Now aside from the debate around the future of home heating, which I am not going to engage in today, what do our GDNs do for us? To help answer this in purely numerical terms, I came across a great infographic courtesy of National Gas (who doesn’t love an infographic?) It uses a classic Sankey diagram to show where the UK’s gas comes from and where it goes. It should give pause for thought for these “experts,” but it probably won’t.

It shows that the GDNs not just National Gas transmission, supplying large volumes of gas to industry and for power generation. These are based around the whole of the UK, not restricted to tight geographic areas or clusters. So dedicated hydrogen networks just for clusters, excluding any domestic use, would not be supply all those that currently need gas. We need the industry to benefit our economy and we will need the gas-fired back up generation as our electricity becomes ever reliant upon wind and solar.

In terms of volumes, over 100TWhs of gas is used for electricity generation and industry supplied via our GDNs, over a third of the gas used in these sectors. In addition, nearly 80 TWhs of GDN provided gas is used for business and the public sector.

So, the presumption of decommissioning the gas networks is not just a folly, it is a dangerous and irresponsible act. Even if all UK homes switched to electric only, there is still a need for GDNs to keep our country going and the lights (and heat pumps) on.

If the energy experts and politicians can just agree to this, it would be a good start. But it is only a start. We then need to talk about decarbonisation and yes, that means hydrogen for these sectors. That discussion is for another day.