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
"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.
While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.
The prices plummet from time to time, even going negative, but not enough for the prices to be lowered.
Seemingly it’ll take a few more years for more energy to reach the south, but by then data centres may be using more.
To me, living in US Northeast, this is astounding. I've read heat pumps lose efficacy below 25F. My family would never forgive me if I made our house cold. But then I see 70% of the Nordics's house are "warm enough", or dealing colder than room temperature houses.
I've asked half-dozen contractors and HVAC people in my area, and none of them have recommended a heat pump. But, I'm just as suspicious of their motives as I am of the science and environmental populizers on YouTube.
These remain 200% efficient down to -4℉ and 150% efficient down to -22℉. Their capacity starts dropping at 23℉ going down to 76% capacity at -13℉.
There's only a few towns in the continental US that cold enough for long enough that it can't be heated well by one of these. You just need an installer that will size it properly for the climate in your area.
January temps in Oslo aren’t much different than Boston. Absolute record low temps are similar too.
Coldest temp ever in Oslo is -30C in the 1800s.
Coldest in Boston was -28C in 1934.
Still doesn’t explain the poor adoption in USA but helps explain why they still work so far up north. The nordics can be relatively balmy to Wisconsin or upstate New York.
Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.
In theory peltier elements are more efficient heaters than resistive heating but if the temp delta are big enough, you lose more heat through conduction than you pump in.
A poorly optimized fireplace may vacuum more warm air out than it radiates in.
IIRC in the Netherlands people don't like it, because it because it means that there is a single company supplying my heat, with
* minimum amounts of 'heat' purchased
* no incentives to maintain their infrastructure above the bare minimum
* no competitionThe heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.
https://www.polarpumpen.se/kunskapsbanken/varmepump-kunskaps...
Because:
It is not experimental (it is no longer 1992)
Your gas comes from Russia, and they hate you - roughly speaking
Your prices are miles from reality
Face it, fossil fuels are deprecated. Your gas heating will be unusable with no gas to put in it
Home PV for example is way less than 0,3€/kWh and rather dramatically changes these comparisons.
If you choose between heat pump and not-heat-pump electric heating, it is cheaper.
(From another post I made in this thread)
Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):
Norway: $92k
Denmark: $77k
Sweden: $62k
Germany: $60k
UK: $57k
Finland: $56k
So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.
South Sweden - i think the prices are more on par with germany.
That is why so many houses here now have air-to-air heat pumps. That is by far the cheapest way to improve heating in an old house with only electric radiators and no existing water heat pipes.
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
You might need other radiators if your current radiators are very small. But you also might not in a recent house, or in a recently renovated house (e.g. the radiator are still sized on single-glazing-glass when having double glazing installed).
You can also choose in-foor heating with the next renovation, a lot of homes already have in-floor heating and it's very comfortable. You can probably also boost existing radiators with small fans on the bottom or choose an electronic back-up module which boost the temperature a bit on the coldest days.
Tldr: it really isn't that hard. The focus on hybrid systems in NL is purely thanks to a lobby from gas-boiler installers and manufacturers. Air/water heatpumps are a drop-in replacement in a lot of cases.
The install itself isn't that hard they come pre-charged with refrigerant. I have installed a few of the air-to air myself and had no issues. All you need is a vacuum pump and proper refrigerant manifold or adapters. Vacuum out the lines for at least an hour to draw out all the air and moisture, close valve and let sit for an hour, if the gauge shows no leak, open the heat pump zone valves and you're in business.
A friend did it and had all the refrigerant leak out after a year but he realized the flared end that came from factory was malformed so he cut and re-flared the end, vacuumed out the system, left it overnight, saw no leak, and had an AC tech do the charge. Was solid after that. A from zero charge requires some knowledge of the systems capacity and a scale to weigh the charge so he hired someone to do it.
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.
these are slightly odd, however: they either need an external air intake set up, or they require that the water (tank/heater) be located in a space that you don't mind being cooled down (often quite significantly) AND that isn't thermally connected to the space you're heating via other means.
still great technology, but deployment can be a little more challenging that space heating/cooling.
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.
edit// Hot water is generated by electric solar panels. 1200w are sufficent to have enough hot water for two persons
You need to find another reason. Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):
Norway: $92k
Denmark: $77k
Sweden: $62k
Germany: $60k
UK: $57k
Finland: $56k
So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.
If I had to bring up some particular reason, gas grids are more or less non-existent in the Nordics, and electricity is cheaper than in central Europe or UK.
wouldn't untreated sewage, still fermenting, be warmer?
Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.
https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...
a bigger one is planned:
https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...
https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A...
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.
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.
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.
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).
But unlike these heat pumps, the reactor doesn't need electricity.
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?
Even Germany had Uranium mines in the Erzgebirge. They just were closed due to environmental concerns and the iron curtain falling, which is also why there are no more "official" reserves. There was no exploration done after 1990, so known exploitable reserves in Germany are low. But that's just because nobody went looking.
Uranium isn't rare and it isn't really expensive. We just need so little of it that there are not a lot of running mines.
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!