The Reason Why Heatpumps are Not What is Needed
Something worth knowing about
This is the first article I’ve written on the subject of heatpumps, never really seeing much harm in them until now, either way.
But when these are traded off against the use of hydrogen, as is obviously being done now, by some very high profile entities we might see as “Hydrogen Experts”, I have to say something, because they are very wrong, in my own view, as arguably an Energy and Systems Engineering expert myself.
This is the main source article, by David Cebon, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Cambridge University, that raises my concerns:
We’ve seen the drive to introduce heatpumps, marketed in “The war against emissions”
I’ve explained in various places, a zillion times, why all talk of net-zero, emissions, carbon mitigation, and even “Renewables”, are not going to fix the problem, only make it worse.
Most of us understand now that if / when we are ill, if the symptoms can be managed by products which can be marketed and sold to us, without curing the illness, this is the preferred scenario for the profit driven system.
The same thing goes for the health of the planet.
The problem is that management of only symptoms usually ends in tears, and death, lots of death. We all know this now, covid was/is a stark illustration of it. That same very real illness still hangs over every one of us, sooner or later, despite much energy being spent on it now, and profits made, in the pursuit of vaccines to control it’s symptoms, only it’s symptoms.
I’ve explained also on many occasions now, how profit is intricately linked with energy by extraction, tying us into it.
It’s an alien thought, and an inconvenient truth that we are going to have to get used to, because it is the hard truth, leading to a hard, physical end, actually not long now, if we can’t change our way of business.
Even the war we are seeing unfold, leading to possibly a planet ending conflagration is systemically linked. The importance of this can’t be overstated.
We need to accept that money is energy, and everything that happens with money, happens with energy, the same energy that we each need to metabolise around 150 or so Joules of per second, 24/7, to live, assuming I am addressing mostly adults:
In fact all the money problems we can see are part of what I call this, the global energy problem.
Money, is the thing we use to massage the energy of the planet around, because money is energy, always, resulting in a net flow of energy from the poorer places, to the richer places. This is whilst actually converting most of it in the end to heat, which in the end just adds to the heating effect of the sun on the planet.
That is what we now should recognise as historical colonialism, in terms of energy.
To try to explain the heating effect of our activity with money, to moderately technical audiences, who might not normally think much about money as energy, I have often likened it to the opening of a fridge door, in a room that is too hot, in an effort to cool down the room.
All we achieve by doing that, is to make the fridge work all the harder, to try to keep the interior of the fridge, which is now open to the room, the same environment as where the fridge is dissipating the heat of its own work done, to the room.
In that state, the fridge inreases its demands on the supply energy, usually from the supply grid (or a gas bottle in the room), whilst dumping the results of its effort into the room as heat, the temperature in this circumstance technically can rise without limit, until the fridge fails, because the higher the temperature goes, the harder the fridge tries to work to cool its interior, which has become just more of the room.
The more efficient and powerful the fridge, and the better the room is thermally sealed, the more quickly the temperature increases to a critical level.
Efficiency in that circumstance, is not our friend!
Opening the fridge door, is what we are doing, by conjuring up all the “Science” and business of “Renewables”, selling it to ourselves with constant sales pitch via all the usual mainstream science platforms, funded as always by the for-profit system, we are ramping up the effort of what is, in our global environment, a room, this room already being increasinly heated by the energy of the sun. Although this room is open, the net heat is the resultant of both the energy of the sun, and our own heat output, us being the fridge.
The production of pollutants of all kinds, including carbon based emissions, are all just symptoms of the source problem, our use of energy from sources extracted from Earth.
Folk trying to argue with me about this have tried to use thermodynamics to counter what I’ve just explained, when this very thing is themodynamics at work.
It’s also E=MC squared at work, verifying the same result. This is beyond dispute, we have the observed symptoms (Our planet starting to burn), and the solid maths and physics, whichever way we cut them, telling us what the problem is, and that it is terminal if not put right.
We opened the fridge door the instant we created the science and industry of “Renewables”.
There we should see also clearly the reason why heatpumps will not help fix the problem of rising planetary temperature at all, only make it worse, the more of them that are implemented, As long as we are powered by extracted energy.
What heatpumps do, is exactly like colonialism massaging the energy of the environment, in a way that we personally benefit from it, if we are in the immdiate area benefited, whilst ignoring the effect on the greater environment, or worse, arguing that there is no effect, or even a beneficial effect.
All we ever achieved by colonialism, and the system of all things for profit, is destruction, net destruction with now our planet literally in flames, not to mention global unrest as a direct consequence.
In the source article that raised my concern, we see statements including the following (“The subject statement”):
Heating the UK
“The UK’s housing stock had an average national requirement of about 70 GW of heat throughout the winter months of 2021 [2]. Accounting for the efficiency of hydrogen heating, 143 GW of renewable electricity would be needed to generate this heat [3].
To generate this electricity, 30,600 of the largest wind turbines equating to approximately 367 GW of installed offshore wind generating capacity would be required — covering a sea area larger than Denmark [4].
In comparison, meeting the same heating requirement using renewable electricity to directly power heat pumps would require a sea area less than a fifth of the size.
This is because the heat pump pathway, with the pumps using electricity to transfer heat from the outside environment into buildings, is approximately 270% efficient — compared to the green hydrogen pathway’s less than 50% efficiency.
This high efficiency is due to most of the heat being transferred rather than generated [5].
