The biggest heat pumps

Posted by rayhaanj 12 hours ago

Counter97Comment118OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by renhanxue 2 hours ago

Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.

Comment by jabl 2 hours ago

Interesting. In Helsinki the municipal energy company has a plant with 7 heat pumps which is slightly smaller at 160 MW heat and 100 MW of cooling. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-signifi...

Comment by renhanxue 2 hours ago

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!

Comment by jabl 2 hours ago

My understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.

Comment by willvarfar 11 hours ago

In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.

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

Comment by OptionOfT 1 minute ago

Interesting that district heating is so popular there.

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 competition

Comment by jack_tripper 11 hours ago

Sign of a rich and very developed country.

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.

Comment by wkat4242 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by hexbin010 10 hours ago

Ditto UK.

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

Comment by cnewey 3 hours ago

I was recently in a situation where I had to replace my oil-fired heating system’s oil tank (it wasn’t double skinned and no longer safe).

It was £2500 to replace the oil tank, or I could opt for £2250 to install a heat pump with the government grant. This included all plumbing, electrical work, installation, and 6 new radiators all over my house.

Honestly to me it seemed like a no-brainer. It’s a tad more expensive to run, but it works really quite well and is a lot less invasive than a big smelly tank of kerosene. I gained another 90cm of width in my garden, it’s actually quieter than the oil boiler, and it doesn’t stink in the summer- win win.

Comment by wkat4242 10 hours ago

Yes, it's just a lot of money for a lot of people.

Norway is really a different kind of rich compared to the rest of europe, they have tons of oil rights all over the world (and as such they still contribute a lot to global warming even though they have a lot of money for 'green' tech at home).

PS yeah Spain is good for heating but not for AC though (which I don't have, sadly). But I do enjoy life here a lot more even though I would make much more money in Holland.

Comment by supersparrow 10 hours ago

A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon.

I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to replace pipework to support heat pump rads.

Pretty sure the government ‘incentive’ was £3k at the time. Doesn’t come remotely close!

Comment by pjc50 9 hours ago

I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/

Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.

This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.

Comment by hexbin010 9 hours ago

£15k included the solar?

Comment by pjc50 8 hours ago

Sadly no, that was a £5k => 3.8kW installation ten years previously. That has long since paid for itself in feed in tariffs.

Comment by hexbin010 10 hours ago

Was your old boiler a non-combi?

Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts.

£20k, jesus!

Comment by rsynnott 2 hours ago

Whatever about a combi, you probably don't want a non-condensing boiler these days, not with gas the price that it is.

Comment by zzbn00 4 hours ago

Condensing boilers became mandatory in UK just over 20 years ago

Comment by mrmlz 10 hours ago

UK houses are really interesting.. Single-glass windows, poor insulation etc. And plumbing on the OUTSIDE(!) :)

Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler".

There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..

Comment by pjc50 9 hours ago

Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.

The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago

My parents' house in Bath is not "trapped by historic building rules" but there is no way in hell they are ever going to replace 3-4 stories of single pane glass double hungs ...

and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.

Comment by rsynnott 2 hours ago

By 'outdoor plumbing' they probably mean pipes running up the outside of buildings (not, like, outhouses). This is somewhat common for waste pipes.

Comment by wkat4242 6 hours ago

Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.

And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.

Comment by asplake 10 hours ago

Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.

Comment by supersparrow 10 hours ago

I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.

Comment by pm215 4 hours ago

You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.

You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.

Comment by Ekaros 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by MisterTea 4 hours ago

> There is install, but even that is not really that significant.

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.

Comment by sowbug 3 hours ago

There is now an even easier way than vacuuming. Instead of pulling the unwanted air and moisture from the lines, you can push it out with another gas, which itself can somehow coexist with the refrigerant. I haven't tried it because I already have the pump and gauges, but if I were installing my first mini split, I'd consider it.

