Most places can use heat pumps just fine.
The bigger problem is the huge infrastructure project to do so, the "just slap it on" attitude of conversion companies working for the council (my neighbour's one has the external unit slap bang in the middle of her patio for no discernible reason), and other problems.
I moved in an all-electric house last year, and the heating shows several decades of trying to get it right from when it was a council house.
In the loft, there is the remnants of a communal hot-water system, long ago disconnected (but they didn't even bother to patch up the HUGE holes between properties or remove the things that held the pipes, I had to do that). The insulation is pathetic, I don't know why they bothered. It all needs replacement. The loft, though, if I was to fit the now-recommended thickness of insulation, would be basically unusable. That's not an issue because the house holds heat so well that I've never cared about it. But my EPC says otherwise.
Then there's the storage heating - retrofitted with surface-run cables everywhere, heaters in incredibly inconvenient places (Living room, sure. Bedroom, sure. Kitchen, nothing. TINY hallway with no space to move? Let's slap a huge thing right in your way to heat 1 sq m of hallway and nothing else. Bathroom, nothing, .etc.) and largely useless (especially because, hey, OVO, you appear to have made my overnight storage heating MORE EXPENSIVE per KWh than normal peak time electricity as of the 1st Jan, you profiteering oiks! All those old people going out of their way to manage their storage heating are literally LOSING money by doing so now, even if they only use it sparingly!). The previous resident started ripping the storage heaters out and it looks like I'm going to finish the job as there's no reason to heat bricks for long periods of time (which I can't really control unless I want to stay up and flick switches at 4am when it's heated) overnight to have them be mostly cool by the time I get home from work anyway.
And the immersion heater that also heats overnight - meaning most of my heating goes towards making an empty house lovely and cosy and then just cold enough to require convection heating or boosts when I get home from work.
So to vaguely modernise that I have to disconnect and ditch half a dozen storage heaters, fit heat pumps to probably 2 or 3 rooms minimum, run that out to a huge box outside in a tiny garden, and then replace my water heating with an instant hot water heater which means pretty much ripping out the immersion heater and replumbing everything (and probably means pumps too). Apart from the electrics, the refrigerant and the plumbing specialists, that's £10k of kit and work. If I had gas, it'd be even more because then you need a Gas Safe guy. And, ironically, I'm not eligible for any grants because I'm not on benefits and because I'd need to spend the recommended £30k to clear my house's EPC of recommendations before they would even consider it otherwise (ridiculously, some of the EPC recommendations literally wouldn't pay back in 100 years even by their own figures!).
Even if I had central heating, it would definitely mean a complete boiler replacement with quite an expensive piece of kit.
It's not that they can't build out heat pumps - it's that it's stupidly expensive to do so and only council houses are ever going to bother.
I'm looking at a self-install heat pump at about £1000 for each (but that's playing a grey area with respect to refrigerants, and having to do the work myself because nobody else will touch that kind of install) and then a tiny instant water heater professionally installed and decommissioning all the storage heater and immersion heater stuff. You're looking at £3k minimum, I suspect, as a private homeowner in an already all-electric house to do the bare minimum, by the letter but probably not the spirit of the law, doing most of the work themselves. That could be £10k+ if you have to use the professionals and have them decommission stuff. That's potentially 10+ years of council tax alone in one project, to benefit the person living there not the council/country.
That's why it's not happening.
Hydrogen would just be a vast waste in that, confusing the issue, retaining gas legacy, increasing costs because of the danger / certification involved, etc. because you'd probably spend far more than that, on something that would be unusual and hard to install or maintain, and would never be more than a niche player. It would end up like my house - a bunch of remnants of poor historical ideas of whatever energy-saving tech fad is doing the rounds.
If you want people to move to heat pumps, they have to be half the cost, and safe enough to be self-installable.
If you want people to move to hydrogen, it literally has to EXIST as a thing, on a grid scale, in DIY shops, in industry installers, etc. as a commodity item, and it simply doesn't.
They know that they cannot and will not meet the deadline or have any of these projects come to fruition.
Hell, I literally still cannot get rid of my stupid three-rate meter at the moment, nor request a smart meter (I know, I try about once a month). And that's a relatively minor and quick thing (I had it done at a previous place, but still only after several attempts) compared to moving everyone to hydrogen or heatpumps.
I've decided, given that I think this will be the last house I will ever own before retirement, that I will become utility independent by retirement. Buying an all-electric house was a serious part of that consideration. Every month, with the refund from my electricity supplier's UNBELIEVABLE overestimation of my bills, I buy solar panels and batteries and things. And I will likely buy and fit my own heat pumps and the like over the next couple of years before they regulate them too much. No government wet-dream is going to do anything for me on any reasonable timescale and they're just going to be throwing money away. But if I can generate enough to charge batteries enough to run my house and maybe charge a little into the (by then, electric) car each day, I can ignore all their pontificating nonsense entirely. If I have to sacrifice my tiny garden for that, and put some hedges around the box to dampen the noise, then so be it.
It won't be any cheaper. It won't be any greener. And my house won't be any warmer. But I just want to be warm enough in winter and cool enough in summer and pay as little money to, and have as little to do with, these people as possible. That's electrical suppliers, governments, and even skilled labourers. And going forward, that means no utilities and certainly not gas/hydrogen in any form.
If I hit retirement and I'm still paying more than the standing charge (if that!), I will be incredibly annoyed at myself.
In other news, anyone want a lot of heavy bricks?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
