Difficult to understand why heat pump systems could delay developments which provide accommodation in inner London. It appears obvious that some kind of Ombudsman is required to cut through the stupidity of local officialdom. I was once involved in justifying a Solar system for a local school. We needed to cut down six overgrown trees which blocked out a lot of the sun. Needless to say the NIMBY’s were out in force. By a stroke of luck a gale blew down all the trees in one night. The Solar system was installed on time.
Heat Networks are a pre heat pump technology - from back when there were efficiency and cost benefits to one big central system. A 10kW heat pump is generally more efficient than a 100 kW system & at a lower cost per kW when you take into account building pipework.
They still make sense where there's a good free source of heat (e.g. data centre) or where buildings are collectively hard to put on a heat pump... but that is pretty rare now. The UK governments focus on them is a big barrier to decarbonisation.
We have district heating and it costs approximately 3x what we would be paying with gas heating.
I am not sure how the myth of district heating being cheaper got started but the reality is far from it. Also, there is no competition with district heating; each system is run by a single provider with no alternatives.
Also I think probably it’s about time and place. If you have cold winters and any boiler you buy will be simple technology then district heating makes sense. When you have complex boilers and the economies of scale is the number of boilers you sell rather than the number of homes you heat then it’s different.
Difficult to understand why heat pump systems could delay developments which provide accommodation in inner London. It appears obvious that some kind of Ombudsman is required to cut through the stupidity of local officialdom. I was once involved in justifying a Solar system for a local school. We needed to cut down six overgrown trees which blocked out a lot of the sun. Needless to say the NIMBY’s were out in force. By a stroke of luck a gale blew down all the trees in one night. The Solar system was installed on time.
Heat Networks are a pre heat pump technology - from back when there were efficiency and cost benefits to one big central system. A 10kW heat pump is generally more efficient than a 100 kW system & at a lower cost per kW when you take into account building pipework.
They still make sense where there's a good free source of heat (e.g. data centre) or where buildings are collectively hard to put on a heat pump... but that is pretty rare now. The UK governments focus on them is a big barrier to decarbonisation.
We have district heating and it costs approximately 3x what we would be paying with gas heating.
I am not sure how the myth of district heating being cheaper got started but the reality is far from it. Also, there is no competition with district heating; each system is run by a single provider with no alternatives.
District heating also means that individual homeowners aren’t directly responsible for it so they can very easily lead to bureaucratic inefficiency.
Yes theoretically they are cheaper but single property heating is much simpler.
I guess this explains why district heating was more popular in countries that were either outright socialist or just had low rates of home ownership?
Also I think probably it’s about time and place. If you have cold winters and any boiler you buy will be simple technology then district heating makes sense. When you have complex boilers and the economies of scale is the number of boilers you sell rather than the number of homes you heat then it’s different.