. And of course the new website goes live in two weeks’ time, on 28th November, when registered installers will be able to get live real time updates on how their applications are progressing.
What is your strategy for upskilling existing heating engineers, so that they can work on heat pumps?
Today’s event is a prime example of all of the new training opportunities that are coming online, principally led, of course, by the private sector in this case, but from the government’s point of view, we’ve currently got bids in for £10 million of training grants, the results of that will be out in the next few weeks. And the previous competition, which was £7 million, delivered 1000s of training places. We’re hoping to get up to 10,000 training places out of this one, many of which of course will be for heat pump installers, which is great. It’s for a range of different low carbon technologies.
Do you think that the future of domestic heating is going to be largely heat pumps or do you see a place for something like hydrogen?
The strategy at the moment is basically to keep our options open. What we do know is that heat pumps are an established technology, they work, tens of thousands have been installed across Europe. So we know that they will work and they are operational and they are technically proficient. We don’t know yet that that’s the case for hydrogen. We do a lot of research work to demonstrate that it’s the case, to make sure that there’s a distribution network, but hydrogen boilers are still very much in their infancy. So hydrogen offers potential but it would be a few years before it’s an established heating technology. But we do know that heat pumps are here, they are working and we’re seeing them installed across the country. So heat pumps will be the majority of the heat decarbonisation that we will see.
Would you like to see a national retrofit strategy?
Well, we do have a retrofit strategy, the heat & buildings strategy is the way that we see the decarbonisation of the heating rolling out in the years to come. And we always adopt a fabric first approach because whichever type of low carbon heating technology we go, using less energy is clearly the way to go. But I’m sure there are going to be more things that we can do in the months and years ahead.
How important do you think installers are at sort of spreading the sort of message of low carbon heating?
I think installers are absolutely vital. They are the first port of call for customers to get advice on the kind of heating technology they want to go for. At the end of the day, people are not going to listen to us in government so much. But they will take advice from their local heating engineer – their gas boiler goes wrong, the engineer comes out they want advice on should they be replacing that boiler or should we be moving to the likes of a heat pump or some other technology and the local installers, the recognised experts in the area, are going to be the prime source of advice for most customers.
