Instagram's TikTok-like test feed is underwhelming, and a lot of people hate it. But it’s not going anywhere. Social network head Adam Mosseri posted a Twitter clip acknowledging the video-focused trial feed is "not yet good." He also said Instagram would invariably become more video-centric over time, as that was the content being shared on the network.
Mosseri also defended the rise of recommended posts in users' feeds. He said they were the "most effective and important" way for creators to grow their audiences. Users can pause all recommendations for a month, but is that a priority for creators, or the audience? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg situation.
The country will focus on building its own space outpost.
The head of Russia's space program says the country will withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024. It will instead focus on building its own space station as a successor to Mir. Russia, and its cosmonauts will remain on the ISS for at least the next two and a half years to fulfill obligations to partners. Earlier this month, NASA and Roscosmos signed an agreement to swap seats on flights to the ISS starting in September.
Logitech’s Aurora Collection is a line of "gender-inclusive" gaming accessories: a mouse, keyboard and headset. The devices are built around "comfort, approachability and playfulness," based on "feedback from women gamers across the community," the company said. There are some interesting features but at relatively high prices, indicative of a pink tax for products designed for women.
The city of Seville is trying something new to raise awareness of climate change. With oppressive heat waves becoming a fact of life in Europe and other parts of the world, the Spanish metropolis has begun naming them. The first one, Zoe, arrived this week, bringing with it expected daytime highs above 109 degrees Fahrenheit (or 43 degrees Celsius). It’s a system akin to ones organizations like the US National Hurricane Center have used for decades to raise awareness of impending tropical storms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The idea is that people are more likely to take a threat seriously and act accordingly when it's given a name.
The Saudi government has released image renders of what The Line could look like. The linear city was designed to only be 200 meters (656 feet) wide, but 500 meters (1,640 feet) tall and 170 kilometers (105 miles) long. It will house multiple communities encased in a glass facade running along the coast and will eventually accommodate up to nine million residents. The plans feature no roads or cars, and the city would run purely on renewable energy. The Line is part of Saudi's $500 billion Neom mega-city project, beset with controversy from the time it started. Around 20,000 people will be forced to relocate by its construction.
The city of Seville is trying something new to raise awareness of climate change and save lives. With oppressive heat waves becoming a fact of life in Europe and other parts of the world, the Spanish metropolis has begun naming them. The first one, Zoe, arrived this week, bringing with it expected daytime highs above 109 degrees Fahrenheit (or 43 degrees Celsius).
As Time points out, there’s no single scientific definition of a heat wave. Most countries use the term to describe periods of temperatures that are higher than the historical and seasonal norms for a particular area. Seville’s new system categorizes those events into three tiers, with names reserved for the most severe ones and an escalating municipal response tied to each level. The city will designate future heat waves in reverse alphabetical order, with Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vega to follow.
It’s a system akin to ones organizations like the US National Hurricane Center have used for decades to raise awareness of impending tropical storms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The idea is that people are more likely to take a threat seriously and act accordingly when it's given a name.
"This new method is intended to build awareness of this deadly impact of climate change and ultimately save lives," Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the think tank that helped develop Seville’s system, told Euronews. Naming heat waves could also help some people realize that we're not dealing with occasional “freak” weather events anymore: they’re the byproduct of a warming planet.
Formula 1 is trying to clean up its act and ensure its operations have a net-zero carbon footprint by 2030. An important part of the plan is to use 100 percent sustainable fuel in race cars, and the organization says it's still on schedule to achieve that by 2026.
It's currently developing a "drop-in" fully sustainable fuel for use in F1 cars — it claims most road cars would be able to use the fuel too. This season, F1 cars are using E10 fuel, which includes 10 percent ethanol that's said to be fully renewable. While going from 10 percent renewable fuel to a fully sustainable version in just a few years is challenging, F1 leaders are confident they can reach that goal.
