European heat pump sales are collapsing
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
Where we have natural gas available we tend to just install a gas furnace and leave it at that.
You can't "just" install a heatpump like you install a TV, these figures are more complex than just "people aren't buying them".
The apparent data source (https://www.ehpa.org/news-and-resources/press-releases/heat-...) seems to indicate that sales are dropping especially in Finland and Denmark. Which is interesting, because Finland seems to be market leader in this stuff: https://yle.fi/a/74-20049437
What this graph also doesn't show, is the huge spike in sales that 2022, the year have been taken as a basis, was compared to previous years: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-heat-pumps-became...
Of course the heat pump industry, which is the source of the data indicating a collapse, would prefer to maintain the huge growth the invasion into Ukraine and the subsequent changes in fossil fuel prices have brought to the sector. However, I suspect sales may fall back to pre-war levels, which is still a sizeable industry, and that the recent boom was an abnormality rather than an indicator of consumer interest.
Finland is especially affected by the construction downturn due to inflation and interest rates. The heating choice is usually still a heat pump.
> 3078 building permits were granted for dwellings in July-September 2023, which was 53% less than a year earlier.
You have a source for this? Corruption is a criminal offence under both german and EU laws. So if there was corruption ... where are the court cases, where are the convictions? Who went to jail? Did anyone even TRY to bring someone to court for this?
There was a time when most germans had oil central heating. And then, since about 1980, this gradually changed. People installed gas central heating more and more --- not caring at all if the gas came from the Netherlands, Norway or Russia. One normally didn't knew. But why did they do that?
- the central heating device was cheaper - the central heating device was more efficient (especiall the "Brennwertkessel") - you didn't need a stinking oil tank in your basement, so yay, one more cellar room!
On top of this, a lot of eastern european country dependend WAY more on russian fossil fuels than Germany, like Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary (that one even today!). That only Germany is singled out is probably a result of very succesful polish PiS propaganda. And the tendency of people to believe things that sound okay, without actual research.
Just look at a map of eastern european pipelines. You might know "North Stream" becuase of propaganda. But notice that there is a maendering of 15 other pipelines visiting all eastern and southern european countries? You never hear about the others ... why? Here's a list of all of them: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Erdgaspipelines#Euro... --- and that JUST gas. Not even oil. And it doesn't also cover coal (where Poland made itself dependent on Russia).
Nordics don't use gas for non-industrial purposes at all, and even industrial ones are rare now that the Russian pipelines are shut down.
This costs me 100e per month.
I'm investing in a full electric ground source heat pump. Which cost me 20k. An alternative is a air heatpump which is around 8k, but with a lower scop.
Let's assume a scop of 5 (air-air) which is conservative. The amount of energy required for heating / showering / cooking was 750 * 9.27 = 6952.5 kWh. Dividing this by the scop of 5 means I require 1390.5 kWh to replace gas. This means I still have excess of solar kWh.
For now I can use the grid as a battery. This means I have no electricity costs - I actually get 20e per month after taxes.
So for 8k I have nullified my gas and electric bill. This means a payback period of 5.5 years (8000/120/12) or a yield of 18% (120/8000 * 100*12) per year.
So it isn't required to have tens of thousands to invest and you get a positive yield (depending the tax climate) even with current gas prices.
The 20k ground source heat pump looks a bit different. But I like that it is quiet and it can cool in summer for less energy that an air-air one.*
If I assume that 2/3 of my usage will be in Winter and I can offset just 200kWh (there is always a bit of sun) then it look like this:
1390.5 * 2/3 = 927 kWh 927kWh - 200 = 727 kWh 727 kWh * 0.40 = 290.80 / year (0.40 is price per kWh)
So I would spend 290 per year so about 25e. Which is 75% less then I do now.
This excludes any other cost / benefit.
ROI depends heavily on the amount of solar power you can also invest into, the weather, and fossil fuel prices. Right when fossil fuel prices spiked because of Russia's invasion, getting a heat pump was a no brainer, because the difference between electricity and fossil fuel prices took months or more off the time to earn back the heat pump investment, but now that fuel prices are dropping back to normal, the equation changed.
Besides the "big heat pump" outside that sometimes needs changes to the house (like installing underfloor heating) people are now starting to use normal split-AC devices with a SCOP of 3 or better for heating. That's even cheaper.
