Heat Pumps and Hydrogen - What is the future in heating? 

The achilles heel of hydrogen (which everyone seems to be missing) is in a future where we're not burning fossil fuels, it will be far more expensive to heat your home with hydrogen than with a heat pump. At best, a hydrogen boiler will be 95% efficient. A heat pump is 300-400% efficient. And don't think that hydrogen will be cheaper than electricity (per kWh), as is currently the case with natural gas. You need electricity to create hydrogen, and the process is only around 80% efficient. So for every 1 kWh hydrogen created, there would be the cost of 1.25 kWh of electricity baked into it's purchase price. So not only will electricity be cheaper than hydrogen (per kWh), but heat pump will crush a hydrogen boiler on efficiency. You'd be better off running bog standard electric radiators in your home, rather than a hydrogen boiler.

My problem with the alternative system is in the event of a power cut (brown out ) common in rural England, your stuffed so to speak especially if your setup uses a cylinder free setup . The U.K. government forced us to have a max of 4kw at the behest of the electric grid who said we would have the issues that Germany have with so many old coal plants being shut down from 2012 now 10 years later were feeling the effects by rising power and a significant amount being imported , with the demand of end of sale of existing we are creating a huge problem, sure I understand the need to move away from diesel heating systems but lpg systems still make over 20% of the grid where utility and builders didn’t want to run mains , but none of the new technology can be used by flat owners and the cost to retrofit would be huge non which landlords would be willing to pay for willingly

Yes the "hydrogen economy" is a buzz phrase at the moment and not just in the Uk. Countries across the world from Peru to Singapore to Australia are talking of investing heavily . So the UK will invest also for fear of missing out. The UK has the advantage of a large gas network but it will need to be relined to prevent compressed hydrogen from just seeping through it. Blue hydrogen may be a stop gap measure and is being being promoted by the oil and gas industry as they have the technology to produce it so no surprise there. Green hydrogen prduced by electrolysis ,the process has been known for about 200 years; is a simple process but little investment has been spent on large scale technology hence it is currently expensive to produce. There is is no one process does it all solution. Hopefully we will be wise enough to develop those technologies that are low carbon regardless of the high initial investment costs ( inevitable because as you say we have left it to very late in the day) than through those groups with vested interests in current polluting technology..

Hydrogen will be expensive and replacement of large parts of the gas network will be required (embrittlement). It's 3.6 times greater in volumetric density which means it needs much higher compression in the gas network. Which require new more powerful compressors. Not doubting it can't be done, it's just terribly innefficient. To get to net zero we need to make efficient use of energy and hydrogen should be reserved for use cases where no other solution exists. iE industry and long haul aviation. understand we have leaky housing stock but this is also energy wastage. High temp heat pumps can work in leaky housing stock and you might only get a COP of 1.5 but it would still be more efficient than losing 30% of electrical energy to electrolysis of water (using electricity) compressing it and pumping it into people's houses (using electricity) to then burn it. Even at 100% efficiency is poor due to losses in production. I'd be very surprised if there is much uptake and cost is normally what drives success.

A cheap £1500 hydrogen boiler is more affordable then a £15,000 heat pump install.. Get the cost down and it'll take off..