@derek-m 

So , having paused for breath. I'll respond:

Having moved last year from a 200 YO cottage which did not lend itself to much in the way of green technology, I now live in a 30 YO bungalow with tiled roofs offering S and WSW elevations. As well as a lot of additional insulation, I have replaced and upgraded the water cylinder, removed the 30YO oil boiler and fitted an LG ASHP, replaced the electric radiators with an AAHP in that part of the house which doesn't have central heating and added 9kW of PV panels and a 13.5kWh battery. I have augmented that with 5kW of solar power in the latest Ripple Energy cooperative and I will add 7kW of wind power through Ripple as soon as they open a new windfarm scheme. In total that will more than cover my total consumption. I've also built 9 raised vegetable beds, a polytunnel, a hen coop, and 5,000l of rainwater storage to complement the fruit trees which were already here.  My primary aim with all of this is CO2 reduction, my secondary aim is to recover some of my up-front costs with downstream savings, and although most of these investments will never produce a payback I will always try to use them as efficiently as possible. I have a PIH car which completes ~90% of journeys on electric power alone, and we use ebikes for local trips. I am very conscious that one round trip to the Montana for my wife and I to see our granddaughter produces five times as much CO2 as twelve months of hot tub use, so I travel less, use Zoom more and stuff insulation into my hot tub cabinet.

On heat pumps:

The industry and the technology are by no means ready for mass adoption. The control systems and documentation are complicated and often opaque, installers know boilers well but don't really understand heat pumps, and customers struggle to use them appropriately. It's much easier to set up and run them badly than well, hence the often damning reports in the press. I'm an engineer and latterly an IT specialist with 40 years experience, and it took me two months to adjust the configuration of my heat pump so that it runs efficiently, and I am still making minor adjustments, - and yet my installer was pretty good. This is all very disappointing, as the underlying technology is sound and capable of doing a good job. Maybe I can get ChatGPT to knock up a decent manual before it exterminates humanity?

On the grid and TOU tariffs:

Upgrading the grid is a necessary consequence of the replacement of locally burned fossil fuels in cars and houses with centrally generated electricity for EVs and heat pumps.  One of the main points of TOU tariffs is to spread the load on the grid more evenly, and so make more consistent and efficient use of our constrained infrastructure. Local generation and storage will also reduce the need for long distance transmission  If it happens that everyone , driven by their tariff, follows my lead and starts charging their EVs at 2 am instead of when they get home from work, then the tariff schedule will shift accordingly and restore the balance.

On the government:

Government interventions are confused and counter productive (for instance giving grants to pay for heat pumps,  while discouraging take-up by loading green levies on electricity rather than gas). There are no easy answers, but there are some answers, just no strategic vision or political will. This government won't change, so I will vote to replace it in 2024 as I did in vain in 2015 and 2019.

1. The government could do a lot to improve the housing stock, not least by running a long-term and large-scale assisted insulation scheme rather than (as it has) setting up and cancelling "eco" schemes so often that reputable local contractors can't be bothered to apply for certification.

2. Onshore wind is cheap and green, and giving local people cheap electricity does a lot to overcome the nimby factor. The government could get this going again almost immediately through a minor planning change.

3. Personally I am in favour of a sliding scale for domestic electricity prices, with no standing charge, a very very low price for the first annual MWh and rapidly increasing costs thereafter, perhaps with some allowances made for those without access to reticulated gas. If necessary this could be restricted on a means-tested basis. 

A few ideas....

Glyn

@glynh

Thank you for the clarification.

I am pleased to see that you are not one of those people who would just like cheap electricity to run their hot tub, whilst some pensioners cannot afford to warm some food or heat their home.