Deeply misleading headline from the BBC "Energy grid investment of £28bn to push up household bills" with a photo showing an electricity pylon
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp84yymxpjno
Only more than halfway down the article do they mention that 64% of the money will be spent on fossil gas infrastructure, which will become a stranded asset when/if we fully decarbonise our energy supply... 🤬
I wonder how many houses you could transition to heat pumps for £17.92B? It looks as if a typical air-source heat pump costs around £10K on average, so that's around 1.8M houses. That's around 10% of the total number of houses with gas heating.
I wonder if that would reduce the stress on the gas grid enough to make the upgrades unnecessary.
@david_chisnall @kim_harding Ordering that many heat pumps would guarantee a hell of a discount, so I’d up that to replacing gas in a third of houses.
That should be a big enough percentage to start to collapse the rest of the gas network, as the high profits and standing charges are moved to a shrinking base, who leave faster, etc.
Ooh, accidental instant decarbonisation. And no need to upgrade the lines after all.
Note that the BBC fails to ask the obvious questions about why that "Of the £108 Ofgem says will be added to energy bills, £48 will be for gas and £60 for electricity" when 64% of the money spent will be on the GAS network...
56% of the increase will be applied to electricity bills, when the electricity grid only gets 36% of the "investment"...
