Homeowners in England and Wales will be offered subsidies of £5,000 from next April to help them to replace old gas boilers with low carbon heat pumps.
The grants are part of the government's £3.9bn plan to reduce carbon emissions from heating homes and other buildings.
It is hoped no new gas boilers will be sold after 2035. The funding also aims to make social housing and public buildings more energy efficient.
Experts say the budget is too low and the strategy not ambitious enough.
Ministers say the subsidises will make heat pumps a comparable price to a new gas boiler. But the £450m being allocated for the subsidies over three years will cover a maximum of 90,000 pumps.
Mike Childs, Head of Science at Friends of the Earth, said number of heat pumps the grants would cover "just isn't very much", and meant the UK wouldn't meet its aim of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.
"Investment will drive down the cost of heat pumps, and technical innovation plus skills training is a part of this, but so is scale. These grants will only incentivise the best-off households."
Greenpeace UK's climate campaigner, Caroline Jones, said the government needed to provide more money to speed up the switch from gas boilers to heat pumps.
"A clearer signal would have been a phaseout of new boilers before 2035," she added.
Jonny Marshall, senior economist the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focusing on poverty, said the plan meant the UK would struggle to meet its goal of cutting emissions from homes in half by 2035.
'Affordable choice'
Heating buildings is a large contributor to the UK's overall greenhouse gas emissions, representing over a fifth of overall emissions, so there is pressure on the Heat and Buildings Strategy to deliver effective reductions.
It comes as the government prepares to outline its overarching strategy for how the UK will reduce its dependency on fossil fuels and achieve sharp reductions in emissions over the next couple of decades.
Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the grants to support the adoption of heat pumps, available from next April, would play a role in that, by helping to bring down the cost of the relatively new technology by 2030.
Currently an air source heat pump costs between £6,000 and £18,000, depending on the type installed and the size of a property.
"As the technology improves and costs plummet over the next decade, we expect low-carbon heating systems will become the obvious, affordable choice for consumers," Mr Kwarteng said.
"Through our new grant scheme, we will ensure people are able to choose a more efficient alternative in the meantime."
While homeowners will be encouraged to switch to a heat pump or other low-carbon technology when their current boiler needs replacing, there is no requirement to remove boilers that are still working, the government emphasised.
Writing in the Sun, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said "the Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi".
Mr Johnson also sought to reassure voters about the government's ambitions by stressing that the costs of low-carbon heating systems would go down over time while their introduction would help create thousands of new job opportunities.
What is a heat pump and how much will one cost me?
Heat pumps extract warmth from the air, the ground, or water - a bit like a fridge operating in reverse.
They are powered by electricity, so if you have a low-carbon source of electricity they provide greener heating.
One energy firm, Octopus Energy, said it expected homeowners would initially contribute around £2,500 to the cost of installing a heat pump, roughly equivalent to the cost of a new gas boiler. The government subsidy would cover the rest of the cost.
But many houses will require an upgrade to their energy efficiency, including insulation, before installing one.
The bulk of the £3.9bn funding spread will be invested in decarbonising public buildings, insulating and installing new heating systems in social housing and for those on low incomes, and helping to provide clean heating networks for homes that are not suitable for heat pumps.
As well as subsidies for low-carbon heating, it includes:
- £3.45bn to decarbonise buildings in England and Wales including social housing and district heating schemes
- £60m to drive technological innovation to develop clean heating systems that are smaller, easier to install and cheaper to run. This money will come from a previously announced innovation fund
Independent climate think tank E3G said that setting the phase-out date for new fossil fuel boilers was "a world-leading achievement" and the pledge to reduce heat pump costs by 2030 was to be welcomed.
However, the funding was insufficient to achieve the government's goals on reducing emissions, programme leader Pedro Guertler said.
"On energy efficiency alone, the public investment announced today falls £2bn short of what was pledged in the Conservative manifesto to 2025," he said.
In all, there would need to be a further £9.75bn invested over the next three years, he said, to meet ambitious commitments on reducing emissions.
"It's challenging, but necessary, achievable and a great investment for people, jobs, skills and manufacturing," he added.
Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, described the strategy as "meagre, unambitious and wholly inadequate", adding that Labour had pledged to spend £6bn a year on insulation and low carbon heating.
The Liberal Democrats described the heating plan as "a kick in the teeth for families across the country facing soaring energy bills this winter".
It's another piece in the Boris Johnson climate-calming jigsaw.
First, he slots in a world-leading policy halting the sale of petrol cars by 2030.
Now he lays down another piece - no new gas boilers after 2035. It's another trend-setting initiative that other nations will surely follow.
There's a problem, though. Because by that date in the middle of the next decade the PM has already pledged to cut emissions overall by 78% over 1990 levels.
Energy experts say that simply won't happen unless he provides much wider incentives for people to insulate their homes and to buy heat pumps to replace their gas boilers.
One group of researchers estimates that to meet his net zero targets he needs to invest nearly another £10bn over three years.
They hope the chancellor will fill that piece of the jigsaw in his spending review next week.
Industry sources welcomed the new strategy.
The Confederation of British Industry, representing larger UK businesses, said the strategy would help members prepare for the changes ahead.
Matthew Fell, CBI chief policy director, said it provided "a golden opportunity for both the public and private sector to pick up the pace of progress to net zero".
But he called for "a clear delivery plan for consumers, businesses and local authorities".
The chief executive of Scottish Power, Keith Anderson, said it would kick-start demand for electric heating, "allowing the industry to accelerate the delivery of electrification and quickly bring down upfront costs."
And Phil Hurley, who chairs the Heat Pump Association, said it would give the industry a confidence boost - allowing it to scale up and retrain in preparation for the "mass rollout of heat pumps".
However, Joanne Wade, from the Association for Decentralised Energy, said she was disappointed that there was "nothing about further supply chain support to build skills and de-risk market entry for smaller firms".
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2021-10-19 07:13:42Z
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