The transition to net zero will not bankrupt us all but will help bring our bills down - Yorkshire Post Letters

There have been many articles and letters recently claiming that the transition away from fossil fuels is unaffordable. Our experience says otherwise; not only are we saving hundreds of pounds each year, we are also using much less energy with no impact on our day-to-day life.

We are a family of four living in a 1930s semi-detached house. In 2010, we installed a small solar PV array which has already paid for itself. In 2016, when we needed to replace our old petrol car, we bought a second-hand EV. Similarly, in 2021, when our gas boiler needed replacing, we installed a heat pump.

In 2023, our electricity bills for the whole year amounted to £1,800 for everything - cooking, heating, hot water and car transport. Compare this to the 12 months before our heat pump was installed, when our combined electricity and gas bills were around £1,600 and we spent a further £1,600 on petrol for the 10,000 miles we cover annually before we bought our EV. And this was before the huge spike in energy prices that occurred in 2022. So as a result of moving everything to electric, we’re saving at least £1,400 per year.

The energy savings are even more striking as we are now using around a quarter of the energy that we used when using fossil fuels.

This is not surprising given that EVs are around four times as efficient as petrol cars and while modern gas boilers are 90 per cent efficient, heat pumps are an amazing 300-400 per cent efficient; for every unit of electricity put in, 3-4 units of heat come out; the extra 2-3 units of heat coming from the air outside.

So don’t believe the doomsayers who say that net zero will bankrupt us all or that it’s not possible. There are millions of houses up and down the country that are like ours and millions of ordinary families like us. All we have done is to move to better technologies when the time comes to replace our old fossil fuelled devices.