The Government has floated the idea of banning all new gas boilers in homes from 2026 in favour of boilers that can also run on hydrogen.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has opened consultation on the idea, and this will run until 21 March 2023.

As part of a wider consultation, the topic is perhaps the most controversial, but other issues that are in discussion include boiler and heating system efficiency minimum standards and the potential role of gas boiler-electric heat pump hybrids in heat decarbonisation in the 2020s and 2030s.
The aim of all the proposals is, of course, to reduce the UK’s dependency on gas as well as reducing carbon emissions.

Under the plan all new could use natural gas but would have to be able to switch to hydrogen, and this could be extremely useful in situations where local heat pumps would be difficult to install or undesirable. There have already been successful trials of ‘blended’ hydrogen, where natural gas has been mixed with natural gas, and the operators of the UK’s gas grids and boiler manufacturers believe that changing to hydrogen will be less disruptive than replacing existing infrastructure.

There are, however, some groups that believe that the future is fully electric, and that gas is a dead end in the race to net-zero.

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