Earth Notes: General Bibliography (cretu2022scale)

• [cretu2022scale] Codrina Cretu and India Kerle and Dimitris Sarsentis and Andrew Sissons How to scale a highly skilled heat pump industry (accessed 2024-02-12), Nesta, 2022-07, PDF (report) (BibTeX).
  abstract

  Replacing gas and oil boilers with low-carbon alternatives is crucial if the UK is to meet its net zero emissions target. Over the next three decades, around 25 million fossil fuel boilers will need to be swapped for less polluting heating systems. That cannot be done without skilled people to do that work. The UK Government's main focus so far has been on increasing consumer demand for heat pumps, which is undoubtedly crucial. We see some indications that demand is beginning to increase — for example, our recent research1 suggested that more than 1 in 10 homeowners would choose a heat pump over a new gas boiler, even before factoring in government subsidies. In this paper we argue that growing the supply of highly skilled engineers and having productive companies to employ them may be even more important and challenging than increasing demand. The low carbon heating sector needs concerted action from governments and others to increase the number of skilled people in the workforce and improve productivity, so that the sector can install more heat pumps. We estimate that there are currently 3,000 trained heat pump engineers in the UK, and that will need to increase to at least 27,000 in the next six years, an average increase of 4,000-6,000 per year. This is a significant challenge. It means training more new engineers every year than are currently in the whole industry. These new engineers need to be highly skilled. Installing heat pumps is challenging work, and the consequences of poorly installed heat pump systems will be serious, both in terms of high energy bills and damage to the reputation of heat pumps. ...