Decarbonizing Building Heat — RAP EU Lead Jan Rosenow On Policy Sausages & Hydrogen – 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 first half of our conversation.

Michael Barnard (MB): Hello and welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today is Jan Rosenow, the director of European programs at RAP and an expert on the proliferation of heat pumps. Welcome, Jan.

Jan Rosenow (JR): Thanks for having me, Michael. Looking forward to a great conversation.

MB: It’s going to be good because this is an important topic and a lot of people are trying to prevent the right answer from being the obvious answer that just gets done quickly and easily. I always like to start these things by finding out and sharing with our listeners. Who is Jan Rosenow? What led you to this interesting place of literally international attention, which you probably didn’t expect, but, you know, how did you get here?

JR: Well, actually my background is in geosciences, so I was always interested in understanding the impact that we as humanity had on the planet, on the ecosystems, on the climate. But I increasingly got interested in how can we solve that, how can we mitigate some of the negative impacts? And once you start looking at that, you don’t have to look very far and you find that energy is kind of number one, right? I mean, most carbon emissions globally come from energy by a very wide margin. Maybe something like 75% or so of greenhouse gas emissions globally are from energy.

That’s why I was drawn towards looking at solutions in energy and also specifically looking at policy solutions and regulatory solutions because I’ve always believed that the key barriers are not technology, but they have all to do with political economy, with the incentives, with the regulations, with the pricing, because once you have that right, then innovation will do its wonderful thing and we probably get into that later. That’s how I got into this energy policy space. And I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now and still learning every day. It’s such a complex field. It’s fascinating, it’s difficult, it’s hard, but it’s also really exciting.

MB: Yeah. So you’ve been doing that for a while and now you’re with RAP. So tell us about RAP.

JR: So RAP is a very peculiar organization. We are not a consulting firm. We are not really an advocacy organization. We’re not doing campaigns or lobbying. We are sort of a think tank. But even that topic, that term doesn’t really work for us because we also do a lot of things. We’re in the weeds there with policymakers. So the main mission that we have is to support policymakers, regulators, with crafting better regulation, better policy to help the energy transition. That’s kind of our mission. And we have historically hired lots of people who have been there, who have been in government, have been in regulators and senior positions, and have then absorbed a lot of wisdom passing that on to the next generation. That is changing a bit.

We now also have people who worked in industry, who have been participants in the energy market, for example, or who have run a company in the renewable space. One of my colleagues and my team, she was the CEO of an offshore wind company in Poland. So we have a much more diverse group of people now than we used to have, but still focused very much on supporting policy makers with a really difficult job. I mean, this is not easy, right? If you are in the European Commission or in a government department, or you’re an energy regulator, figuring out what to do, how to do it, and how to do it well is difficult. It’s really hard. And we try to help them with that by being creative, by sharing what are the best practices in other places around the world.

How could this be adopted and adapted for your specific region, your country, and then really bringing all that together in a specific context, like we might talk about heat pumps later. I have the suspicion, Michael, maybe that’s a good example of that. People are really looking for how can we scale this technology? What do we need to do in order to create the right conditions? That’s the sort of question that we would take and try to tackle. We don’t pretend we have all the answers, but we have some answers.

MB: And so what’s the breadth of RAP’s programs? I mean, just Europe or global or other? And to be clear, this sounds like a fascinating thing, but how do you actually put food on the table? You know, get your daughter school books.

JR: Yeah. Well, let me answer your first question first and then I come to the how we’re funded question. So the way how we operate is that we are a global organization and we focus on the four biggest power markets in the world. So that’s the US power market, the European power market, China and India. But we have increasingly diversified and also look at things like gas and other fuels, fossil fuels in general, and how we can transition away from those. But those are the key four regions. So we are truly global organizations. I have just been in DC meeting with the other regional directors from India, China and US and our CEO. And we don’t do exactly the same work in all these places because the issues will be different, right? I mean, in India the discussion is very different from the discussion in China.

From the discussion in the US or in Europe. But the way how we work is similar. And how are we putting food on the table, how you put it? Well, we have a number of different funding sources. One is philanthropy. So we write a work program that we would like to accomplish and then try to find funders who are willing to support that. So that’s kind of one important income stream. We do a lot of work also with government. So we have a number of direct government contracts. This might be technical assistance research that we do for government departments, sometimes regulators, sometimes the European Commission and other kind of governmental organizations. And then finally there are some large research grants, like the Horizon program in Europe, for example.

