The messages have been fairly muddled till now. We all know we’re supposed to be getting off natural gas heating, but there’s been more heat than light on how to do it.

Now, however, we may be at a tipping point. We may look back on 2022 as the year when heat pumps, a technology that is essentially the reverse of refrigeration, properly broke through globally.

For analysts are saying it’s the year of the heat pump. In fact, the International Energy Agency has just issued a report which declared, “Heat pumps, powered by low-emissions electricity, are the central technology in the global transition to secure and sustainable heating.”

Only you would hardly think so given the number of heat pumps installed across the UK. Recently published figures suggest just 280,000 installed across the country, the lowest rate, in 2021, in Europe. A report by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that UK gas imports would be a fifth lower if UK had deployed heat pumps at the same rate as Estonia.

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Hence, we should welcome the announcement this week by Patrick Harvie that the Scottish Government is offering owner-occupiers £7500 grants to take up a heat pump as well as an additional £7,500 to install energy efficiency measures in their homes.

Those in rural areas will also qualify for an extra £1,500 for heat pumps. With this money, more barriers to homeowners making the shift to pump is gone. (Previously, applicants were required to sign up for a loan before getting funding.)

It’s not surprising really that few of us, so far, have made the leap. I’ve long known we need to wean ourselves off gas heating but have still yet to ditch my gas boiler. Until now heat pumps looked risky, unusual, and unaffordable at between £7,000 and £13,000.

But suddenly more and more people are talking about their brand new heat pumps. Among them is Neil Kitching, author of the book Carbon Choices, and of a regular blog.

He has been describing his “home electrification project”, which included first an electric car and charger, solar panels and then a 7kw heat pump. Kitching claimed a £7,500 grant plus a £2,500 loan from Home Energy Scotland.

He found that the process of getting grants, loans, quotes and installation, required huge motivation and recommended that there should be “a subsidised service to help the homeowner to clearly specify their needs (including heat loss calculations) – a one stop shop”.

Kitching’s home seemed reasonably appropriate for such an installation – 1960s built and recently upgraded in terms of insulation, including some cavity wall insulation. But many houses are not so appropriate – particularly our old and draughty tenements, which make up 77,000 homes in Glasgow and 182,000 in Edinburgh. Their structure, condition, and the multiple forms of ownership, make them one of the big challenges in terms of net-zero emissions targets.

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I don’t live in a tenement, but I do live in an Edinburgh double-upper, which shares some of the tenement’s problems – and what is interesting to see is that there may be progress even on such buildings.

The first tenement retrofit including heat pumps has recently been completed by a pioneering architect agency in a housing association building on Niddrie Road, Glasgow.

But still, I find reason to stall. Perhaps it’s laziness. Or perhaps it’s because our government has taken so long to put up the signposts for how we get ourselves off natural gas. It let hydrogen muddy the boiler water.

We are now starting to see the direction of travel. This grant represents one of those signposts – as does an analysis by Jan Rosenow which found in a review of 32 independent studies that “none of them provides evidence that would support the case for widespread use of hydrogen for heating.”

In other words, if you’re holding back on getting a heat pump because you’re still wondering if the future might be hydrogen, don’t. Perhaps take a look at a recent report authored by Louise Sunderland and Duncan Gibb titled “Taking the burn out of heating for low-income households”.

Sunderland is clear about what technologies she sees as being cost effective in the long term – and these are “heat pumps and district heat”. The report also expresses concern that as wealthier households switch to new forms of heating, low-income households are likely to find themselves stranded on increasingly expensive fossil fuels, or hydrogen.

Sunderland’s paper is a reminder that there is another option too – district heating. A more collective approach is possible. I welcome this grant. But the drive to decarbonise homes has to push harder again. It has to work for everyone and signal a way in which we all move together, rather than one by one.

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