The UK’s Heat Pump Strategy is in DEEP Trouble

Here in the UK, the Government is trying to persuade householders to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps.  It’s a key part of their net zero strategy, tackling the 13% of CO2 emissions that are attributable to gas-based home heating.  The “one size fits all” message is “Heat Pumps Good, Gas Boilers Bad”.  The Government has set a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps each year by 2028, rising to 1.6 million annually by 2028.  To help achieve this, they have introduced a Boiler Upgrade subsidy, but the latest Government statistics show that only 16,959 applicants have replaced an existing gas boiler with a heat pump since the scheme began in May 2022, which is a little bit short of the 1.4 million target for that period

These targets were set without much understanding of the difficulty or cost of retrofitting heat pumps.  Much of Britain’s housing is old and not very suitable for conversion.  Having set the policy, the Government initiated a major study in 2019 called DEEP – the Demonstration of Energy Efficient Potential, to provide evidence to justify it.  DEEP’s remit was to quantify the real effects, costs and returns of upgrading the structure of older houses.  They’ve just published the results, which basically says it’s not economic for these older properties.  It suggests that the payback time for heat pumps in older homes, along with the insulation upgrade to make them suitable is “generally over 100 years”.   So, where does that leave the plan?

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Auracast™ Audio.  Better than the original?

If you’ve not heard of Auracast™, it’s time to find out about it.  It’s part of the new Bluetooth Low Energy Audio specifications which support broadcast audio.  What that means is that it allows individuals and places to share an audio stream, so that multiple people can listen to the same thing.

Auracast builds on the telecoil experience, which has been part of hearing aids for many years, but supports a new codec, called LC3.  This can be used to generate high quality audio with such a low latency that the Bluetooth stream can reach your ears at the same time as the ambient stream.  Last week, Auracast had its first major public demonstration in the US at a performance of Richard Einhorn’s “Voice of Light” in the Lincoln Centre in New York.  A number of users, both with and without hearing loss were able to hear how it works.  I was one of the lucky few to try it.  Talking to others after the performance, it was obvious that not only did it work exceedingly well, but the audio quality was so good that we were starting to have some fundamental questions about how live music is recorded.  Andrew Bellavia has already written about the devices which were  used.  I was fascinated with the resulting experience.

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Why can’t the Audio Industry be more inventive?

The audio industry is constantly telling us how great its products are.  Their latest wheeze is to push the message that we all need even higher quality.  That’s despite the fact that nobody can hear the difference.  Unfortunately, the major players so believe their own PR that over the last century they’ve largely missed the fact that there’s more to the listening experience than just extending frequency response.  On the few occasions we’ve seen real innovation in audio, it’s almost always come from outside the established audio industry.  So how do we put innovation back into audio?

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What’s next for Apple and hearing aids?

It’s around a month since Apple received approval from the FDA to sell their AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids.  That announcement caused a flurry of excitement amongst audio industry analysts and journalists, predicting that it would change the hearing aid market.  I suspect that may prove to be false.  The more interesting debate is whether it will lessen the stigma which is still associated with wearing a hearing aid.  Andrew Bellavia and Joao Martins have written well-considered pieces on this.  It’s a topic which needs more consideration than the media’s obsession with the technology or manufacturer, as it’s still unclear how we can change society’s attitude to hearing loss.

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Mr Smart Meter takes charge of UK energy policy

What could possibly go wrong?

Back in 2009, when Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary in the closing days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, he announced Britain’s Smart Metering programme, promising to install smart meters in 26 million homes by 2020.  He stressed that “it’s important we design a system that brings best value to everyone involved”, with projected consumer savings of billions of pounds.  Fifteen years later, it’s still floundering, having cost consumers over £20 billion.  Now Ed’s back as our energy supremo.

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No juggling, no religion.  It’s the Edinburgh Fringe.

The Edinburgh Fringe programme is out and the first task for visitors is to work out what to see.  The Edinburgh Fringe boasts over 3,500 different shows, and expects to sell more than 2.5 million tickets over its three weeks of performances.  That means there’s a decent chunk of data to play with.  You can see (or scrape) all of the shows on the edfringe.com site, or you can pick up a printed programme.  So how do you choose?  It felt that this should be a useful example of seeing how data and AI are being used in the arts community.

It’s almost a year and a half since ChatGPT became public and the world started agonising over the possibility of AI taking over from humans.  This year marks the first real opportunity to see how AI influences the Edinburgh Fringe – the world’s largest arts festival.  Will it be used to write new plays, or to tell audiences what’s hot and what’s not?

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