ASHPs and all that Flak...

The perils of Sharing on Fatebook!

I usually share my Substack posts on Fatebook in an attempt to draw in a wider audience. My piece on ASHPs and all that Jazz was then re-posted by various folk (many thanks) but picked up a fair bit of flak on the way. Made me remember why I write on Substack...

The flak seemed to arise from people who had invested in ASHPs and were well pleased and either didn't read my article or misinterpreted it as me saying ASHPs don't work, hence they had made a mistake. In the end I posted a clarification and I thought I might as well put it up here on Substack as well.

above: Penrhos stream in winter- here’s where the power lies.

So I am not saying heat pumps don't work, indeed, in the article I note my good friend Jim is delighted in the gentle, even warmth pervading his home. Cosy! What I am saying is that the “one size fits all” package being pedalled by the English and Cymric governments will not suit all conditions and some folk with find they are paying a lot more to keep warm or simply can't afford to run them and there is good evidence for this, including some scare stories such as this one from Wales Online.

In some situations, such as my own admittedly rather uncommon, off-grid situation, the best deal I was offered including 4kw of solar panels, will simply not provide enough power to run an ASHP in winter. So for me its pointless to even consider them at the moment.

As permaculture designers, we know that solutions to challenges of whatever form will be context sensitive, that is, solutions will be relative to the individual, the place and the community, so the lack of flexibility in the schemes is a very serious limitation. A more flexible scheme might offer me the opportunity to invest in small scale hydro, probably the most efficient form of renewable energy generation and well suited to our increasingly wet winters here in Coed Y Brenin. (I will get to Coed Y Brenin rainfall in a Substack piece shortly, as it makes for very interesting reading and confirms scientists' predictions of global warming induced climate change).

above: me and good friend Jim who designed Proud Mary, the first water power at Penrhos. Here we demonstrate the permaculture principle, “mutually beneficial realtionships”. When we were young….or at least younger - I actually have some hair..

Rolling out 600,000 heat pumps a year for years to come will increase the UK demand for electricity massively and that's before we add in the increased demand for charging all those electric cars to replace petrol and diesel. Check out this from the BBC: “Right now, at peak times, the National Grid requires 60GW of electricity. By 2050, some estimates suggest it will need to double to at least 120GW.”

Where all that additional energy is going to come from is a moot point but apart from that, these energy intensive solutions, utterly dependant on the National Grid, do absolutely nothing for increasing local resilience which is going to be essential to get us through the ongoing disasters of global warming induced climate change. When winter storms take out power lines, all those ASHPs go down too and it doesn't matter how many solar panels you have, you will not be able to use them if they feed into the grid.

above: A good reminder that things can get cold, even given global warming. Fool on a frozen pond (me) in 2010 at -13 degrees C. Water power doesn’t work in this situation… A log burner does.

Finally, as I said in the article, the ASHP “solution” is business as usual, attempting to solve a problem using the same thinking and methodologies that got us into the problem in the first place. Great for certain businesses and GDP but unfortunately also drivers of global warming.

I thank I have said enough on this subject, for now anyway!

Thanks for reading.

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Next up is more Konsk. Till then, hwyl! Chris