Decarbonizing Building Heat – RAP EU Lead Jan Rosenow On Heat Pumps, Hydrogen, Insulation, & Gas Networks – CleanTechnica

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Recently I sat down virtually with energy policy expert Jan Rosenow of RAP on my podcast “Redefining Energy — Tech” to discuss how residential and commercial building heat solutions. In the theme of providing transcripts of presentations I’m giving in various places for people who prefer the written word, this is the lightly edited transcript of the second half of our conversation. For those who missed the first half, here’s the link.

Michael Barnard (MB): Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. This is the second half of my discussion with Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at RAP, an expert on all things heat pumps. Always when I’m talking heat pumps, when I ask the question or somebody just brings it up because they’re ticked off. Do you like the name heat pump or do you have a preferred term for heat pump?

Jan Rosenow (JR): I mean this, yeah, I’ve seen this many times. I don’t think it’s a problem that they’re called heat pumps, I mean, whatever you call them, I don’t think that’s the main problem. I’ve just done an interview with Wired, the tech magazine in the US. I think they are based out of San Francisco. And they say the heat pump stories are the best, most read stories? Everyone wants to read about heat pumps. It’s like, really? Yeah. But that seems to be like just heat pumps in the title and people click on them and want to read about them. The Guardian recently did a myth-busting series about heat pumps and it was hugely successful. I wrote an article for Carbon Brief on heat pumps and myths. Huge success. Lots of people clicked on it.

So I don’t think there’s a problem with the term as such. I think there’s a lot of problems with the marketing. I mean, it’s getting better now, but I think when you look at how this technology has been marketed and the customer experience, there’s certainly been room for improvement. Just the design and the look of heat pumps, especially air source heat pumps. This gray box in your garden that looks ugly and not particularly nice. It’s not very difficult to design a box that looks appealing. You don’t have to be ugly. And there are no companies doing that. Making it look nice, slick, something that you can actually say, oh, look, yeah, look at my heat pump. A bit like a statement rather than just trying to hide it away because it’s an ugly box. So we’re seeing that changing.

But I think the term heat pump as such, I’m sitting on the fence. I haven’t seen a better term come along. So I don’t think that’s the main issue really. I just wanted to bring up one more thing, Michael. When we went through these technologies, we were kind of talking about the supply of heat. Where does the supply of heat come from? What is the fuel that you’re going to use to heat your home? The other big missing piece in this, of course, is there’s still a lot of potential for demand-side reduction measures. Simple stuff that doesn’t really get the limelight very often. But if you don’t have any insulation in your loft, you can insulate the loft, right? You should have loft insulation.

If you have some gaps between your windows, you should be draft-proofing those windows. There’s a lot of easy stuff that can be done to reduce demand and make properties more efficient, more comfortable. That’s not sexy. It’s not like the hydrogen versus heat pump discussion, but I think we need to keep focusing also on that, because these are low hanging fruits and there’s still lots of them, and there’s not a lot of people who talk about it these days. But I think it’s still important that we, at the same time, once we have this big effort on decarbonizing the heat supply, we also try to really use heat more efficiently and smartly. We might want to go into that later, but I think smart and dynamic use of heat is going to be much more important in the future as well.

MB: Well, two things to pull apart from this. The first one, efficiency types. There are many people who are deeply committed to efficiency first and negawatts who get really annoyed with me because my Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work does not include that. It starts with electrify everything, including heat pumps, and it doesn’t include insulation. The reason is that if we electrify heat and the electricity is low carbon, then the primary concern is the cost of the heat, not about climate change. My focus is on climate change. Secondarily, there’s a nuanced argument about reducing the increased demand of electricity by efficiency measures for a systemic thing, but that is secondary to electrifying heat, in my opinion.

The data point I tend to draw out on is a UK study. You’ve probably seen it, out of I think it was Cambridge, might have been Oxford. They looked at 55,000 UK homes which had received grants for insulation, for envelope retrofits from the early 2000s to 2020 or something. They looked at the ones that had gas heating, which is all, virtually all of them. And what they found was that after two years, virtually all gas reductions had been eliminated. After four years, people were using exactly the same amount of gas as they had been before.

