The biggest heat pumps (opens in new tab)

Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.

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.

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

That's old heat pumps. Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps designed to work well in cold weather in 2007, with Fujitsu and Daikin adopting similar technology by 2012, and others following within a few years.

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.

Don’t let the 15 degree+ differences in latitudes fool you, a lot of the Nordic population lives near the sea, so low altitude and plenty of sea current temperature moderation.

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.

A lot of the Nordic heat pumps are ground source, that is to say you drill a hole a couple of hundred feet down into the bedrock where it's always a bit above freezing and you circulate your heat exchange fluid down there and back up again. Air-source heat pumps are mostly a thing in the southern parts where the climate is relatively mild.

You never go below 1 in efficiency. Worst case the water is heated directly with electricity.

I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).

The 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.

Most district heating systems in the Nordics are publicly owned, in part or in full. There are also price controls for the privately owned ones.

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.

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.

Imagine if things were the other way around. That we already had heat pumps and someone suggests we should pipe this toxic and explosive gas into our homes and burn it. That would be an insane idea.

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.

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.

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.

Get an ERV - it will most likely have air filter. Such a life improvement to a point I'm actually waiting for winter now (in summer you have a problem of mosquitoes, house doesn't cool quickly enough by itself and if you close shades for sleeping - you don't get adequate ventilation).

air conditioning is also a heat pump. they cost way less then the air/water heatpumps and are easy and cheap to install. Since two years I heat with air conditioning and its super effective and cheap.

edit// Hot water is generated by electric solar panels. 1200w are sufficent to have enough hot water for two persons

> Sign of a rich and very developed country.

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.

LMAO good one.

Looks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!

Maybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).

We couldn't since all the capacity would go to AI, not to your home heating.

Except that nuclear power is extremely expensive.

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. :)

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 air temperature isn't relevant.

I'm just comparing the magnitudes here. A nuclear reactor powering dumb cheap resistive heaters is just several times more expensive than the heat pumps.

But unlike these heat pumps, the reactor doesn't need electricity.

1.6GWe gives you 3.2GWt max alongside. In more modern this is even less. Of the 100% energy produced 33-38% will end up in the electric grid.

A heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it.

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?

At this rate by 2135 Europe will have returned to feudal society, most people will be living without electricity, and the primary source of heating will be wood and coal.

You mean if Germany still exists and the mongols did not have take over Europe.

We did buy Uranium from Russia because it was cheap, but they are far from the only suppliers. Half the world can mine uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

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.

That is such a bad explanation. One, Russia is not the only supplier, two, Germany still buys fossil fuels from Russia.

No, this is a lie. It is also funny because Germany was so depended on Russian Gas that nuclear fuel even if fully depend on would be laughable.

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!

This problem could have been solved by breeder reactors. Now China is doing it instead of us.