Micro-combined Heat and Power

Debate between Alan Whitehead and Andrew Smith

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I have been here before—who can forget my seminal Management of Energy in Buildings Bill, a private Member’s Bill in 2005, which, among other things, tried to promote deemed permission for domestic microgeneration, or my proposed new clauses to the 2008 and 2010 Energy Bills on plans for the development of micro-combined heat and power and passive flue gas recovery schemes? I am afraid that the blank looks of those present seem to answer that question, but I am here to have another go.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way so early in his contribution and congratulate him on securing this important debate and commend his expertise. I assure him that he did not receive a blank look from me—he has been a path-breaker on this issue and is leading the way once again.

[Dr Whitehead]

I thank my right hon. Friend for ruining my opening statement about the incomprehensibility of my previous arguments, but I am grateful to him for his support and cognisance.

I am armed today with substantially better prospects than at any stage hitherto as far as micro-CHP is concerned. What is micro-CHP and why am I so exercised about it? Put simply, it is a rather prosaic technology which, while it will probably not induce conversation at dinner parties, is potentially important for all of us, because most of us possess something that looks remarkably like a micro-CHP unit—namely, a boiler. So this is about boilers.

Members will remember how a previous boiler revolution—in which I was pleased to have had a hand in developing revised building regulations—has probably been responsible for reducing more domestic CO₂ emissions than virtually any other measure of recent years. I am talking of the specification in building regulations that condensing boilers should be installed in homes. That measure was implemented in 2005 and changed the face of boiler installation in the UK. Within a year, more than 85% of new boilers installed were condensing. They were 20% more efficient than traditional boilers, saving about 15% of gas consumption as a result.

A micro-CHP boiler goes into a kitchen or on a wall in exactly the same way as a standard boiler. It also heats the house and provides hot water in the same way, but it is powered by a Stirling engine, a Rankine cycle or—this will be the case in the near future—a fuel cell boiler, all of which are efficient and produce electricity alongside their heating duties. A typical domestic installation produces, effortlessly and alongside the normal heating of the household, about 1 kW of electricity, so it might generate 10 kW of electricity over a winter’s day of heating, which is equivalent to the output of a 3 kW solar installation on a sunny day.

Micro-CHP boilers have been promising for some years. The Stirling engine was invented in 1815 and has been promising since then. Indeed, I first visited the site of the then EcoGen boiler plant in Peterborough in 2002 and was told that the product was about two years from market, but it was not, and nor were other micro-CHP plants, and I think that some people have lost a little faith in the products over the years. Now, however, very efficient micro-CHP boilers are on the market. They work well and are coming down in price with larger-scale production. I visited Ceres Power in Surrey during the autumn. It is developing an even more efficient fuel cell boiler and I am confident that it will come to market in the near future. The products are now there and, if we have the imagination, are set for the second boiler revolution.

The simplicity of such a revolution has already been demonstrated. People will have boilers in their homes for the long-term foreseeable future. What is more, about 1.5 million boilers break down or retire and are replaced every year, so it is not difficult to see that, if future building regulations favour micro-CHP boilers as replacements, that would happen not with a great deal of fuss or with many lifestyle magazine articles, but with a further leap forward for domestic energy sustainability, which we will have to work on urgently over the next few years, as the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), is well aware, with the emergence of the green deal and the energy company obligation.

The potential of 1 million boilers installed by 2020 is, on any reckoning, considerable. Not only would that level of installation generate about 20 GW of electricity on a typical winter’s day—which is about equivalent to what we import via interconnectors on any given day—but 1 million householders would save considerable sums on electricity through self-generation, for which there is considerable appetite, as suggested by the upsurge in solar photovoltaic installations. Micro-CHP-generated electricity is eminently compatible with solar PV, because we would generate far greater amounts of electricity at precisely those times of year when solar PV generates least.

The second boiler revolution could act just as dramatically in reducing emissions. Even if those 1 million boilers replace older condensing boilers, rather than non-condensing models, after a 10-year life, they would generate a saving of more than 2 million tonnes of CO₂, which is about half the total estimated CO₂ savings that the Committee on Climate Change has pencilled in by 2020 for the results of greater efficiency in household appliances. That would be a dramatic contribution to emissions abatement.

The heating and hot water taskforce produced the “Heating and Hot Water Pathways to 2020” report last year. It underlines the potential and relative straightforwardness of the revolutionary path:

“Since it is a boiler replacement the route to market is already well established. With over 1.5 million gas boilers installed in UK homes each year (most of which are replacements) the potential market is huge. Also as a direct boiler replacement there is likely to be less installer and consumer resistance compared with other low carbon technologies.

MicroCHP has been said to have the greatest mass market potential of any emerging low carbon domestic microgeneration solution. Studies have shown that microCHP could displace as much as 90% of existing boiler sales.”

That is the ambition that we could set ourselves.

I have given the sunny uplands vision, which will be generated, possibly, by nothing more than a stroke of a pen on a building regulation during the next few years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andrew Smith]

Before my hon. Friend leaves the sunny uplands, is not another of their aspects the fact that a lot of the technology’s development has taken place in this country, so, as well as its environmental benefits, it has industrial and employment benefits? We do not want this to be another industry in which breakthrough developments happen in this country, only for the commercial exploitation to go abroad.

[Dr Whitehead]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that important point, although I am slightly worried that he may have broken into my office and looked at my speech, because I am about to address that precise, important point on this clutch of technologies and their developers.

After the sunny uplands, we have to look at the reality, which is somewhat different. The industry has, on few resources, determinedly placed itself in a position in which it can supply reliable boilers over the next few years to the quantity that I have sketched out, and in so doing substantially reduce the cost differential between micro-CHP and conventional boilers. As my right hon. Friend has mentioned, the UK industry is a world leader on the technologies.