In this week’s Gossage Gossip, our columnist discusses the falsehoods some boiler manufacturers have been telling regarding ‘zero carbon’ boilers.
It is currently Government policy that, within a couple of years, no new buildings will have gas boilers installed. And that by 2035 all gas boilers will be illegal. Even though Liz Truss is anxious to encourage as much gas extraction as possible from the North Sea, and is studiously ignoring the specific commitment in the Conservative manifesto at the 2019 election that “we will not support fracking.”
Even so, the threat of elimination within the next decade or so is causing some consternation amongst companies that make these gas boilers – of which well over two million are currently sold each year.
What to do? Simple. Just pretend your boiler is not fuelled by natural gas. Recently I was at a trade show at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham, where two of the largest British manufacturers, Worcester Bosch and Vaillant, were marketing 100% hydrogen boilers. In Worcester Bosch’s case, the label, inevitably coloured green, described the same ‘hydrogen ready’ boiler as being ‘zero carbon’.
But were you to install such a ‘zero carbon’ boiler today, you would find that it would still mostly run on natural gas – even if hydrogen was available. If and when green hydrogen was to be injected into existing gas grids on any large scale, ‘blended boilers’ would still only run on 20% hydrogen. Leaving them reliant on natural gas to provide 80% of the power to heat buildings.
