carbon limited

In the UK we generate enough heat each year to meet the needs of every home in the country… and then we throw the heat away. So why should we promote the use of precious resources and expensive technologies to generate that heat a second time?

Traditionally, all efforts to reduce UK energy emissions have focused on green electricity. In a carbon context, heating has long been ignored as electricity’s poor, stupid, but much larger cousin (responsible for about half of all UK emissions).

But policy makers now recognise the importance of heat and so have made it the focus of their flagship incentive programme, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). The RHI is big and bold – and it’s also the last of the government incentive programmes. There will be no other low carbon incentives for the foreseeable future – that’s it for Government money.

The underlying policy driver for the RHI is the UK Renewable Energy Strategy (15% of all energy from renewables by 2020), itself a product of wider carbon reduction targets. So while carbon reduction is at the heart of the RHI, because of its parentage there is a pedantic focus on renewables.

A perverse side effect of this is that the RHI ignores the most plentiful (and lowest carbon depending on your accounting) source of warmth in the UK. Power stations throw away almost the same amount of heat each year as all UK householders use to keep warm. This heat is chucked into atmosphere or into seas and rivers.

Instead of using this hugely valuable resource, through the RHI we offer large subsidies to generate the heat a second time using biomass, electric heat pumps, and solar thermal panels. Therein lies the fundamental perversity. And what’s worse, except in small systems where output is assumed rather than measured, the more heat you generate, the bigger the payoff.

What should we do instead? Bring in a carbon tax of course, but that’s not going to happen. Short of that, we need to recognise the value of heat we’ve already got by prioritising transmission and distribution.

The UK is going to lose about a third of its existing electricity generation capacity (subscription req’d) in the next five years. This will largely be replaced with gas turbines. The crisis presented by this “generation gap” is an excellent opportunity to learn from the urban planning failures of the past and co-locate generation assets with the population centres that use that energy.

So could the RHI be used to drive the use of currently available waste heat, delivering heat with zero additional emissions? Could it also spur energy companies to locate assets near to areas with high density of heat demand? It could – if a portion of the RHI is dedicated to distribution rather than generation of heat.

Policymakers recognise the irony but argue that we can’t expect the RHI to do everything. It’s mainly a vehicle for attaining our 2020 renewable target, not a means of reducing emissions from heat in general.

But there won’t be another chance to get this right – this is the last incentive programme of this kind we’re likely to see for quite a while. It’s essential that the RHI makes the biggest possible cut in carbon from heating rather than just narrowly focusing on hitting a bureaucratic target.