The recent (2021) AC unit with a heat pump in this apartment draws 0.75 to 1.1kW. That means for every hour I'm using it I'm paying about €0.50, and I can't turn on neither the dishwasher, nor the washing machine, nor the oven while it's running. Maybe I can use the hairdryer but even that might trip the breaker if the wrong combination of lights, TV and fridge happens.
Electricity is scarce and expensive in Europe, gas isn't. I appreciate how efficient and more sustainable heat pumps are but money doesn't grow on trees.
Are you sure of those numbers?
3kW is the max capacity of a single socket (at least in the UK). My electric shower is 10kW and electric hobs/cookers also need higher ratings than standard sockets. Here in the UK I believe that the standard domestic capacity is 100A per home (so about 24kW).
But seriously, how can you cope with 3kW power to apartments? No electric ovens, no water kettles, no AC?
Just running a few modern gaming computers on full load will trip the breaker O_O
I live in a top top US state and pay <$0.10/kWh for unlimited electricity and can get down to 7 cents if I sign up for alternate times and special programs.
I used over 1,000kWh last month.
I’m trying to figure out if my future is 5x energy prices or there’s just a huge structural difference that makes one country’s energy infrastructure vastly superior.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
* electricity is half as expensive in the USA * but median US households use double the electric power than their european counterparts
Reasons are much better housing standards here (much better insulation), and WAY less AC devices. Another reason is of course the higher price, this makes people buy household devices that use less power. Like the european fridge, which hasn't an ice-cube maker by default, so it's insulation isn't artificially broken.
Also, european pay more for infrastructure in their power prices, like for the transit lines. If you ever look up hard statistics about power outages (like the SAIDI value, amount of minutes per year per customer without power) you see that the US power grid has been starved to death: more than 240 minutes per year without power. Compare this with about 11 minutes in Germany ...
And finally, many european subsidized "green energy" (like Solar) when it was still more expensive than fossil-made electricity. And the subsidy was then paid by all power consumers, not from general taxes.
As a result, CO2 emission per electricity customer / household in most of europe is lower than the same value in the USA.
France has cheap energy and a lot of electric heating.
Guess for whom a heat pump might be the next best thing?
Yeah French people.
You can’t even generalise about a single country. North Germany has a lot more renewable electricity than South Germany.
Is the AC power consumption you’re citing for summer or winter? Seems crazy high for winter in Italy (if that’s where you’re from ref your other comment). Our home in Norway uses about that much right now in mid winter.
I guess the apartment might not be well insulated? That’s another problem countries in Europe need to work on. It’s insane to waste energy due to insufficient insulation. Energy, especially fossil energy, is not going to get more plentiful any time soon. If you don’t invest in energy saving measures soon you’ll be screwed eventually.
Southern Europe is different story.
Heat pumps are very cost effective and me and most other homeowners I know have, over the last couple of decades, completely migrated from wood to heat pumps. In fact, there might not be that many homes who'd convert left to convert.
The House construction locally has definitely tanked this last year. Much fewer projects.
My thermodynamics class is some time ago, but pumping the heat stored in arctic air to a sufficiently high level for residential heating sounds indeed like an electric heating effectively.
I think air heat pumps are more common due to their low price. They are easy to install and work well as a complement to other heat sources.
Geothermal is popular too, but the installation cost is significantly higher.
I come from rural-ish Norway and live in a big city in Germany. Lots of people here in Germany are quite willing to tell me that heat pumps don't work in the area where I come from, where I have many friends with heat pumps. Their confidence amazes me. I don't understand how they can be so confident.
So everybody has been telling everybody in Germany that "electric heating" doesn't work, heat pumps are vaguely "electric heating" (different mode of operation, but for that you'd have to know how heat pumps work in the first place), and with all that you end up with some "wisdom of the crowd" that fuels false confidence.
Why is this? Isn't electric heating (in the space heater context) by definition 100% efficient, because all of the energy is translated into heat (with the light as a byproduct)?
In the large: That idea is from a time when burning fossils at home (including coal) was the way to heat, and burning fossils to drive a (relatively inefficient, at least compared to today, and filters were an unknown luxury) generator was the way to create electricity.
You likely got more heat at home out of a bucket of coal when burning it at home rather than burning it at the power plant (with some excess heat there), converting it to electricity (with some losses), transporting electricity home (with some losses) and then heat up the home with that, even with 100% efficiency at that last step.
(These days I wouldn't be so sure: those power plants, even the fossil burning type, are fine tuned high-tech at a level you can't just put in ordinary homes, so they might actually extract more energy to use after all the losses along the chain than the fireplace at home that evicts a considerable percentage of the heat through the chimney)
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work...
