1000. When installed well, and despite the Energy Price Guarantee being in place, heat pumps are cheaper to run than gas boilers, but action is needed to ensure that this remains the case, and that the market delivers on this momentum.
1001. Improving the efficiency of heat pumps reduces running costs significantly. Nesta, a UK innovation agency which designs, tests and scales new solutions to society's biggest problems, told the Review that making heat pumps just 8% more efficient a year could achieve savings for households of £65-£150 a year. The Review's own analysis has found that bringing the coefficient of performance (power supplied to the home by the heat pump vs. the amount supplied to the compressor) up from 300% to 350% could dramatically improve savings for the average household and equalise the distributional impacts of net zero so that more household groups end up with a net saving. The coefficient of performance can be affected by different factors, from the unit itself, the nature of the home it has been installed in, the time it is turned on and the quality of the installation.
Government should choose from multiple options which could help increase heat pump efficiency: • Suppliers say this could be done via a mandate stating the minimum efficiency which needs to be achieved by all installations. Government should test whether this could be done by most major installers for most properties. • Set up a heat pump coefficient of performance competition, run for example by the Energy Efficiency taskforce. This will show the state-of-the-art technologies with higher efficiencies and allow others to replicate these. • Quality of the installation matters; training and installation standards need to be accelerated to support this. |