JR: I’ve actually reviewed that stuff on Twitter, I think, when it came out, and I’m not persuaded by the analysis, I must say. I certainly had some questions that were unanswered, because there is data that the government has of metered data. The UK government has data from energy use before a measure was being installed and after, and they have it over several years, and they show very clearly that there is an effect. The effect isn’t as big as you would expect when you model it. When you sit down with the perfect model, this is what we expect because you have a rebound effect and you also have a performance gap. So the insulation technologies don’t deliver 100% of what you might assume in the model. That data shows a reduction.

We also have longitudinal data of energy use at an aggregate level for the whole sector. You can look at the building sector and you see energy use and how it develops over time, and it’s gone down substantially in the UK, and you can then do decomposition and analysis. So what’s driving that, you know, is that because there are fewer people living in these homes, has the indoor temperature dropped? Are people working in the office and not at home? Like, what is the driver? When you look at that, efficiency shows up. So I think it’s indeed a nuanced picture. I actually just did a paper with some colleagues at Oxford University and University College London on fabric first. Is it still the right approach? And our conclusion is, not really.

I mean, for new buildings, If you construct a new building, you want to make sure that because the marginal cost is fairly minimal, and if you can build a new building that’s more efficient, uses less energy, it’s going to be cheaper to run. That makes the problem smaller. If you have an old stone building, thick walls, do you really want to insulate all of that? Does that make sense before you even think about the heating system? No. You can run a heat pump very efficiently or connect to district heating. If you have the right kind of heating system installed in the house, you can still achieve very high efficiency.

I just never bought the argument that if you want to decarbonize your heating, you first need to do all these insulation measures, otherwise you can’t do it. But if you want to just install another fossil system, your oil boiler breaks down, you put your new oil boiler in. That’s fine. That’s okay. You can go ahead and do that. You don’t need to think about insulation. That’s completely acceptable. But if you put a heat pump in, you have to do all of this stuff first, otherwise it’s not perfect. It’s not what we want you to do. I don’t understand why. Because the carbon impact of putting a fossil fuel heating system in an inefficient building is way bigger than replacing a fossil fuel system in an inefficient building with a heat pump. You’re saving way more carbon.

In fact, when you install the oil heating system, you’re saving no carbon. Maybe a little bit, because the new system is a little bit more efficient. This is one of those, I think, topics that we’ve seen a shift, right. We had this sort of mantra of deep retrofits. That’s the way to go. Fabric first. I think that’s changing now because the electricity mix is getting cleaner and the carbon argument is no longer persuasive. You can decarbonize without any insulation. I think the question then is, well, what is the residual value of insulation? I think there still is one. Reduced running costs, the ability to pre cool and preheat, shift heat demand around comfort. So these arguments are still there, but they’re different arguments.

MB: Yeah, it’s exactly the place I arrived at five years ago when I spent time looking at this, which is its fabric second. There’s a Pareto argument for all of those types of things. You don’t have to achieve 100% perfection passive home retrofit. 20% of the cost provides 80% of the benefits, and it balances the case for operational and capital cost exchanges. We ended up in the same place, even though we disagree on that UK study to a certain extent. To be clear, you’ve spent more time looking at it than I have, so you have a more nuanced view on it.

The second thing I’d like to pull in, though, is something we haven’t talked about, which is cooling. One of the reasons that the name heat pump is problematic is that it’s taking a while for the public to clue in, the general schmo who goes about their job and worries about reality TV, that heat pumps pump heat out as well as pumping heat in. They’re like a refrigerator. The inside of your refrigerator is cold because a heat pump is pumping the heat out of the refrigerator, not because it’s pumping cold in. Same thing with heat pumps.