I'm in a house in Germany and got it converted from gas to heat pump a couple of years ago. It took some adaptations to make that work, but on the flip side we obviously blasted lots of heat into the atmosphere before, which we're reigning in now (still work in progress).
So yeah, conversions of houses not built to "heat pump spec" has follow-on efforts and costs that the heat pump hype didn't advertise. I had a rough idea what to expect and that it'll take a while to sort out everything, but if you went into the conversion with the idea that you're just replacing one part with another, you're in for disappointment.
https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1401/new-brunswicks-most-ener...
My grandma's house from the 1950's wasn't "designed for heat pumps", neither my other grandma's house from 1940. Neither was my mother in laws from the same period.
You don't need to design anything, you just need a hole in the wall to run the cables.
What does make the houses suited for heat pumps is the fact that Nordic houses are designed to keep the weather out. So when you heat/cool the inside, the house doesn't leak it all outside.
Alright, my bad. Consider "designed" replaced by "suitable".
Houses of a certain era in large parts of Germany (those with only a few days of moderate sub-zero temperatures) tend to have been built with a bit of air leakage capacity to avoid mold. Yes, that's wasteful, but since fossils were (and are) subsidized like crazy, you just heat a bit more and be over with it.
That strategy doesn't work as well when you have less heat to work with.
There are still people who argue that it's unhealthy to live in a properly insulated house ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I doubt you have a lot of that nonsense in areas that deal with freezing temperatures for months at a time.
I have a gas boiler -radiator piping built into the walls and people I talk to say the radiators wont work with heat pump level of temperatures so as in your case the system needs to be converted but how. What are methods and techniques?
The inbound temperature into the radiator network took a dive from about 70°C to about 40°C here (I _could_ push the inbound temp to nearly 50°C but by then I'm no better off than with resistive heating), and that's rather obvious when heating the rooms.
The main advice everything came down to was "have a lot of surface that can heat" and from my experience that seems to be quite true.
The house has a bunch of radiators that never ran in the nat-gas days, basically it was overcommitted on heating surface. Now they're pretty well used. Another retrofit option that I had in the back of my head was radiators equipped with a fan to move the air along the radiator surface more quickly (essentially creating "virtual heating surface"), but I didn't need those.
Other than that, warm and cold parts of the house (e.g. basement) are more clearly separated. A FLIR camera module for my phone gave some hints on where heat escapes so that I could focus on the right spots.
When a larger rework of a room is due (and there's a huge mess in any case), that's a chance to look into floor or wall heating there, connected to the same system.
Once that's (mostly) done, I suppose the inbound temperature can be reduced some more, and I expect super-linear electricity savings from that (due to the way the heat pump works).
In terms of costs, it comes out at about the same, although there are more options in electricity availability, and I suspect that pricing there remains more stable than with fossil fuels, so longer-term I expect operating costs to develop beneficially (even if that only means "remains flat"). TCO of the project, I don't know, but I was optimizing for long-term OpEx for various reasons.
By the way: Heating engineers tended to dismiss the project, but the project started before there were any issues with gas supply, so "just use gas" was their go-to solution anyway (for the eco-conscious, they dangled the carrot of "it's H2 ready!", even though it's unlikely that the pipe work will ever support that). Not sure if the attitude of heating engineers changed in the meantime.
In the end it was done by air conditioning technicians, and it can be switched between heating mode using radiators and AC with split system frontends, so this house covers cold winters and hot summers with just one external device (which pleases the historical landmark office)
That's not what I've heard of even air, but to be clear, you are talking air source right? I'm near the Canadian border in northern New England and am getting ready at work to have another vertical ground source (geothermal) heat pump put in, and those are very effective year round. Well loop is around 515' (~155m), which is on the longer side but not a big deal by well drilling standards (which is why lots of well drilling companies have been expanding into heat pumps in the last 5 years and availability has sky rocketed). The price is definitely much higher than air source for now, maybe always will carry some premium, but the major government incentives here help significantly and of course the reliability is high. There are a few minor other bonuses as well I guess, like aesthetically speaking once done there can be nothing to near nothing visible outside.
There are a few other strategies (horizontal ground, water source, semi-open) that some are looking at too but around here simple vertical closed looks likely to end up as the majority due to economies of scale, it can be done anywhere vs needing more/special land, and like I said leverages an existing industry. It's neat to see coming along, so perhaps longer term that'll offer an option in Northern Europe too.