To think if my energy usage is lower than average my bills shouldn't be almost double average?

[ASHPwoes]

We have an air source heat pump heating system. It's an environmentally friendly technology which heats our four bedroom house efficiently. Our annual electricity consumption (total energy usage) is under 12000kWh. Previously we had it on a "green" tarrif which was supposedly from renewables, although I'm not certain that's still the case since the energy market went insane.

Anyway, because it is an electric system rather than gas, and because the current cost of electricity is 34p per kWh vs 10p per kWh for gas our annual bill looks like being around £4500 compared to about £2500 for a four bedroom house using 12000kWh gas and 2900kWh electricity. As the prices rise further for everyone that difference will be magnified for anyone with all electric households.

AIBU to think that having a reduced energy usage after investing in green technology we shouldn't be penalised with massively increased bills?

YANBU as the energy pricing structure is completely broken. How is it that renewable electricity is priced at the same cost as gas generated electricity?

I'm pretty sure an MP asked Hunt about this in the commons yesterday? Might be worth finding out who it was to see if there is going to be or could be action on it. Overall, however, yes the energy market is not fair to consumers but very good to companies

When the electricity price was first linked to gas, electricity was almost 100% produced using gas. It is now I believe around 50% renewables. I do think it will be unlinked over the coming years particularly as any new gas boilers are banned from 2025.

My theory as to why they haven’t done it yet is that the large majority of houses are still using gas to heat their properties. The only way they can unlink it without taking a financial hit is to charge more for gas, which would leave many, many people vulnerable to not being able to afford to heat their homes in winter.

we are going gas free within the month but I’m hoping it will actually work out cheaper (not taking account of the significant set up costs) as they’re super efficient hard wired electric heaters that only need to run for maximum 15 minutes every hour to maintain heat in the room and are easily controlled by an app so we will only have 1 or 2 rooms of a 4 bed house at temperature at any one time.

Last paragraph - why?

As in, why is there not going to be the net energy?

According to Scottish Government no new builds in Scotland can have fossil fuel heating (gas or oil) or log burners after 2024.
Existing homes will not be able to replace an oil boiler after 2025 or a gas boiler after 2030 and all homes will need to be on air source or ground source by 2045. I would imagine it’s going to be impossible to have a log burner fitted also. I’m not sure how people in the north are supposed to heat their homes effectively without a massive outlay which few can afford.

https://www.gov.scot/policies/energy-efficiency/energy-efficiency-in-homes/

I'm sure a couple of years ago the energy saving trust quietly reviewed some ASHP installations and concluded that they are rarely installed and operating as efficiently as they should be?
We've looked in them and the more research I did the clearer it became that they are a bit of a con, yes supposedly 'greener' but in the UK we just don't have the right weather conditions for them to be working optimally so to heat your home sufficiently they end up using loads of power to do so.
As a PP has said, we need to be using LESS power generally, not just power from a different source.

Just won’t happen. The cost of converting and installing new systems which run on the alternative methods will be astronomical and many won’t be able to afford it. Particularly if you also need to install solar at the same time to make it affordable to run. And Scotland isn’t ideal for solar generation..

We had an ASHP at our last house. It was new build and we were the first ones in - I'm not sure how they fare over time. However when we moved out, our new home (same size also mid terrace) was gas and electric and our bills shot up. Our ASHP was definitely more cost effective for us. The house we moved into is older which could be a contributing factor but it's very well insulated.

Are you on economy 7? You should be as all electric.

What ways can we reduce power use? Rural north Scotland.
We don’t have a tumble dryer. We wash clothes when they are dirty, not after one wear. We do have electric showers but have reduced use to every second day, and with a timer. We have all LED lights, double glazing , the best insulation we can for or house.
We’re on oil (which we hardly use) but a log burner. The wood for the log burner we grow ourselves. We only take out dead or dangerous trees and for each one felled we plant about 10 more. The trees trap the carbon and we release it. Isn’t this caron neutral? Yet the government would have us rip out this way of heating.
Also, on a wider scale how do we encourage a global reduction in energy use when some countries aren’t interested?

I think we are all being conned. In more ways than one.

In what way ? I’m more inclined to think it’s just politicians not having a clue any making up random policies without considering the consequences.

It’s a big topic in itself that you can devote a life to researching, but in a nutshell.

The cheap and easy to access low lying fruit of the fossil fuels are dwindling, have been for some time now, and what’s left is much more energy intensive to extract and refine.

Think of it this way. We’ve been the equivalent of a commuter driving a road to work that has a petroleum station they stop at. But over time, that petrol station runs out of stock at that price. The only other station nearby is off your route by twice the distance you commute daily, and the price is double what you were paying. So you’re now paying more for what in the end will be less fuel overall when you factor the extra mileage to get there.

