Heat pump target to stay despite industry warning

Government is sticking to its heat pump installation target, despite warnings from industry that doing so could undermine efforts to decarbonise the UK’s heating network.

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), as it was previously known, unveiled ambitious targets in 2020 to install 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028 – up from 30,000 annually at that point.

However, a new report by the Sustainable Energy Association (SEA) warns that focussing on a set target of heat pumps could in fact prove counterproductive to efforts to decarbonise the UK’s heating network.

The report, titled A Technology-agnostic approach to heat and buildings policy, adds: “The government’s current prioritisation of electrification through hydronic heat pump technologies, ASHPs [air source heat pumps] chiefly, risks [becoming] isolated, prescriptive, single-solution policy support.”

It continues: “This approach risks both marginalising other markets and solutions within the electrification or low-carbon fuels industry, as well as new innovative measures entering the market that will help to achieve the net-zero target. Further, resulting damage could be done to the heat pump market if installations made are not suitable for the building in question.”

It adds that “targets like the 600,000 heat pump installations by 2028” risk encouraging “a ‘quantity over quality’ market, or ‘race to the bottom’ effect […] whereby, obligations and incentives for heat pump sales or installations are attempted to be met at the lowest cost possible”.

Speaking at the launch of the report, SEA policy adviser Ben Copson implored “government to take a more technology-agnostic approach [to heating buildings]”.

Copson said that government policy must be adapted to “focus on outcomes” and urged government to give the same level of support for “all technologies that will deliver decarbonised buildings”.

However, in response, a senior policy maker within the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (formerly BEIS) said that the government will be sticking with its targeted approach to heat pump installations.

Matthew Aylott, the department’s lead on electrification of heat, said that targets “give the industry the certainty that it needs”.

He added: “Industry thrives on certainty. And certainty of demand is needed for installers, development of manufacturing supply chains, familiarising the public with new technologies and of course reducing costs through economies of scale and that is why we’ve taken the approach to grow the heat pump market to 600,000 installations by 2028.”

However, Aylott did concede that “there is no one-size-fits-all approach” and while government will be sticking by its heat pump target there will be support for other technologies.

“Of course, we need to keep an open mind but our modelling tells us that heat pumps will be the principal means of decarbonising the majority of homes in the UK because they are the cost-optimum technology in most cases,” he said.

“But there is a big enough pie to be split up between all the different technologies and there are benefits in all of them and I agree we will need that combination in different technologies and we need to support them all. […] So I think we need to do both a tailored approach and a technology agnostic approach.”

Other industry figures, involved in the creation of the report, called for policy reforms to ensure alternative technologies – such as infrared heating, solar PV, electric battery storage and smart thermal storage – are given equal footing as heat pumps.

Alex Mellor, head of technology applications at Naked Energy, which specialises in solar heating, said: “We need to come in at a level playing field. We should be focussing on outcomes, and rewarding every kg of carbon saved, rather than focussing on rigidly prescribed targets.”

Thermal storage UK founding director Tom Lowe also supported other technologies being given the same backing as heat pumps and called on the government to ensure tax breaks offered within the heat pump market are rolled out to other technologies which focus on decarbonising heat.

Last year, the National Infrastructure Commission raised doubts over the plausibility of the government’s heat pump target.