BRITS face paying an extra £100 on their gas bill next year if they don’t get rid of old boilers.
In a major move to net zero, ministers are set to change energy subsidies in order to make clean electricity more attractive than polluting gas.
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Households that remove boilers and replace them with heat pumps will see bills drop by £100.
But those who don’t will be penalised with higher gas costs.
The eye-watering hike is expected to come in as early as 2024, but ministers are still drawing up details.
In the mean time, households won’t be forced to tare out boilers for at least a decade.
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This morning Energy Secretary Grant Shapps insisted homes will move from gas to cleaner energy “over the next decade or two”.
He told Sky News: “We all know that electricity can be a big way to decarbonise, but we also know these are big changes. So this is not a sort of rip-out-your-boiler moment.
“This is a transition over a period of time to get to homes which are heated in a different way and also insulated much better.”
The Energy Secretary admitted “we’re in the low numbers still” of heat pumps, with only around 42,000 installed last year.
He added: “There are technical issues that people are having to deal with in order to meet the switchover”.
Mr Shapps said he would not shift on eventually phasing out boilers.
And he resisted pressure from Tory MPs to delay a ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to the EU target date of 2035.
He said: “We are not in Europe, we don’t have to do what Europe does — we’ve always been more forward leaning on this stuff than the EU.”
Meanwhile, up to 300,000 families will get help to insulate homes with the Great British Insulation Scheme.
And £5,000 bungs to get a new heat pump will continue until 2028, and the world’s second largest floating wind farm, East Anglia Three, will power 1.3million homes from the coast of Norfolk when it is completed.
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But the Government will delay its response to Joe Biden‘s Inflation Reduction Act — where firms will get billions to subsidise green plans — until autumn.
Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth, said: “These plans look half-baked and half-hearted.”
