Next Up, Heat Pumps [Updated]

If you’ve wondered how liberals expect you to heat your house after they have outlawed fossil fuels, the short answer is heat pumps. Heat pumps have joined “batteries” as the all-purpose “green” solution. But in reality, they are no solution at all. This article is in the Telegraph, but it applies equally well to the U.S.:

Has there ever been a more pernicious lie spread by government and lobbyists than the claim that net zero will save us money? Heat pumps, for example, weren’t just supposed to decarbonise home heating and thereby save the planet; they were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips renewable energy from wind and solar farms.

The narrative was always flawed: if heat pumps really did promise to save us money the government would hardly need to push them at us, offering grants of £7500 through its Boiler Upgrade Scheme. The government has good reason to bribe, as heat pump installations last year reached only 55,000 – far short of the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028.
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Remember how government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? That’s not quite going according to plan. The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices). It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.

When you add massive amounts of demand for a product by mandating or subsidizing its use, the price goes up, not down.

Electricity prices are so much higher than gas prices that you can’t count on saving money when it comes to running costs – even if your heat pump works as intended, and pumps at least three times as much heat energy into your home than it consumes in electrical energy. In any case, field trials have repeatedly shown many heat pumps failing to reach this benchmark, with the coefficient of performance (the ratio of heat energy out to electrical energy in) achieving a median of 2.80, falling to a mean of 2.44 when the outside temperature falls below 2 Celsius – exactly when you need your heating the most.

In this respect, heat pumps are like electric vehicles. You need them the most when it is cold outside, and that is when performance plummets. I will say it again: there is no transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in process, nor will there ever be.

UPDATE: On the final point, no transition:

Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
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Nasser said alternative energy sources have been unable to displace hydrocarbons at scale, despite the world investing more than $9.5 trillion over the past two decades. Wind and solar currently supply less than 4% of the world’s energy, while total electric vehicle penetration is less than 3%, he said.

Meanwhile, the share of hydrocarbons in the global energy mix has barely fallen in the 21st century from 83% to 80%, Nasser said. Global demand has increased by 100 million barrels of oil equivalent per day during the same period and will reach an all-time high this year, the CEO said.

Gas has grown 70% since the start of the century, Nasser said. The transition from coal to gas is responsible for two-thirds of the reductions in carbon emissions in the U.S., he said.