Nearly a fifth of the UK’s carbon emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels to heat our homes. This puts the scale of the challenge of reducing heating emissions somewhere between tackling the emissions from transportation and agriculture.
The good news is that we have most of the technology we need to change this: some houses will probably switch to using hydrogen instead of natural gas, others will use a form of electric heat pump, district heating will work in a few places and nearly every home will need better insulation. Combining these with de-carbonised electricity will make a big impact. But there are hurdles to jump first.
Let’s start with scale: there are 29 million homes in the UK. Yes, new homes will be built but new building standards will only ever help with a tiny percentage of the challenge. That means persuading or compelling up to 29 million homeowners to invest in new technology. Luckily most boilers need replacing every 15 or so years so if we start now, we do stand some chance of getting everyone converted to decarbonised heat in time for our 2050 net zero deadline.
The bad news is that all of this is going to cost money and persuading homeowners to part with additional cash is going to be especially tough over the next few years as we deal with the economic fallout of Covid. But before we get to that conundrum there is a sunnier knot to untangle. In the years to come, we will have to persuade non-believers and the most cash-strapped to get on board but right now we actually have more people who want decarbonised solutions installed than we have capacity to provide.
The government is offering households cash to do this. And the keen early adopters are investigating only to discover that yes, they can buy a heat pump, yes, their home is suitable but there are no installers for miles around. This is ‘levelling up’ gold!
Installation engineers are skilled blue-collar workers, required across the country. So far, the government skills investment for net zero has focused heavily on the education of new workers, via apprenticeships. BEIS no longer has a direct link to skills policy – now it all sits within the Department for Education. That means we have thousands of engineers whose skills WILL become obsolete over the next 20-30 years without action. They are the miners of this generation. While we talk about 200,000 new jobs in green building, we are condemning the old guard.
Daisy Powell-Chandler has worked on multiple general election campaigns, Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliamentary elections, the No to AV campaign, Remain and the campaign to keep Scotland in the UK. She was briefing officer to David Cameron during the 2010 General Election. During her political career she also set up and led grassroots consultation and policy research for the Conservative Party and worked as a researcher in a number of high-profile think-tanks including Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Justice, rising to the position of Research Director at the influential Centre for Policy Studies.
After politics, Daisy became a pollster at the research company Populus where she ran strategy projects for clients such as RBS, the Charity Commission, the National Gallery and No. 10 Downing Street. Now Daisy is a Director at Public First where she helps leaders to measure and improve the reputation of their organisations. She also produces and hosts the reputation podcast Why Everybody Hates You.