Heat pump diffusion

Heat pumps can in many situations efficiently replace oil and gas boilers with electricity both as large scale industrial system and on domestic private consumer scale.

The use of domestic electrical heat pumps can have challenging effects to distribution grids. In highly temperature sensitive countries in cold winter peaks, one of the commonly proposed solution is the use of a combined technology using electricity in base load times and switching to a fossil source in order to meet peak loads. These so called “hybrid heat pumps” (HHP) heat ambient air and water typically with gas instead of using ambient (ground)water or air temperature differences.

In the TYNDP2018, hybrid heat pumps were only modelled for countries with extensive residential natural gas infrastructure which would allow their extensive application.

The upper boundary of growth rate of the diffusion of heat pump systems in the residential and commercial sector was set to 10 %, which is closely in line with the growth rate estimations of the European Heat Pump Association until 2020.

Framing the uncertainty of hybrid heating pumps diffusion is much more challenging given the limited availability of past development rates. Thus, these values were derived using the upper boundary provided by Gas TSO with high penetration of gas in the heating market and detailed numbers for the development path of hybrid heat pumps within their scenarios.

Table 15: Heat pump growth rates

Table 16: Maximum share of hybrid heat pumps in total installed heat pumps

Figure 15: Share of energy carriers to cover H/C demand per country. On the secondary axes (right) the total demand per country is shown in TWh (2012)

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