The heat pump supply chain could grow by 20 times in size before “even getting close to a regret level of deployment”, a BEIS official has stated.
Danny Newport, deputy director of the heat and buildings strategy team at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) made the comments during an annual event hosted by the Association for Decentralised Energy.
Answering a question on the possibility of creating stranded assets, Newport said he did not believe there is any immediate risk and that the deployment of market-ready technologies should not be delayed whilst the government makes long-term strategic decisions on the decarbonisation of heat.
“I think we can grow the heat pump supply chain 20-fold before even getting close to a regret level of deployment,” he responded.
“Similarly, with heat networks, there are areas of the country that heat networks are always going be better suited to a heat network, we are unlikely to regret that.”
Newport said the government will also be in better position to make these decisions once technologies such as heat pumps have been scaled up: “We are going to be much more successful at addressing these big strategic decisions when we are choosing between a number of winners that are in motion, than we are trying to do it today where we have a static choice between two or three options, neither of which are a genuine consumer proposition at scale right now.”
He additionally confirmed that the government’s heat and buildings strategy is unlikely to be published until May, stating: “This is a really big priority for the government at the moment, and the fact that it is taking a little while to get out reflects the level of attention and involvement across Whitehall that is going into the net zero sector strategies in the run up to COP this year. It is an agenda that is very, very high on the political agenda right now, from the very centre outwards.
“There are real big no regret steps that we can take and we can take them now, and the strategy is going to be about how we can do that with a mind to the difficult decisions that are coming down the road to us.”
His sentiments were echoed by Climate Change Committee chief executive Chris Stark who said: “We have been gripped by making the wrong decision for too long. There are a set of properties where we know what the right solutions will be and we should be moving to put that quickly in place.”
Back in November, prime minister Boris Johnson announced the target of installing 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028 as part of his ten-point plan for “green industrial revolution”. The government also intends to introduce a ban on the installation of fossil fuel heating in new homes as part of its Future Homes Standard, with heat pumps expected to be the main replacement.