“We’re working on an E fuel where the carbon circle is completely neutral so the carbon utilized to produce that fuel is the same quantity as the carbon emitted from the internal combustion engine," F1 managing director of motorsports Ross Brawn said in a statement. "It means that the engines do not add anything to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." Brawn noted that making the fuel available more broadly could help reduce emissions around the globe, especially in areas where switching to electric vehicles won't be feasible for a long time.
F1’s chief technical officer Pat Symonds, who is leading the 100 percent sustainable fuel project, said the motorsport is still in good shape to meet the 2026 target. “We’ve been working with Aramco and have now tested 39 surrogate blends of fuels,” Symonds said. “This has helped us understand the effects of the different types of blends that you can use in a sustainable fuel. We’ve been testing those in a single cylinder Formula 1 power unit, so it’s representative testing — and I think that’s helped accelerate our progress.”
President Biden is still unveiling measures to combat climate change, and his newest efforts are aimed at preventing environmental crises. The President has outlined a string of executive actions that, notably, include the first "Wind Energy Areas" in the Gulf of Mexico. The 700,000 acres will allow for enough potential offshore wind power to supply over 3 million homes, according to the administration. The Secretary of the Interior, meanwhile, will further work on wind power along the mid-to-southern Atlantic Coast as well as the Florida Coast.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has unveiled $2.3 billion in funding to bolster resilience against heat waves, wildfires and similar climate change-related disasters. New guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services expands the use of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program for air conditioning, community cooling centers and other resources to fight extreme heat.
As in the past, Biden characterized his efforts as useful for the economy, not just the environment. The wind power projects should create jobs, while the FEMA and Health Department initiatives could minimize the damage from natural disasters. These events disproportionately hurt minorities and underserved communities, he said, and they also put critical infrastructure at risk.
This isn’t as extensive a response as some expected. The Washington Post reported that Biden considered declaring a climate emergency this week, though press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed he is still open to the idea. Biden is far from alone in failing to treat the warming climate with urgency, though. Congress has struggled to pass climate-related legislation given Senate opposition from Republicans and Democrat holdout Joe Manchin. These executive moves could help Biden advance elements of his climate agenda despite the legislative roadblock.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Postal Service plans to substantially increase the number of electric-powered vehicles it’s buying to replace its fleet of aging delivery trucks, officials said Wednesday.
The Postal Service anticipates boosting electric vehicles from 20 percent to 50 percent in its initial purchase of 50,000 vehicles — with the first of them rolling onto delivery routes next year. It also proposes buying an additional 34,500 commercially available vehicles over two years, officials said.
The proposal, to be posted in the Federal Register on Thursday, came after 16 states, environmental groups and a labor union sued to halt purchases of next-generation delivery vehicles under the initial plan that was skewed heavily toward gas-powered trucks.
The new environmental proposal effectively pauses the purchases at 84,500 total vehicles — 40 percent electric — even as the Postal Service seek to buy up to 165,000 next-generation vehicles over the next decade to replace aging delivery trucks that went into service between 1987 and 1994.
Future purchases would focus on smaller amounts of vehicles in shorter intervals than the original 10-year environmental analysis, officials said.
The goal is to be more responsive to the Postal Service's evolving operational strategy, technology improvements and changing market conditions, the Postal Service said in a statement. A public hearing on the new proposal will be held next month.
The next-generation delivery vehicles are taller to make it easier for postal carriers to grab packages and parcels that make up a greater share of volume. They also have improved ergonomics and climate control.
Congressional Democrats are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy to address the recent proliferation of cryptocurrency mining within the US. In a letter sent Friday (via The Guardian), Senator Elizabeth Warren and five other lawmakers said the two agencies should work together to require crypto mining firms to disclose their energy use and emissions.
The request comes after the group recently completed an investigation that began at the start of the year. According to the letter, data collected from seven of the largest mining companies in the US, including Stronghold, Bitfury and Riot, indicates they can collectively use more than 1 gigawatt of electricity. Put another way, that’s almost enough to power all the residential buildings in Houston.
