Expensive and unreliable, heat pumps are a nightmare for consumers. It’s little wonder the government has resorted to bribes.

Has there ever been a more pernicious lie spread by government and lobbyists than the claim that net zero will save us money? The Telegraph has the story.

Heat pumps, for example, weren’t just supposed to decarbonise home heating and thereby save the planet; they were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips renewable energy from wind and solar farms.

The narrative was always flawed: if heat pumps really did promise to save us money the government would hardly need to push them at us, offering grants of £7500 through its Boiler Upgrade Scheme. 

The government has good reason to bribe, as heat pump installations last year reached only 55,000 – far short of the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028.

As today’s National Audit Office report all but confirms, people are not falling for the bait. The Boiler Upgrade scheme has been an expensive failure, with consumers seeing through the guff and working out that dumping their gas boiler for a heat pump is not going to save them a bean; on the contrary, it will cost them more to install and more to run.

Remember how government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? 

That’s not quite going according to plan. The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices).

It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.

True, there are those aforementioned £7500 grants available for early-adopters, so it might be possible if you have a small property to fit a heat pump at no greater cost than a gas boiler. But grants are not free money: we are all paying for them through our taxes and energy bills.

If the government ended up having to bung all 30 million UK households grants of £7500 to fit a heat pump, it would add over £200 billion to annual public spending.

Read the full story here.