Alternative sources of heat

There are only a small number of alternatives to gas-fired heating.

Fossil fuels for heating

Oil is both dirtier and scarcer, so makes little sense as an alternative (or indeed as a heating fuel in general, given oil's unique utility as a transport fuel). Coal is relatively abundant but dirtier still, to the extent that it is no longer considered a practical option in most of the country.

Electric heating

We could use more electric heating, but that electricity will have been produced mostly from fossil fuels at around 40% efficiency. 15% of that will have been lost delivering the electricity to the consumer, before that electricity is converted back into heat. It is far more efficient, and therefore less expensive and polluting, to use the fossil fuels to produce the heat directly than to convert them into electricity and back for the purposes of heating.

Some of the big electricity suppliers argue that this electricity could increasingly come from renewable sources, which is fine so long as you are prepared to cover the landscape with wind farms (at present, the combined annual output of all our wind farms is less than 1% of our energy demand), only want to heat your house when the wind is blowing, and build giant resistors to dump the output of these wind-to-heat farms in summer.

Micro-generation

The micro-nuclear heat producer has not yet been invented and is unlikely to be. Micro gas-fired CHP boilers have been invented, and offer increased efficiency in the use of the gas, but that increase is marginal. Both the micro-CHP unit and the modern gas-fired condensing boiler can achieve over 90% efficiency, but the CHP unit wins by displacing a little electricity that would otherwise have been produced less efficiently. But electricity is a small part (around 10%) of the output of these units, so the benefit is small.

Renewable heating

The only options that can make a significant impact on our dependence on natural gas for our heat supplies are a small number of renewable technologies. Solar thermal panels, heat pumps and geothermal energy have their uses to a greater or lesser extent depending on climate and geology, but by far the most significant of these options is the use of biomass to produce heat.

Biomass fuels

Biomass is (roughly) anything that grows. Solid biomass can be burned to produce heat directly, or the wetter forms that don't burn so well can be digested anaerobically to produce a gas that can be burnt to produce electricity and/or heat or possibly even compressed as a transport fuel.

Biomass has not been much used in the UK in recent years, and the little that remains is generally directed to inefficient applications by perverse government incentives. Summerleaze is investing in the production and supply of biomass fuels such as wood pellets or biogas from anaerobic digestion, to try to encourage the more widespread and practical adoption of biomass for heating and power-generation.