Warren and the other lawmakers say they’re concerned about what all that power use will mean for the environment and consumers. Regarding the former, they state that emissions data from three of the surveyed companies indicate they emit approximately 1.6 million tons of CO2 annually or the equivalent of the tailpipe emissions of almost 360,000 cars. “Bitcoin miners are using huge quantities of electricity that could be used for other priority end uses that contribute to our electrification and climate goals, such as replacing home furnaces with heat pumps,” the letter states.
On the latter point, the lawmakers cite a 2021 study from the University of California, Berkeley that estimated crypto mining in upstate New York raised annual electricity bills by approximately $165 million for small businesses and $79 million for consumers. What's more, they say their investigation doesn’t even scratch the surface of the full impact of crypto mining on power use and emissions in the US. “None of the companies provided full and complete information in response to our questions,” they note.
“The results of our investigation, which gathered data from just seven companies, are disturbing, with this limited data alone revealing that crypto miners are large energy users that account for a significant – and rapidly growing – amount of carbon emissions,” the letter states. By requiring crypto mining firms to disclose their energy use and emissions, the group says the EPA and Department of Energy could provide lawmakers with better data to inform future policy decisions. The agencies have until August 15th to respond to the request.
As the boundaries between developed spaces and wildlands continue to blur, the frequency and intensity of human-animal interactions will surely increase. But it won’t just be adorably viral trash pandas and pizza rats whistling on your veranda — it’ll be 30-50 feral hogs in your garbage and birds of prey predating upon your precious pekinese. Next thing you know your daughter’s knocked up and the fine china’s missing! But it wasn’t always like this, Peter Alagona explains in his new book, The Accidental Ecosystem. He explores how and why America’s cities — once largely barren of natural features — have exploded with wildlife over the past 150 years, even as populations have declined in their traditional habitats.
In the excerpt below, Alagona examines our long and complicated relationships with the coyote, one that has lasted for millennia and ranged from reverence to revulsion, a narrative now influenced by the social media hivemind.
Urban adapters and exploiters may be prepared for life among people, but are people prepared for life among them? In the 1970s and 1980s, when coyotes started showing up more often in dozens of American cities, residents and officials were unprepared, and many were unwilling to accommodate animals they saw as dangerous interlopers. As one teenager who lost her toy poodle to a coyote told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, “Coyotes make me mad. They take care of our rats, which are really disgusting. But I hate coyotes.” The same year, the Yale social ecology professor Stephen Kellert found that, among US survey respondents, coyotes ranked twelfth from the bottom on a list of “most liked” animals, above cockroaches, wasps, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes but below turtles, butterflies, swans, and horses. The most-liked animal was the dog, which is so closely related to the coyote that the two can mate in the wild and produce fertile offspring.
In his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals, the anthropologist Hal Herzog wrote that “the way we think about other species often defies logic.” This is not to say that our ideas about animals are arbitrary, but rather that the ways we think about them are shaped as much by history, culture, and psychology as by physics, chemistry, or biology. In the absence of this social context, people’s ideas about and actions toward other animals can seem nonsensical, hypocritical, or downright weird.
Animals are often presumed innocent or guilty — and thus treated with respect or contempt — based on the baggage our culture, through art or literature or tradition, has forced them to carry. An animal’s inherent or perceived qualities also matter. We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to creatures that are big, that we think are cute, pretty, majestic, or humanlike, that seem to embody admirable qualities such as grit, entrepreneurship, or good parenting, or that at the very least leave us alone. Yet such perceptions rarely reflect a species's real behavior or ecology. Many people see rats as disgusting or dangerous, even though most rats pose little threat to most people most of the time. Cats, meanwhile, seem friendly and cuddly despite being ferocious predators and disease-ridden ecological wrecking balls.
