Hot water heating system maker Rinnai has called for the creation of a single unifying body to concentrate efforts of the building products and services industry in the UK’s drive to achieve net zero carbon emissions
The Runcorn outfit said a single body is needed to achieve clear and concise information exchange and create a pragmatic and non-partisan pathway to achieve and promote the goal of net zero.
Rinnai wants that body to be composed of all interested parties - residential & industrial consumers, contractors, installers, distributors, designers & consultants, manufacturers – to plan for a realistic and practical route.
“We need to look at this from the consumers’ viewpoint. We need to be putting accurate information in the public arena,” said Rinnai managing director Tony Gittings.
“Now, there are a lot of interested bodies and companies showing understandable self-interest in wanting to know they have a future in the marketplace,” he added.
“We cannot be agnostic towards energy vectors of the future, the combination of hydrogen, BioLPG and electricity combined will provide a robust decarbonisation pathway. In our sector we have manufacturers of similar or like-for-like products which are looking to what will replace natural gas as the fuel of mass consumption and how that will affect them.”
Gittings continued: “We also have the pragmatic logic of trying to find affordable fuels for the mass market. Alternatives on their own are simply not an answer. We also need to look at the range of innovations and developments such as hydrogen and BioLPG that will come on stream.
“No single product or system is the panacea to the issue of carbon emissions. Individual products have a place. But what would be the net zero answer, as an example, to a commercial or industrial building envelope that has the added complications of needing Legionella prevention regimes and constant high temperature hot water in large volumes?
“How would electrification and heat pumps, for example, be attractive in terms of capital, installation and ongoing operational costs and performance?
“Yet when we look towards notional building models within the new future buildings standard or the Scottish government's draft Heat in Buildings Strategy these documents are clearly looking for a silver bullet solution, that doesn’t exist”.
“Everything has a role to play and everything non-carbon can have a future. And a collective, equable effort will give us the result we all want, the result we must have, if we are to have a sustained quality of life.
“For this to be achieved widespread unity and clear, responsible information exchange is required to avoid the partisan or the “silver bullet” approach, thus avoiding technology dystopia in the future.”