That’s the global economy now. At a precipice of having exponentially inflating costs as more and more of the net energy we get from energy is put back into maintaining, let alone increasing, the amount we need to run society.

In the early 20th, you could get 100 barrels of oil for the cost of one, by basically putting a spike in the ground and seeing oil flow out in rural Pennsylvania. Today, we have to drill miles below the hardest to operate in seas to get at new, good deposits, or do fracking which is horribly expensive.

What's important in saving money is the ratio of gas to electric prices (currently about 3.3). If the COP of your ASHP is much lower than this (about 3 normally) then it costs more to run with an ASHP than with gas (this assumes gas is 100% efficient, it almost is, about 90%-95% for a modern boiler).

Basically ASHPs aren't that good at saving money. They are more expensive to maintain than gas boilers and cost more upfront. The only time to me that they are worthwhile is if you don't have mains gas. Even then heating oil might be a better alternative, although my guess is the ASHP stacks up better against heating oil than mains gas.

If I was moving to a new house I would want to check it was "ASHP ready" - in other words not a huge cost to convert to ASHP, just in case the government decides to go nuts and ban gas boilers (in fact I doubt they would do this, but they may in the future increase the gas cost relative to electricity to disincentivise gas boilers or put a large tax on them). It can cost a large amount to convert an old house to make it ASHP compatible. I think there are some rules in place re ASHP in new builds already.

I think there is a questionmark over gas boiler replacements. Basically the government is taking about adding hydrogen to the gas supply. At the moment they think they can add 20% to the gas supply without people having to change gas boilers. This is good, because hydrogen can be generated from renewable (unpredicitable) electricity. In a few years time boiler manufacturers will start making gas boilers that can run on either 100% gas or 100% hydrogen. So there is a questionmark over whether this is worth having. I still think probably having a 20% mix hydrogen gas is 10-15 years away, and getting to a stage where the gas mix would be 100% hydrogen is probably 30 years +, which is well past the lifetime of any boiler.

I think it is a bit of a shame, because early solar adopters did well (probably too well) out of the feed in tariff, which resulted in a huge increase in solar capacity added around 2015. If they did the same for ASHPs then the uptake would be much larger. However someone has to pay for that, and that someone is everyone else who doesn't have an ASHP. Since rich people are far more likely to have the 20K to invest in solar/ASHP, it would effectively be a tax on the poor to subsidise the rich.

Honestly don’t see hydrogen coming about. We need to MASSIVELY overbuild our electrical grid to produce and store that stuff at very low efficiency.

A lot of the hydrogen buzz is also to have the likes of academy keep their gas pipelines around, which could be seen as no different to car companies wanting to solve climate issues with using EVs rather than public transport programmes.

You can be as rich as you like at the moment but in many areas you still can’t cover your roof in solar panels since we have no way of storing the excess electricity plus a lot of the electricity networks are too old to enable people to generate large amounts.

we wanted to put 25 panels on our roof. We were limited to 5kw since (in very basic terms) otherwise in the event of a power cut, the electricity can for literally a fraction of a second, flow back into the grid and both injure people working on the grid and cause damage to the infrastructure.

I think it is a bit of a shame, because early solar adopters did well (probably too well) out of the feed in tariff, which resulted in a huge increase in solar capacity added around 2015. If they did the same for ASHPs then the uptake would be much larger. However someone has to pay for that, and that someone is everyone else who doesn't have an ASHP. Since rich people are far more likely to have the 20K to invest in solar/ASHP, it would effectively be a tax on the poor to subsidise the rich.

This is exactly the problem with all green incentives, the poor getting poorer to pay for the rich to get richer. Remember when electric cars came out, there were huge subsidies for people who could afford to pay for a new electric car. Plus free charging too.

My own employer has installed free charging points for electric vehicles, so anyone who can afford to run a second car can get an electric one and travel for free. But there's no help for saps like me who get the bus of course.

The problem with this story is that it always ignores the flip side, which is that although oil is getting a lot more difficult to find and extract, we are at the same time getting a lot better at finding and extracting it.

That "extraction improvement" kind of comes in waves. So around 2005 everyone was talking about peak oil and how the fossil fuel industry was doomed. Then fracking in the US started, and the US went from being a producer in decline to the worlds largest hydrocarbon producer (even larger than Saudi) in about 10 years.

How many waves of improvement in extraction techniques are left I don't know. I do know that there is a ton of oil and gas still down there and my guess is that there is no way it will run out before we decide we don't want to extract it any more. There is a famous quote, the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones and this is pretty much applicable to oil and gas. We'll transition to renewables/fusion long before it runs out.

There is that flip side, yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that more energy is expended to do these more complex recoveries and, in heavy tar and oil sands fields, processing.

