Category: Smart Energy

Smart Meters will need secure, low power wireless to connect to devices. This section of the blog looks at the issues around choosing these, what they enable and the opportunites to reduce energy consumption.

Marketing Net Zero

I wonder how many UK householders know that part of their electricity bill is a payment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?  It won’t be immediately obvious to most electricity users why they are paying them, but it’s a royalty payment for the use of Einstein’s image in the rather crass adverts which the Government uses in an attempt to persuade everyone to have a smart meter fitted.  It’s only one of an increasing number of invisible charges added to electricity bills to persuade users that they should support the Government’s fast-track approach to net zero. 

The campaign’s not working very well, which should be worrying Mr Miliband and his band of merry net zero mandarins at DESNZ (the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero).  So far, the Smart Metering marketing campaign has spent about £500 million trying to persuade us to do something which is free.  If the UK is going to meet the Government’s decarbonisation targets for home energy, their next task is to persuade us all to sign up for something which will cost millions of home owners tens of thousands of pounds each.  The prospects are not looking good.

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EPCs and Net Zero Coercion

If you live in the UK and own or rent a property, you’ll know about EPCs.  Their official name is an Energy Performance Certificate, although most people are more likely to consider them as Entirely Pointless Certificates.   They were introduced by the UK Government in 2007 to give anyone buying or renting a property a guide to its energy efficiency, rating houses in much the same way as electrical appliances on a scale of A (good) to G (worst).  The letter signifies how much carbon dioxide your property is likely to produce each year.  EPCs also provide guidance of how you could “improve” your home, with suggested measures to reduce the CO₂ emissions, along with an indicative cost of doing it.

If you sell or rent your home you have to obtain an EPC.  Currently you are not allowed to rent a property unless it has an A to E rating.  There were proposals to tighten this to an A to C rating, but those proposals have been pushed back.  However, many owners feel that EPCs are likely to be used as a stick to force them to make changes to meet net zero targets.  Although that has been consistently denied, a recent survey by the Social Media Foundation titled “Whose energy transition is it anyway?” shows that concern is still real.  That is reinforced by a new Government consultation on Reforms to the Energy Performance of Buildings Regime, which implies that EPCs may be turned into a net zero coercion tool.

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Is Carbon Capture the new Fusion? 

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research.  It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors.  At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”.  That last claim was made in 1954.  It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity.  However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream. 

What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage.  Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s.  You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing.   Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion.  Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change.  The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story.  In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans.  The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.

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The UK’s Heat Pump Strategy is in DEEP Trouble

Here in the UK, the Government is trying to persuade householders to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps.  It’s a key part of their net zero strategy, tackling the 13% of CO2 emissions that are attributable to gas-based home heating.  The “one size fits all” message is “Heat Pumps Good, Gas Boilers Bad”.  The Government has set a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps each year by 2028, rising to 1.6 million annually by 2028.  To help achieve this, they have introduced a Boiler Upgrade subsidy, but the latest Government statistics show that only 16,959 applicants have replaced an existing gas boiler with a heat pump since the scheme began in May 2022, which is a little bit short of the 1.4 million target for that period

These targets were set without much understanding of the difficulty or cost of retrofitting heat pumps.  Much of Britain’s housing is old and not very suitable for conversion.  Having set the policy, the Government initiated a major study in 2019 called DEEP – the Demonstration of Energy Efficient Potential, to provide evidence to justify it.  DEEP’s remit was to quantify the real effects, costs and returns of upgrading the structure of older houses.  They’ve just published the results, which basically says it’s not economic for these older properties.  It suggests that the payback time for heat pumps in older homes, along with the insulation upgrade to make them suitable is “generally over 100 years”.   So, where does that leave the plan?

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Mr Smart Meter takes charge of UK energy policy

What could possibly go wrong?

Back in 2009, when Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary in the closing days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, he announced Britain’s Smart Metering programme, promising to install smart meters in 26 million homes by 2020.  He stressed that “it’s important we design a system that brings best value to everyone involved”, with projected consumer savings of billions of pounds.  Fifteen years later, it’s still floundering, having cost consumers over £20 billion.  Now Ed’s back as our energy supremo.

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Why politicians fail at energy policy

This week, the UK’s opposition leader, Keir Starmer, outlined his plans for the United Kingdom’s energy policy, delivering his party’s national mission on clean energy.  The key plank of this is to do for oil and gas what Maggie Thatcher did for coal.  Margaret Thatcher had an ulterior motive, which was to try and break the power of the coal unions. Keir Starmer appears to have no ulterior motive, other than a desire for a glib soundbite.  In explaining the policy, he posited that stopping any new North Sea oil and gas exploration licences would let the UK concentrate on more renewables.  Explaining why he thought that was a good idea, he claimed that as renewable energy isn’t subject to global price surges, we would not be held to ransom when global demand causes costs to soar.  Instead, we would have a British energy company making British energy for British people.

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