Decarbonising home heating is the largest remaining decarbonisation challenge facing the UK without a clear pathway. Transport will be electrified, businesses will become service providers based on electricity, and industry will disappear overseas anyway.
As we increasingly live in cities in higher density housing, we face the dual challenges of keeping warm in the winter and cool in our increasingly hot summers. A year ago in one of these posts I looked at Trellick tower, a large brutalist tower block in London, and considered how it could be decarbonised and mentioned air conditioning as a likely requirement.
Air-to-air heat pumps are really air conditioning units. Currently there is a £2,500 grant available for air-to-air heat pumps, which is well over the typical £1,000 cost of a single air conditioning unit. In many cases the installation is effectively free. They also avoid the plumbing complexity of water based systems, air ducting can be installed in most homes with limited disruption.
Couple this with the recent announcement of allowing plug in solar in the UK and a solution starts to emerge. An air-to-air heat pump with a solar panel on each balcony. In the winter the heat pump runs on cheap overnight electricity to heat the home, and in the summer the solar panel output peak matches the peak cooling demand during the day.
Air-to-air solutions do not generally provide hot water, so this could be provided by the shared boiler as it is today, or homes could have hot water tanks or simply heat water on demand.
Let’s get going, a systematic programme of working with local authorities to implement these solutions will have huge societal and environmental paybacks.
