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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

We tried to do this by law in germany and it almost ended in a civil war.

Are heat pumps economical heating sources in Germany? Power there seems very expensive and natgas cheap. No wonder if there's pushback if you have to do expensive renovation and you don't even end up with lower operational expenses.

It really depends on a lot of factors. For example if you have solar, how well insulated your house is, etc.

I am currently renovating a house in Germany and had a quote for a heat pump system and a quote for a central gas heating system. The heat pump system was quoted at 66.000€, it would however be reduced by 24.750€ to 41.250€ as the government is currently giving a subsidy for these systems. The Gas system was quoted at around 18.000€.

Both of the quotes included removing the old Oil Heating system and disposing of it. The Gas System included the price of connecting to the cities gas supply.

I went with the Gas System, as not only the install would be cheaper, the running cost would also be substantially cheaper. Some electricity providers have a seperate tariff for heat pumps that is marginally cheaper. However even then my calculation was that a Heat Pump would only have a comparable running cost if I also invested in a large Solar install on the Roof.

Heatpumps can be powered by natgas as well. Heat pumps are just a compressor and a heating element for a defrost cycle. Gas powered compressors are relatively common, e.g. in camping trailer refrigerators.

Also, even with Germany's relatively expensive electricity, heat pumps are economical after 15-20 years, which is good enough.

While that's technically correct (the best kind of correct!), I doubt a lot of natgas heatpumps are being installed in homes at the moment.

I suppose the real economics are going to be better, as you probably need to make gas more expensive by carbon trade or something in order to decarbonise. And electrical power should be very cheap.

That's an overstatement. Also, people routinely rebel against the introduction of change, but soon become accustomed to it. For quite over a year, heat pumps have made up over 50% of new installs [1]. I don't think it's useful to focus too much on short-term pains here.

[1] https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-b...

The track record of the German people going to war over something is not great. They were probably on the wrong side (again) on this one.

Partially because of articles from a certain German newspaper which admitted they don't understand how heat pumps work.

And now, the leader of the opposition is attending heat pump PR events, after vehemently opposing the governments plans to promote heat pumps, claiming they were uneconomical.

However, the damage is done.

And yet, like all the issues the conservatives rally against, once the law actually came into force, everyone stopped caring about it and now heatpumps are standard.

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