I REFER to the proposals from the Scottish Government earlier this week and the column from Lesley Riddoch on Thursday (Denmark has the solutions, if only Scotland would notice, November 30).
The whole world including Scotland must transition away from fossil fuels and probably much faster than planned.
We considered going all-electric recently but costs stopped us. We could have, at minimum disruption and cost, swapped our gas boiler for an equivalent electric one. They cost around the same as gas boilers and the total changeover would have taken less than two hours with no other disruption for our combi system.
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We rejected this on cost grounds as gas is app 7p per kilowatt-hour but electricity is pegged artificially at app 27p per kilowatt-hour – four times the price! The alternative of installing the recommended air heat pump would have cost well in excess £10,000, even after deduction of the available grant, and would have resulted in extensive work through our home. We are doing what we can to better insulate our home but will never bring it up to new standards without a substantial retrofit.
The Scottish Government are wrong in their approach in four ways:
1) They continue to push air-sourced heat pumps for the many existing homes like ours which are not suitable without the extensive expense and disruption described. Even then, they are noisy and struggle to keep older homes warm when the temperatures are low like now.
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2) The artificially high price of electricity is a disincentive to ditch gas. Does our government prefer to see the energy giants make enormous profits from their wind turbines rather than reducing the energy costs for our population? Increasing gas prices to match electricity would be a cruel addition to the cost-of-living crisis individuals are suffering.
3) Individual home owners are responsible for funding (net of grants) greater insulation and conversion from fossil fuel systems rather than the much more efficient state-organised systems. A whole street could be retrofitted per house much cheaper than an individual contract. Has an economic appraisal been done to calculate the effect of removing this cumulative extra expenditure from our economy? Maybe again company profits are prioritised over individuals costs?
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4) Lesley Riddoch on Thursday morning explained how established successful alternatives can work at our latitude and reduce costs. Her excellent article broadly repeats the “Green New Deal” produced by Common Weal two years ago. This costed plan covered the state-financed and state-organised retrofitting of Scotland’s homes and the installation of district heating schemes. This plan saw the ending of fossil fuel use in heating our homes, relieving individuals of the cost of bringing their home insulation up to standard and lowering individuals’ heating costs. Why are plans like those of Lesley and Common Weal propose ignored? Does our government again favour the multinationals’ profits over our people’s wellbeing?
What? It’s Westminster’s fault and our parliament doesn’t have the power or finances to fund such a scheme?
Put this, along with the NHS, front and centre of a sustained campaign for our desperation for independence and watch the support quickly grow.
Campbell Anderson
Edinburgh
NO vision and possibly a bit of nimby culture here. Part of the problem may be the lack of engineering knowledge in councils and government. If they do not understand Boyle’s law on heat transfer they are on a loser understanding the technology.
Robert Anderson
via thenational.scot
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