Double down. Already, reality has started to bite with the EV market and consumer resistance. The idea of penalising manufacturers and installers if they don’t meet stupid targets for heat pumps was dropped by the Conservatives, because they couldn’t force a reluctant market to take them, so, this being Labour and that twat Miliband…
Miliband won’t directly force households to rip out their boilers and install heat pumps. Even he wouldn’t go that far. At least, I hope he won’t.
Instead, he’s turning up the heat on boiler makers by forcing them to make more gas pumps – even if nobody wants to buy them.
Ultimately, consumers will pay the price.
Under his plan, boiler manufacturers will face open-ended fines if they fail to make the Miliband-mandated correct number of heat pumps every year.
It’s a disaster in the making.
Yeah, sure. You can see it. I can see it. Everyone with half a functioning brain cell can see it, but this is Ed Miliband we are talking about. Intellectually challenged and ideologically driven. He will legislate away any objection to this stupid policy. A Ceausescu moment really can’t come soon enough for these nasty bastards.
Manufacturers are warning they will have to hike the price of boilers people do want to buy, to cover the cost of making those they don’t.
This could easily add £180 to the cost of an extra gas boiler.
My boiler still has a few years left in it. Hopefully this moronic policy will have imploded by the time I need a new one. If not, however, I’ll pay the £180 and have a warm house. I am not – absolutely not, never in a million years not – having a heat pump just as I’m not having an EV. Any little thing I can do to scupper the policies produced by these ideologues, I’ll do it.
Wasn’t this the twat who couldn’t even manage to successfully eat a bacon sandwich?
And he’s in charge of energy policy?
FFS.
It’s almost enough to make you want to run for office…
Yep, that’s the twat. What’s more, he failed to eat a bacon sandwich about a week after saying he wanted to be the first Jewish Prime Minister. He was also the twat who came up with the infamous “Ed” stone, the 2001 A Space Odyssee like slab with a list of bullshit pledges etched on it.
It is long past time for car manufacturers and boiler manufacturers to band together and simply refuse to comply.
Our gas boiler is just over a year old so it will hopefully outlive the madness. Are heat pumps more energy efficient than gas boilers anyway? Turning gas into electricity in order to drive a heat pump which becomes less efficient when it gets colder, as opposed to just burning gas directly for heat, sounds like one of those ideas that hasn’t been thought through. The same can be said for so called zero emmission cars. Wind and solar power provide only a tiny fraction of our electricity, most of it comes from nuclear or good old fossil fuels. So your zero emmission car is actually just an emmisions but way over there car. That is without mentioning your massively polluting battery which means that your car will go to the crusher and have to be replaced in a laughably short time.
If these things were actual solutions to an actual problem then these government policies might, only might, be justified. But what we have is a non problem and solutions that wouldn’t work even if there was one.
With milk float, a part of the laughable fantasy that they are replacements for real cars is that they can be comparably priced.
I had a quote for a new gas boiler a few years ago (mine’s 37 and still going strong. Damn good those Pottertons!), including fitting, £2.7k (needs new flue arrangements to comply with current legislation).
What’s the cheapest I could get a cunt pump? I’d be amazed, even with bungs and bribes, if it was less than three times this. Even if the same thing happens with milk floats and manufacturers desperately try to flog off unwanted stock, would it even come down to twice as much?
£180?
Not even noise.
For a cunt pump to have even a remote chance of coming close to the cost of gas (even LNG from the states) over it’s life, the house has to be be properly and efficiently insulated.
Mine is anything but, and the cost of making it so (if at all possible to the requisite degree) moves it from laughable to certifiably insane!
I am beginning to wonder if Lammy really is the dumbest starmtrooper in the einzatzgruen of idiocy!!
It’s a very competitive space and there are many opinions on who is the thickest. One thing is certain. They are all in with a chance.
Indeed!
The ground is thick with enemy thick
In any other profession, there is a requirement for a minimum level of competence. With politics any half-wit can get elected and then govern the country with precisely the results we are witnessing. They have a combined IQ that almost matches my shoe size and I have small feet.
This is what happens if you voted Labour (or Conservative/LibDem, thus depriving Reform of a majority).
The nice part is that the surplus heat pumps don’t have to be functional and reliable, as they would if they were going to real customers. They just need to pass, to a minimum standard, whatever level of inspection the Government requires which is probably just paperwork. Then they can be whisked smartly off to be crushed and recycled. That’s probably how the cost is being kept down to £180 per real boiler.
The surplus heat pumps don’t even have to be crushed – just dismantled, so that the components can then be re-used to create “new” heat pumps…
Don’t know if it’s viable to recondition conventional boilers but if so then the right people will be in for a bumper few years.
Until Rachel Thieves hits them with a windfall tax that is.
Our new gas boiler is basically paying for itself by being much more efficient than the old one which really was quite an antique. It also takes up much less space in the house, it’s about the size of a fridge and lives in the cupboard beside what was the fireplace. The old system used a back boiler and there were two water tanks in the loft and one in the bedroom. Altogether I’m pretty pleased with it.
The more they keep pushing the more people like us will say NO.
Sadly we’re in the monority still, just how far does this Animal Farm/1984 enlarged vision of hell need to go before the majority of proles awaken.
We had a new larger output gas combi fitted earlier in the year, not having any of their smart meters and will not under any circs be having a battery only car, would rather bloody walk, a Toyota hybrid yes we would but only Toyota because every taxi driver and his dog isn’t wrong and well all of my our Toyotas have proved totally reliable, hybrid makes sense to recover deceleration and downhill braking losses.
It’s going to be a bit “Ship of Theseus / Triggers Broom” though, isn’t it? Just keep replacing the parts on old boilers until you’ve got a new boiler in the old wrapper. The only thing stopping you is a lack of parts and that sounds like a challenge to the Chinese market.
I doubt the penalty will remain £180 for long. That’s just the first stick to beat the consumer with. Regardless of how much of the country is simply unsuitable for heat pumps.
Even the SNP killed their own ridiculous law that prevented new builds having wood burners installed.
Sanity is still a long way off, but pursuit of NetZero idiocy and the uncosted and very, very substantial costs attached will eventually start to hit home in ways that even Two Tier Kier and the morons of Labour cannot avoid or evade.
I had to have a “smart” meter fitted at our office.
When the installer came, he realised there was no power source nearby so “smart” meter is still a dumb meter, albeit new, and I still have to take readings from it…
’…but this is Ed Miliband we are talking about.’
Ah, Ed, whose nemesis was a bacon sandwich. And his leader, whose nemesis is sausages.
The Breakfast Party.
The could use the Miniscribe option. Put bricks in a box and label it “heat pump” and store them in a warehouse. “You told us to manufacture 20,000 heat pumps, our audit shows we made 20,000 heat pumps.” Job done.