The story I like to tell, the simplifying story, you have a gas furnace, you have central air, and you’re paying maintenance on both of those, and you have different technicians that are coming on those, and you have different insurance concerns for those. It’s really nice just to put in a single unit that replaces both of those. The total capital cost is lower because you’re replacing two units with one, the maintenance costs are lower. If you don’t have air conditioning today, getting a new gas furnace and insulation won’t help you with that, but getting a heat pump will. We focus on the heat side, but the cooling side is critical. How many people was it in Europe that died in that heat wave three years ago, 61,000?

JR: I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but those numbers will be growing. We’re going to see more heat waves and temperatures that were unheard of in Europe. The drive to cooling is already happening. In the US, I think something like 95% plus of all buildings have air con. In Europe, I think it’s less than 5%. Certainly in residential buildings. Commercial buildings have more because they often have reversible heat pumps, actually for heating and cooling, but cooling demand will go up. It can go up in a kind of really unmanaged fashion. So people go on Amazon, buy a mobile air conditioning system for a specific room. That’s not a great way to go about this.

Ideally, you think, okay, we’re gonna need cooling every year or every other year. So you may as well have a heating system and cooling system that’s integrated that does both. That’s one of the upsides of having cooling. I would be surprised if in ten years’ time, this wasn’t more on people’s minds. When they think about the next system they want, might not even be about, oh, will I pay more money or less money running this system? But really I want cooling, I want the comfort, and I’m willing to pay extra for that. I think we’re going to see that happening increasingly where people will look at cooling, and that’s an opportunity, in a way, to also then talk about the heating at the same time.

In the US, I know this is a conversation that the installers of heat pumps often have with their customers, where they say, look, you’ve got an old cooling system here, that air con system that needs to be replaced. You also have the furnace. How about we get rid of your heating system and just have one system that’s going to, for exactly the reasons you’ve outlined, cheaper to operate and cheaper to install. You’re actually saving money. But this is, I think, one of the arguments being made.

MB: There’s also a health argument. Back to that 61,000. I live in a jurisdiction in British Columbia, in the lower mainland. It was incredibly temperate. It was rare to get below freezing. It was rare to get above 25 degrees Celsius. That was the range that British Columbia exists in. The average winter day has a high of seven degrees Celsius, which is something in Fahrenheit American listeners can go look up. That range is interesting. Two or three years ago we had over 900 deaths in the lower part of British Columbia, during the heat dome over the region. It hit 37 degrees in the area surrounding my condo building.

And like Europe, British Columbia, Lower Mainland buildings, British Columbia buildings had no air conditioning. We didn’t need it. It just wasn’t a requirement. We had heat. Unlike New Zealand, which doesn’t have heat in any of its buildings, which is really weird. I was down there last year, and I was like, where’s the thermostat? There is no thermostat. They have a space heater in the closet that they provide. But now what’s happening in Vancouver is going to be happening everywhere because the health effects epidemiologically start appearing when nighttime temperatures do not get below 20 degrees Celsius for two to three nights. People start dying. The lower socioeconomic classes who do not have the luxury of going outside, the people in the upper stories of lower multi-unit residential rental buildings, they start seeing extreme heat, and they start seeing the challenges of that.

Now, Vancouver has mandated that as of 2025, all new residential units must have air conditioning. And they must be EV-ready as well, which is nice, that’s good, but air conditioning will save people’s lives. And so we are starting to see a really big transition. I’m leading a retrofitting of our multi-unit residential building for heat pumps right now. All my baseboard heaters are gone, and I have gaping holes in my drywall. But I have air conditioning and cheaper heating. Cooling is that secondary factor, and just replacing the heat, if you just stop at replacing the heat, you miss the advantage. That simplification of a heat pump for both heating and cooling and heat pumps. I’m just going to say this. Heat pumps are generally more efficient than the air conditioners they replace because the technology has moved on. The coefficient of performance is better than the stuff they’re replacing.

