My Lords, the Government are investing £6.6 billion over this Parliament in improving energy efficiency and installing low-carbon heating. A further £6 billion has already been committed for 2025 to 2028. Heat pumps are the key technology for decarbonising heating in the near term and are essential in all 2050 scenarios. Therefore, the Government’s aim is for 600,000 heat pump installations annually by 2028. However, a range of technologies will be needed to decarbonise heating, including expanding heat networks in the longer term.
My Lords, the Government’s emission targets are both ambitious and critical, so why are we still allowing gas boilers to be installed in new housing developments right now?
As the noble Lord knows, that is a matter for building regulations. The future homes standard will come in from 2025; it will not specify the type of heating but it will put in place standards that will, in effect, end gas boiler installations in new homes.
My Lords, the Minister will know that heat pumps are a very efficient means of turning electricity into heat, but does he think that, while electricity costs roughly three times as much as gas, there is any prospect whatever of them taking off in the UK?
The noble Lord is right about the efficiency of heat pumps and about the cost of electricity. Later this year we will issue a consultation on so-called price rebalancing, which will attempt to bring the electricity price down relative to gas.
My Lords, will the Government turn their mind to trying to encourage heat pump installers to install them in flats, where a large proportion of UK residents live? In other countries, they can do this; obviously, it is not feasible in all cases, but in many cases it is.
The noble Baroness makes a valid point. Heat networks are probably more appropriate for most flats—for instance, you could have one heat pump in the basement that would heat all the flats—but for some cases she is right.
That depends on what target the noble Lord is referring to. There are a number of different targets but a substantial amount of government funding is going into this—some £450 million for the boiler upgrade scheme and £6.6 billion to decarbonise heating generally.
My Lords, this July, residents of Whitby in Ellesmere Port vetoed plans to be one of two proposed sites for hydrogen village trials out of safety concerns—concerns which were extremely well-founded, I might add, given that hydrogen is the lightest element in the periodic table and notoriously difficult to control. I have two questions. Can the Minister confirm that the residents of Redcar in Teesside will have a similar right of veto? Which other locations are now being considered for these ill-advised hydrogen boiler trials?
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that decarbonisation would be faster if we had better insulated rental properties, rather than seeing most of the heat go through single-glazed windows, particularly in the north of England?
I would not characterise just rental properties in that way; whatever form of heating is used, better insulation and better performance of buildings is a good thing.
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet. As the noble Lord, Lord Birt, made clear, the decarbonisation of home heating will require an even greater supply of clean electricity. I therefore welcome the Government’s announcement today that they will finally end the destructive and irrational effective ban on onshore wind development that we have lived with since 2015 by updating the National Planning Policy Framework. What scale of difference does the Minister think this will make to the amount of electricity generated by onshore wind? I am sure he will be aware that, last year, we managed two new onshore wind developments while Ukraine managed 19.
The noble Baroness has been dogged in her pursuit of this. It is very difficult to give an estimate, as she asks me to do. It would depend on the number of applications and its acceptability for local communities.