Forcing British households to adopt "luxury" heat pumps risks triggering a backlash akin to a rebellion by Germans over the country's boiler ban, the UK's biggest gas network operator has warned.
Angela Needle, director of strategy at Cadent Gas, warned that ruling out the option of using hydrogen for heating homes risked leaving consumers with just one option, heat pumps, which remained far too expensive for most households.
She pointed to controversy in Germany over a ban on buying new gas boilers from 2024, dubbed the "heat hammer" by critics, adding: "Heat pumps are a luxury product for folks who've got £13,000 in the bank.
"Forcing one solution on everybody will be politically very difficult and I think you've seen with Germany, with the heat hammer, that it's not going to be a vote winner.
"You can see how it's happening with the off-grid issue at the minute, people being told that from 2026, they can't have an oil boiler anymore.
"I would argue that the cost of hydrogen will have to come down significantly to be affordable. But I think there'll be a combination...just flicking to a binary answer is not going to be helpful."
Practical option
She also insisted that hydrogen was a practical option, pointing to tests carried out by Cadent which have looked at using both existing and new gas pipelines to carry hydrogen to homes and found that only "small" changes would be necessary.
Cadent, which serves the North West, West Midlands, East Midlands, East of England and north London, is already undertaking a multibillion-pound programme to replace metal gas pipes with plastic ones that are suitable for carrying hydrogen, subject to approval from the Health and Safety Executive.
Ms Needle said: "We want to be able to use the existing infrastructure that we've all paid for, which silently delivers energy all day, every day, without a huge amount of disruption.
"And we do worry that the gas network is being ignored."
The Telegraph says her comments come after Grant Shapps, the Energy Secretary, said he was not convinced that piping hydrogen into millions of British homes, instead of natural gas, was a practical option.
"There was a time when people thought you will just have something that looks like a gas boiler and we'll feed hydrogen into it," he said in July.
Green hydrogen
"The problem is you'd have to replace a lot of piping and we've got to produce the green hydrogen to make the whole thing stack up."
In another blow to companies such as Cadent, which want existing gas infrastructure to be used for hydrogen, ministers have also abandoned a planned hydrogen trial in Whitby following a backlash from residents.
Another trial, in Redcar, may still go ahead ,but has not yet been confirmed.
Some energy experts have also dismissed hydrogen as an overly-expensive solution for residential heating, because of the relatively high energy requirement to produce it and the low efficiency of burning it.
Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus Energy, has compared it to "flushing the toilet with champagne".
Phil Hurley, chief executive of the Heat Pump Association, said the cost of heat pumps would fall over time as demand for them ramped up and more plumbers were trained to install them.
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