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How to cut your energy bills by 30 per cent with a heat pump (www.thetimes.com)

submitted 2 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/unitedkingdom

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

But with the UK it always comes back to having the worst insulation in the world.

Most of the UK has relatively-comfortable temperatures, so the impetus to add lots of insulation is relatively low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_British_Isles

Temperatures do not often switch between great extremes, with warm summers and mild winters.

The British Isles undergo very small temperature variations. This is due to its proximity to the Atlantic, which acts as a temperature buffer, warming the Isles in winter and cooling them in summer.

Over here, in the US, the places with the lowest temperature variations are also islands, like Hawaii. Extreme temperature swings happen in places like the Dakotas, far away from the ocean.

You've been cursed with fairly comfortable temperatures. :-)

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 2 months ago

Oh, and one other factor. I was just reading a paper on British housing policy. I'm not taken with the format -- it's imagining a world where planning restrictions on building new housing were reduced, and talking about the benefits of it -- but it does also make a number of good points, including the point that some of it is that the UK hasn't been building housing at the kind of rate that would probably be ideal for some time. Since newer buildings are better-insulated, that also means that the present stock of buildings tend to be less-well-insulated than would be the case had more construction occurred:

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IEA-Discussion-Paper-123_Home-Win_web.pdf

Although this was not initially the motivation, there have been environmental benefits as well. For a long time, Britain used to have poorer energy efficiency standards than most neighbouring countries. It is not that all British homes were energy inefficient. It is just that Britain used to have the oldest housing stock in Europe (European Commission n.d.), and the energy efficiency standard of a dwelling is strongly correlated with its age (ONS 2022). Rejuvenating the housing stock has therefore accidentally driven up its average energy performance.

This is the "the paper is from a potential future looking back at the imaginary past" format talking here.