International. Trane Technologies shared an analysis that electric heat pumps are getting a renewed boost to the existing low-carbon technology portfolio.
The company reveals that in 2022, Americans installed 4 million heat pumps, surpassing for the first time gas furnaces that run on fossil fuels. The European Heat Pump Association reported a 38% increase in heat pump sales in 2022 compared to the previous year. Technology retailers have been touting heat pumps as an efficient electrical alternative to fossil fuel systems. There was even a panel on heat pumps at South by Southwest this year.
It has also left many people wondering why this technology isn't used more widely and what makes heat pumps a significantly more efficient way to heat and cool buildings.
According to the International Energy Agency, in 2022 electric heat pumps covered only 10% of heating needs in buildings worldwide. But they are able to supply more than 90% of global space and water heating with a lower level of CO2 emissions compared to condensing gas boiler technology.
While the public profile of heat pumps may be receiving renewed interest, the technology has been used since the 1950s, with significant improvements in performance along the way.
Trane Technologies says there are multiple reasons why heat pumps are a lower-carbon alternative to traditional electric and gas heating and cooling.
Any heat that is released into the environment can be considered wasted, and since it takes energy to produce heat, wasted heat is wasted energy. Because heat pumps extract latent heat, their ability to recover and reuse heat makes them a powerful resource in the "free energy" sector.
For example, the data centers that power the Internet as we know it. These server groups produce a large amount of waste heat and require significant cooling. At Alsameer Energy Hub in the Netherlands, excess heat from a local data center was captured and transferred via hot water to three neighboring locations, including a school and gym. Chilled water from those same facilities returned to the data center, providing the necessary cooling requirements.
Thanks to heat pumps combined with other thermal management technology, this energy transfer delivered a lower base temperature in the data center, helped significantly reduce the electricity needed to create an optimal temperature within the facility and the energy needed to heat water for school and gymnastics.
Even in cases where a heat pump's direct power source is a coal-burning power grid, conservative estimates reduce a heat pump's electricity demand by 30 to 40 percent. When combined with renewable energy sources, such as solar, modern heat pumps have the potential to become zero-carbon solutions.
Trane Technologies explains that advanced technology, such as heat pumps, allows us to combine independent heating and cooling systems, resulting in impressive gains in energy efficiency. Compared to conventional heating and cooling technologies, efficiency performance can increase by more than 300%. In some cases, high-efficiency heat pumps can generate their own internal power, requiring even fewer units of power from a direct power source.
For all climates
Thanks to technological advances that have improved the performance of electric heat pumps in geographies with sustained sub-zero temperatures, a resurgence is taking place with adoption even in some of the world's coldest climates, such as Finland.
In fact, 60% of homes in Norway are equipped with heat pumps. The key feature enabling this ultra-cool performance is a breakthrough in variable speed inverter driven compressor technology, which was not available in major residential offerings just a decade ago.
Good for new and old buildings
For a large part of the world, replacing old systems involves retrofitting buildings with new technology. Since building in older, denser urban environments presents a unique set of challenges, custom district heating schemes can be an important solution in the future of district comfort heating and cooling.
In one example in Geneva, Switzerland, a major district heating solution uses a thermal network to heat and cool buildings in and around the city centre with water from the lake, growing from an initial footprint of 50 buildings in 2018 to a goal of expansion to more than 350 buildings by 2035.