JR: Oh, huge differences. I mean, that’s when you look at, you, can some people track this, right? You can see in history how the efficiency improves with increased deployment. You have that innovation. In Switzerland, for example, there’s a longitudinal study going back, I think, to the 1970s, and they’ve done a lot of ground source heat pumps and also air source heat pumps. You can see how that efficiency getting better over time, because the technology is getting better, the installation that’s also important is getting better. The installers figure out how to install these technologies in a way that delivers higher efficiency.

When people have a really poor experience with heat pumps, it’s often down to a very bad install. If you have an installer who doesn’t really know what he or she is doing and the system is installed badly, you end up with a really inefficient system. Then often people turn to social media and they say, my heat pump is terrible. It doesn’t work, it’s super expensive. A journalist will pick that up, write a story about it. The main reason why it’s not working is because the person who installed it didn’t do a good job.

Then we look at the top installs. There’s now a great website, I think it’s heatpumpmonitor.org or something for the UK, where you can see like there’s some real nerdy stuff going on, but people basically do it. They share the API for the data of the heat pump with that platform. You can see a ranking of who has the most efficient system and you can see who installed it, what kind of model is it? But you can see these vast differences in efficiency. They could be twice or three times as efficient if installed well. This is a really significant factor, but just on the cooling piece, because I think it’s fascinating and it’s overlooked.

We’re going to run into a lot of problems, not so much in southern Europe, perhaps because the buildings are constructed in a way to deal with quite extreme heat. They have been built already, hundreds of years ago in a way, to deal with heat, but inner cities, take Paris, for example. A colleague of mine lives in Paris, in an old building on the fifth floor. During the heat wave, I asked him what the temperature was at night. He said, oh, it never got below 25 degrees Centigrade. Try to sleep at 25 degrees Centigrade. I mean, I can’t sleep. It’s too hot. It’s awful. So this is going to become a huge thing, and I think no one is really yet paying enough attention to it. So, yeah, this could be a huge challenge. But at the same time, as you said, Michael, it could be an opportunity to use it for accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels used for heating.

MB: The nice thing about summer cooling is you can time-shift excess solar to nighttime cooling much more easily than you can time-shift summertime solar to winter heating. There is a better match.

JR: Right, the match with solar and cooling. Indeed. It’s only the evening hours, but that’s less of a problem in Europe. But I think if you’re near the equator, for example, and you need cooling after dark and it’s still hot. Right. That’s kind of where solar doesn’t really help you anymore. You can do some pre-cooling, but I think that’s what we’re seeing in California, right, where we have that evening ramp up, where people want air con, they’re home, they want it nice and cool, but the solar is dropping off. Then all these batteries are now kicking in. That’s a fascinating story. I think cooling almost warrants its own episode on this podcast at some point, it seems.

MB: I think it’s time to really put a few more nails in the coffin of hydrogen for domestic and commercial heat. You’ve been publishing, it feels like every three months, a new meta analysis of independent studies of the question of hydrogen versus its alternatives. Would you like to tell us about when you started that process and what the numbers are up to now and what the findings are?

JR: Very happy to. Where do I start? When I first started to look at decarbonization of heating, it was perhaps five or six years ago when I wrote the first paper, 2019, I think it was. I wrote the first paper on what do we do with heating? And I came to this really not wanting to get involved in the technology discussion too much. I was more interested in what is workable, what can we scale. I don’t want to be in this kind of polarized discussion that I was seeing taking place. But I increasingly realized that unless we resolve this discussion, we can’t move on.

Because every time you say, oh, we should have a policy that’s supporting the uptake of heat pumps or district heating, someone will say, no, no, hydrogen is going to come along, that’s a waste of public money, or that’s a poor policy decision. So it was really holding back the progress that I thought we would need to make. So then my next step was, okay, let’s look at the evidence. Let’s look at the scientific evidence and not the evidence that’s been manufactured, paid for, because there’s a lot of studies that you can find and that will say hydrogen is the best way to decarbonize heating. And when you look at who’s funded that work, it’s companies with vested interests.