But that’s less kind of policy advice, but really more about doing the research that you need in order to then give advice. So that’s basically where money comes from. We don’t work as consultants for industry, we don’t represent any industry groups. Even though sometimes I’m being told by people who don’t like what I say publicly that I’m funded by the electricity companies or the heat pump industry or some other industry. That’s not the case. We don’t take money from companies to represent their interests. We don’t do that because we want to keep our independence. We are fiercely independent.

MB: So the evil heat pump cartel that everybody knows and loathes, that distorts public information, you don’t take money from them. That seems like a gap. Okay, so you mentioned policy. I’m less in the policy weeds. I tend to criticize policy sausages without being part of making the sausage, which of course makes me an annoying external bystander because I don’t know all the compromises that went into it and all the forces that went into it, I can only hypothesize. So when I criticize the US hydrogen strategy, or criticize the US transportation blueprint, I’m doing it post facto, which is arguably a lot less productive than what you guys do. You guys are at the coal face or the sausage grinder level. This metaphor that’s drifting all over the place.

Europe is fascinating because in some ways the EU is a country, but in many ways it isn’t. It doesn’t meet the Westphalian nation state definition, but arguably the United States doesn’t as the states have so much independence, it’s hard to say either. There are just different matters there. There are different policy challenges. So if you had to characterize how the EU’s policy issues, what complicates policy in the EU. Why does it take, you know, five to seven years to make a sausage of policy?

JR: You kind of pointed to it already, Michael. The fact that there are 27 member states that all have to somehow agree on these policies makes this complicated, difficult, and then you have a fairly complex European institutional setup, right, where the European Commission is the only body that can propose policy. So they have a vast amount of resources in terms of money for research, policy officers who can draft proposed policies. Then you have the European Parliament that has to vote on the proposed policies. And we know that’s going to get more complicated. The election result will be coming in very soon. Probably at the time of streaming this policy podcast, it will be known what the election result is for the European Parliament.

And that could get things even more complicated because you might end up with a parliament that is maybe more conflicted about certain things and less benign when it comes to energy and climate policies. So there’s a tension there. And then you also have the European Council of the different member states. So that’s basically where all the heads of government need to agree. And all three, the Commission, the Parliament and the member states, they need to find somewhat common ground on many different issues. And there is a very complex process that I think for the real policy nerds is called the trilogues, where these three institutions, essentially, it could be very late at night, sometimes it’s an all nighter. They flesh out the final detail of policies and that’s what ends up being European legislation. That’s kind of the final stage.

But in the run up to that, there’s a lot of back and forth, different proposals, different alternatives being discussed, external parties coming in, making suggestions. It’s a really complex undertaking. Once you have it, then you have a framework for 27 countries, and usually that framework is in place for several years, and then the next framework is built based on that. So yeah, it’s complicated to get to that point, but once you have it, you have that consistency across 27 countries, which of course, if you want to make progress, then that can be really helpful. If those are the right kind of policies, that’s of course important.

MB: Well, then there’s the EU-plus states, the Eurozone, and the side by side countries that, because it’s stupid not to tend to align with EU policy. And a lot of things like if we take some of the Scandinavian countries, they’re in the Eurozone or they’re not, but they are northern progressive states and so they tend to have alignment. Norway, of course, is its own beast with its own massive fossil fuel funding. The UK, of course, is “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve decided not to dance with you after all”. But they’re dancing with the EU anyway because they’re aligning their carbon pricing with the ETS. They’re trying, through policy, to keep them equivalent. And then, of course, I’m going to ask this question in a specific way. Germany and France are kind of first among equals in the EU. Germany and then France and then Germany, depending upon the year. How does that play out politically?

JR: It was actually quite helpful to have the United kingdom in the mix because you had three very different countries, and having three helps to reach a compromise that is perhaps more pragmatic. And the Brits have been known for being pretty pragmatic, perhaps leading more to market-based solutions, which is different to both France and Germany. And we now end up in a situation in energy. I mean, to give you a specific example, of course, there’s disagreement about nuclear and Germany being very much anti-nuclear and France being very much pro-nuclear, but that’s not very helpful if you have the two biggest countries arguing about nuclear in energy policy and that stalling progress, because we’re not going to get to the really important aspects of the transition. So that makes it more complex.

