Hydrogen is less efficient than electricity, and takes more energy to produce. Unless the process improves significantly, I can understand why it won’t be the major source of heat for home use.
Guess it’s back to electrify everything then.
Induction and heatpumps are the only answer.
For home heating and cooking, they’re definitely a good route.
Ordinary coil stoves are fine to cook on too (I did for decades) but don’t meet the need for upper-class signalling in the way that induction does.
Ordinary coil stoves are fine to cook on too
It’s not their effectiveness that’s in question, just their efficiency.
Obviously the conversion of electricity > heat is always the same (100%) but induction is better at getting more of that heat into the food rather than the surroundings.
I wonder if geothermal is something they can do there.
It’s common in the Nordics and is usually the cheapest way to heat homes.
Last winter electricity was so expensive that district heating won.
But geothermal has otherwise been cheapest.
Most of the time when people suggest heat pumps they mean ground source ones. District cycle heat pumps would be the best solution from a cost and efficiency perspective, but require common action to install new infrastructure and so are harder to get than building level solutions.
Outside of that, unfortunately geothermal electricity tends to be very location and geology dependent. We absolutely should be taking full advantage of it where we can, but there are unfortunately limits on where is practical.
It’s just a sad ploy for the companies that own the pipes to pretend they can stay relevant for a few more years.
I think there’s more to it than that. Much of the UK’s existing housing stick will find it difficult to switch to heatpumps in the short-medium term to replace existing gas boilers, so as part of netzero, the UK government did pilots to see if piping hydrogen could be a viable alternative.
Turns out the answer is “no, not really”.
Pretty much
That’s one way of being remember in History. Like the people who said the internet wouldn’t ever be practical