When it comes to cracking, that’s source rock, which means it’s the hydrocarbon equivalent of squeezing a sponge of water. There’s nothing more beyond that once it’s gone, and as the Permian and related fracking sites are showing, they have tremendous drop offs in output after 18-24 months. Without constant capital injection, fracking in the US can drop off amazingly fast which is concerning.

Saudi and OPEC+ cutting production is also more than likely due to being unable to maintain rates of production they have had for the last year. And the world is still nowhere near that 2018 peak we had pre-COVID.

Natural gas is still growing for now, but it’s not in the right places and LNG murders cost effectiveness. Coal is being a solid backer for Chinese energy, yet even there they are not able to rely solely on coal to boost energy output.

This is a bit of a tangent, but oil being the master resource and which has been having constantly dwindling findings for decades now, is the canary in the coal mine (pun intended).

This is a few years old, but the paywall protected Rystad reports lately are not bucking the trend.

It is unfair that those people who are doing what is being asked (moving away from fossil fuels to electricity, which can be greener) are having to pay a premium to do so.

For people connected up to the gas network, it's just not worth switching to an ASHP until the cost of gas is more than one third of the cost of electricity (as heat pumps can extract 3kW of heat for 1kW of electricity).

At the moment lots of the green policy costs are added to electricity bills rather than to gas bills (considered to be fairer as almost everyone has electricity but lots of people don't have mains gas). According to this policy costs make up 13% of electricity bills but 3% of gas bills.

If they are serious about getting people to move away from gas and onto electricity then they need to start shifting more costs over to gas and reducing those on electricity. Plus a review of how electricity costs are calculated. With more smart meters they could also look at more dynamic pricing linked to smart appliances so that energy can be used when production is abundant and we can use less when there is less available. As well as finding good ways to store electricity for future use- it's not all about batteries, there are also schemes such as pumping water when production is high then releasing it to create hydro electricity.

Looking at your figures though, you must be using more than the average amount of energy.

If the 'average home' amount of 12,000kWh of gas is for heating/hot water only and your ASHP has a COP of 3 (so you get 3kW of heat for 1kW of electricity) then you would expect to use 4,000kWh of electricity for heating/hot water, added to the expected average of 2,900kWh and the average use for a purely electric house should be expected to be around 6,900kWh.

Say that your ASHP can't always match a COP of 3 and you run at an average of say 2.5 over the year, then that would be 4,800kWh for heating, so an total of 7,900kWh.

So as a family of five in Scotland you would expect your bills to be higher than the average, so you can't really compare your expected bills to average. I just checked the figures and if we had an ASHP with a COP of 2.5 (so lower than the expected), our heating costs would be about £500 a year more than on gas (and we are high users).

Might be worth checking your system is running efficiently, or you might not be as frugal with use as you think you are.

Yes you are using 12000 kwh of electricity. Approx 3000 of that will typically be non heating use. That means you are using 9000 on heating which if the 3kwh from 1kwh calculation is correct means that you are having 27000 kwh of heating. That’s bonkers and way more than double the level of heating that most have.

to get a saving on Ashp you’re supposed to be reducing your electricity use by two thirds . So 3000kwh on non heating and 3000kwh on heating (generating 12000kwh). That would mean paying for 6000kwh and that’s where your saving comes in.

you’re just extremely high energy users I’m afraid.

Moving from mains gas to ASHP is more of a lifestyle choice atm, although if you do not have access to mains gas then it is a different issue.

If you want to save money and the environment simultaneously then solar is a better way to go and probably a lot more practical for the vast majority of people.

I believe ASHP installation costs are already massively subsidised. I would rather the government funneled money towards solar than ASHP. We were doing great with solar until they removed the subsidies. If we had added solar at the same rate as we were in 2015 then we would now have 30 GW of extra solar capacity, which when you take into account the capacity factor (about 10%) would be the equivalent of adding a power station the size of Hinkley Point C.

Solar is also complimentary with wind power generation.

We are mains gas so will only move to ASHP if it's either necessary or cheaper. As much as I would like to be greener I don't want to have to spend lots of money for a new system that will cost us more money in the long term.

I agree that solar should be better subsidised- whilst the original old feed in tariffs were a bit too high compared to energy costs at the time, the current Smart Export Guarantee rates are so low they barely make it worth exporting.

We are getting solar panels in the next couple of weeks, along with battery storage so we will try to make the maximum use of energy when we're generating it and we can time the use of high energy appliances to when we either have stored power or lots of sunshine. It's a high upfront cost but I think it will prove to be worth it in the long term.

Our oil boiler is 20years old but still reasonably efficient. If, in 2 years time, the Scottish government is going to ban us from replacing it we have a big decision to make soon. Our house will not be warm enough with air source due to the age/size of the house and the water table is too high here for ground source. Combine that with no more log burners and we’re a bit stuffed. Solar with a battery pack might be an option but where does the money come from for that?