According to the European Commission, heat pumps are necessary for the transition to clean energy and to achieve the European goals of carbon neutrality by 2050. Gradually, they will heat more and more buildings. Romania plans to replace the current wood stoves mainly with heat pumps.

Heat pumps will cover a quarter of the heating and cooling sources

Energy-efficient technologies currently used for heating/cooling will gradually be replaced by heat pumps.

The aim is to achieve a 25% share of heat pumps in useful energy demand for heating/cooling, according to the revised version of the Integrated National Energy and Climate Change Plan 2023-2030.

According to the document, “biomass-based furnaces will be replaced mainly by heat pumps, a clean technology classified in turn as renewable.”

In the heating and cooling sector, the share of renewable sources in Romania will be 32.7% in 2030 and 34.7% in 2050. This share will be achieved, on the one hand, by replacing biomass with heat pumps for heating and cooling premises.

Hundreds of thousands of new installers will be needed in Europe

The REPowerEU plan aims to double the current rate of installation of heat pumps in buildings and accelerate the deployment of heat pumps in large district heating and cooling networks.

According to the European Commission, 3 million heat pumps were installed in 2022 alone, and at least 10 million additional heat pumps are expected to be installed by 2027.

Due to the phasing out of polluting heating sources, European ambitions set for 2029 expect at least 30 million additional heat pumps to be installed by 2030 compared to 2020.

But in order to increase the production of heat pumps and their installation, another 750,000 installers are needed. In addition, at least 50% of existing installers need retraining to work with heat pumps.

How much European money will be allocated to heat pumps and where it comes from

Total investment in heat pumps in the EU almost doubled from €13 billion in 2020 to €23 billion in 2023, despite a slowdown in 2023 due to lower energy prices and reduced subsidies, the European Commission said.

New financing instruments will support the installation of heat pumps. Starting from 2026, all EU countries will be able to benefit from the Fund to mitigate the social consequences of climate measures. It is an EU fund of €86.7 billion and the money will be used to decarbonize heating and cooling of buildings, including the installation of heat pumps, for vulnerable households and micro-enterprises.

The fund for mitigating the social consequences of climate action will be mainly fueled by revenues from the auction of carbon emission certificates under the new trading scheme. From 2027, a carbon price will be set for fuels used in construction, road transport and other sectors.

European plans aim to identify funding opportunities for both the installation of individual heat pumps and district heating supplied by large heat pumps as part of local and regional heating and cooling strategies.

What are heat pumps?

Heat pumps make better use of renewable energy sources, environmental energy and waste heat. In buildings, heat pumps are used for heating, hot water supply and in some cases also for cooling.

Instead of generating heat, they extract and use environmental energy (hot or cold, from outside air and surface or wastewater) or geothermal energy (hot or cold, from ground or underground water). In most cases, the refrigeration cycle is vapor compression, which uses electricity, but there are also cycles that work with heat.

According to an article in Panorama, heat pumps are used in a similar way to refrigerators, taking heat from the products inside and transferring it to the outside. Only instead of food, the pumps use the environment, from where they take heat and introduce it into the house.

What makes a heat pump special compared to other heating technologies is that the drive energy is less than the energy extracted. For this reason, specialists call heat pumps “energy multipliers”. Typically, the drive energy is about a third or a quarter of the energy obtained from the environment.

Depending on the resource they use, heat pumps are aerothermal, hydrothermal, which use water from lakes, rivers or even groundwater, and geothermal, which use the temperature of the earth. Each type of pump has its strengths and weaknesses. Aerothermal heat pumps (air-to-water heat pumps) are similar to air conditioning systems, Panorama also notes.