Returning with the second half of our discussion, Jan Rosenow shares why he likes the term heat pump, why hydrogen for building heating is DOA and more.
Recently I sat down virtually with energy policy expert Jan Rosenow of RAP on my podcast “Redefining Energy — Tech” to discuss how residential and commercial building heat solutions. In the theme of providing transcripts of presentations I’m giving in various places for people who prefer the written word, this is the lightly edited transcript of the second half of our conversation. For those who missed the first half, here’s theHi, welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech.
We also have longitudinal data of energy use at an aggregate level for the whole sector. You can look at the building sector and you see energy use and how it develops over time, and it’s gone down substantially in the UK, and you can then do decomposition and analysis.
The second thing I’d like to pull in, though, is something we haven’t talked about, which is cooling. One of the reasons that the name heat pump is problematic is that it’s taking a while for the public to clue in, the general schmo who goes about their job and worries about reality TV, that heat pumps pump heat out as well as pumping heat in. They’re like a refrigerator.
And like Europe, British Columbia, Lower Mainland buildings, British Columbia buildings had no air conditioning. We didn’t need it. It just wasn’t a requirement. We had heat. Unlike New Zealand, which doesn’t have heat in any of its buildings, which is really weird. I was down there last year, and I was like, where’s the thermostat? There is no thermostat. They have a space heater in the closet that they provide.
Because every time you say, oh, we should have a policy that’s supporting the uptake of heat pumps or district heating, someone will say, no, no, hydrogen is going to come along, that’s a waste of public money, or that’s a poor policy decision. So it was really holding back the progress that I thought we would need to make. So then my next step was, okay, let’s look at the evidence.
In fact, there was agreement that hydrogen is going to cost consumers more, is going to have higher energy system cost, and also the limited evidence that there is, has higher environmental impacts because of the increased use of resources required to produce the hydrogen in the first place. That is, electricity use and the resources required to build out renewable energy for that. That was the first piece of it. In the aftermath, there was a multitude of more studies getting published.
Has it changed the debate? I’ve been told it has, because it’s kind of provided that clarity, which I think when I started out where it wasn’t clear. Where is this debate? Like, are you pro hydrogen or pro heat pumps? It seemed like a silly debate with no evidence base behind it. Now there is an evidence base and hopefully that will have supported that clarity that we needed to see to move forward.Three or four things about this.
You’re undoubtedly familiar with RISE, the Swedish Research Institute. I participated in a freight trucking decarbonization study for Europe with RISE over the past eight months or so. One of the questions I was discussing with the lead researcher, Jakob Rogstadius, was, will there be a hydrogen gas distribution network in Europe? I said, no, look at Jan’s study.
It’s happening already in Switzerland, in Basel, in Wintertour, for example, we’re seeing municipalities taking steps towards that. I think we’re going to see more of that, whether we like it or not. Yeah, I don’t think this is stoppable. It’s going to happen, but I think if it happens, we should deal with it in a way that is orderly and managed, rather than having a chaotic decommissioning approach.
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