Example: https://www.highseer.com/products/pioneer-kwik-e-vac

Comment by oceanplexian 2 hours ago

It's so ridiculously easy to vacuum and charge a heat pump it's kind of unnecessary.

I think I spent $200 in parts on Amazon and have done 4 heat pumps now. It's a vacuum pump, a scale, and a digital manifold/guage. Punch the numbers for subcool/superheat into a calculator and use the temp probes on the lines where they connect to the condenser and you can even skip the scale.

Comment by MisterTea 2 hours ago

My only caution is this method does not let you check if the lines are leak tight.

Comment by jack_tripper 10 hours ago

Probably not for entire apartment buildings since most of them run on oil or gas burning here. I only saw heat pumps on apartment buildings built after 2020 or the single family homes in the affluent areas.

Comment by Ekaros 10 hours ago

Yeah, here they are used for AC in apartments. Unless for some weird reason they are electric heating... And even then for some reason we do not like them visible so they need to be hidden on balconies and like.

Comment by wkat4242 10 hours ago

That's another problem in Holland too. The government mandates people moving to heat pumps for new houses (and existing ones in the longer term) because they don't want Russian gas dependencies and they want to close the national gas fields (they cause earthquakes).

But then neighbours start complaining about the look of the outdoor units and causing hassle with court orders etc. Really if they want people to move they should make it easy and cheap, so invalidate cosmetic complaints automatically.

Comment by jabl 2 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by stephen_g 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st 1 hour ago

> air-to-water heat pumps

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.

Comment by ssl-3 3 minutes ago

They are weird in the way that their utility varies.

IIRC Dave Jones of EEVBlog fame has shown a air-to-water heat exchanger that he has at his home. It's outside. And the climate in Sydney is generally warm(ish), so it makes perfect sense there.

I can also see them being useful in parts of the American South where big garages being common and the weather gets hot: Take some of the heat from the garage and convert it into hot water for showering and cleaning. Win-win.

But they're not so hot, per se, in my part of Ohio, where unfinished basements are commonly used as utility spaces.

My own basement, for instance: As unfinished basements go, it's pretty good. It's not a bad place to hang out and work on stuff any time of year. But it's a big space, and it's cold down there in the winter because I don't want to pay to warm it up. Despite being cold, that's really the most-suitable place for a conventional water heater for this house -- and it's where the house was designed to have it, too.

But if I were to "upgrade" to a heat-exchanger water heater, then as a practical matter I'd be making my already-cold basement even colder.

If it ever got cold-enough down there to make supplemental heat desirable (or worse: necessary), then it'd be an absolute loss: Burn energy over here in one place in the basement to try to keep it warm, and use that energy down the way a bit to concentrate into a tank full of hot water, while the basement stays cold.

Even if it I had a nice modern mini-split down there to provide that supplemental heat: That would mean having air-to-water heat exchanger that is backed up by an air-to-air heat exchanger that is already at the edge of its efficiency curve because it's cold outside. The combination would be reprehensibly dumb: A complicated Rube Goldberg system that costs more to buy, more to maintain, and more to run than approximately anything else would. (I might even be better off just burning my dollars directly.)

(The smarter move for my own home, in Ohio, would probably be a gas-fired tankless water heater, since they leak almost no heat while not being used.)

Comment by jack_tripper 9 hours ago

>Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though

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.

Comment by bratwurst3000 3 hours ago

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

Comment by moooo99 11 hours ago

As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.

Comment by lnsru 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by xeromal 3 hours ago

I installed mini splits (small heat pumps) in each of our rooms. Everyone gets their own temperature and they were only 800$ a piece. Did installation myself and it was pretty easy. Hardest thing was pulling a vacuum in the lines before releasing the freon (or whatever it's called) but all I did was watch a youtube video. They've been going strong for several years. I looked at the prices and they are still the same.

