Last week I launched a report in Parliament on the future of our gas grid. It followed an enquiry I’d been co-chairing with Alan Whitehead from the Labour Party and Callum McCaig from the SNP.
In our report, we’ve been looking at what role gas might have in our future energy mix whilst still achieving our decarbonisation goals. So much of the debate so far has been focussed on moving away from gas towards providing heat through electricity or heat networks. Both will be increasingly common, especially in areas like ours where the gas grid is not universal. However, the reality is that millions of homes and businesses have gas fired heating systems and beneath our roads is a gas network that is worth billions of pounds. We’d be mad not to look at how that infrastructure might be used in the future.
Our conclusion is that we will not decarbonise heat through electricity and heat networks alone. We won’t even get close. Instead, by introducing ever higher levels of bio-gas into our system we will incrementally decarbonise heat without consumers really noticing. However that will only get us so far. The long term future must the use of hydrogen.
There isn’t room here for me to go into the detail of that but if you’d like to read the report for yourself, you can find it at www.policyconnect.org.uk/cc. Right now, making hydrogen is pretty expensive and uses a lot of energy. In the future, however, that process will be more efficient and with it all sorts of opportunities for heat and transport will be unlocked. In the meantime, we need to make sure that we in Government make policies that allow this future to be achieved whilst minimising costs to the consumer.