You also find lots of studies, by the way, that will say heat pumps are the solutions, district heating is a solution, bioenergy is a solution funded by the companies that sell these products, these technologies. Again, of course they would say that, otherwise they wouldn’t publish these studies, which they paid for. The studies that they paid for that don’t arrive at that conclusion, they wouldn’t publish. I’m not saying these studies are wrong, I’m just saying we have to take them with a pinch of salt and be cautious about them. So I was then concluding, let’s look at just the independent studies not funded by industry at all, whether that’s the electric utilities, the heat pump companies, the gas boiler manufacturers, the gas network operators.

None of those studies are included in what I started doing as my first review on LinkedIn. Actually, I think it was only ten studies, and I put them together in a table and it didn’t look particularly pretty. Then people were asking me for more detail and they were encouraging me to write this up, and they were sending me stuff as well. I mean, that’s like, oh, have you looked at this? Have you looked at that? I then decided, actually, it’s time to do a meta analysis.

MB: Let’s talk about the pyramid of evidence and where meta analyses sit on the pyramid of evidence.

JR: Is it worth describing what a meta analysis is, what that entails?

MB: Let’s start with what a meta analysis isn’t. I mean, at the bottom you’ve got expert opinion and people refer to me and I just keep saying to them, here’s the pyramid of evidence. Here’s what I’m saying. For the most part, it’s expert opinion. So then you get controlled case studies, you’ve got controlled trials with control groups, and then you’ve kind of got something else. But then you get to meta analyses at the top of the pyramid of evidence.

This is where, let me paraphrase, because I’ve been involved in a couple kind of peripherally, this is where people, a group of people, or an individual establishes criteria for inclusion of high quality evidence, makes a judgment about the evidence, says this is not high quality enough to be reliable, and then assesses the results across all of the reliable pieces of evidence of scientific papers that other people have done to assert what the best current view of common reality is. The IPCC reports are a meta analysis of all climate change and climate impact efforts. It is the biggest, most expensive, most long running meta analysis going. Jan is doing a small version of that for heating around hydrogen and heat pumps. So Jan, massively credible, top of the pyramid of evidence, you’re doing it. Tell us what the results are.

JR: In the first meta analysis that I did, I had just above 30 different studies that I identified that were independent, that were looking at using hydrogen for heating in buildings, and what the economics of that would be. The cost, the consumer, the system cost. How feasible is that? They didn’t all answer the same question. They looked at different aspects of hydrogen for heating. None of those studies that I found at the time, all of which are independent, that was for me, was a cut-off, like any non-independent study, was not included in that. None of them suggest that hydrogen for heating would be a scalable solution, that would be cheaper, more efficient, less costly, with lower systems cost.

In fact, there was agreement that hydrogen is going to cost consumers more, is going to have higher energy system cost, and also the limited evidence that there is, has higher environmental impacts because of the increased use of resources required to produce the hydrogen in the first place. That is, electricity use and the resources required to build out renewable energy for that. That was the first piece of it. In the aftermath, there was a multitude of more studies getting published. I did an update a year and a bit after that. That was published in December last year, in December 2023, and that was now at 54 studies. Again, similar picture, very similar picture.

There was only one study in there that was kind of sitting on the fence. They were saying hydrogen isn’t going to be cheaper, but it’s also not necessarily going to be more expensive. We don’t know the uncertainties, but it didn’t come out saying hydrogen is a great solution. Since then we had another, I think, five studies. We’re now at 59 studies. I think that we’re not quite at 60 yet. The picture hasn’t changed. I have people on LinkedIn in particular, when I published this and put the paper out, attacking me and saying, you are biased, you know, you haven’t included all of the studies.

I said, send me any studies that I haven’t included because what I have done is just to explain how you actually go about, yeah, there’s Web of Science, which is a database for scientific papers, Scopus, another database for scientific papers, Google Scholar, that’s a little less reliable because it’s more wide-ranging. But I’ve used all of the usual platforms. You define your search terms, you screen all of the papers. I’ve screened thousands of papers, filtered out the ones that are relevant, and then you do the analysis. Right. I couldn’t find any other papers, so I said, please, if I missed something, which is possible, because sometimes the search terms that you’ve used don’t get you to all of the papers, that can happen. But no one could send me anything.

