Climate gap report: heating

Our heating accounts for around 14% of our total emissions. Yet, in 2022, the Climate Gap report found that emissions from heating are not being cut fast enough to meet the UK's 2050 net zero target.

If we are to reverse this trend, the report highlights three key actions that all consumers must take.

1. Insulate our homes
2. Reduce emissions from residential heating
3. Choose heat pumps where possible

On this page, we explore these actions: why they are necessary, how far we are from them, and the changes that businesses and governments can make to ensure we achieve these goals. We call on consumers to not only reduce their own emissions in the areas we have identified, but to also consider getting engaged with political campaigns trying to persuade the government and companies to take some of the actions identified too.

Heating and the climate gap

Heating accounts for around 14% of our emissions. About 77% of that is from homes, 14% commercial buildings and 9% public buildings. [1]

The first priority is reducing heating use through insulation and behaviour change. The CCC suggests a 12% reduction, but some houses achieve much more – in the extreme cases more than 50%.

Achieving the 12% involves: insulation of 3 million cavity walls, 11 million lofts, 3 million solid walls and 3 million floors, including some top-ups of existing insulation. Cuts from behavioural measures contribute around 3% of the 12% reduction – more than a fifth of the total. This comes from multizone control (heating only portions of the house), some other smarter management using real-time displays, and low-flow shower heads.

Fuelling our heating

Once we’ve reduced our heating use as much as possible, we then need to power the heating for our homes, while ditching our gas boilers. A crucial question is therefore, what power source should we use?

There is general agreement that the limited supply of biomass should not be used for heating but is best reserved for other sectors. Biomass is like gold dust in a decarbonised world. Not only can you make fuels from it that are basically identical to fossil fuels, with all of those handy features that made us dependent on them in the first place – easy to store, high energy density – but you can also use it as a ‘net negative’ if you preserve it in buildings or burn it in a centralised point with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Thus, you really want to save it for the places where you can make the best use of its potential. In the CCC’s scenarios, some is used as back up for the electricity grid for when the wind doesn’t blow, some in industry, some in the more awkward parts of the transport sector, and some as wood in construction.

Another option is direct electric heating, which can be used in desperate cases, but if everyone used it then it would raise peak electricity demand too much. Low-carbon district heating (powered, for example, by waste heat from industrial facilities) can be used where there are suitable source of heat – it covers 18% of homes by 2050 in the CCC figures we have used. But it’s limited.

That leaves just two options for most of our heating: heat pumps or hydrogen. Significant use of hydrogen is still a way off, and the CCC estimates that once all costs are taken into account, it is unlikely to be cheaper than heat pumps anyway. Thus only 11% of the houses in its scenario use hydrogen in 2050. All its scenarios are strongly heat pump led.

This means that 1.1 million heat pumps are being installed every year by 2030.

Current situation: 2022 report findings for heating

The report card below summarises our key findings on heating, covering around 14% of our total emissions. It looks at how much we must cut our emissions by by 2030 to meet UK targets on heating, and whether we are moving fast enough towards these goals. It then highlights the key actions we must - as consumers, governments and businesses - take, and how willing we are to do so.

c. = circa or approximately; CCC = Climate Change Committee

Comments on the 2022 report card

The CCC complains that there is currently no proper data on heat pump, gas boiler or insulation installations. The figures here are its estimates. They suggest that progress in this area is still glacial – the 55,000 new heat pumps is only about 3% of the new heating systems that were installed in 2021.

Some of the reason is money. The current energy price crisis is changing the relative cost of technologies, but when the CCC report was published in June it still reported that “under current gas and electricity prices, the cost of running a heat pump would typically still be 10% higher than a gas boiler”. The Government has the ambition for heat pumps to come down in cost by between 25-50% by 2025, and intends to use market-based mechanisms to do this - placing an obligation on boiler manufacturers to sell a rising proportion of heat pumps relative to gas boiler sales. However, the CCC argues that more direct intervention on pricing is needed.

Insulation should be becoming more attractive – it can cut gas bills by a fifth, and a fifth is now large. An analysis by the website Carbon Brief found the least efficient “F” or “G” rated homes face bills as much as £2,000 higher than those rated “C” or above. However, progress is still frustratingly slow. The Government’s target is for most homes to achieve EPC “C” by 2035, but it has no firm policies on how to achieve this.

While the gas price crisis should hopefully give us a much needed push in this area, as the CCC puts it “there is the potential to push harder, in particular on energy efficiency and heat pump roll-out... it is important that efforts to ameliorate consumer costs do not entrench existing use of fossil fuels.”

Feedback on the report from our heating workshop

Bean Beanland from the Heat Pump Federation began by challenging our thinking around the notion that you should only install heat pumps in buildings that have previously been insulated to high standards by asking "Why is it not OK to leak sustainably-generated heat, when by not installing one you’d be leaking fossil-fuel generated heat instead?" Obviously it might be expensive to do this, but there was wide agreement from our panellists on the need for subsidies anyway.

We also heard from James Standley, Managing Director of Ethical Consumer Best Buy heat pump manufacturer Kensa, who drew attention to the need to think about 'thermal storage' as much as battery storage in the transition to sustainable heating solutions nationally.

David Cowdrey from the MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme) Charitable Foundation emphasised the need for the government to create a public awareness campaign around how to decarbonise our home heating.

There was general agreement that there was a lack of a central lobbying group which unified all the civil society groups working on decarbonisation in this sector, like we have in other impact areas like Food where the Eating Better Alliance (for example) works well. The EPC ratings for housing were also thought to be desperately in need of an overhaul.

Handy advice on climate actions you can take

We are creating series of articles highlighting actions you can take for the climate on the areas of food, heating, transport and consumer goods - see the links below:

References

1. CCC, 2020, The Sixth Carbon Budget, Sector Specific Summary: Buildings
2. CCC, December 2020, The Sixth Carbon Budget, the UK’s path to net zero.

We would like to express gratitude to the Ecology Building Society for its sponsorship of the 2022 Climate Gap Report.