In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.
Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.
PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D
A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire.
Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.
Yes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment.
I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .
Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.
Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).
PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.
A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.
Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.
Air-to-Air heat pumps can be quite affordable. Or even cheap if you find no name deals. There is install, but even that is not really that significant. This is at least in Nordics.
Probably not for entire apartment buildings since most of them run on oil or gas burning here. I only saw heat pumps on apartment buildings built after 2020 or the single family homes in the affluent areas.
Yeah, here they are used for AC in apartments. Unless for some weird reason they are electric heating... And even then for some reason we do not like them visible so they need to be hidden on balconies and like.
That's another problem in Holland too. The government mandates people moving to heat pumps for new houses (and existing ones in the longer term) because they don't want Russian gas dependencies and they want to close the national gas fields (they cause earthquakes).
But then neighbours start complaining about the look of the outdoor units and causing hassle with court orders etc. Really if they want people to move they should make it easy and cheap, so invalidate cosmetic complaints automatically.
Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though - a fridge is just a heat pump, and an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps aren’t that much more complicated, nor should they be any less reliable.
It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge.
I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.
Long term I'll be dead anyway. To me the the actions taken in the present is most important that what maybe might happen 30 years from now since that's why everything is fucked in Europe, because everyone coasts on hopium for the long term instead of fixing the present.
As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.
Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again. The monthly bill is the same.
What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump.
Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.
Well Norway (Hydro), Sweden (hydro and nuclear) and Finland (Nuclear Wind Hydro) all have cheap electricity which seems to be the main driver for adoption.
Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.
The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.
I know I paid about 1000EUR for an air-air heat-pump with install in Sweden, but that was a decade ago and they cost 1500-2000EUR total these days. I also have a fancy big ground-source heat-pump bigger than most residential ones and that cost under 10000EUR total. So not sure what makes them so expensive in other countries; you'd hope competition kept prices competitive.
"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"
Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.
In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades
Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible.
The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.
Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.
Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.
Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.
Heh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :)
According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.
It not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it.
Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient.
If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.
Practically, the water would need to be somewhat warmer than 0℃ because you don't want it to freeze and clog the plumbing after you have extracted a useful amount of thermal energy. :)
Depending on the contaminants, it's more likely a few degrees below 0C but you point still stands. Fish are removed as contaminant but minerals and pollution likely is not.
And normal water takes quite a bit of heat extraction to actually freeze if at 0C, maybe the device does not even extract enough. But you want to be on the safe side of course since clogging up your heat exchanger with ice (which expands) is not great.
(edit: and as noted in other reply pressure is a thing)
Moving water will get much colder than 0℃ before turning solid. -10℃ or even -25℃ are easily possible. If the water is also under pressure, it can get even colder.
The river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.
The best thing about using watercourses as your heat source for heat-pumps - the water flow naturally takes away your "colder" output and brings you more "warmer".
Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.
The opposite effect is also why thermal stations (including but not only nuclear) are usually on the coast or near large rivers: you can dump a lot of water heat into water and have it carried away.
Not always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Sizewell C claims to plan recover waste heat and use it for carbon capture somehow, about which all I can say is a big old hmmmmm.
> always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
It has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks.
You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.
It is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground.
The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.
Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.
There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.
The heat pump generates 162MWt, at the cost of around 50MWe.
The nuclear reactor produces 1.6GWe alongside 4.5GWt.
Furthermore the listed costs are also unrelated: the 235 millions are for the bare units (and an estimate for something a few years out), while the 8bn are turnkey (of what exactly I’m not sure: the beleaguered Olkiluoto 3 and flamanville 3 cost 11~12bn, while Taishan is estimated at under 8 for two reactors).
Sure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.
Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.
Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore.
The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.
And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!
Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.
PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D
A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire.
Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.
I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.
Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc .
Lucky you living in Spain though lol
Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).
PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.
I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.
Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!
Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.
This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.
Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.
£20k, jesus!
Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".
There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
But then neighbours start complaining about the look of the outdoor units and causing hassle with court orders etc. Really if they want people to move they should make it easy and cheap, so invalidate cosmetic complaints automatically.
It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge.
I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.
Long term I'll be dead anyway. To me the the actions taken in the present is most important that what maybe might happen 30 years from now since that's why everything is fucked in Europe, because everyone coasts on hopium for the long term instead of fixing the present.
https://www.polarpumpen.se/kunskapsbanken/varmepump-kunskaps...
South Sweden - i think the prices are more on par with germany.
"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"
Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.
In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades
The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.
Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.
Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.
Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.
According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.
Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient.
If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.
And normal water takes quite a bit of heat extraction to actually freeze if at 0C, maybe the device does not even extract enough. But you want to be on the safe side of course since clogging up your heat exchanger with ice (which expands) is not great.
(edit: and as noted in other reply pressure is a thing)
Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.
Not always good for the local ecosystem without mitigation, but at least one Japanese reactor allowed local colonisation by tropical fish and local legend said the same about Sizewell.
Sizewell C claims to plan recover waste heat and use it for carbon capture somehow, about which all I can say is a big old hmmmmm.
Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).
You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.
The air is colder in winter than the water, and the ground only provides a limited amount of heat before you can't extract any more. So water beats both.
And if it was really warm enough you wouldn't need heating in the first place.
Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.
There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.
A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.
The heat pump generates 162MWt, at the cost of around 50MWe.
The nuclear reactor produces 1.6GWe alongside 4.5GWt.
Furthermore the listed costs are also unrelated: the 235 millions are for the bare units (and an estimate for something a few years out), while the 8bn are turnkey (of what exactly I’m not sure: the beleaguered Olkiluoto 3 and flamanville 3 cost 11~12bn, while Taishan is estimated at under 8 for two reactors).
The article describes how there will be a water battery.
So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide plan and grid?
Germany has its own fuel enrichment and production, and it is still running https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau
And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!