Where Does The Telegraph Get Its Dopey Journalists From?
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Reporters would have been fired in the past for writing nonsense like this!
Poland was always an unlikely candidate to become a heat pump utopia.
It has a populist, right-wing government and a heavy reliance on coal power. In 2018, it was home to 36 of the top 50 most polluted cities in Europe.
But in 2022, Poland’s heat pump market blew the rest of Europe out of the water.
Heat pump sales in Poland soared by 120pc, according to the Polish Organisation for the Development of Heat Pump Technology.
Sales of air-to-water heat pumps in Poland have increased by 100 times over the last 10 years.
Poland is not Europe’s market leader; the heat pump markets in Scandinavia and France are far more advanced. But Poland is rapidly undergoing a heat pump revolution – and is breaking records in the process. “It is absolutely number one in terms of growth,” says Thomas Nowak, of the European Heat Pump Association.
“No country has seen such exponential growth from such a low base,” adds Jan Rosenow, of the Regulatory Assistance Project, an energy NGO.
The contrast to the UK is extreme. In its drive to net zero, the British Government wants to phase out all gas boilers by 2035. But the UK’s heat pump rollout lags far behind the rest of Europe.
“Poland is racing to the top of the green tech race for clean heat,” says Juliet Phillips, of climate and energy think tank E3G. “The UK has a lot to learn from Europe’s clean heat rising star.”
There is absolutely no comparison between Poland and the UK, which dopey Melissa obviously has not worked out yet.
The biggest difference is that Poland is wanting to install heat pumps to replace coal, not gas as in this country. 46% of Polish homes rely on coal for heating, along with another 28% which have district heating, also mainly coal powered. Poland has many good reasons for this, such as air pollution and reliance on Russia for coal imports (which their government has now banned anyway).
Melissa does not appear to have realised that Britain went through the transition away from coal two generations ago.
And a second big difference is that Poland is chucking incredible amounts of money into subsidies for heat pumps. Poland’s 10-year Clean Air Programme set up in 2018 allocated Eu 25 bn for replacing coal heating systems with cleaner alternatives, enabling the government to offer subsidies of $6700 per household. Last year they raised subsidies to up to $16500, which will certainly make the bill a lot more than 25 billion. Given lower labour costs in Poland, these amounts would be enough to cover the full cost of heat pump installations. The cost of this is funded from the carbon credits Poland earns from the EUA carbon allowance scheme, which sends billions back to Poland if it reduces emissions.
Maybe Melissa would like to work out how much such subsidies would cost the UK? I’ll give her a clue.
We have twice as many households as Poland, and to subsidise the full cost of a heat pump would cost the government upwards of £400 billion. Maybe she would like to tell us where that money would come from?
The simple fact is that for a Polish home with a coal fire, a heat pump is a definite upgrade. But we went through that transition fifty years ago, replacing coal fires with gas central heating systems, which cost less to buy and run than heat pumps.
So why on earth would we want to make a retrograde step to an inferior technology and at huge cost?
It is quite frightening that Melissa is actually an economics reporter:
And you might have guessed it, but she has no relevant training at all, unless you count her degree in English Literature!
Heaven help us all!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
You asked: “Where Does The Telegraph Get Its Dopey Journalists From?”
From what passes these days as “institutions of higher learning”. I will not be leaving anything to either of my alma maters as they have become increasingly “woke”.
Quite right, Joan. As someone who spent near 40 years in a desperate struggle to keep something of British industry afloat with management so technically illiterate that they would have had hysterics contemplating the complexity of a bicycle, I fully understand the horror of our current situation. The ‘arty – farty’ numbskulls who dominate our society have brought this country to its knees. I recommend that she extends her literary understanding by reading, ‘Diary of a Nobody’. There, in the character of Mr. Pooter, she will find the personification of the culture to which she belongs!
There was a discussion on GBN some months ago and it was noted that journalists today are more like activists and that they push their private agendas.
Apart from increasingly pushing the socialist agenda the DT ha become so full of typos, spelling mistakes and misinformation I regularly have to make sure I havent clicked onto the Guardian newsfeed!
Has!
And the heat pumps will be powered by coal-fired electricity. More electricity for heat pumps means higher coal usage.
The Polish energy mix is dominated by hard coal – approx. 48% and lignite – 24%. (When it comes to green energy, wind installations had the highest contribution of 9%)
They are thinking of a nuclear plant but “some energy analysts said at the end of 2021 that “a credible coal phase-out discussion on a national level in Poland has yet to start”
That said, my heat pump has been keeping me cool for the last 4 days (maximums 35-40℃ and minimum last night >26℃). Hang in there heat pump, only one more day to go before the weather changes.
The issues are that Poland has pretty flat terrain so hydro is no great resource, continental wind resource is poor, solar insolation is low and there ain’t no tides in the Baltic. So it’s down to fossil fuels or nuclear. They have toyed with over 10GW of nuclear but not really committed to anything.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-o-s/poland.aspx
So it’s coal, coal or maybe even coal for the foreseeable.
Unfortunately, due to crazy EU subsidies, biomass, often from old growth forests, is going to be a big source of “green renewable” energy for Poland.
