Here are some useful facts on HVO especially when read alongside the comments above. This is from 2019.

HOUNSFIELDBOILERS.CO.UK "https://hounsfieldboilers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/LI2025-HVO-fuel-fact-sheet.pdf"

@prjohn thanks PRJ. They are presented as facts, but are just statements. They are presented by a company trying to sell HVO boilers. International Sustainability and Carbon Certification is mentioned. But no reference. I googled but it takes you to a German TUV site but not the research. The doc also presents 3 comparisons of CO2 foot print HVO to electric generation. UK electric CO2 generation has been dramatically reduced over the past 10 years. And also varies day to day. So there is no baseline comparison. 
That said, I can see some benefits to HVO as a short term fuel to eliminate kerosene. Homes need to be better insulated. UK needs to continue to decarbonise electric production. And move away from gas

@julianc You are correct these are not really facts. I wish I looked deeper. The website is hounsfieldboilers. co. uk which is commercial

Posted by: @editor

@jeff, thanks for that. I think it’s crazy that the government doesn’t consider alternatives. Heat pumps are amazing, but since we’ve been on the HVO trial we are currently emitting less CO2 than running our heat pump off electricity generated by gas. Even if it’s for a few years, get people using HVO instead of kerosene for those that don’t go down the heat pump route because kerosene is awful in terms of emissions. 

Here is the related consultation which gives some insight into the governments thinking about off grid homes (some of the thinking equally relates to on main gas grid homes)

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/phasing-out-fossil-fuel-heating-in-homes-off-the-gas-grid

The summation of our HVO experience this winter:

What's really so frustrating is the oil advocacy. I'm pretty disappointed that you're burning food waste instead of dealing with what seems like a slightly flawed ASHP installation. HVO does seem better than kerosene, but as Mars outlines, kerosene is so awful that that isn't really much praise. As the Fully Charged Show said, we need to stop burning stuff. Even the cleaner fuels are still pretty bad for air quality.

Replying to an earlier point in the video: there's a lot of UK gas-free rural housing that isn't 100s of years old. There's post-war council housing (much of which had its insulation upgraded until someone right-to-buy'd it) and a lot of modern housing from smaller private developers, which tends to be better than some of the big builders' suburban sprawl stuff. All of those should be pretty good for heat pumps and the cost should be £10,000 or less for most homes. I'm not sure where you were getting £20,000 from. That's probably a pretty large home and even an oil burner for that size home isn't cheap. These kerosene-heated modern rural homes should be low-hanging fruit for carbon reduction by heat pump. Keep the HVO for the strange situations that heat pumps don't currently suit. Please don't overpromote it.

@mjr, you're spot on about burning stuff, but it's not quite as simple as that. Despite us having heat pumps, at any point in time in the UK (depending on how windy it is) 50-75% of the electricity is coming from burning gas (with coal thrown into the mix this winter). So just because our heat pumps aren't visibly emitting things from the flue, as humans we're still continuing to burn fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate. 

Our HVO emissions last year were less than if we'd run our heating via the heat pump, and I've also lost count how many members on the forums here (all heat pump owners) will be supplementing their heating this winter with their log burners.

Posted by: @mjr

What's really so frustrating is the oil advocacy. I'm pretty disappointed that you're burning food waste instead of dealing with what seems like a slightly flawed ASHP installation. HVO does seem better than kerosene, but as Mars outlines, kerosene is so awful that that isn't really much praise. As the Fully Charged Show said, we need to stop burning stuff. Even the cleaner fuels are still pretty bad for air quality.

Replying to an earlier point in the video: there's a lot of UK gas-free rural housing that isn't 100s of years old. There's post-war council housing (much of which had its insulation upgraded until someone right-to-buy'd it) and a lot of modern housing from smaller private developers, which tends to be better than some of the big builders' suburban sprawl stuff. All of those should be pretty good for heat pumps and the cost should be £10,000 or less for most homes. I'm not sure where you were getting £20,000 from. That's probably a pretty large home and even an oil burner for that size home isn't cheap. These kerosene-heated modern rural homes should be low-hanging fruit for carbon reduction by heat pump. Keep the HVO for the strange situations that heat pumps don't currently suit. Please don't overpromote it.

