Following several years of strong growth, heat pump markets slowed in Europe in 2023.
In previous articles for Carbon Brief, we discussed this initial surge in 2021 and explored the impact of the energy crisis in 2022.
Yet, despite a drop in heat pump sales in key European regions, the trends in 2023 are more nuanced than an outright downturn.
Heat pumps generally increased their position relative to fossil heating systems and, in some of the continent’s biggest heating markets, they saw continued growth.
If policymakers want to keep the transition to low-carbon heating on track, then thorough, consistent and coordinated policy efforts remain critical to scaling up heat pump markets.
Heat pumps in Europe falling short of 1.5C path
In 2023, the heat pump market’s expansion in Europe hit a plateau, as shifts in policy, changing energy prices, a stagnating economy and backlash against climate initiatives adversely affected sales in several nations.
Across the continent, there was a general downturn in sales by about 5% compared with a year earlier, as shown in the figure below.
The impact was more pronounced in the segment of air-source heat pumps for space heating, with a 12% decrease in air-to-water and a 10% fall in air-to-air sales.
Conversely, the segment for hot water heat pumps – those used for heating water for use in the home – saw significant growth, surging by nearly 20%.
However, while still high in historical terms, these sales are far from what is required to meet climate goals.
The EU will need around 60m heat pumps by 2030 to get on track for net-zero by 2050, according to modelling from the European Commission.
The aggregated statistics presented above show that, as of the end of 2023, there were roughly 23m heat pumps across the 21 EU nations included in the data. (The figures also include, under “Rest of Europe”, three non-EU countries, the UK, Norway and Switzerland, while excluding smaller EU markets.)
This means that an average of around six million installations would be needed per year out to 2030, in order to hit the 60m milestone, whereas the current pace of growth is closer to 2.5m per year.
Trends in 2023 went in the opposite direction to what would be required. Among the countries accounting for the largest decline in sales were Italy, Finland and Poland, as shown in the figure below.
According to market statistics from the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA), Italian sales fell to around 345,000 units in 2023, compared to 514,000 the previous year, a decrease of 33%.
In Finland, some 114,000 heat pumps were sold compared to nearly 200,000 in 2022. And in Poland, the market fell to 129,000 units after reaching 208,000 in 2022.
While the European market contracted overall, several individual countries saw strong market growth. In Germany, sales increased by 60% year-on-year from 276,000 in 2022 to 439,000 in 2023.
In the Netherlands, 154,000 heat pumps were sold, a 53% increase on 2022 levels of roughly 100,000. Belgium experienced Europe’s largest market increase at 72%, breaking through 100,000 sales in one year for the first time.
In the UK, trade group the Heat Pump Association reported annual growth of 4% to reach more than 60,000 units sold. This data includes air-to-water and ground-source heat pumps, but does not account for air-to-air and is, therefore, incomplete.
Heat pumps gain market share
The decrease in the European heat pump sales in 2023 is moving in the opposite direction to what would be required to meet Europe’s decarbonisation goals. Nevertheless, the overall picture is more nuanced than this contrast suggests.
For example, in certain countries where homes are predominantly heated by fossil fuels, heat pumps have continued to gain market share.
France is the leader in this regard. The market share of heat pumps has been steadily growing over the past decade, with more heat pumps sold than gas and oil boilers for the first time in 2022.
This French trend continued in 2023 – as shown in the top left corner of the figure below. Fossil fuel boiler sales fell sharply by 23%, allowing heat pumps to reach 61% of the heating market despite also seeing a small fall in sales.
Germany (top right) has seen the heat pump market share steadily increasing year-on-year from around 10% in 2014 to 33% in 2023. Despite a booming fossil heating market, enough heat pumps were sold in 2023 that their market share continued to grow.
In Poland (centre left), although the market share of heat pumps plateaued in 2023, it has risen significantly to 40%, from just 10% in 2018. The Netherlands (bottom left) has also seen a rapid shift, with a heat pump market share of 18% in 2023, compared to just 1% in 2014.
Italy’s heat pump market share (centre right), which is more stable, contracted in 2023 after two years of growth. In the UK (bottom right), heat pumps have roughly tripled their market share in five years, but from a very low base. Excluding air-to-air heat pump sales, only around 60,000 units were sold in 2023, with a current market share of roughly 3%.
Considering all six countries together – the largest markets for heating installations, all of which still have gas boilers as their predominant heating technology – the market share of heat pumps has tripled from around 8% in 2013 to 24% in 2023.
A challenging outlook
European countries are facing diverse challenges to growing heat pump sales. The plateauing of heat pump sales in France, Europe’s largest market, is a key example of this.