Comment by bratwurst3000 2 hours ago

Did the same. air air is cheap and works like a charm. this 40k for heatpump is for the most luxury version every salesmen trys to sell

Comment by xeromal 1 hour ago

Yeah if 40k is the go to amount of heat pumps, the entire country has lost the plot

Comment by stefanfisk 10 hours ago

What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump.

https://www.polarpumpen.se/kunskapsbanken/varmepump-kunskaps...

Comment by willvarfar 10 hours ago

Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.

Comment by lnsru 8 hours ago

State subsidies and insane overregulation. Think about replacing the cabinet for electricity meters (+4000€) for heat pump installation.

Comment by pjc50 8 hours ago

Why is that required? Switch to three phase? Wasn't required for me in the UK.

Comment by holowoodman 3 hours ago

No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever.

But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.

Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).

That's why it's 4kEur...

And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.

Comment by stefanfisk 3 hours ago

OK, but what about the rest of the price difference? Once the electrical is taken care of it should just be a matter of replacing the furnace and pulling some tubes and wires to the outer unit? You said 40k, but the heat pump itself isn’t even 10k.

Comment by holowoodman 3 hours ago

I didn't say that, but it is true that in Germany it is extremely expensive, mostly due to installers being greedy.

German article, but some translation tool might help: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/waermepumpe...

Comment by Retric 3 hours ago

40k for heat pumps is wildly overkill here if that’s what you where quoted someone is trying to scam you. More critically, those prices aren’t set in stone over the next 30 years.

Home PV for example is way less than 0,3€/kWh and rather dramatically changes these comparisons.

Comment by vintermann 2 hours ago

If we only could get China to do for heat pumps what they did for solar panels...

Comment by pjc50 10 hours ago

The problem is the gas (a) emits CO2 and (b) comes from Russia.

Comment by worik 2 hours ago

> 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.

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

Comment by jabl 2 hours ago

> Germany is not really rich compared to nordics.

(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.

Comment by looofooo0 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by 1313ed01 2 hours ago

Sweden used to have very cheap electricity. That's why there are so many houses with electric radiators. Far more expensive now.

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.

Comment by mrmlz 10 hours ago

Hrm. It might be cheaper than in Germany but its not cheap in Sweden except for the most nordic parts (hydro).

South Sweden - i think the prices are more on par with germany.

Comment by looofooo0 10 hours ago

Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.

Comment by willvarfar 9 hours ago

The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.

Comment by looofooo0 8 hours ago

I was solely talking about heat pump adoption due end user prices.

Comment by willvarfar 8 hours ago

I know I paid about 1000EUR for an air-air heat-pump with install in Sweden, but that was a decade ago and they cost 1500-2000EUR total these days. I also have a fancy big ground-source heat-pump bigger than most residential ones and that cost under 10000EUR total. So not sure what makes them so expensive in other countries; you'd hope competition kept prices competitive.

Comment by jgalt212 3 hours ago

> Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps

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.

Comment by renhanxue 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by jabl 2 hours ago

Air-source heat pumps are also somewhat common in retrofits where the remaining expected lifetime of the building isn't big enough to be worth spending some 20-30k€ (?) that installing a ground source heat pump costs. A significant part of the cost being drilling the hole.

Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.

Comment by Phenomenit 2 hours ago

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

Comment by hexbin010 11 hours ago

From the PDF at your link:

"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

Comment by renhanxue 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by zzbn00 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by DrScientist 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by jcsager 10 hours ago

Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.

Comment by pjc50 9 hours ago

Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.

Comment by holri 3 hours ago

There is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019:

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...

a bigger one is planned:

https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...

Comment by calaphos 11 hours ago

> heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity

Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.

Comment by xg15 3 hours ago

A bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?

Comment by jimmaswell 2 hours ago

If we all went full-in on nuclear we could use resistive heat and air cool datacenters all day with no concern for the cost. It's a shame.

Comment by rsynnott 2 hours ago

I am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.