Interesting idea about which rural homes to install heat pumps. I would like all the easy stuff ignored. 

I personally would like to see things flipped the other way. Scrap the universal boiler upgrade screen.

Refocus the money on means tested grants to improve the fabric of hard to heat homes at the same time as installing heat pumps in them.

Leave the owners of the easy homes to sort themselves out.

Too much money is currently being dished out to people who can afford to make the transition anyway. Just like the universal support for energy bills. We donated our £400 to charity.

Posted by: @editor

@mjr, you're spot on about burning stuff, but it's not quite as simple as that. Despite us having heat pumps, at any point in time in the UK (depending on how windy it is) 50-75% of the electricity is coming from burning gas (with coal thrown into the mix this winter). So just because our heat pumps aren't visibly emitting things from the flue, as humans we're still continuing to burn fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate. 

It shouldn't be that way, of course. Successive governments and energy companies deserve a good slap for letting it continue to be so.

However, it is fixable, while there is no way that an HVO burner will ever not be burning some fuel. That's why we probably should phase them out too, even if they are a stepping stone off of kerosene.

Posted by: @editor

Our HVO emissions last year were less than if we'd run our heating via the heat pump, and I've also lost count how many members on the forums here (all heat pump owners) will be supplementing their heating this winter with their log burners.

I suggest that a 5kW log burner used a couple of times a year to cover a shortfall is a much smaller problem than people installing big HVO burners for frequent use.

@mjr

I don't disagree with you that opportunities have been missed by various governments in the past, and may continue to do so in the future. This does not surprise me in the least, since the primary task of our MP's is to keep the voters happy, so that they do not loose their seat at the next election. So they are hardly likely to wish to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers money, or even worse put the cost on the voters energy bills, to fund renewable energy subsidies when we still had a plentiful supply of quite cheap oil and gas.

It is not quite as simple as sticking up a few wind turbines or building some solar farms. The first problem is no voters want a wind turbine within 100 miles of their home, and only want solar farms if they cannot see them or receive a hefty payment for having one on their land. The answer of course is to stick the wind turbines in the North Sea, but I think that you may agree that this is neither easy or cheap to do.

A further problem is that we cannot yet store energy in bulk, to provide the needs of our energy hungry society on a freezing fog November day when there is virtually no wind or solar generation.

This evening the peak electricity demand was 37GW at 17:30, of which 11.34GW was provided by fossil fuels, 14.01GW was from renewable's, 7.5GW was from Other, which consists of pumped storage, nuclear, biomass and other, and the remaining 4.15GW was via the interconnectors.

At the moment nuclear generation has been fairly constant at 4.63GW, which I assume is the maximum available, and cannot easily be raised or lowered by any appreciable amount.

Biomass generation can be raised or lowered within limitations, but would be insufficient to fully balance the grid, and it also involves burning fuel, so may not meet with your approval.

Pumped storage actually uses more energy than it produces, since it normally involves using electrical energy to pump water from a lower lake to an upper lake, so that by releasing it later it can be used to generate electricity.

To replace only coal and gas generation in the above example would require twice the amount of wind generation, or approximately 13.6GWh of battery storage, which would only last for 1 hour.

At 05:00 when demand was at its lowest the UK was still consuming 19.6GW, though 1.17GW was actually being exported via the interconnectors, so the true demand was 20.77GW. This was being provided by 3.83GW from fossil fuels, 11.42GW from renewable's and 5.55GW from Other. So even if bulk storage existed, the only way to charge it would be by burning more fossil fuel.

This is all before everyone switches from their gas or oil boiler to a shiny new heat pump, and of course plugs in their EV.

The future does not look too rosy.

I forgot to add, I blame it all on the caveman or cavewoman who discovered fire. 🙄 

The current target is to fully decarbonise electricity generation in the UK by 2035.

Be interesting to see how close we get to that.

Ironically if we keep the number of ashp installations and cheap EVs low it will be easier to meet the target😊