3 ms·

Then you had a great starting point. Replacing a gas heater with a heat pump at sub 1000 euro annual heating costs will not pay back fast, for example.

blitzar 3y ago
Most of the UK has the same if not worse starting point. Somehow the culture war decided that loft insulation is proof of the "woke mind virus".
- makomk 3y ago
  Most of the UK absolutely does not. In order to get payback numbers like that, you basically have to have no loft insulation at all, and previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/sep/27/energy.loft.insulation https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/sep/27/energy.loft.in... For a while after that, the government funded insulation top-ups in order to get an impressive sounding number of installs they could brag about, but those had much worse return on investment and that program was killed off a few years later. The thing is that we have an election coming up and a lot of the British press want the party that was in power back then and still is to lose, so they've pushed the narrative that cancelled insulation program would've achieved a lot more than it could've in reality and that people would've been saved from high energy bills if the government hadn't cancelled it for being too woke. There's been similar nonsense about other things like onshore wind for the same reason. Anyway, at least in the UK the problem is that almost all of the easy, high-return on investment insulation upgrades have been done, and the only way to have a substantial impact is through ones that have payback times in the decades. If the era of zero interest rates is over permanently, that's basically equivalent to saying they'll never pay back the cost in many cases.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    > previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008 The UK government thinks that by 2020, there were still 8 million homes with lofts and no loft insulation: > At the end of 2020, 14.3 million properties had cavity wall insulation (70 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 16.6 million had loft insulation (66 per cent of properties with a loft) and 772,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/970064/Detailed_Release_-_HEE_stats_18_Mar_2021_FINAL.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... edit: updated stats from 2022 > At the end of 2022, it is estimated that 14.8 million properties had cavity wall insulation (71 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 17.0 million had loft insulation (67 per cent of properties with a loft) and 805,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls)
    - makomk 3y ago
      Ah. Those government stats only count homes as having loft insulation if they have more than 125mm of it (this is actually documented in the PDF you linked but it's all the way on page 24 so if you just read the summary you probably missed that). In practice there are a lot of UK homes out there with loft insulation that falls short of that because there's rapidly diminishing returns from adding more and it's a lot of extra hassle to put insulation in that's deeper than the joists. Those homes have much, much worse return on investment on adding loft insulation than a house which genuinely didn't have any.
throwaway473825 3y ago
Gas heating is heavily subsidized in most European countries: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxation-policy-contradicts-climate-goals-auditors-say/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa... When the subsidies are gone - and they will be after Russia's invasion of Ukraine - reality will catch up fast.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Not really, even if the total costs doubles the payback period will be quite long. And that differential taxation needs to change first anyway - blowing up people's heating costs can easily turn into a non-starter.

blitzar 3y ago

Most of the UK has the same if not worse starting point. Somehow the culture war decided that loft insulation is proof of the "woke mind virus".

makomk 3y ago
Most of the UK absolutely does not. In order to get payback numbers like that, you basically have to have no loft insulation at all, and previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/sep/27/energy.loft.insulation https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/sep/27/energy.loft.in... For a while after that, the government funded insulation top-ups in order to get an impressive sounding number of installs they could brag about, but those had much worse return on investment and that program was killed off a few years later. The thing is that we have an election coming up and a lot of the British press want the party that was in power back then and still is to lose, so they've pushed the narrative that cancelled insulation program would've achieved a lot more than it could've in reality and that people would've been saved from high energy bills if the government hadn't cancelled it for being too woke. There's been similar nonsense about other things like onshore wind for the same reason. Anyway, at least in the UK the problem is that almost all of the easy, high-return on investment insulation upgrades have been done, and the only way to have a substantial impact is through ones that have payback times in the decades. If the era of zero interest rates is over permanently, that's basically equivalent to saying they'll never pay back the cost in many cases.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  > previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008 The UK government thinks that by 2020, there were still 8 million homes with lofts and no loft insulation: > At the end of 2020, 14.3 million properties had cavity wall insulation (70 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 16.6 million had loft insulation (66 per cent of properties with a loft) and 772,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/970064/Detailed_Release_-_HEE_stats_18_Mar_2021_FINAL.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... edit: updated stats from 2022 > At the end of 2022, it is estimated that 14.8 million properties had cavity wall insulation (71 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 17.0 million had loft insulation (67 per cent of properties with a loft) and 805,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls)
  - makomk 3y ago
    Ah. Those government stats only count homes as having loft insulation if they have more than 125mm of it (this is actually documented in the PDF you linked but it's all the way on page 24 so if you just read the summary you probably missed that). In practice there are a lot of UK homes out there with loft insulation that falls short of that because there's rapidly diminishing returns from adding more and it's a lot of extra hassle to put insulation in that's deeper than the joists. Those homes have much, much worse return on investment on adding loft insulation than a house which genuinely didn't have any.

throwaway473825 3y ago

Gas heating is heavily subsidized in most European countries: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxation-policy-contradicts-climate-goals-auditors-say/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa... When the subsidies are gone - and they will be after Russia's invasion of Ukraine - reality will catch up fast.

RandomLensman 3y ago
Not really, even if the total costs doubles the payback period will be quite long. And that differential taxation needs to change first anyway - blowing up people's heating costs can easily turn into a non-starter.