Heat Batteries: Decarbonising Homes

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Deirdre Costigan]

I am sure that the Minister will have more to say on that when she responds.

Heat batteries in the UK currently face a significant disadvantage compared with heat pumps as they are not eligible for a grant under the boiler upgrade scheme. I know the Minister is continuing to look at how she can maximise the benefits of the scheme and I hope she will also look at whether new technologies such as heat batteries can also be supported.

Unlike heat pumps, heat batteries are not on the list of energy-saving materials that qualify for VAT reductions, so extending VAT relief to heat batteries would help to heat the 20% of homes currently missing out. I have written to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to ask him to consider reducing VAT for heat batteries, and I hope the Minister might work with him on that.

There are barriers to installing networked ground source heat pumps that use heat batteries, including planning considerations and the need to adopt a street-by-street approach that can upgrade hundreds of homes in one go. The Minister has already committed to changing planning rules for air source heat pumps. I hope that she will consider whether changes also need to be made for networked ground source pumps and that she will include networked heat pumps allied with heat batteries in the forthcoming low-carbon flexibility road map she is working on.

To give certainty to British businesses investing in innovative technologies such as heat batteries, we need to ensure that there are consistent heating requirements for new homes being built. The Minister will shortly be bringing forward the new future homes standard to end the scandal of gas boilers still being installed in new homes. I hope the standard will include heat batteries and other emerging technologies.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way; she has been very generous and has brought a genuinely important issue to the House. She mentioned the future homes standard. According to a calculation I carried out, if every new home built since 2015, when the Conservatives cancelled the zero-carbon homes programme, had solar panels on the roof, we would have saved around 30 MW of energy—enough to obviate the need for an entire gas-fired power station. As a complement to what she is arguing for, I hope that she would support solar panels on every new house. My constituents in Taunton and Wellington cannot understand why that is not already a regulation.

[Deirdre Costigan]

We do not have solar panels feeding into our energy system to that much greater degree because of the last Government; it is as simple as that.

I will continue with the changes that I would like the Minister to consider. Lastly, I would like her to think about heat pumps and heat batteries and the way they both currently use electricity. Electricity can make them more expensive than gas boilers, which is one of the big barriers to consumers. It sounds strange, but because of the way the market works, the price of electricity depends on the price of gas. It is surely unfair that a levy is paid on the electricity used by heat batteries, but those levies are not paid back when and if they feed back into the grid.

We need to look at the electricity market to see if there are ways of splitting off the price of cheaper renewable energy from the price of gas to reflect the true value of energy storage. I hope to hear more from the Minister on that point, as part of the review on the electricity market that she has committed to undertake.

Every family and business in the country has paid the price of Britain’s dependence on foreign gas markets. Retrofitting homes with the help of heat batteries is just one of the range of actions we need to take to bring down bills and keep Britain’s leaky homes warm. In just six months, the Government have already made huge advances in increasing our energy security, and I look forward to hearing more from the Minister on her plans to harness new technologies to protect the cost of heating our homes from decisions made in other countries.