I think it’d be interesting to see how Poland, with a new government, with Donald Tusk, who is a poster child European, he’s been very involved in the European project. And, of course, Poland had a pretty right wing government before that was not really pro-European, and on many climate issues and energy issues, not particularly progressive. But now we have a government there that is wanting to move much faster and they are bringing forward the phase out dates for coal lignite in Poland. That’s going to change the dynamics quite a bit. I think having a pretty powerful central eastern European country with a progressive government thrown into the mix to remain interesting.

But, yeah, I think having Britain no longer in the mix, it’s a real loss for, I think, the quality of the debate, the diversity, and I think they’re still dearly missed in Brussels. Whenever I’m there, I hear that from people who have had very good experience working with Brits.

MB: I just dug through a very detailed history of Europe from 1945 to about 2010. The sheer number of redrawing of boundaries in that time, the sorting out of ethnicities prior to World War one. Ethnic, you know, it was a much more heterogeneous population in all regions. But then as boundaries started getting drawn and people getting shuffled into their ethnic enclaves of countries, you know, there was a sorting out that occurred that really changed Britain and changed Europe, and it was fascinating to read about.

There’s another thread to this, and I’d like your observation on this, simply because I observe inertia in policy and assertions about beliefs. I’ll take the example of hydrogen. Jeremy Rifkin was a strong advisor to the European Commission’s president in the early two thousands, wrote the book The Hydrogen Economy, and was strongly lobbying for and getting the EC to get behind what at that time seemed one of the few avenues that were available for decarbonization. And like nuclear, I say in the early two thousands, it was completely possible to say that nuclear was probably one of the only answers for electricity and energy, and hydrogen was probably one of the only answers for decarbonizing transportation and a bunch of other stuff that’s completely wrong. Now, it’s been disproven by empirical reality through time. But EC policies and Germans policies and a whole bunch of other policies have internalized that. The research organizations have internalized that from my observation. And so we’re dealing with that inertia around a solution which has been proven to be much less of a solution than we thought. How do you see that playing out?

JR: I mean, the hydrogen story, of course, goes back even further. Like, the first time, there was a bit of a hype. A first wave was in the 1970s, I think, during the energy crises that we had in the seventies, and the real desire to move away from fossil fuels, especially oil, because of energy security concerns and high prices. And hydrogen received a lot of attention at the time. So if you look at the literature that was published around that time, you will find similar books not so dissimilar to Jeremy Rifkin and what he’s written about it. There have been several waves, and we’ve kind of seen a third wave of hydrogen hype, as I would call it, and many others have called it, probably starting about maybe four or five years ago in earnest.

I’d say it’s now you can see that we’ve kind of reached the peak of that hype, and it’s hitting reality a little more and bit by bit, I think we’re getting a little more clarity where there are actually useful applications of green hydrogen and possibly even blue hydrogen. But yeah, I think this, there are these waves of hypes and why, you know, the question is sort of why is that? I guess, why do we see, why are policymakers, the public, our community, right. The energy and community is so prone to jumping on the bandwagon and getting excited about technologies that don’t yet exist, at least not in a scaled fashion and commercialized fashion. I have several, I mean, several theories as to why that might be. I think one is from the policymakers perspective, it’s quite attractive, right?

If somebody tells you there’s a new technology that’s just around the corner, this will solve all our problems. It’s not quite ready yet, but you just got to fund a bit of research and then we can get ready and then at some point we’re going to deploy that. Yeah, that makes your job a lot easier because you don’t need to do anything of substance. You might put some money into R and D and then you kind of, if people ask you what are you going to do about this problem? You’re already funding research and that’s going to come and that’s going to solve all our problems. So I have basically done what I needed to do. Right.

From the perspective of some of the, I would call them vested interest groups, you know, people who have, the incumbents who have invested a lot of money in our existing infrastructure, of course, you know, they like any technology that enables them to continue to use that infrastructure. I mean, that is not a contested thing to say, I would have thought. Because it’s just self interest. If you’ve created a successful business model, why change it? If you’re forced to change it because of climate goals, if there’s an alternative technology that looks like you can continue, why not embrace that? So there’s clearly a self interest at play.

