Main reason is that gas was heavily subsidised and promoted for a bit when they were pumping it from the North Sea.

That was obviously short term stupidity at the time, but has only become more so with hindsight.

That's not obvious at all. At the time that the UK switched to gas, Norway was pushing resistive electrical heating and not heat pumps - and that only worked for them because nearly all of their electricity came from hydroelectric generation. The push for heat pumps is much more recent, with only a few thousand households in Norway having heat pumps as recently as 2005. The UK doesn't have the geography for that kind of large-scale hydroelectric, and there's a huge efficiency and equipment cost to using resistive electric heating rather than burning fossil fuels directly when your electricity has to be generated from fossil fuels. Also, the coal that cheap natural gas largely replaced in the UK was directly killing a bunch of people by causing pretty nasty pollution.

In general, a lot of comparisons with other countries that get published in the British press are like this - they ignore important differences between the UK and those countries or problems and costs associated with what they're doing because the goal is to make it seem like there were easy options that the UK missed out on because our government is evil, not to actually help people understand the world.

True - and fair point on the UK comparisons.

Though of course, sometimes there are easy options that the UK missed out on because they are inept and apathetic, which would vindicate some of those comparisons to some extent.

> as recently as 2005

That's 18 years ago. Not exactly recent.

The UK had its phase of pushing resistive heating in the 1970s. For a while I had a flat in London that had storage heaters fitted in that period. They would heat up a kind of brick overnight using the off peak 'Economy 7' cheaper rate then emit heat over the day while I was out at work.

What is a heat reservoir for the shower, and what does it have to do with the sun? I'm Googling the term and all I'm finding is standard hot water storage tanks [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_water_storage_tank

Thanks. That's wild, never heard of them before.

Now I am indeed curious what the minimum amount of sunlight required is. I'm sure the angle of the sun is just as important as the duration, on top of weather and seasons and temperatures.

I heard (I know, I know) that solar hot water didn't count towards Kyoto Protocol "credits" so it wasn't promoted, in favour of solar photovoltaic, which did.