Mass and social media play especially important roles in shaping perceptions. When large and charismatic wildlife species started showing up in many American cities more frequently in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time of Kelly Keen’s death, newspapers and TV shows often adopted one of two tones: irony or sensationalism. Ironic images and stories emphasized how surprising it was to see wild animals showing up in supposedly civilized areas. Sensationalistic stories emphasized conflicts between people and wildlife. They often used military metaphors about wars and battles or echoed the paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day, comparing wildlife to undocumented immigrants, gang members, criminals, terrorists, and “super predators.”
These images were circulating in the media during an era when the proportion of Americans with firsthand experiences of wild places was flattening or even declining. During the 1970s and 1980s, \consumer products and better infrastructure fueled the growth of outdoor sports, including non hunting wildlife activities like bird watching and photography. Yet technology, which enabled so many people to enjoy the outdoors, also began inserting itself into these same people’s encounters with nature, first mediating and then replacing them. Video screens allowed Americans to spend more time watching virtual creatures and less time interacting with actual animals. Animal-themed visual media exploded in popularity, while zoos and museums struggled to attract patrons. Between 1995 and 2014, even the National Park system saw its annual per capita visitation slide by 4 percent.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the people who encountered wildlife in cities often reacted by treating these animals like the caricatures they read about in the news or saw on TV. For many, creatures like coyotes looked like either cuddly pets or bloodthirsty killers. Neither image was accurate, of course, but both had real world consequences.
When people who viewed coyotes with suspicion saw them in urban areas, often the first thing they did was call the police. Involving the police tended to turn a non problem into a problem or make a bad problem worse. Yet moving away from a law-enforcement-based approach has been difficult.
As late as 2015, New York City, which saw its first coyote twenty years earlier, was still often approaching these creatures as outlaws. That April, the New York Police Department, responding to an early-morning 911 call reporting a coyote in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, deployed tranquilizer guns, patrol cars, and helicopters. The ensuing three-hour chase ended when officers failed to corner the fugitive canine. When questioned about the costly and time-consuming incident, the NYPD contradicted a statement previously issued by the Department of Parks and Recreation saying that the city would no longer pursue coyotes that did not appear to pose a threat. It turned out that the two departments did not have a written agreement spelling out this policy. NYPD officers were not trained on how to deal with coyotes, but it was up to them to decide how to respond. The result was predictable: the same excessive force that has plagued modern policing in general was mobilized to combat a wild animal that presented little if any risk.
Over time, some cities and their residents adjusted to their new reality of living with coyotes. Jurisdictions with ample budgets, supportive residents, and helpful institutions like zoos and museums developed research, education, conservation, and citizen science programs. Some parks and police departments started working together to develop new policies and practices, limiting the use of force and trying, with some difficulty, to respond only to genuine emergencies. One of the key messages wildlife officials stressed was that the decision to launch a response should depend on an animal’s behavior — whether it appeared injured or sick or was acting aggressively — and not its mere presence.
As such messages have percolated, attitudes have evolved. In New York, as people have become more accustomed to living with coyotes, fear has given way to tolerance and even a tenuous kind of acceptance. In some neighborhoods, individual coyotes have become mascots with names, backstories, and social media accounts. Few people actually trust coyotes, and most people don’t want them prowling around their backyards, schools, or playgrounds, but many communities have shown a growing willingness to embrace their furry neighbors.
As early as 2008, studies from suburban New York showed that most residents appreciated coyotes, enjoyed having them around, and even “found the likelihood of injury from a coyote acceptable.” But people’s willingness to live alongside coyotes in their communities dropped quickly when incidents occurred, suggesting that tolerance for them remained fragile. Overall, however, the longer most people lived with urban wildlife like coyotes, the more they viewed these creatures not as threats but as natural and beneficial members of multispecies urban communities.
A company in Finland has created an an unusual storage solution for renewable energy: One that uses sand instead of lithium ion or other battery technologies. Polar Night Energy and Vatajankoski, an energy utility in Western Finland, have built a storage system that can store electricity as heat in the sand. While there are other organizations researching the use of sand for energy storage, including the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Finns say theirs is the first fully working commercial installation of a battery made from sand.