The difficulty is, I think when that then leads to misinformation, lobbying and unscientific arguments that penetrate the political debate and are being adopted by policymakers and we then not seeing the progress we need to see on technologies that actually are scalable now that can decarbonize our economy, that is a problem. So there’s this delaying effect. I think that we’re seeing in many areas where hydrogen has been overhyped, actually to the detriment of sectors that really might need a lot of hydrogen. And we could talk about that maybe later. Michael, I know you have some strong views on that yourself, but we’re now seeing the shipping industry, for example. Right? They’re saying we need at least some derivative of green hydrogen for long haul shipping. We can’t do it with electric batteries. That’s not going to work, not for long haul shipping.

So we don’t want the policymakers to focus all their efforts on using hydrogen in cars or for heating. We want that hydrogen. So there’s kind of this. This is now happening. We’re seeing that sectors that really need it are getting, or think they need it, getting quite concerned about the distraction that we’re seeing in the debate around hydrogen, where it’s being supposedly used in pretty much all applications, which it clearly won’t be.

MB: What I’ve seen is some institutional inertia, like if we take the EC, as I understand, the Joint Research Center is a part of the European Commission, it’s the research arm and funded independently for that. The Potsdam Institute on Climate Impact Research, I think it’s in Brandenburg, is a German version of the JRC, funded by Germany for an overlapping thing. I don’t know how many people the JRC has but the PIK has about 400 researchers.

I had occasion recently to dig through all PIK’s hydrogen material and all their energy material over the past while. And the PIK has a very low price per kilogram of hydrogen, hard coded into their primary models and no ability to find it and edit it. Because there was a consensus about cheap green hydrogen, and everybody had an over belief in the quality of the models, they didn’t escape from model land and say, hey, our results show that green hydrogen is half the cost of electricity, which doesn’t make any sense. And so, you know, bad results have been coming out because of this ongoing perception of things. We have this, you know, some people would call it consensus. BCG called a consensus. I call it a shared hallucination or delusion of cheap green hydrogen. People were working back to, “what does hydrogen need to cost in order for any of this to make sense”? And then the institutions are all tied around this. JRC’s numbers on many things were completely fallacious. PIK’s models gave completely wrong results and nobody looked at them and said, excuse me, hello, that’s wrong.

In Germany, it’s gruppendenken. I discovered that great word and it’s immediately obvious to English speakers what it means. So it’s interesting to see that from your perspective, it’s more of a global hype. I mean, the United States is suffering from the hydrogen hype, Canada is suffering from the hydrogen hype. Although, to be clear, we’ve got it because Germany’s Chancellor came and instilled it in us and said, during the energy crisis, “you’ve got to give us green hydrogen”. And so now we’re wasting a lot of time and money on green hydrogen, that it is less institutional and more hype cycles. My observation is there’s definitely the hype cycle, but there’s some institutional inertia and research inertia that has over focused on hydrogen.

But perhaps what it is there’s a bunch of stuff going forward and because the hype cycle tends to highlight those aspects for me.

JR: That inertia is interesting when we look at the targets that were just adopted. I think it was in 2022 in the REPowerEU strategy, which was a strategy written in response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the spikes in natural gas prices that we have seen all around the world, but particularly in Europe, where gas prices went up, like tenfold at some point. The Commission then said, we want to have 10 million tons of green hydrogen production by 2030 in Europe and we want to import another 10 million tons of green hydrogen from other places. And when it was, when people asked, where does this target come from? Who has actually come up with a number? Right?

I mean, 10 million is a round number, but who came up with the analysis behind it? And it turns out that it’s based on an industry figure. It’s based on what the industry that wants to be part of the hydrogen economy is suggesting what Europe should be doing, and that was adopted as a commission’s target. When you kind of backtrack where you find it and it’s still there, we still have that target, but we are now seeing that there’s a huge gap. I mean, the deployment over the last two years of green hydrogen is minimal compared to that target. And that gap is getting harder and harder to bridge as we move towards 2030. Right, but it’s still there. The target is still there. The import target is still there for 10 million tons of green hydrogen.

