Mr. P.J. Ryan:

I was looking into it since I wrote that. It is not the ideal solution. I modelled the links for years and you always reduce the demand first, so that means insulating the house and then you would add in the renewable. Looking at the figures and the targets one has to be realistic and ask if there is a transition we could do instead. I do not know how many gas boilers are replaced every year because they are end of life and people do not want to insulate their homes. It is just a huge inconvenience and expense to insulate their house in order to get the heat pump to work efficiently. You can replace a gas boiler and have a heat pump sitting alongside it in a hybrid system and it is all by the one manufacturer. It is all controlled. As we have such a mild climate, maybe for 50% of the time that heat pump would be running to generate hot water during the summer and maybe for the shoulder seasons of the year or depending on the temperature. It would be all programmed into it. You would programme in your electricity rates such that maybe when it gets to 7°C or lower, the boiler would come in. It is not perfect but rather than being absolutely heat pump or fossil fuel maybe there is an interim step. It is a little bit like the EVs with plug-in hybrids. For a lot of people it is behavioural.