29 Jan 2022 | The Future of Heating Your Home

Show #1357

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Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world, welcome to EV News Daily for Saturday 29th January. It’s Martyn Lee here and I go through every EV story so you don't have to.

Thank you to MYEV.com for helping make this show, they’ve built the first marketplace specifically for Electric Vehicles. It’s a totally free marketplace that simplifies the buying and selling process, and help you learn about EVs along the way too.

When it came time to decarbonise my travel, there were already some great choices of electric vehicle on the market when I wanted to buy one. As many of you know our first EV, many years ago, was the original Renault Zoe. 

After you've bought your first EV, many people turn to other things in their life which needs to be cleaned up. And one of those is home heating. I remember growing up in the 1980s with overnight cheap rate electricity, which would be used to heat storage heaters, which would give heat slowly during the day. They were honestly terrible! But they were electric.

In all of my adult life, in every house I've owned or rented, we've always had gas heating. And often gas cooking as well. In fact 17 million homes in the UK alone still used gas boilers, they burn tonnes of fossil fuels to stay warm. But only recently on my visit to Octopus Energy did I discover that 1.5 million people in the UK replace their boilers every single year! That seems to me even higher than the amount of people who replaced their cars every year.

If we can replace our cars to be green, why not our boilers, and heat our homes with electricity? The answer of course is that there has been no suitable alternative until recently. I was invited, alongside my friend Nick Raimo from the EV Nick YouTube channel, to go and look inside a secret research building owned by Octopus Energy.

From the outside you'd never know what was to be found locked away inside. On the outskirts of London, in a giant warehouse, Octopus Energy have built two real life detached houses. One built exactly to 1970s building specifications, and a second one built to more modern standards. Inside they are decorated, furnished, and if you didn't know better look like any other home.

We were invited down there before Christmas to have a look at the work octopus are doing with heat pump technology. We discovered that heat pumps have been around for 160 years, and when you think about it we use them every day. Our kitchen fridge is just a reverse heat pump. The advantage of heating our homes with a heat pump is that they are crazy efficient. 

However until today, we just never had the technology to decarbonize our home heating and make it as responsive as a gas boiler. Heat pumps use electricity to exchange heat, taking energy from the cold side and moving it to the inside. For every kilowatt of electricity I heat pump uses, it creates between two and four kilowatts of heat. There four times as efficient as a traditional boiler. Just as I'm always saying on this podcast, we need to provide people the help and support they need to buy an electric car. And exactly the same applies to home insulation, solar PV, solar thermal, and heat pumps.

Nick and I spoke to Jon Szymek [Shim-mek], CEO of Octopus Energy Services, to find out more. I started by asking Jon why we need to bin our gas boilers….

NEW QUESTION OF THE WEEK WITH EMOBILITYNORWAY.COM

Tom Moloughney’s Lucid Air 70mph range test yielded a real world highway range of 500 miles. That raises the bar by a huge amount and make the Lucid Air easily the longest range EV ever tested. But…do EV’s ever need a range of 500 miles?

Email me your answer now: hello@evnewsdaily.com

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