As a result, only 26 GW of renewable electricity is required to provide the same 70 GW of heat to consumers’ homes [6]. This requires an installed offshore wind capacity of approximately 67 GW in the form of 5,600 turbines, requiring a sea area of 9,000 km2 — less than a fifth of the size of Denmark.”
The image used to make the argument above, is this one:
Addressing those six paragraphs one by one respectively, these are my thoughts:
Paragraph 1
The source data reference [3] quoted, is the UK DUKES energy data for UK. DUKES takes no account of domestic and community solar. It can’t, because only utilities energy data is monitored by DUKES.
I say a lot more about this in my stories about money owed to the public as solar indexed stimulus.
I also explain why moving completely to domestic and community based solar hydrogen is the only solution to the energy problem, and why hydrogen has to be part of the solution (Nothing else can do it).
The paragraph concludes that “143 GW of renewable electricity would be needed to generate this heat [3].”
Cross checking this with figures for UK numbers of average dwellings occupied (About 26 million) gives us a rough estimate of 5.5KW or so per household, if heated by hydrogen.
Maybe surprisingly I don’t think this is far out.
It equates to three average electric fires burning 24 hrs a day in every household, losing the rest to heat.
What is lost to heat, if the source power is entirely solar, at worst can only ever be what would have been converted to heat from the energy of the sun if neither nature nor we used it.
Notice we removed a large part of nature that used to use it.
Compare that with the case that we use energy of Earth, whether it is by any energy from Earth whatsoever, it can be fossil fuels, heatpumps, wind generators, hydroelectic, nuclear, even fusion, all of it converts things that nature converted from sunlight to things other than heat, back to heat as if nature never used it.
This is destruction, by definition, of everything created by nature.
Our real challenge is to stop that destruction, to stop taking the energy already put to use by nature, to stop converting it to heat.
The only way we can do that, is to become creators ourselves, deriving all of our energy from the same source, the only one we can use to create, the sun.
Otherwise we just heat the Earth, in addition to the sun heating it, which it wouldn’t do if we used it.
It is really important we see this the double whammy, and act on it, the only way we can act on it, with no further delay.
I am not sure we will ever hear Professors, or Scientists at any level of any conventional academic establishment ever saying this, until they know they can say it without fear of losing their hard-earned financial security.
Issuance of solar indexed stimulus would give us all that security, whilst incentivising a sun-rush of all communities to go fully solar hydrogen, keeping all aerospace airborne, and fixing the global energy problem at source once and for all.
We would do this in maybe one or two years flat, whilst defusing pretty much all crime, including war.
Like that we would be like an adult baby that always suckled from its mother, learning to just stop sucking, and accept the energy being handed to us on a plate, from the environment, for free, nothing asked in return for a single Joule of it, only that we use it wisely, by monetising it with money that has to be issued for free to reflect the value of it.
I mean if there are aliens out there, this is how they must see us, like an adult baby that still has not learned how to stop sucking.
My own calculations indicate 6KW of solar capacity might be needed to provide for a solar hydrogen powered household. This sounds prohibitve at first, but for the reasons above, this is deliberately a very generous allowance, to more or less guarantee over-production of hydrogen, as necessary to provide hydrogen that can be passed on to transportation, by every community. In truth, every community successfully employing solar hydrogen will consistently overproduce, because it is impossible to accurately predict all energy requirements in advance.
This is the same reason why we each consistently over-provide for ourselves in terms of energy, we always make sure we obtain more much for ourselves than the minimum 150 or so Joules per second we each need for life, at least in countries where we are lucky enough to be able to do that. We might even define the ability to do that, as the definition of, and a basic requirement of what we call “Civilisation”, and actually creation, expecially after we learn to actually create as a species.
Paragraphs two and three of the subject statement quoted become completely nonsensical, when we know this. No-one is suggesting a scenario of massive wind farms, far less even grids, actually.
Paragraph 4
I think para 4 deserves special comment because it vividly illustrates a problem in the way we think, which I think is conditioned by the system of all things for profit.
Efficiency of “270%” is given, as if this is something to aspire to, since it implies profit — energy profit.
Energy profit is physically impossible, though there is an explanation given, and an acknowledgement made, that actually what is happening is that the additional energy used in the calculation came from somewhere else.
Why is the figure of 270% even quoted? I would argue this is part of the sales pitch we all look for, to say to folk to try to sell whatever it is we are trying to sell.
In the case of the good prof, it’s obviously heatpumps, and I bet if we were able to trace who provides his funding, we would find at least a large part of it, is from the manufacturers of that equipment. His information there has to be seen as highly valuable to heatpump manufacturers. But what they gain, is what we lose, as we are seeing, in terms of energy.
Open the box, by connecting money with the actual energy of creation, the energy from the source of all creation, and finally we will have the world we wish we could have, it seems to me. But if we use flawed documentation like the example here, comparing heatpumps to hydrogen, all we are doing is muddying the waters, of the real urgency of the problem, and the only way out of it, it seems to me.
=============================================================
N.B. The skills of folk involved in the heatpump industry are not far away from the skillset needed for hydrogen technology. One of the main challenges of hydrogen, where much improvements can probably be made, is in the pumping requirements. It probably will never be practical to have hydrogen liquification in domestic and community installations, but they do have a requirement to have gas tank pumping and pressure regulation to around 350 bar. 700 would be even better, but it looks like 350 would give a reasonable trade-off between cost/energy lost, and benefits gained. So I would say to them why not transfer the expertise they have on heatpumps to hydrogen application — its a move they woud never regret, the hydrogen market is potentially massive, as hopefully all can see.
