by Will Jones
Heat-pump sales in Europe plummeted by 47% in the first half of the year, as fewer households switched from gas boilers. The Telegraph has more.
Just 765,000 heat pumps were sold in 2024 across the 13 European countries that represent 80% of the market, the European Heat Pump Association said.
Over the same period in 2023, 1.44 million heat pumps were sold in countries including France, Italy, Germany and Sweden.
It means fewer than 1.5 million heat pumps are likely to be sold in 2024, which is the lowest level since 2019.
Sales were hit by dropping gas prices, which soared after Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, wavering government subsidies and the cost of living crisis.
After the war began, the EU set a target of installing at least 10 million more heat pumps by 2027 as part of efforts to lessen its dependence on Russian gas but a subsequent boom in sales is now over.
The U.K. Government is reported to be planning to introduce heat-pump targets in Britain next year in what has been branded a “boiler tax” on households.
Homeowners in countries such as Germany rebelled against government drives to install more of the green technology, which is expensive to set up, during the cost of living crisis.
Olaf Scholz’s under-fire coalition has since watered down its proposals to make heat pumps compulsory from 2024 in the face of public anger.
Worth reading in full.
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The problem with heat pumps is that they are an inferior product at a higher price, just like electric cars. The target market for both of these products is wealthy virtue signallers. This is a pretty small market and once it is saturated, sales of heat pumps and electric cars will be poor.
I have three HPs that heat cool 2500 ft2 of my house. The basement is heated with two propane stoves.
After 5 years, my energy cost gain is about $200/y, after an investment of $24000 for the heat pumps
If financing costs are added, at 5% for 15 years, I lose about $2000 per year.
When it gets colder, I turn off my HPs, because they have become so inefficient, and turn on my propane stoves
HPs HAVE PROVEN TO BE TOTAL $LOSERS IN NEW ENGLAND
ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU OTHERWISE IS A LIAR OR IGNORANT OR BOTH
In southern states, HPs are useful to take the chill off, and for AC, if electricity rates remain low.
BTW, I am an energy systems analyst, now retired
” if electricity rates remain low “
My current “Energy Delivered” cost is $0.1021/kwh. There is also a monthly set fee of $26.60 called a Facility Charge. The rate is set once each year and does not vary otherwise. Just east of me, on the east side of the Columbia River in central Washington, the rate is under 5¢/kwh.
Newer houses with ducts (etc.) do fine — not old stone units in the UK & EU. Also, I am about 7 miles from the nearest gas lines. An alternative is propane. The house needs to be designed for one or the other. My neighbor went the propane route.
In New England rates are = total bill/kWh used = 21 c/kWh and up
I wouldn’t install a heat anywhere where temperatures spend more than a few hours per year below freezing. As “Planning Engineer” pointed out, the power systems really take a hit when heat pump penetration becomes significant – in really cold weather, the heat pumps can’t provide enough heat so the resistance heaters kick in which greatly increases power demand. This will typically be before dawn, so solar will be of zero help.
“I am an energy systems analyst; – I lose about $2000 per year.”
Will, sorry for your loss;
you didn’t do a very good job of analysing your own energy system, a few simple calcs on the back of an envelope should have raised red flags.
Heat pumps can be superb & efficient in very specific circumstances, outside of those parameters they rapidly become mediocre &/or expensive rubbish.
( Nb: I used to develop heat pump systems )
Yes. Like most things they dont work for every one. I like the de humifying in summer and winter
The prices a have gone up substantially once gov announced subsidies; we /Gov never seem to learn. Same happened with post secondary education, low interest loans and many other freebies ultimately paid for by tax payers.
I used a heat pump in my previous house, and it was brilliant. Mind you, it used underground heat source 30m below ground, not air heat source, and the house was designed for thermal efficiency.
