This week the Energy Bill returned to Parliament for its Second Reading which was a chance for me to return to the theme of one of my own Bills at the beginning of the year: helping those in rural communities and using kerosene boilers to heat their homes to switch to renewable fuels like Hydro-treated Vegetable Oil (HVO) instead. It is a proposal that has attracted a lot of interest and dozens of other MPs in the House of Commons contacted me to offer support.
There are currently 1.7 million households in rural communities in the UK using conventional kerosene boilers and such boilers are common in rural parts of Cornwall that are not connected to mains gas. Under current Government proposals, all "off-gas" homes in rural communities will be banned from purchasing replacement boilers from 2026 and expected to have an air source or ground source heat pump system instead. Such systems cost at least three times as much as conventional boilers and they are inappropriate and less effective in many older properties. The capital costs involved in such a change are a huge barrier to large-scale adoption and it will take over a decade to see any meaningful change in carbon emissions from such a policy.
It can often cost around £12,000 or more to convert a rural property to an air-source heat pump and often, in areas like Cornwall, the equipment can be prone to decay and rusting. It also requires a lot of additional insulation in homes, with which comes a lack of ventilation. In some old properties, an associated problem of increased insulation is an increased risk of mould and the health problems that come with that. There is also a lot of resource waste because in some cases entire radiator systems need to be torn out and replaced. A better way would be to allow existing kerosene boilers to be converted so that they can run on renewable liquid fuels, like Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO). It only costs a few hundred pounds to change the nozzle in the boiler and adjust pressures slightly. This also extends the life of any existing boiler and guarantees a reduction of carbon emissions by around 87% in the near term, so it moves you faster towards the objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions quickly.
The village of Kehelland has been running a ground-breaking pilot into the use of HVO in traditional kerosene boilers. The results have been incredibly encouraging, and the fuel has been embraced by the community. Residents report that the fuel burns more efficiently and they typically use about a third less fuel to get the same outcome. The local chapel uses the church hall some evenings and wants to be able to switch the heat on intermittently, it is far better than the alternative of a continuous air source heat pump and the school finds that it's a better option to heat the space they need in the school much of which is still within a traditional Victorian building.
If we are to meet our net zero ambitions and the crucial carbon budget staging posts in the meantime, the key is to make it as easy as possible for people to make the change through smaller steps. The easier we make it and the more effort we put into making sure that they do not need to radically change their way of life, the faster the uptake will be; and the faster we get uptake, the quicker we will get to net zero. That is why I will be using the opportunity of the Energy Bill to make the argument on behalf of those rural residents by calling on the Government to bring forward changes that allow the use of renewable fuels like HVO.
Read about George's 10-Min Rule Bill here: https://www.georgeeustice.org.uk/news/hvo-alternative-kerosene