Comment by octocop 11 hours ago

Dumb question, why is the water in the Rhine warm?

Comment by Someone 11 hours ago

It not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it.

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.

Comment by kijin 11 hours ago

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. :)

Comment by consp 11 hours ago

Depending on the contaminants, it's more likely a few degrees below 0C but you point still stands. Fish are removed as contaminant but minerals and pollution likely is not.

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)

Comment by oceanplexian 2 hours ago

> Fish are removed as contaminant

Why do I have a feeling this is one of those "green" ideas that has some horrible environmental consequence. One that could have been solved with a way simpler technology for far less money in exchange for a bit of efficiency loss.

Comment by kijin 3 hours ago

You also don't want to create an iceberg at the point where you dump the water back in the river.

Comment by ahofmann 11 hours ago

Moving water will get much colder than 0℃ before turning solid. -10℃ or even -25℃ are easily possible. If the water is also under pressure, it can get even colder.

Comment by greazy 11 hours ago

The river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.

Comment by alextingle 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by georgefrowny 11 hours ago

The opposite effect is also why thermal stations (including but not only nuclear) are usually on the coast or near large rivers: you can dump a lot of water heat into water and have it carried away.

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.

Comment by kergonath 10 hours ago

> 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.

Not quite the same thing, but there is a tropical greenhouse in the south of France that used to be heated by cooling water from a nearby uranium enrichment facility: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ferme_aux_crocodiles (unfortunately not available in English).

Comment by crote 10 hours ago

It has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks.

You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.

Comment by PunchyHamster 11 hours ago

It isn't. It's just warmer than air in winter

Comment by alextingle 11 hours ago

The air temperature isn't relevant.

Comment by pbmonster 11 hours ago

It is, since the obvious alternative to taking the heat from water would be taking the heat from the air or from the ground.

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.

Comment by georgefrowny 11 hours ago

It is a bit relevant because if the air was warm enough you would be better building huge air source heat pumps.

And if it was really warm enough you wouldn't need heating in the first place.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by BoppreH 12 hours ago

> The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($2.3m; £176m).

Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.

Comment by PunchyHamster 11 hours ago

At that rate the article will be eventually correct, give it few years

Comment by esskay 11 hours ago

Looks like its already been corrected

Comment by unwind 12 hours ago

Heh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :)

According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.

Comment by looofooo0 10 hours ago

Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.

Comment by triceratops 2 hours ago

It's the year 2135. Discussions about energy anywhere in Europe begin with the customary lament for Germany's shortsighted decision to cease nuclear energy production sometime in the 20th century. Nobody knows where this tradition originates from but it is rigorously upheld.

Comment by oceanplexian 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by triceratops 2 hours ago

Touch grass.

Comment by Maledictus 10 hours ago

Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore. The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.

Comment by holowoodman 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by jwr 3 hours ago

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

Comment by looofooo0 10 hours ago

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!

Comment by MrBuddyCasino 4 hours ago

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

Comment by ErroneousBosh 11 hours ago

> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.

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.

Comment by cyberax 11 hours ago

So $235 million for 162MW, or $2.35B for 1.6GW

A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.

Comment by masklinn 11 hours ago

These are… completely unrelated ratings?

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).

Comment by looofooo0 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by cyberax 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by pjc50 11 hours ago

.. those are somewhat unrelated things, though?

Comment by willvarfar 11 hours ago

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?

Comment by pjc50 10 hours ago

Sure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.

Comment by renhanxue 2 hours ago

Sweden's first commercial nuclear plant[0] was built right next to a newly constructed suburb precisely so that it could be used for district heating too. And also for producing small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, for... research purposes. Waste not, want not!

(It didn't last very long and was shut down in the mid 1970's, for somewhat obvious reasons.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant

Comment by looofooo0 8 hours ago

It was Philippsburg was 30km to Mannheim, Could have send 3GW of thermal energy over.