I’ll be honest. I was going to purchase air-conditioning but we had a 25 year old furnace. Instead I bought a heat pump for $18K, which was the same price as replacing the gas furnace and install air conditioning. With the heat pump I got a high efficiency gas furnace that runs when the heat pump exceeds 80% usage, otherwise the noise is irritating. The heat pump is electric, which our electric rates are some of the lowest in the world, so we save on natural gas and our electric bills aren’t that high. I did shut down several of our business servers that were in our garage too, which helped reduce our electric bills. We live in a mild climate so a heat pump was an excellent option, whereas in most other areas it is costly.
Now, I’m just going to have to wait to see if the pump lasts 20 years.
Homeowners in countries such as Germany rebelled against government drives to install more of the green technology, which is expensive to set up, during the cost of living crisis.
Not much rebelling.
It’s mostly old buildings that have a gas or oil boiler that they replace before the outphasing of fossil fuel powered boilers. So enjoy them prop up the numbers while it lasts.
Heat pumps are being installed in new houses purely because of government regulations. There is no public demand for them. Heat pumps can work ok in houses which are specifically designed for them but more expensively than gas boilers. Trying to retrofit heat pumps to the existing housing stock would be incredibly expensive and they will not work well in houses which are designed for gas boilers. They will not heat old houses properly and will also cost more to run.
The government foists electric heat pumps on society and then govenment Net Zero policy drives up the cost of electricity. A Perfect Storm for consumers and the economy as the economy slows down when consumers have less to spend because their electricity bill is taking all their extra money out of their pockets.
Net Zero Climate Change Policy is turning into a Disaster, exascerbated by politicians who can’t see the trainwreck coming.
Here’s the AI solution.
Electric vehicles (EVs) can catch fire and burn down houses in a number of ways.
Oh ye of nil intelligence.
A large proportion of older homes cannot be fitted with heat pump without huge expense.
It just WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Great to know you want people to have NO HEATING or COOLING when there is no wind or solar..
You really don’t like people, do you !!
All that headbanging and for what?
Malthus
WEF
And in the UK, Planning and Building Regulations force the use of so-called renewable energy on new housebuilders, but sane people don’t want unreliable forms of energy.
It’s the same with bloody EV chargers, Part R of the Building Regulations mandates the installation of an EV charger despite the vast majority will never be used.
Do the buyers or renters of these new residential units select the type of heating equipment used in the buildings or does the builder select it following government regulations? If the builder chooses then what you said shows ignorance and a lack of thinking ability.
“Do the buyers or renters of these new residential units select the type of heating equipment used …”
Do an images search for: house with ducts for heating
A building designed with circular or rectangular ducts for forced-air heating and cooling will not need pipes for gas, so the buyers/renters can choose one building over another, but it would be odd for a building to have both sorts of spaces.
My question was did the buyers have a choice for a new unit. AbuserName was not clear how the choice was made.
In the UK over 22m of the 28m houses are heated by gas. Many millions of these are Victorian and later terraced houses totally unsuited to retrofitting with heat pumps.
Add to that the fact that electricity is around FOUR times more expensive than gas in the UK and you can be sure that the Government is never going to reach the target 600,000 pa installations from 2028.
Looks like the plan calls for maybe 160,000 installations per year. There won’t be that many heat pumps manufactured nor will there be enough trained installers. Government believes passing a law or approving a regulation is all that is required to make something happen. Mom and Dad (Mother Nature and Father Time) will be teaching them once again how little power they actually have.
Nothing in your post contradicts the OP, and in fact seems to confirm it. FROM YOUR LINK:
“However, in the fourth quarter of 2023 the number of heat pumps produced was down 41.4% on the previous quarter and down 49.5% on the corresponding quarter in 2022.”
What do you think (sic) why they plummed 50%?
Story Tip
Green party destroyed in Germany. 🙂
‘Everyone Hates Them’: German Leaders Resign After Green Party’s Crushing Election Loss – Climate Change Dispatch
Hopefully the beginning of the end to all the totalitarian “green” madness that spawns mandates on EVs, heat pumps etc
Just needs a rooftop solar juggernaut to fix the problem-
Rooftop solar ‘juggernaut’ risks grid overload as AEMO issues first-ever low-demand warning – ABC News
Ignore the whingers and skeptics-
Solar industry irate as Victorians to bear cost of technology to switch off rooftop PV | RenewEconomy
We are charging headlong into a situation with a massive mis-match between supply and demand. There will only be electricity when it happens to be available. People will be penalised for rooftop solar generation when the sun is shining, and will have blackouts the rest of the time.