Similar to traditional storage systems for renewables, Polar's technology stores energy from wind turbines and solar panels that isn't used at once. To be precise, it stores energy as heat, which is then used for the district heating network that Vatajankoski services. Sand is inexpensive and is very effective at storing heat at about 500 to 600 degrees Celsius. Polar says its technology can keep sand "hotter than the stoves in typical saunas" for months until it's time to use that heat during Finland's long winters.
As the BBC explains, the resistive heating process used to warm the sand generates hot air circulated inside the structure. When it's time to use the stored energy, the battery discharges that heated air to warm water in the district's heating system, which is then pumped into homes, offices and even pools. At the moment, Polar's sand battery only serves a single city, and it's still unclear whether the technology can be scaled up. The BBC also says that its efficiency "falls dramatically" when it comes to returning electricity to the grid instead. It's early days for the technology, though, and other companies and organizations might be able to find solutions for those issues.
Amazon has started delivering packages by cargo e-bike and on foot in the UK for the first time as it makes more progress toward its climate goals. The company has opened a micromobility hub in central London. The company says the walkers and e-bikes will make more than a million deliveries a year from the hub in Hackney. It claims those trips will replace thousands of van deliveries.
At the outset, the e-bikes and on-foot couriers will be in service across more than a tenth of the city's ultra low emission zone (ULEZ). E-bikes and fully electric vehicles are exempt from the London Congestion Charge and ULEZ fees, so Amazon and its delivery partners will avoid having to pay those.
Amazon plans to open more e-cargo delivery hubs in the UK in the coming months. It already has more than 1,000 electric delivery vans on the road in the country. Earlier this year, the company added five fully electric heavy goods vehicles to its UK fleet to replace diesel trucks.
This isn't the first time Amazon has used cargo e-bikes. Euronewsnotes that they're being used for deliveries in five cities in France and seven metropolitan areas in Germany. It also employs electric scooters in Italy and Spain. As of last November, the company was fulfilling two-thirds of deliveries in Paris with e-bikes, on-foot couriers and electric vans.
Under its Shipment Zero project, Amazon aims to deliver 50 percent of packages with net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. It expects to become net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge.
The company also plans to run its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025. It will install more than 30,000 additional solar panels at its sites in Manchester, Coalville, Haydock, Bristol and Milton Keynes by the end of the year. Amazon has 18 on-site solar projects in the UK and it's working to double that number by 2024.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated a number of fault lines already present within the global energy supply chain. This is especially true in Europe, where many countries were reliant on the superstate's natural resources, and are now hastily looking to cut ties before the supply is shut off. This has revealed the fragility of Europe’s energy market, and caused it to drive up demand and prices for consumers all over the globe.
In the UK, things are becoming increasingly dire and energy prices are skyrocketing. Bad planning on the infrastructure side and the cancellation of several major domestic energy efficiency programs are exacerbating the problem. It’s clear that real, useful action on the national level isn’t coming any time soon. So, I wondered, what would happen if I, personally, simply tried to break up with natural gas on my own? It’s relatively straightforward but, as it turns out, it comes at a cost that only one percenters will be able to bear.
Dan Cooper: Energy consumer
I live in a four-bedroom, end-terraced house that’s around 150 years old and I’ve tried, as best as I can, to renovate it in an eco-friendly way. Since we bought it almost a decade ago, my wife and I have insulated most of the rooms, installed a new gas central heating system and hot water cylinder. We are, like nearly 20 million other households in the UK, reliant on natural gas to supply our home heating, hot water and cooking. And in the period between January 8th and April 7th, 2022, I was billed on the following usage:
Usage (kWh)
Cost Per Unit (GBP)
Cost (GBP)
Electricity (incl. standing charge)
861
0.32
£307.18
Gas (incl. standing charge)
8696.7
0.753
£678.80
Total (incl. tax and other charges)
£1,035.28
Essentially, I paid around $1,300 for my natural gas and electricity in the first quarter of 2022. That figure is likely to rise significantly, as the UK’s mandatory price cap on energy rose by more than 50 percent in April. A further price rise is scheduled for October, with the figure set at £2,800 per year, even though wholesale energy prices are no longer increasing. It’s likely that my energy bill for the first quarter of 2023 will be nearly twice what I’ve just paid. In 2020, the UK reported that 3.16 million households were unable to pay for their energy costs; that figure is likely to leap by 2023.
