Replace your boiler with one that is hydrogen-ready#
This may be the easiest action to take when your boiler fails, but it isn’t a green measure.
British Gas says that any boiler you buy now will end up running on natural gas for its entire working life. At most, it will start to use 20% hydrogen at an unknown point in the future. This is as much as current “hydrogen ready” boilers can manage. They don’t expect a switch to 100% hydrogen to be possible until some time in the 2040s. The industry is still working on boilers that will run on 100% hydrogen, how delivery would work, and how to make a complex switch happen.
The UK is scheduled to decide what percentage of our future energy mix will be hydrogen in 2026. Any type of hydrogen is likely to be more expensive than electricity. Opinions are mixed about whether it should be used for heating but advocates largely come from companies with roots in gas heating. Hydrogen generated from fossil fuels has no carbon advantage over gas even if carbon capture is used. It’s possible to generate “green” hydrogen from water using electricity from renewable sources, but it takes six times as much electricity as it would to just use electricity to heat the building in the first place. The UK is already struggling to build enough renewable electricity capacity to decarbonise transport and other sectors. Using green hydrogen would take even more new off-shore wind farms and, some would say, nuclear power plants. Hydrogen’s big advantage is that it takes fewer changes to the building than installing a heat pump, making it an easier “sell”, but you’ll still want to make big changes to address heat loss, and Which thinks you’ll need to change your gas pipes.