Crises often present us with both challenges and opportunities – the current energy crisis is no different.

With the April price cap increase now in effect, the typical British household will be paying nearly £700 per year more for their energy – that’s a jump of 54%. This is very bad news for households already struggling with rises in the cost of living.

It’s estimated that energy bill increases will push an estimated 2 million more people into fuel poverty.

This huge and unwelcome leap is a result of spiralling wholesale gas prices. Energy suppliers could buy gas for their customers for around 65p per unit of energy last August, but were paying £2.70 per unit by January 2022. While gas is the culprit, the way energy markets work means that the price of electricity has gone up too.

A combination of factors has driven this surge. Demand for gas has grown globally as economies emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to price spikes because of fears that supplies could be disrupted.

With gas prices so easily affected by shifts in demand and geopolitical events, it’s hard to predict how they will change in future, but the outlook isn’t good – it’s widely expected that the price cap will increase again in October 2022.

In the UK, we’re highly gas-dependent. Around 40% of electricity comes from gas-fired power stations and 85% of households rely on gas for heating. But the writing is on the wall: if we want to have a long-term, tangible impact on fuel poverty, we need to invest in green alternatives.

The UK government has today published a new energy security strategy, aiming to cut reliance on imported fossil fuels. This includes a welcome focus on quickly ramping up offshore wind and solar electricity generation.

Increasing supply of green energy is just one side of the equation, though. We can also help break reliance on imports, reduce carbon emissions and cut costs for households by reducing the amount of energy we use.

Importantly, this doesn’t have to come at a cost to comfort. We can reduce demand for energy by insulating homes and heating them with more efficient technologies. In the short term, optimising existing heating systems would be a big win. Although modern condensing boilers can be up to 98% efficient, most are running well below optimum efficiency.

Simple steps, such as turning down the flow temperature on combi boilers, could save households up to 8% of their gas usage – this great blog shows how. There’s potential to go further too, by upgrading boilers so that they adjust their output depending on the outside temperature, and by using smart controls to help ensure homes only use the energy they need.

The real prize though will come from getting more electric heat pumps into homes.

Because they make use of ambient heat from the air or ground, heat pumps are much more efficient than gas boilers, producing 3-4 units of heat for every unit of electricity put in.

So why aren’t we all using them already? In short, affordability. It costs on average £10.5k to install a heat pump into a home that’s been using gas or oil for heating, and with electricity costing around four times as much as gas, heat pumps can be more expensive to run than gas boilers despite their greater efficiency.

Bringing down the cost of heat pumps is possible though. In fact, energy price spikes mean that for many the lifetime cost of a heat pump is already competitive with fossil fuel systems. Relatively small changes, such as removing green levies from electricity bills, could make heat pumps even more cost-effective, while the VAT cut announced in the Treasury’s Spring Statement, and action announced today to boost UK heat pump manufacturing, could bring costs down further.

With energy so high in the public consciousness, there’s a real opportunity to capitalise on demand for heat pumps and other efficiency measures.

We’ve found that up to 25% of consumers said they would choose a heat pump over a gas boiler at current prices – the current crisis could see those figures climb even higher.

What’s crucial is that policies are implemented effectively. The new Boiler Upgrade Scheme in England and Wales, which launched on 1 April, must avoid the failures of the Green Homes Grant that preceded it, so that consumers can easily access the grants and installers aren’t disadvantaged by delayed payments.

The current energy crisis is just that – a crisis. But it could also act as a catalysing moment – one that pushes us on to make difficult decisions about what our future looks like.

Ultimately, we don’t have to remain tethered to the unpredictable fluctuations of the gas market. With green energy and technologies like heat pumps, we can invest in a more sustainable future for both people and the planet.