And when you look at other technologies that have been scaled in the past at rapid pace, like warplanes during the second World War, there’s a great paper, actually, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research on a thought experiment. Let’s scale green hydrogen as quickly as solar and wind, because that’s sometimes what we see people on social media say. Oh, yeah, you’re so pessimistic when you say we’re not going to have enough hydrogen by 2050. Look what will happen with solar and wind. Let’s just do the same for hydrogen. So they apply the same growth rate for solar and wind and apply it to green hydrogen, and they’re not getting anywhere near what would be needed. Then they say, okay, let’s take it a step further.

Let’s look at the technologies that in history that have grown the fastest, apply those growth rates, and again, there’s a big gap. So I think that’s just a great way to insert some realism. I’m not saying these are the right growth rates or the maximum growth rates, but it’s definitely a good thought experiment to see how realistic it is that we can scale this technology that is still in its infancy. A fraction of global hydrogen production is green. And you know this, right? It’s less than 1%. Scaling that at a rapid pace. We’re not going to get those fast quantities needed anytime soon. And I think that those targets are still in place.

And hopefully, at some point, someone will see sense and do a bit of a reset and say, okay, we’re not going to reach those targets, so what do we do instead? Right. That should be the real question. And at some point, we’re going to get there. Until now these targets are still in place.

MB: I always like to say that it’s not actually a new technology because hydrogen was discovered centuries ago, isolated centuries ago, and identified as a separate chemical. The first fuel cell was invented around 1840 and built around 1840. Fuel cells were on the United States Gemini rockets that orbited the moon in 1962. In 1965, the first fuel cell forklift, commercial fuel cell forklift, was delivered and was put into operation. So you kind of, like, look at that and go, oh, wait, we’ve been using these technologies, even commercially for 60 years, and yet nobody’s using them, comparatively speaking.

JR: I mean, you could make the same argument, of course, for electric technologies like electric vehicles have been. Actually, the first electric vehicles showed up already in the late 19th century. I mean, when you look at pictures of New York, most of the cars that replaced horses in New York were electric to begin with. And then that changed quite dramatically, very quickly. It was the internal combustion engine that was overtaking EV’s for a number of reasons, including range and things like that. The same goes for heat pumps. I mean, the first heat pump was invented more than 150 years ago, and that’s not a new technology either. So the same argument, I think, could be applied to lots of technologies. They have been invented at some point.

I think the question is, I think the fundamentals of is it scalable and can it be scaled with significant cost reductions? Right. And the question then becomes how? Well, if you believe it can be scaled with cost reductions, how do you go about doing that? What is the best way of doing that? Is it to throw a bunch of subsidies at the problem? Is it to create a market framework that removes distortions, whatever your mechanism is? But currently, I think with hydrogen we’re seeing in Europe, there’s been an auction for hydrogen that recently took place. And some of those projects that have won the auction, actually the main revenue stream that they are seeing is not so much the subsidy that they get paid, but they’re using the waste heat to feed into district heating, for example, from the electrolyzers.

So it’s a fascinating projects that have been funded, but the subsidy payment is really secondary to them. They’re kind of using revenue from other sources. But yeah, it’s still a small fraction of the big 10 million tons of green hydrogen.

MB: Yeah, I have a heterodox opinion that hydrogen demand, supply and demand will actually diminish in the future simply because a full third of it is for oil and gas refining or oil refining. And, you know, when a third of your market goes away and everything else gets more expensive and there are alternatives, I don’t see it being competitive. But this is the time to talk about. To narrow it down. You mentioned district heating. We’ve been talking about heat pumps. So let’s narrow the focus. Let’s narrow the focus to domestic and commercial heat, because this is a big place. And we’ll start talking about all the.

If you could share the alternatives, the quantification of the energy for domestic heat in Europe or wherever else you have it, how big a problem that is, how much natural gas is currently being burned or coal, and then kind of say, and here’s the alternatives that we have, then we can kind of compare and contrast them. Hydrogen’s in that mix and heat pumps are in that mix, but they’re not the only ones.

JR: I start by just pointing out how important heating buildings is as a contributor to carbon emissions. This is not just a small fraction of our carbon emissions globally. About 50% or so of all the carbon in the world that’s being emitted goes in some way back to heat. And that’s both heat used industry for processes, we can talk about that too, perhaps, but also buildings, it’s about half and half. So about 25% buildings. 25% is from industry, very roughly.

MB: I spent 90 minutes with Paul Martin explicitly focused on process heat for industry. I think even the nerds who listen to my 90 minute discussions with people who are deep experts and stuff would say, Mike, that’s a bit too much on process heat for industry. So let’s focus on buildings, if you don’t mind.