The sad thing is that not only was this all predictable, but it actually was formally predicted and no-one in authority was prepared to listen. We need to get the reasons examined in the law courts and the offenders jailed. Who are the offenders? The businesses bribing politicians to force disastrous renewables on the market, the politicians taking the bribes (described no doubt as political donations) and the media and social media companies who joined the bandwagon.
Forgive and forget? No way. I can forgive honest mistakes, but this was not an honest mistake. Prosecute. And, BTW, same for the coronavirus stuff-up.
Logic, common sense don’t come into it..
More Ed Miliband madness as Labour revives hated ‘boiler tax’ adding another £150 to bills
As Labour Party voter ratings collapse, you might of thought it would try to come up with a popular policy or two. Instead, it’s doubling down on one of the most hated of all. https://www.express.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/1951668/Ed-Miliband-boiler-tax-heat-pumps-energy-policy-Labour-Party
Good job most of us only have the one kitchen
Across the sea of suffering….
Unfortunately, the blueprint is 1984.
It’s the instruction manual in prose.
I miss the window tax
We all miss the Navy right now, Redge.
Don’t bother with heat pumps in France-
In France, climate is collapsing: millions of lives threatened (msn.com)
Flee to the Middle East or Africa by all accounts.
Here in Colorado, I have to wait for some warming to enjoy a comfortable bike ride. Fortunately, a couple of hours will do it.
As a heat pump user since 1988, I have had experience ranging from bad to acceptable. My first was a ground water sourced system in Michigan. The experience was bad. It had serious reliability issues, culminating in a leaking water to refrigerant heat exchanger in 10 years resulting in replacement with a gas furnace. The water source was a 52 degree F well, the sink was a lake. Surprisingly, the return line to the lake would frequently plug with black sediment, requiring replacement or cleaning. A big complaint was that to gain efficiency, the warm air flow rate was quite high, and only a fraction of a degree warmer than ambient. That meant that when the rooms would cool to the point of needing heat, cool air would start blowing at everyone.
The water to air AC system was great, so I never even hooked up the compressor assisted cooling. I kept that in place even when replacing the heating part of the system.
I have two ambient air heat pumps in southern Texas. My experience with them has been mostly acceptable. One has resistance backup, which rarely turns on. The other is for an outdoor workshop, and has no backup. During the 10 day wind turbine outage a couple of years back we were surrounded by rolling blackouts, but had power the whole time. We happen to live near a small hydro dam and I presume that’s why our power stayed on.
The workshop unit failed miserably. It turned into a solid block of Ice twice. It took more than an hour of flooding with 72 degree ground water to melt all the ice each time. The “defrost cycle” obviously wasn’t quite adequate.
It was good we had power all along. My “disaster plan” would have failed miserably. I have adequate backup gasoline power generators. However, I store little gasoline since the summer heat destroys it. That should be no problem because of my 4WD car, a remnant of a Michigan heritage. However, the snow and Ice on the roads prevented the gas stations from getting refills, and a couple of days into the storm, all the gas stations ran out of gas. I need a new plan for that.
“”bad to acceptable””
Is nowhere good enough in my book.
The main problems are:
Suggestion: Use propane power backup generators as propane doesn’t deteriorate the way gasoline does.
What is the “cost of living crisis”? The Telegraph mentions it as though it is a natural disaster. I assume they mean the cost of living increases due to the Net Zero policies of the government.
It is the insanely and artificially high energy costs. Everything requires energy.
“”Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world
Cost of power for industrial businesses now four times more expensive than in US””
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burdened-most-expensive-electricity-prices-in-world/?utmsource=email
We have shale, coal, the North sea and… net zero chance of ever realising their benefits.
The more expensive your energy is the more virtue you possess.
