We have just experienced the conundrum of what to do when the gas central heating boiler dies.
Our 14 year old gas boiler died recently. Our house is close to 50 years old, but thanks to a rolling program of improvement over the last 25 years it gets, just, an EPC of B. WE thought the solution would be a heat pump. We were wrong, for 3 main reasons...
1. Price and Delivery: A gas boiler cost £5000 fitted and delivery was 3 days: it was made in England. The best quote we got for a Chinese heat pump was £12,000 AFTER the grant and delivery would be 3 months. So 3 months with no heating and hot water from the immersion heater.
2. Disturbance and Unpredictable Extra Costs: Our house has half inch copper pipes, embedded in the floor screed. The advice received was that because the heat pump works at 2X the flow rate and 50% higher pressure the probability of leaks was high, so better to replace all the piping with plastic: disruptive and an additional cost.
3. Lack of Electricity: We would have to give up our EV charging point as the local transformer doesn't have the capacity to provide power for both EV charging, a Heat pump and other domestic consumption.
Stopping or restricting the sale of gas boilers will not achieve change.
Investing in Electricity distribution infrastructure and making the cost of heat pumps the same as gas boilers might.
Requiring all new builds to have both PV panels, batteries and heat pumps makes far more sense.
As to synthetic fuel, this requires only water, Carbon Dioxide from air and energy. The final product is virtually indistinguishable, chemically, from petrol. So no investment in or change to storage and distribution is neededand all existing ICE engines will run with it.
The middle eastern "desert" states are investing heavily in green electricity production as they have space, sunlight and wind in excess.
As has been said, marine transport is a massive polluter: a few new floating hotels run on LPG, but that isn't the answer.
The planet's environment is evolving, we are not the sole cause, but we have to learn to live with it, we cannot stop it and it is pointless to try.
Enough, let's all talk about something we can change, such as incompetent and disingenuous politicians.
Actually,, I'm not sure we can even achieve that.