In the US, the EIA says that monthly utility bills rose to a national average of $122 in 2021, with Hawaii ($178 per month) and Utah ($82 per month) the most expensive and cheapest state to buy energy in. The average price per kWh is around 13.7 cents, which is less than half the comparable price in the UK as it currently stands. For natural gas, the average natural gas price for residential customers was $10.84 per thousand cubic feet in 2020.
The gas problem
Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
Much of Europe is reliant on natural gas, a significant proportion of which was supplied by Russia. Despite a rapid decline in domestic production, Europe sought to make natural gas the bedrock of its energy policy in the medium term. A 2013 policy paper written by Sami Andoura and Clémentine d’Oultremont outlined the reasons why officials were banking on it. “An economically attractive option for investors, a potential backup source for renewables and the cleanest fossil fuel, natural gas is expected to play an important role in the European transition towards a low-carbon economy by 2050.” This is despite the fact that “European energy resources are being depleted, and energy demand is growing.”
In 2007, then EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said that the bloc is “dependent on imports for over one half of our energy use.” He added that energy security is a “European security issue,” and that the bloc was vulnerable to disruption. “In 10 years, from 1995 to 2005, natural gas consumption in the EU countries has increased from 369 billion to 510 billion m3 [of gas] year,” he said. He added that the EU’s own production capacity and reserves peaked in the year 2000.
The EU’s plan was to pivot toward Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), methane which has been filtered and cooled to a liquid for easier transportation. It enables energy supplies from further afield to be brought over to Europe to satisfy the continent’s need for natural gas. But the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has meant that this transition has now needed to be accelerated as leaders swear off Russian-sourced gas and oil. And while the plan is to push more investment into renewables, LNG imports are expected to fill much of the gap for now.
Except, and this is crucial, many of the policy decisions made during this period seem to be in the belief that nothing bad would, or could, disrupt supply. Here in the UK, wholesale gas prices have risen five times since the start of 2021 but there’s very little infrastructure available to mitigate price fluctuations.
The Rough Field is a region in the North Sea situated 18 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, and was previously a source of natural gas for the UK. In 1985, however, it was converted into a natural gas storage facility with a capacity of 3.31 billion cubic meters. This one facility was able to fulfill the country’s energy needs for a little more than a week at a time and was considered a key asset to maintaining the UK’s energy security.
However, Centrica, the private company spun out of the former state-owned British Gas, opted to close the field in 2017. It cited safety fears and the high cost of repair as justification for the move, saying that alternative sources of gas – in the form of LNG – were available. At the time, one gas trader told Bloomberg that the closure would “boost winter prices” and “create seasonal swings in wholesale energy costs.” He added that the UK would now be “competing with Asia for winter gas cargoes,” raising prices and increasing reliance on these shipments.
And, unsurprisingly, the ramifications of this decision were felt in the summer of 2017 when a pair of LNG tankers from Qatar changed course. The vessels were going to the UK, and when they shifted direction, Bloomberg reported that prices started to shift upward almost instantly.
Analysis from TransitionZero, reported by The Guardian, says that the costs associated with natural gas are now so high that it’s no longer worth investing in as a “transition fuel.” It says that the cost to switch from coal to gas is around $235 per ton of CO2, compared to just $62 for renewables as well as the necessary battery storage.