In 2016 a government committee concluded that , for the UK housing to change to electric heating , would need a 400% increase in generation capacity .
So the idea was considered impossible .
Now the whole insane idea is being pushed again , which just shows that the media and Green propaganda people have absolutely no idea about reality and are still just coming out with rubbish and lies .
In The Real World,
that extra capacity will only be needed for a few months of the year, so will much of it be shut down for seven or eight months of the year? That is very uneconomic, to say the least!
Well Iain Reid . That extra capacity could be used to charge up EVs .
This winter , with just 1 to 2 % of them as road vehicles , there have been grid shutdowns most days across the country . Usually explained away as other things , but actually because there is not enough generation .
But that 400% increase would just about be able to supply heating in the winter , and charge up most of the road vehicles in just the summer months .
So , if everybody pays up the odd hundred thousand £ or more , then the country could have electric heating and EVs , [ but not at the same time ].
I had a subscription to the Daily and Sunday Telegraph from around 1980 until 2018, when I cancelled it. the reason? Because they jumped on the AGW bandwagon.
I want truth and honest opinion from a newspaper, which up until then, the Telegraph provided from the likes of the both late lamented Christopher Booker and Peregrine Worsthorne.
I was emailed a courtesy copy a few weeks ago, with an offer of a reduced subscription, I declined to accept it, the articles were even more Woke than they were when I first cancelled it!
Alas, agreed about D.T.
Even if the AGW hypotheses were valid, the UK, woth negligible CO2 output could make no useful contribution to decarbonisation.
Present policies, based on ignorance and/or corruption, are ruinous
Crony capitalist corruption (Fascism) is driving much of it now. Nobody listens to CliSciFi “scientists” anymore.
One assumes Melissa has been given a chance to rest from her daily ‘house price crash’ predictions. With her track record of soothsaying, she’ll be perfect in Team Climategeddon.
“Where Does The Telegraph Get Its Dopey Journalists From?” Cast offs from the Guardian?
Poland is due to receive over €75 billion from the EU during the 2021-2027 budget period.
It’s by far the biggest beneficiary. You can afford to do a lot of things when someone else is paying.
First find out who is doing the hiring – usually in their own image.
Some more background. Like most countries in the Soviet bloc Poland had almost no gas distribution networks serving housing and local businesses – gas was used either for industry or local heat plants serving district heating networks. When I was at the World Bank we had projects to fund both gas networks and geothermal heat because the district heat networks were in very bad shape. However, progress was slow, partly because the Poles did not want to become too dependent on Russian gas supplies.
So large parts of the country, especially outside the largest cities, continued to rely on coal for domestic heating. District heating systems are contracting, so promoting heat pumps is a way of skipping the build-out of gas networks that occurred in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, there is the question of how the electricity required by heat pumps will be generated. As noted above, the Poles are ambivalent about nuclear power and are determined to protect their coal mining sector from spillovers of German renewables. So, in effect, the country is switching from inefficient use of coal by households and heating plants to more efficient use in large power plants.
I remain dubious. Whilst Poland is growing rapidly, heat pumps are very expensive and require well-built, well-insulated houses to work properly. Poland’s average gross salary is a €17,000 which is better than it sounds as the cost of living is low,but heat pumps are imported and cost what they cost. Without vast subsidies for the pumps themselves and the work required on housing, its not going to happen.
They ARE getting vast subsidies!
Gordon H: Your point is correct. When I worked in Poland in the early 1960s my appartment was lovely and warm and was supplied with district heating from the facory I was working at. Brilliant! Meanwhile there was a salutary letter in the DT today about the real cost of heat pumps from a long term user. Mr Schumacher stresses how unready they are for widespread use and quotes £400 per year for servicing each unit and £5000 for a repair! No than you.
O/T but a must see if you have missed it.
Mark Mills once again providing some reality checks on the energy transition
“Exponential growth from a low base…”
Well there you go. They sold 1, then 2 then 4…so after 10 years of exponential growth they sell 500. Poland leads in growth!
In 2022 Poland installed about 200,000 heat pumps, only slightly behind Germany for instance, so yes growth is from a low base, but installations on a per capita basis are currently right up there.
Throw enough OPM at something and you get it in abundance. Other people eventually catch onto your hustle and you run out of OPM. Its frightening how much damage it is doing to Western economies in the meantime. Learn Mandarin.
Well Dave Fair. Back in the 60s someone told us that the optimists were learning Russian and the pessimists were learning Chinese.
Given the lowly position of China at the time, quite an accurate forecast.
Most reporting of energy issues is probably derived directly (copy-and-paste) from Big Green Marketing. There are very few contradictory voices, as the traditional energy companies are too scared of the Green Mob.
I looked up the background of its Editor. Apparently he fearlessly chases the truth, lives in Finsbury. and left Oxford, sans anything, after one year.
No, traditional energy companies are now crony capitalists; reaping oodles of money from the CliSciFi scam.
When you’ve mastered English Literature everything else climate science/economics/mathematics and all the rest are a piece of p*ss.
We should only teach English literature and drop stem
They are all public school gels
Instead of carbon pollution, Poland is getting noise pollution and will still need a wood or coal burner when the cold winters set in.