“It is the insanely and artificially high energy costs. Everything requires energy.” And people require food. That’s why the Marxists are moving to control both. You don’t have to believe in conspiracy theories to see/watch the plan unfold.
Well that and the Covid helicopter money to save us all from dooming having to wash through the supermarket etc. There may be a common thread here but trust them they’re from the Gummint and they’re here to help with our various doomings.
I went with a multi-speed five ton heat pump in rural east Texas. Due to large efficiency designs to the house, I could get by with a 3.5 ton, its nice to change the temperature within the house by 10 degrees (F) in an hour or so and as I discovered when the temps hit lower 20s (F) the unit was working very hard, in conjunction with a propane fireplace to keep the house warm.
With lots of older trees spanning the above-ground electrical service all over the area, a good bit of wind will knock out the power for a day or week (depends on how big the wind storm). I can power the whole house during the peak of summer with a 9500W gasoline powered inverter generator and do everything except dry clothes while keeping the house in the mid 70s (F) mostly because the heat-pump is just loping along at a low amount of power.
The use case that concerns me is the 20F WX with ice knocking out the power lines. The heat pump, while it has auxiliary electric heat strips, I can get by with running the fireplace and having the HVAC blower move the air around the house. What problem I can’t solve is when it goes into de-ice mode 8000+W for 30-90 seconds while the unit is also using the power of a five ton just to squeeze some heat out of 20F air. The generator can’t handle that.
So now I am looking at a 20KW Cummins generator to cover that possibility. The problem I have with the heat pump is clearly a first-world problem. A heat pump is an adequate solution for the region of the world I live in. Its adequate until it isn’t. And while a propane furnace probably would cost me more over the span of years, I wouldn’t need a large generator to keep the house running when the heat pump is struggling during common power outages. But for the 98% of the rest of the time, its OK. For the spring and fall, the variable speed heat pump is superior to all other forms of climate control in the house. I would think that the single speed or two-stage heat pump is likely inferior to traditional AC/gas all season HVAC solutions.
I know that a variable speed is expensive. Its a vanity thing to not ever hear the HVAC running except for temperature recovery operations (transitioning from “away” to “home”). But heat-pump really was the best solution for me,
I’ve had an air-sourced heat pump for 20 years. I can get temps 10 degrees below Zero, so have a modern catalytic-burner wood stove to carry me through the winter. I also have my own trees, a chainsaw, and all else I need to have firewood. Urban residents won’t be able to match such a situation. [Washington State has strict controls on wood stoves.]
In this area the trees are self pruning meaning that firewood literally drops from the skies and just needs to be harvested and cut to size.
“just needs to be harvested and cut to size.”
A job for someone younger than I. 🙂
A lot of people around here have wood stoves for winter, I have thought about it once or twice, then remembered not liking cutting up firewood much when I was living near Canberra in my younger days.
I have 2 reverse-cycle air-conditioners, which work well, cooling and chewing up solar panel output during summer.
Bit more expensive when used in winter to warm the house in the evening, from the grid.
We spent 6 months in southern Europe last winter. 95% of our accomodations used heat pumps. We were cold all the time. A few places had furnaces for a couple of hours a day. Those few hours were a treat. Heat pumps in contrast were near useless. And we were in the warmest parts of Europe.
Having a heat pump, I would agree with that experience. Heat pumps, particularly the variable speed varieties are excellent at maintaining a temperature so if you dial in a temp/humidity setting, the heat pump can achieve and hold it without the cycling. So heat pumps are superior for that use case.
That said, it is very satisfying being near an air vent that is discharging noticeably warmer air rather than the slightly warmer than ambient air that is pushed through a heat pump’s vents. I think it has to do with the fact that air moving over the skin seems cooler and that the function of a heat pump is to maintain a certain air temperature rather than heating or cooling human beings.
For that feeling of warmth, we have fireplaces with the circulation fans that envelope the fire box.
That said, it is very satisfying being near an air vent that is discharging noticeably warmer air rather than the slightly warmer than ambient air that is pushed through a heat pump’s vents.
