From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Reporters would have been fired in the past for writing nonsense like this!
Poland was always an unlikely candidate to become a heat pump utopia.
It has a populist, right-wing government and a heavy reliance on coal power. In 2018, it was home to 36 of the top 50 most polluted cities in Europe.
But in 2022, Poland’s heat pump market blew the rest of Europe out of the water.
Heat pump sales in Poland soared by 120pc, according to the Polish Organisation for the Development of Heat Pump Technology.
Sales of air-to-water heat pumps in Poland have increased by 100 times over the last 10 years.
Poland is not Europe’s market leader; the heat pump markets in Scandinavia and France are far more advanced. But Poland is rapidly undergoing a heat pump revolution – and is breaking records in the process. “It is absolutely number one in terms of growth,” says Thomas Nowak, of the European Heat Pump Association.
“No country has seen such exponential growth from such a low base,” adds Jan Rosenow, of the Regulatory Assistance Project, an energy NGO.
The contrast to the UK is extreme. In its drive to net zero, the British Government wants to phase out all gas boilers by 2035. But the UK’s heat pump rollout lags far behind the rest of Europe.
“Poland is racing to the top of the green tech race for clean heat,” says Juliet Phillips, of climate and energy think tank E3G. “The UK has a lot to learn from Europe’s clean heat rising star.”
There is absolutely no comparison between Poland and the UK, which dopey Melissa obviously has not worked out yet.
The biggest difference is that Poland is wanting to install heat pumps to replace coal, not gas as in this country. 46% of Polish homes rely on coal for heating, along with another 28% which have district heating, also mainly coal powered. Poland has many good reasons for this, such as air pollution and reliance on Russia for coal imports (which their government has now banned anyway).
Melissa does not appear to have realised that Britain went through the transition away from coal two generations ago.
And a second big difference is that Poland is chucking incredible amounts of money into subsidies for heat pumps. Poland’s 10-year Clean Air Programme set up in 2018 allocated Eu 25 bn for replacing coal heating systems with cleaner alternatives, enabling the government to offer subsidies of $6700 per household. Last year they raised subsidies to up to $16500, which will certainly make the bill a lot more than 25 billion. Given lower labour costs in Poland, these amounts would be enough to cover the full cost of heat pump installations. The cost of this is funded from the carbon credits Poland earns from the EUA carbon allowance scheme, which sends billions back to Poland if it reduces emissions.
Maybe Melissa would like to work out how much such subsidies would cost the UK?
I’ll give her a clue.
We have twice as many households as Poland, and to subsidise the full cost of a heat pump would cost the government upwards of £400 billion.
Maybe she would like to tell us where that money would come from?
The simple fact is that for a Polish home with a coal fire, a heat pump is a definite upgrade. But we went through that transition fifty years ago, replacing coal fires with gas central heating systems, which cost less to buy and run than heat pumps.
So why on earth would we want to make a retrograde step to an inferior technology and at huge cost?
It is quite frightening that Melissa is actually an economics reporter:
And you might have guessed it, but she has no relevant training at all, unless you count her degree in English Literature!
Heaven help us all!
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