JR: That’s completely fine. So currently, when you look at how we generate heat in buildings in Europe, a lot of what people call natural gas, what I would call fossil gas, just to get a bit more clarity that this is a fossil fuel. Right. And the numbers that we currently see is that the share is about 40% of space heating, hot water heating in Europe. It’s more in the US, actually, it’s more than 50%, perhaps even 60% in the US. So a significant part of heating is fossil gas. And then there’s still a lot of oil. I mean, it’s declining, but it’s surprisingly still a significant amount of oil that’s being used in Europe’s buildings and also in the US to keep warm.

In places like China, there’s also coal in the mix, a very important role in district heating systems, but until recently, also individual stoves. You know, where if you went to Beijing, you could still see, not that long ago, you could see people delivering solid coal to people’s homes so they could burn it. And that was banned, actually, because of the air pollution problems. But, yeah, overall, most of the heat that we use is from fossil fuels. And the significant contributor is gas. That’s the most important heating fuel across the world when we look at space heating. And of course, that’s very carbon intensive. So what are the alternatives? So we clearly can’t continue using fossil fuels if we want to meet those climate goals, because there’s no conceivable way how you can reduce emissions to net zero and keep 25% of your emissions just the way they are.

So we have to find a way to decarbonize. What could this look like? There are really not that many options. Sometimes it appears that they are like all these different technologies. We don’t know what we should be doing. I think it’s a limited set of options that we really have that are realistic. I mean, one option is to burn biomass or biogas. We’re seeing that in some places where this is happening, especially in Scandinavian countries. Actually, in Sweden, for example, there’s a lot of biomass that’s being used also in Finland, but that’s. Yeah, of course, has some significant limitations. And the sustainable biomass that we can actually harvest and use for heat production is very limited indeed.

The numbers just show that there’s a limited potential, and it’s nowhere near enough to replace all the fossil fuels we’re currently burning to keep warm in our homes with biomass or biogas from agriculture, for example. So, yeah, that is not going to be the solution. It could play some role in some places, but most scenarios show a very small amount of bio in the mix generally, certainly not the majority of emission savings in the future. And you could look at technologies like heat pumps, electric technologies, also in addition to heat pumps, would include direct resistive heating. Not as efficient, of course, as a heat pump. And the IEA is saying on its website now, it’s very clear that heat pumps are the most important technology when it comes to decarbonization of heating. And that is for two reasons.

One, heat pumps can use electricity from clean sources directly, and they’re also super efficient. I mean, you get that efficiency of using one unit of electricity, and you’re getting three, four, maybe even five units of heat back. There’s no other technology that comes even close. So heat pumps will play a big role. And in my view, and the view of most people who work in this space, will be the central technology. There could be large scale heat pumps feeding into district heating networks. It could be small scale heat pumps that run to heat individual buildings. There will be a role for ground source water source heat pumps, air to water heat pumps. There’s a whole range of different types of heat pump technologies, but overall heat pumps will be a significant part of it.

And then I think district heat is going to play an important role, too. And it’s not very widely used in North America. I mean, there are some systems, I think, in New York, where there’s district heating. I don’t actually know how many there would be in Canada, I presume not very many.

MB: Last time I spoke to a heating engineer about the subject, there are five within 30 kilometers of me.

JR: Oh, that many.

MB: But I’m in Vancouver, which is kind of like a… Well, it’s not like an European city, because it has lots of Asians, but it’s very much a progressive, aggressive, liberal, climate-centered society. We’ve had district heating here under what’s now called Creative Energy for 20 or 30 years in the downtown core. Sadly, the condo building I live in the downtown core is just too far from one of their big pipes. Otherwise they would have hooked us up for free, and I would have had our building turn off our natural gas feed for our hot water, because that’s the only thing we actually heat with gas. I’m still trying to convince the vice president over there, Diego Mandelbaum, to, you know, get a pipe down to Yaletown. But yeah, it’s growing, it’s not prevalent. Sprawl and district heating don’t go together.