There was one guy who sent me a paper that was funded by a gas network company, or this was funded by the boiler association. I’m not going to include that. I still stand by the same conclusion, which is that the independent evidence is very conclusive that hydrogen for heating is going to be more expensive for consumers, has higher system costs, and is unlikely to play a significant role. I think that is a statement based on the evidence. This made it into different parliamentary proceedings not just in Europe, and it’s been quoted in regulatory proceedings also in the US, I think also in Canada, because people are ultimately interested in what the evidence says and regulators are very interested in that question. Policymakers who are sensible will look at that and, yeah.

Has it changed the debate? I’ve been told it has, because it’s kind of provided that clarity, which I think when I started out where it wasn’t clear. Where is this debate? Like, are you pro hydrogen or pro heat pumps? It seemed like a silly debate with no evidence base behind it. Now there is an evidence base and hopefully that will have supported that clarity that we needed to see to move forward.

MB: Three or four things about this. One is part of what I spend my time doing, people point me at DNV reports on hydrogen pipelines from offshore hydrogen generation at wind farms, or, you know, other reports that are funded by trucking lobbies. I look at them and they’re often credible organizations. DNV is a very credible organization, a northern European quality assurance and standards organization. It’s responsible for safety of a lot of infrastructure. McKinsey is a blue chip consulting firm. Roland Berger out of Germany is another one.

But the thing is, I used to work in consulting firms, and I know how they work, and I know how consulting reports are written. A client comes and says, I need this outcome, and the consultant goes, how does it need to be framed? What do we need to do? What conditions do we need to put on it? How much are you willing to pay me for it? And they hold their noses in many cases, or they’re biased themselves and do the study and find the results the client wants. And they have a strong impetus for this, because consulting firms have to manage their bench. They have people sitting on the bench not doing anything, who are not making money for the company, resources with fixed costs. And if there’s no revenue covering those costs, the company is losing money. I look at some of these reports, and then I look at the provenance of some of the authors and I go, okay, those three people were definitely sitting on the bench and the lead is the hydrogen lead for the company.

That’s a problem. One, we get weak reports that are bought and paid for results. But then the organizations that are buying those reports are also paying PR firms to amplify those results, which no scientific paper gets. It’s like the DNV paper, for example, which found that green hydrogen manufactured offshore and piped into Europe would be cheaper than anything else. Guess who funded it? The European Gas Pipeline association. It’s very clear. And they got the oil and gas side of DNV to do that. I won’t tell tales out of court, but I’ve heard a bit about the internal furor about that. It was not well received in all of DNV.

We have this interesting conundrum where organizations, legacy organizations who are threatened, like every gas utility in the world, have a tremendous amount of money. Existing lobbying groups clearly see the writing on the wall, and it doesn’t say, your business is golden, and you’ll have 4% compounded annual growth rates for the next hundred years. Here’s a bottle of Cristal and a cigar. Let’s go and have a smoke. It doesn’t say that. Says quite the opposite, but unless they can put hydrogen into those pipelines, they won’t exist.

You’re undoubtedly familiar with RISE, the Swedish Research Institute. I participated in a freight trucking decarbonization study for Europe with RISE over the past eight months or so. One of the questions I was discussing with the lead researcher, Jakob Rogstadius, was, will there be a hydrogen gas distribution network in Europe? I said, no, look at Jan’s study. If there’s no use for hydrogen for heating buildings, there’s no gas distribution retail network, because that’s what the primary use is. There’s no way to pay for it. There’ll be an industrial network, potentially, that’s probably already about as big as it’s going to be, but no retail network. The entire gas utility industry is facing the utility death spiral. That means they have to set up a strategic schedule to shut down their distribution, their gas distribution system, sub isolation network by sub isolation network, strategically, and help the neighborhoods to get heat pumps or hooked up to district heating. You know, that’s just what it is.

