On the credibility of the heat proposals, in the near term, the focus on off-gas-grid homes and heat networks in urban centres has quite a large potential. We might be able to get up to 30 per cent renewable heat. That is definitely credible, but it should be made clear in the climate change plan that that is what the Government intends to do.
You are right to pick up on the credibility of gas-grid hydrogen in the longer term. The pathway in the Scottish Government’s plan is far quicker than the one that is recommended by the Committee on Climate Change, and I would be interested to know how the almost overreliance on renewable heat in buildings has come about.
It looks as though we are easing off on fabric energy efficiency initially and then going quicker on it in later years, in a kind of back-loading of effort. You are absolutely right to pick up on that policy, because it is questionable in terms of the technology that will do it and what has been moved to give it space. In my view, energy efficiency has been slowed down in favour of an indeterminate policy for the gas grid.
Let me clarify my views on hydrogen in the gas grid. The best way to tackle the heat issue is to come at it from the heat pump side and the heat network side. We can make inroads on either side of the gas network and then, at some future point, make a big decision on that technology. The options are not quite clear. Previously, we tended to have hybrid electric heat pumps in homes, with a small gas boiler to top up the supply during really cold periods, so that all the combined electricity demands did not create too much of a burden on the electricity system. That approach has changed slightly in recent years, and there is a new focus on hydrogen as a possible way of decarbonising buildings. People like that, because it sounds like business as usual: “Let’s just put hydrogen into the gas grid.”
However, we need to be clear on what we are talking about. The hydrogen would have to be produced from biomethane, gas or coal, and we would need a feedstock. Given the quantities of hydrogen that would be needed to supply buildings, it would probably have to come from either gas or coal. We would then need to use carbon capture and storage to take the CO2 that resulted from making the hydrogen and store it underneath the North Sea, which would be a big infrastructure requirement. We would need CCS equipment outside cities and networks of pipes to take the gas to the coast.
The idea of locking ourselves into more fossil-fuel production raises all sorts of questions. At present, we give fossil-fuel companies a blank cheque and there is no requirement on them to develop or invest in CCS technology. The credibility of CCS as a technology that will actually come into play is dubious, given that there have been two UK Government-funded schemes to develop the technology and both have been scrapped. In this country, we are nowhere near building our first CCS plant.
I just wanted to give you the bigger picture on hydrogen.