Interesting, also it's effect on methane.
Like hydrogen no one has any Idea of the leakage from methane producing "on farm" bio digesters which is one of the reasons I think they are a menace, on so many levels.

What woould we do without you Will? (should say 'I'). Get more careful I suppose.

I think we are trying to heat the wrong things. Rather than trying to heat entire houses and offices, it would be cheaper and less harmful to the planet to just insulate people instead.
Abolition heating allowances and give wooly jumper and thermal underwear allowances instead. :)

Phil the DNOs are doing that mainly for electric cars, which for most people will use much more power than their heat pumps (remember only a third of the heat is delivered down the wire, the rest is delivered by air!).

The issue for me with burning green hydrogen is you start with electricity and convert it to hydrogen then to heat, overall efficiency ~50%. But a heatpump's efficiency is 300% or more. So the running costs of a hydrogen boiler will be 2x more than of a fan heater, and 6x more than a heat pump. The gas boiler industry have been curiously silent about this, because people are accustomed to gas being the cheapest fuel. I can't see why customers would want to pay 6x more for hydrogen, beyond the initial "inertia" period.

I can see hydrogen being useful for energy storage, heavy vehicles, trains, planes and some industrial heat, and for buildings which cannot use heatpumps. Hydrogen derivatives could trade energy over long distances (eg ammonia from Australia).

The Hynet experiments switching villages over to hydrogen are interesting but that hydrogen will be made from fossil gas in the refinery. To roll out "green" hydrogen, a huge infrastructure of electrolyser plants would be needed, and 6x as many wind turbines to power them - that's the capital cost to balance against the DNO upgrading the transformers.

Scottish Gas Networks are doing a green hydrogen experiment with 300 homes - they have a 5MW electrolyser, hydrogen storage tanks and are replacing everyone's boiler, for £30million
https://www.sgn.co.uk/H100Fife

Posted By: WillInAberdeenPhil the DNOs are doing that mainly for electric cars, which for most people will use much more power than their heat pumps (remember only a third of the heat is delivered down the wire, the rest is delivered by air!).

I dont know what rating EV chargers are/can be but cooking lunch just now was pulling up to 5kw and if we had a HP we'd be drawing another 4/5kw. Weve no plans for an EV but if we added a HP we'd have fried our current transformer pretty quick, without an EV. Neighbours are probably all in a similar boat but ours only came to light with the application for extra PV.

Looking further afield than our locale, if I look at our DNOs distribution heat map the majority of it is red meaning its at its limit https://www.spenergynetworks.co.uk/pages/sp_manweb_heat_maps.aspx. Im guessing its a similar picture country wide?? Thats before any mass transition to electric.

On the cost of hydrogen, I dont think most people look past their next pay packet and if they have a choice of a hydrogen ready boiler for £2k or a HP for £10k Id be fairly sure an awful lot of people will go for the boiler and worry about running costs later. Remember also that theres lots of reports of disappointing HP performance and COPs significantly lower than 3. A badly intalled/operated HP isnt going to be cheap to run.

On the generation of hydrogen, remembering that the wind doesnt always blow to power electrolisers, Id hazard a guess that the plans for hydrogen production involve a significant proportion of natural gas produced hydrogen with CCS.

Re Hydrogen in the atmosphere, it is the only gas that can reach escape velocity and be lost from the atmosphere and the planet.

Hydrogen is incredibly difficult to keep in pipes and very explosive if it leaks out, way more explosive than “natural gas”

It will in my opinion hydrogen become the long term fuel of the future

There was some government study about hydrogen safety in houses last year, IIRC they thought that there would be more frequent gas explosions, but it would stop carbon monoxide cases. There was something about replacing the gas meter and adding extra shut off valves for more leak proofing, and replacing cookers and boilers with safer models, and having natural ventilators in kitchens etc.

The village-scale experiments in the next few years are partly to scope out this kind of work; if they switch a street at a time over to hydrogen they'll have to do the work on every house at the same time.

Unfortunately hydrogen has only about one-third the energy per m³, so a 10% hydrogen blend would only replace about 3% of the carbon energy and emissions.

I'm sure you can think of dozens of easier ways to reduce a building's carbon by 3% ! Though blending in some hydrogen would push up the cost of the gas supply, which might have a greater effect on reducing consumption.

To have a meaningful impact, we'd need to replace 100% of the methane with green hydrogen, which is forecast to be sufficiently available from the 2040s. Any "hydrogen ready" boiler fitted today, will have worn out and been replaced before that hydrogen supply arrives. AFAICS It's just a green marketing gimmick for the fossil gas boiler industry.