======
exactly what we found. You had to turn the heat pump up to 30C or 85F to feel warm, so they weren’t saving anything. And if you did turn them that high they would ice up and stop working.
Being foreigners, you didn’t know that you are supposed to have polar bear fur lined clothing.
Installed a twin split unit myself( mostly) for my gal who has electric heat ( so no ducting) works well down to minus 15 ( Canada). She has a pellet stove in basement ( bungalow) for colder weather or emergency. Using them successfully depends on application and location. It saves her $100s every month and carrying 40kg bags of pellets down stairs. There are even newer units that show more promise. Many seem to dismiss them because of a ‘distaste’ for all things ‘eco’ related, same could be said for better insulation. Like all things, one needs to way the pros and cons
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
— Unknown (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
Let’s see the residential electricity prices as part of this advocacy driven policy reach.
The whole business sounds like a duplicate of the decline of EV sales once it became obvious they were overpriced, undependable, and had a low resale value. Now the shortcomings of heat pumps are becoming evident, and consumers don’t appreciate having a product of questionable value and a higher price rammed down their throats to fight the non-threat of climate change.
I’m a little surprised because Europeans generally don’t have air-conditioning, and the heat pumps go either way. Maybe in the name of energy conservation, the heat pumps that are being installed can only heat?
The rules must also be requiring that the gas furnace be removed in order to get the heat pump subsidy, otherwise the rational thing to do would be to keep the gas furnace and just add some mini splits.
That’s what people in the colder parts of the United States do in the fall and spring, when heat is needed but it isn’t too cold outside yet.
Then heat pumps are more efficient than gas, but they get less efficient as temperatures keep dropping, so when serious cold hits the heat pumps get shut down and people switch to gas.
In spring the heat pumps get turned on again, and they stay on as the call switches from heating to cooling.
Expensive, but that’s unavoidable in real cold, and the redundancy is also valuable. You better have some radiant electric heat available for that purpose too, and maybe a wood stove, and propane and kerosene back ups as well, and a backup generator that can run off of gas, gasoline, or propane, haha.
Minnesota. Whew. Hard to imagine how humans used to survive that in a teepee.
It just doesn’t stop, government must get out of the power business. It will take some time to recover from the damage they have already caused. It’s a bad deal.
If the UK Telegraph is to be believed, there is also increasing resistance to EV sales there.
Interest in electric cars has slumped to its lowest level for four years as an increasing number of drivers say they will stick with petrol-powered vehicles.
Figures from the Department for Transport show that just 13pc of all drivers plan to buy a fully electric car as their next vehicle.
By contrast, interest in combustion-engine cars has risen, with 37pc of motorists saying they will buy a petrol-powered vehicle, up from 31pc a year earlier.
The figures represent a new setback to Labour’s plans to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by the end of the decade.
The 13pc of people planning to buy an electric vehicle is the lowest since the summer of 2020, when the vehicles were much less widely available.
It is down from 16pc this time last year and a peak of 19pc in the summer of 2022. Interest in hybrids has also dipped.
The latest figures show that around 30pc are now seeking to buy them as their next car, down from 35pc in 2022.
Among potential hybrid buyers, motorists are increasingly opting for older non-plug-in variations that largely rely on internal combustion engines […]
The research, carried out by YouGov for rental marketplace Turo, asked participants when, if ever, they expected to make the switch, with 49pc replying they did not expect to do so at all.
The concluding para of this piece is hilarious:
Rory Brimmer, head of UK business development at Turo, said: “As our car ownership index shows, there are still some doubts among drivers when it comes to switching to EVs”
Only some doubts?
I live in Kentucky. When my hp died i had a “gas pack” installed. This is a gas burner unit that includes air conditioning. All of the duct work under the house was replaced. My installed cost was less than $7,000. I will confess that I have a two-story house, 2400 sf, and only one gas pack. The thermostat is downstairs. My wife adjusts the thermostat before going upstairs to bed. However, my wife is happy winter and summer – happy wife, happy life.
Heat pumps have a niche application being an environment where the temperature swings are not extreme.
Like anything else, there is no one size fits all.