JR: It requires quite careful planning. And yeah, I’m a big fan of district heating because you can combine lots of different heat sources and that could be, it could be heat pumps. Doesn’t have to be. It could be waste heat from an industrial facility that feeds into district heating. There’s so many. You can have heat storage. I mean, that’s the other, I mean, this is still a big, of course you know this and listeners will know this, but one of the biggest problems will be, well, once we have electrified a lot of our energy use, we will need a lot of storage. And what is the cheapest form of storage? Certainly a lot of thermal storage will be super cheap.

And we’re seeing that again in Scandinavia, in Denmark, but also in Finland, where thermal storage connected to district heating is now being used to essentially use cheap solar in the summer and heat up. Maybe it’s an underground water storage, and then using it in the winter by using a heat pump, putting it back into district heating. Much cheaper than battery electric storage. Very simple technology. So I like district heating because of its versatility. You can use all these different heat sources, you can have storage in the mix, and it’s a communal system, so you can convert a whole neighborhood, but it requires careful planning, and it’s much more complex than just doing. Replacing a gas furnace.

A gas boiler with a heat pump in a single building is pretty simple, straightforward, but building a district heating network for an entire neighborhood is a big infrastructure project, takes time, is more complicated. But yeah, those are the three. So I mentioned biomass, biogas, electrification or heat pumps and district heating. And then of course, the fourth option, which is, in my view, not an option, at least nowhere near any reasonable scale, is using so called alternative gases such as hydrogen. That’s been promoted heavily in Europe. Not just in Europe, I know, also in Canada, but in the US, in Australia, around the world, really, by the companies that run the gas networks, but also by some of the suppliers of heating equipment as the solution to decarbonization. Yeah, I have serious doubts that this will ever play a role of any significant scale.

I mean, there might be places where in district heating systems, you use the waste heat from electrolyzers. Right. If there’s an electrolyzer nearby and there’s waste heat, yeah, of course you should be using that. But I have serious doubts that we will ever use a gas distribution network and pipe 100% hydrogen around to heat our homes. And maybe we can go into that a little bit more, in a bit more detail. As you know, Michael, I’ve done a significant amount of work on this topic, looking at the evidence base, really trying to understand what does the science tell us and how robust is the case. But yeah, I would say those are the kind of four buckets usually that people kind of think of when it comes to the decarbonization of healing.

MB: When we talk about burning biomass, we talk about burning wood in a fireplace, and it provides this real sense of something that’s easy and obvious, and it just has a strong cultural overlays and it seems so obvious and easy, it just doesn’t scale. And of course, wood smoke inside homes is as bad as coal smoke inside homes. People just don’t believe me when I tell them it’s really toxic. Make sure you vent well. They just know it’s wood smoke. It’s natural. No, it’s long chain carbon stuff like hydrocarbons, but it’s fresh and that’s all the difference. And then for hydrogen, it also has that simplicity. Oh, we’re just going to replace one gas with another gas.

We have to tweak your stove, we have to tweak your hot water heater, you have to tweak your furnace, but that’s it. Otherwise everything’s the same. It’s a very comforting message. Oh, so my thermostat doesn’t change and my bill doesn’t change? Oh, no, it’ll be cheap, really.

JR: Which is, you know, to say, it’s a good story. And yeah, I think that’s partly why it’s so attractive. Right. It’s a lot simpler to tell that story than saying, oh, you know, it’s going to be, we have to build a district heating network, it’s connecting all these waste heat sources, we got to have storage, and like, everybody has to have a heat exchanger in their home and we have to take out the furnace and the boiler, or you have to have a heat pump, we have to upgrade the electric grid. This all sounds terribly complicated. Just change the gas in the pipes. Right? It’s a simple solution, easy. That’s why it gets, I think, so much traction. And this is for people who are not looking a little deeper, it seems like a no brainer.

And I keep hearing this from neighbors who know I work in energy, and they say a gas boiler is kind of coming to the end of its life. Yeah, I think I should just wait for hydrogen to come along. Right? I mean, I shouldn’t be doing anything, really. And, you know, because they kind of read that maybe in the media or saw it on social media somewhere. This is a real problem because a simplistic and, in my view, unrealistic solution that seems compelling is being promoted. And because it’s been promoted, we see then policymakers adopting it and not doing what is actually needed. And that’s to get going with the stuff we know works and has worked very well in many countries around the world. So that’s what’s frustrating in this.

But it also shows that we need to be really clear, I think, in how we communicate about this topic with clarity and also based on evidence rather than wishful thinking.