On the one hand, the French government cut funding to one of the main heat pump support programmes by €1.4bn while announcing an increase in electricity tariffs. On the other, the regulator also announced a hike in gas tariffs, linking it directly to a decrease in gas consumption, among other factors, including the removal of a price cap.
This indicates an escalating financial vulnerability for customers remaining on the gas network in France. The heating industry expects a further contraction of the boiler market in 2024, although not at the pace seen in 2022-2023.
Elsewhere, the 2022-2023 heat pump market surge in Germany is not expected to continue, RAP analysis suggests. Already in the latter half of 2023, installations had slowed compared to the previous year, as had applications for the country’s subsidy programme.
This is largely linked to Germany watering down its Building Energy Act. It remains to be seen to what extent mandatory municipal heat planning, part of the EU’s revised Energy Efficiency Directive, will drive an uptake of heat pumps in the coming years.
Poland was Europe’s fastest-growing market for heat pumps in 2022, with a 120% increase in sales in a single year. The 46% contraction of heat pump sales in 2023 was largely driven by a 40% drop in the single-family home boiler market, with total sales of fossil fuel heating systems falling in turn. As a result, heat pumps maintained their market share in 2023.
However, the unfavourable price ratio in Poland, typically more than three times as expensive for electricity as for gas, remains a key challenge. The recently elected government is considering policy reform options to address this, however.
Italy’s steep market decline, especially for air-to-water heat pumps, which fell by more than 50%, moves the country in the wrong direction for decarbonising its heating sector. The country’s 2023 heat pump sales were even lower than in 2021.
Key reasons for this include changes to the Superbonus energy efficiency support program, which lowered its reimbursement rate from 110% to 90% and a tightening of eligibility for the scheme.
The heat pump market in the Netherlands was one of Europe’s fastest growing in 2023.
While there was a decline in sales in the country during the last quarter of 2023, due to supply chain constraints, the long-term outlook is for further growth. The market is expected to remain at similar levels throughout 2024.
However, regulation expected to come into effect in 2026 that would have phased out installations of stand-alone fossil fuel heating systems is now expected to be scrapped. The new Dutch right-wing coalition government announced a u-turn on the policy along with a raft of other climate measures in May.
In the UK, the heat pump market expanded slightly in 2023 compared to 2022. With around 60,000 units installed, however, it is well off the government’s target of 600,000 installations per year by 2028.
In October, heat pump grants under the boiler upgrade scheme were increased from £5,000 to £7,500.
The government also recently confirmed that, from 2025, new homes will no longer be allowed to install fossil fuel heating systems or so-called “hydrogen-ready” boilers. This will result in a substantial market boost of more than 150,000 additional units per year, RAP analysis suggests, assuming most new homes will include heat pumps.
However, there is continued uncertainty around the clean heat market mechanism, the main instrument expected to drive heat pump installations in existing buildings.
A one-year postponement of the scheme – which will set a rising standard for heat pumps as a proportion of fossil fuel boiler sales – was recently announced following pressure from the gas boiler industry.
At EU level, previously strong indications of support have begun fading. The European Commission has delayed its heat pump action plan, which would have continued to lay the groundwork for the rapid expansion of the technology across the EU.
More than 60 chief executive officers across the heat pump industry criticised the decision, warning that it risked billions of euros in investments.
At the same time, the European Parliament and the European Council recently passed the revised Energy Performance in Buildings Directive, which will prohibit subsidies for standalone fossil fuel boilers after 2025 and aims for a full phaseout of fossil fuel boilers by 2040.
Consistent policy remains key
Heat pumps are the “central technology” for low-carbon heat and rapid growth in their market share is crucial for meeting national and international climate goals.
After expanding rapidly in 2021 and 2022, the plateau in the European heat pump market in 2023 highlights the impact of inconsistent policies in denting their long-term growth.
The variance in market performance across countries – stemming from a mix of policy shifts, funding cuts and regulatory changes – underscores the complexity of scaling heat pump technologies rapidly enough to meet Europe’s decarbonisation goals.
Nonetheless, far more heat pumps are being installed than in previous years and heat pumps are continuing to gain market share in Europe’s largest heating markets.
RAP analysis shows that consistent and forward-thinking policy packages are likely to be key to boosting this trend. Such interventions could lower the upfront cost of heat pumps and ensure their running cost competitiveness, as well as providing the industry with the market certainty necessary to spur investment, innovation and consumer confidence.
The post Guest post: Heat pumps gained European market share in 2023 despite falling sales appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Heat pumps gained European market share in 2023 despite falling sales
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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