Swearing off gas
MarianVejcik via Getty Images
In order to break up with gas in my own home, I’ll need to swap out my stovetop (not so hard) and my whole central heating system (pretty hard). The former I can likely achieve for a few hundred dollars, plus or minus the cost of installation. (Some units just plug in to a standard wall socket, so I may be able to do much of the work myself if I’m feeling up to the task.) Of course, getting a professional to unpick the gas pipeline that connects to my stovetop is going to be harder.
Unfortunately, replacing a 35kW condensing gas boiler (I have the Worcester Bosch Greenstar 35CDi) is going to be a lot harder. The obvious choice is an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP), or even a geothermal Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP), both of which are more environmentally-friendly. After all, both are more energy-efficient than a gas boiler, and both run on electricity which is theoretically cleaner.
More generally, the UK’s Energy Saving Trust, a Government-backed body with a mission to advocate for energy efficiency, says that the average Briton should expect to pay between £7,000 and £13,000 to install an ASHP. Much of that figure is dependent on how much of your home’s existing hardware you’ll need to replace. A GSHP is even more expensive, with the price starting at £14,000 and rising to closer to £20,000 depending on both your home’s existing plumbing and the need to dig a bore hole outside.
In my case, heat pump specialists told me that, give or take whatever nasties were found during installation, I could expect to pay up to £27,000 ($33,493). This included a new ASHP, radiators, hot water and buffer cylinders, pumps, piping, controllers, parts and labor. Mercifully, the UK is launching a scheme to offer a £5,000 ($6,200) discount on any new heat pump installations. But that still means that I’m paying north of £20,000 (and ripping out a lot of existing materials with plenty of life left in them) to make the switch.
In the US, there’s plenty of difference on a state level, but at the federal level, you can get a tax credit on the purchase of a qualifying GSHP. A system installed before January 1st, 2023, will earn a 26 percent credit, while a unit running before January 1st, 2024, will be eligible for a 22 percent credit. Purchasers of a qualifying ASHP, meanwhile, were entitled to a $300 tax credit until the end of 2021.
The contractors also provided me with a calculation of my potential energy savings over the following seven years. It turns out that I’d actually be spending £76 more on fuel per month, and £532 over the whole period. On one hand, if I had the cash to spare, it’s a small price to pay to dramatically reduce my personal carbon emissions. On the other, I was hoping that the initial investment would help me reduce costs overall, but that's not the case while the cost of gas is (ostensibly) cheaper than electricity. (This will, of course, change as energy prices surge in 2023, however, but I can only look at the data as it presently stands.)
An aside: To be honest with you all, I was fully aware that the economic case for installing a heat pump was always going to be a shaky one. When speaking to industry figures last year, they said that the conversation around “payback” isn’t shared when installing standard gas boilers. It doesn’t help that, at present, levies on energy mean that natural gas is subsidized more than energy, disincentivizing people making the switch. The rise of electric cars, too, has meant that demand for power is going to increase sharply as more people switch, forcing greater investment in generation. What’s required just as urgent is a series of measures to promote energy efficiency to reduce overall demand for both gas and electricity.
Energy efficiency
Dan Kitwood via Getty Images
The UK has had an on-again, off-again relationship with climate change mitigation measures, which has helped sow the seeds of this latest crisis. The country, with low winter temperatures, relies almost exclusively on natural gas to heat its homes, its largest energy-consuming sector. As I reported last year, around 85 percent of UK homes are heated by burning natural gas in domestic boilers.
Work to reduce the UK’s extraordinary demand for natural gas was sabotaged by government in 2013. In 2009, under the previous Labour government, a series of levies on energy companies were introduced under the Community Energy Saving Programme. These levies were added to domestic energy bills, with the proceeds funding works to install wall or roof insulation, as well as energy-efficient heating systems and heating controllers for people on low incomes. The idea was to reduce demand for gas by making homes, and the systems that heated them, far more efficient since most of the UK’s housing stock was insufficiently insulated when built.
