On November 30, IEA released The Future of Heat Pumps, a special report in the IEA’s World Energy Outlook series. The report provides an outlook for heat pumps, identifying key opportunities to accelerate their deployment. The report also highlights the major barriers and policy solutions and explores the implications of an accelerated uptake of heat pumps for energy security and efforts to tackle climate change. One of the key messages of the report is that heat pumps are the key solution to reduce natural gas use for heating, support energy security, cut emissions and keep energy bills affordable.

According to IEA’s press release Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of IEA, has stated that “heat pumps address many of policy makers’ most pressing concerns on energy affordability, supply security and the climate crisis all the pieces are in place for the heat pump market to take off, in a similar way that we have seen for other key climate technologies like solar PV and electric vehicles. Policy measures are in place today, but they need to be reinforced urgently to allow heat pumps to fulfil their significant economic and environmental potential.”

This report is the first comprehensive global outlook on the subject. It conveys the message that heat pumps are a hyper-efficient and climate-friendly solution, which help consumers save money on bills and enable countries to cut reliance on imported fossil fuels.

Energy Machines (EM) is a leader in the design, implementation and operation of integrated energy systems for buildings. Hence, EM has a key focus on the digitalization of heat pumps and is, in relation to that, also a part of the Danish working group in the HPT Annex 56 on "Digitalization and IoT for Heat Pumps".

Ground source heat pumps, which take advantage of borehole thermal storages (BTES), are some of the most flexible heat pumps which provide high energy efficiency. When designing a new BTES, care must be taken to avoid the dropping of temperatures below freezing in the boreholes. The lifetime of the underground storage is typically designed for 25 years. In practice, this is controlled on-site by dumping excess building heat in free-cooling mode during spring/early summer and excess heat from the hot side into the borehole in warm summer months during active cooling. Thermal energy meters can be placed around the site to estimate the heat power going into the boreholes, but they are expensive and in most applications, the energy meters are therefore limited to only measuring the building interface (heating/cooling side).

The use of Ground Source Heat Pumps (GHSP) is a technological alternative to produce higher efficiency for air conditioning for cooling/heating buildings coupled with the reduction of the carbon emissions from building operations. In Brazil, this sort of technology started to drive attention and become an alternative for reducing carbon emissions and was included as one of the strategies in the Brazilian Energy Plan for 2050.

The ground temperature along the depth can be divided into two regions, a zone in the shallow ground, where the ground temperature varies with the seasonal change and a zone in the deeper ground (a depth of more than ~10 m below the surface) where the ground temperature remains relatively constant. Considering that the Brazilian climate is diverse, a ground temperature variation from south to north is expected. For this reason, the feasibility of GHSP may also be variable in this country. In the tropics, the constant ground temperature in the deeper ground zone varies between 20oC and 25oC, which still permits the cooling of buildings.

The historical development of the heat pump market in Austria shows an early phase of technology diffusion in the 1980s, mainly heat pumps for water heating, followed by a significant market decrease in the 1990s and a strong market diffusion starting from the year 2001. Now mainly heat pumps for space heating.

From 2001 onwards, the diffusion of heat pumps for space heating coincided with the introduction of energy-efficient buildings with low heating energy demand, which offered good conditions for an energy-efficient and economically attractive operation of heat pumps. This is due to low-temperature needs in heating systems and low specific energy consumption for space heating in this type of building.