JR: Actually, Michael, we’re actually having a paper coming out very soon on this very subject, because what we’re seeing now is that this is already happening, right? In France, president of the regulator, last year, when the grid fees for the gas network went up, said, this is happening because we see less volume of gas being piped through and fewer customers. So if you have the same cost of operating the gas grid and you have a smaller number of customers and less volume, well, guess what? Your cost per customer, in particular, kilowatt-hour, or BTU, I think, as you would call it, probably.

MB: I’d call it a gigajoule personally.

JR: But that goes up, right? And this is only very modest. But the projections, and we’ve looked at projections in our paper, in some cases, the projections are for the UK, the regulator, things could be going up by ten times. So by 2050, if you do nothing, if you just say, we’re not going to do anything, and if you let the decarbonization journey continue and people are switching away from the gas grid, the remaining gas customers will have to pay more and more for remaining connected to the gas grid, which then in turn drives them to consider other options. Because the economic case for switching away from the gas grid, it becomes ever greater. The incentive to move away is increasing, which then in turn drives again more of that death spiral.

What we are really trying to figure out is how can you, rather than just letting this happen, how can you manage this, how can you make sure this is not happening in an unregulated fashion, which is actually in the interests, I would argue, of the gas network companies and of the investors that want to get their money back. An orderly regulatory framework that makes sure we have a transition that is managed is preferable to a situation where it’s chaotic and people are defecting the network at rapid pace. There’s no plan for how to deal with the decommissioning costs, which are also not insignificant. I mean, it’s not that, it’s you just leave the gas network in the ground and then you walk away. You have to make it safe. And there’s a cost associated with that.

You need to disconnect people from the network. But again, there’s a cost associated with that. So we’re going to spell out in more detail what we think that can look like, that framework, how it can be done. But this is becoming, I think, in the next decade, I think this will be one of the number one topics in the energy discussion. There’s no doubt. I think the last sort of ten years, and just before that, it was all about getting out of coal and decarbonizing the power sector. We’re now moving towards getting out of fossil gas and especially the distribution grid. We’re just getting into the discussion now.

In countries like Germany, where the government decided that there’s going to be a requirement for municipalities now to put forward plans for how they decarbonize their building stock, their heating system, they can’t just say, oh, we’re going to have hydrogen in 2030 or 2035, and it’s going to be fine. No, the regulator will very carefully check whether that’s a realistic proposition. So if your local gas grid operator says, we’re going to continue, we’re going to convert our network to hydrogen, unless they have a really credible plan to do that, the regulator will say, we don’t believe that, you know, that’s not going to happen. And we will see more and more of that where at the city level, decisions will be made to decommission parts of the gas grid in stages. Not going to happen all in one go.

It’s happening already in Switzerland, in Basel, in Wintertour, for example, we’re seeing municipalities taking steps towards that. I think we’re going to see more of that, whether we like it or not. Yeah, I don’t think this is stoppable. It’s going to happen, but I think if it happens, we should deal with it in a way that is orderly and managed, rather than having a chaotic decommissioning approach.

MB: The proof point I point to is Utrecht, which has been going down this path for five years in the Netherlands municipality in the region of 470,000 people or so. They’ve actually done the study. They say, here’s the list of sub-isolation networks. A sub-isolation network is where you can turn off a single valve and you’ve isolated a bunch of homes or buildings. They’re down at that level. They have a schedule through 2045 or so of all the shutdowns. They’ve already started the process, they’ve communicated it to everybody, and they’ve established assistance programs for transition. The way I always say it is, the gas utilities won’t do this on their own. Governments, through the regulatory agencies, have to force this upon them because they’re not set up to shut themselves down. It’s just the nature of the beast.

JR: I think the risk is that especially low income customers, they might be tenants, there might be people who have any disposable income. They’re not going to be the ones who switch away from the gas grid first. They’re going to be the ones who switch last or not at all, and they’ll be stuck on the system that will become more and more expensive. There’s a real equity issue there that needs to be addressed head on, because who’s buying heat pumps? It tends to be better educated, wealthier people right now. If that continues, there’s a real risk that the poorest people who are least able to afford it will be the one stuck with an expensive gas grid.