But in 2013, then-Conservative-Prime Minister David Cameron was reportedly quoted as saying that he wanted to reduce the cost of domestic energy bills by getting “rid of all the green crap.” At the time, The Guardian reported that while the wording was not corroborated by government officials, the sentiment was. Essentially, that meant scrapping the levies, which at the time GreenBusinessWatch said was around eight percent of the total cost of domestic energy. Cameron’s administration also scrapped a plan to build zero-carbon homes, and effectively banned the construction of onshore windfarms which would have helped reduce the cost of domestic electricity generation.
In 2021, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change examined the fallout from this decision, saying that Cameron’s decision kneecapped efforts to reduce demand for natural gas. As Carbon Brief highlighted at the start of 2022, in 2012, there were nearly 2.5 million energy efficiency improvements installed. By 2013, that figure had fallen to just 292,593. The drop off, the Committee on Climate Change believes, has caused insulation installations to fall to “only a third of the rate needed by 2021” to meet the national targets for curbing climate emissions.
Carbon Brief’s report suggests that the financial savings missed by the elimination of these small levies – the “green crap,” – has cost UK households around £2.5 billion. In recent years, a pressure group – Insulate Britain – has undertaken protests at major traffic intersections to help highlight the need for a new retrofit program to be launched. The current government’s response to their pleas has been to call for tougher criminal penalties for protesters including a jail term of up to six months.
A chart, courtesy of Carbon Brief, showing the impact of the removal of the 'green crap' levies on domestic energy-efficiency installations in the UK.
Carbon Brief
Making my own power
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Looking back through my energy bills over the last few years, my household’s annual electricity consumption is around 4,500kWh per year. A heat pump would likely add a further 6,000kWh to my energy bill, not to mention any additional cost for switching to all-electric cooking. It would be sensible to see if I could generate some, or all, of my own energy at home using solar panels to help reduce the potential bill costs.
The Energy Saving Trust says that the average homeowner can expect to pay £6,500 for a 4.2kWp system on the roof of their home. Environmental factors such as the country you live in and orientation of your property mean you can’t be certain how much power you’ll get out of a specific solar panel, but we can make educated guesses. For instance, the UK’s Renewable Energy Hub says you can expect to get around 850kW per year out of a 1kW system. For a theoretical 5kWp system in my location, the Energy Saving Trust thinks I’ll be able to generate around 4,581kWh per year.
Sadly, I live in an area where, even though my roof is brand new and strong enough to take panels, they aren’t allowed. This is because it is an area of “architectural or historic interest where the character and appearance [of the area] needs to be protected or improved.” Consequently, I needed to explore work to ground-mount solar panels in my back garden, which gets plenty of sunlight.
While I expected grounded panel installations to be much cheaper, they apparently aren’t. Two contractors I spoke to said that while their average roof-based installation is between £5,000 and £7,000, a 6kWp system on the ground would cost closer to £20,000. It would be, in fact, cheaper to build a sturdy shed in the bit of back yard I had my eye on and install a solar system on top of there, compared to just getting the mounting set up on the ground. That’s likely to spool out the cost even further, and that’s before we get to the point of talking about battery storage.
The bill
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For this rather nifty thought experiment, the cost for me to be able to walk away from natural gas entirely would be north of £30,000 ($37,000). Given that the average UK salary is roughly £38,000, it’s a sum that is beyond the reach of most people without taking out a hefty loan. This is, fundamentally, why the need for government action is so urgent, since it is certainly beyond the ability of most people to achieve this change on their own.
In fact, it’s going to require significant movement from central government not just in the UK but elsewhere to really shake our love-hate relationship with natural gas. Unfortunately, given that it’s cheap, cleaner than coal and the energy lobby has plenty of muscle behind it, that’s not likely to happen soon. And so we’re stuck in a trap – it’s too expensive to do it ourselves (although that’ll certainly be an interesting experiment to undertake) and there’s no help coming, despite the energy crisis that’s unfurling around us.
