Tony Gittings (pictured top) asks for balance and reason in the drive to decarbonisation…
The most recent paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA) was reported by the UK media stating that, according to the IEA, all domestic boilers fuelled by natural gas should not be sold past 2025. All major media outlets, lead by the BBC in the UK, went on to repeat the story – using the word ‘banned’ – creating the impression that legislative measures will be enforced.
Yet it has never been reported that this report was inaccurate as the IEA state that coal and oil-fired domestic boilers should be banned, not natural gas.
For the truth of the matter please look at the recent paper from the International Energy Agency (IEA) titled Net Zero by 2050: a Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector.
The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1974. The IEA was initially dedicated to responding to physical disruptions in the supply of oil. Only member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development can become members of the IEA.
The report is 224 pages long but the UK media, led by the BBC, zoned in on one recommendation stating that gas boilers powered by fossil fuels should not be sold past 2025. All major media outlets in the UK have now gone on to repeat the story creating the impression legislative measures will be enforced which will ban natural gas fired domestic boiler heating systems.
The IEA acts as a policy advisor to multiple countries with the specific aim of securing energy supplies and reducing damaging emissions. The IEA cannot impose international legislative policy. To claim the IEA have successfully engineered a worldwide ban on gas powered domestic appliances amounts to a perceived spread of misinformation.
The BBC maintains a block audience largely consisting of financially stable, middle-English consumers and relies on this demographic through its license fee so a predominant percentage of its content will logically have to appeal to this audience.
As the IEA report has advised that boilers be excluded from consumer options in domestic heating products and instead present heat pumps as a solution capable of delivering net zero, certain questions become apparent: are there enough heat pumps being manufactured globally to provide the UK and mainland Europe, let alone the entire world’s population? What happens if your home fails the prerequisite insulation standards demanded for installing a heat pump? If heat pumps are expensive to install, how expensive are they to repair? And how often will they require repairing?
Renewables – wind, solar and terrain – also feature in the global task of decarbonising the world’s fuel supply, however, collectively they fail to fulfil the criteria of a single and affordable fuel source that successfully negates the release of harmful emissions due to disparate geographic capabilities.
The IEA report calling for the ‘banning’ of gas boilers from consumer choice in domestic heating by 2025 simply fails, it could be argued, to acknowledge separate capital and economic interests which ensure international economic cohesion.
Major global companies, ports and conglomerates have issued intentions or have begun proceedings in introducing hydrogen into domestic infrastructure: Germany, The Netherlands and North West of England are regions that have expressed serious intentions in doing so, and if so, hydrogen is the more plausible option in domestic power due to its existing gas pipe accessible convenience.
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