That is not right, and that’s not fair. It’s not the right thing to do. That’s why we need to, as you say, get regulation to deal with that, rather than leaving it to the operators of the gas grid. Actually, I think it’s in their interest, too. If they can depreciate their assets more quickly, have regulation that allows them to orderly decommission the gas grid while still maintaining a profit as they do that. I think that’s in their interests, too. But of course, right now we’re still seeing that battle of will we even have to do that? But I think that battle is increasingly getting lost. I mean, the trials for hydrogen for heating in the UK, three of those have been canceled or stalled. So it didn’t happen in two cases because of local protests.

In the third case was supposed to be a hydrogen town. The government didn’t even proceed with looking at which town would it be and the detailed plans for that. This is not a viable option going forward. So if that’s not happening, we got to talk about the future of the gas grid. So that, again, you have another topic for another episode. Michael, what to do with the gas grids if the gas use declines. Our paper should come out very soon and has much more detail on what we think that could look like.

MB: Michael Liebreich asked me about this a couple of years ago when we were chatting, and I said, well, obviously this is the strategic approach, and I published on it then. But, you know, I at best get into gray literature. Some of my pieces. People say, we’d like to publish this in our peer reviewed journal. I say, can you make me not have to suffer the peer review process too much? People mistake me for an academic, but I’m not an academic. I’m just a nerd who needs to know, and I do the level of granularity required to satisfy myself, which seems to be the level necessary to satisfy a lot of people.

We’re a bit over an hour and a half in. This has been amazing. Thank you so much. But I always leave an opportunity at the end for just that open-ended thing. Whatever you feel you want to say to the audience that’s listening, who’s persisted through this kind of nerdy discussion of policy, sausage-making alternatives for heat, what thoughts would you leave them?

JR: Well, I think people often make this all look like it’s all too difficult. We’re not going to get there. This is too hard. It’s too difficult and we shouldn’t do it because it’s hard. I really think that’s a mistake. We have heard the same arguments about other technologies that are now widespread. Yeah, people have said the same thing about EVs. We are never going to have electric vehicles. This is never going to work. We’re never going to have renewables play any significant role. The German utilities actually funded adverts in the early 1990s, saying renewables could only ever contribute something like 4% in the long run to electricity generation. Last time I checked in Germany, it was more than 50% of renewable electricity. So we see history repeat itself just on a different subject.

Now it’s about heating and using fossil gas and buildings and the gas grid. I have no reason to believe that we’re going to see just the same that we have seen with electric vehicles, with the power system. It’s going to be a different journey, of course, because it’s different technologies, different actors. But overall, the story will be very similar. Lots of skepticism, lots of distractions. But in the end, we are moving ahead with this, and there’s going to be, yeah, there’s going to be bumps in the road. Of course we make mistakes, but ultimately I’m an optimist. I believe we’re going to see innovators. They’re seeking this opportunity. We’re seeing that now. We’re seeing private equity moving into this space, funding innovation, new company startups spotting inefficiencies in the market. Things are moving very fast.

So if we have the same conversation in five or ten years, things would have changed dramatically. So I think we are in a good position now to move forward after spending maybe too much time discussing all the things that maybe should not be in the mix. And I hope that I can focus more of my energy on what needs to happen rather than what maybe shouldn’t happen in the future.

MB: Personally I would be delighted to not have to write another debunking hydrogen article again about something stupid where hydrogen is clearly not an option. Jan, great pleasure to have you with me. Thank you for your time today.

JR: Thanks for having me. Great talking to you, Michael.

MB: I’m Michael Barnard of Redefining Energy Tech. My guest today has been Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at the RAP and an expert on the proliferation of heat pumps and why hydrogen just isn’t going to be part of the solution space for domestic and commercial heat.