Vienna Embraces Heat Pumps to Ditch Russian Gas | Bloomberg
The Austrian capital has a $21 billion plan to end its dependence on imported natural gas with heat pumps, boreholes and energy efficiency.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/7201674
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17635721
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Less reliance on fossil fuels while making use of efficient heating / cooling systems, which in the long run will reduce emissions.
The technology for heatpumps doesn't involve fracking. You can have air-source heatpumps, which involve 0 drilling.
Are you thinking of geothermal?
the main reason for reducing emission is to reduce the influence of Russia and China
Do you mean reducing gas usage? All people I've talked to want emissions reduced to benefit the environment, not reduce the influence of Russia / China.
the technology is similar to fracking for gas
(I'm not going to be using the correct terminology) There's multiple types of heat pumps that operate by transferring the heat via the ground, air or water source. These are air and (closed) ground types
Whereas this is an (open) ground type
The environmental effect of closed types is during manufacturing and what the electricity is sourced from (solar, coal etc).
For fracking what happens is water is injected into the ground in an attempt to extract gas (very simplified explanation), the resulting water and gas can then make its way into local water sources which will effect the local population. An open heat pump system works by taking the water from ground water tables, using the water for heating / cooling and putting that water back into the ground, and due to the large size of these water sources, the average temperature doesn't really change (lighting a fire outside doesn't increase the temperature for your neighbour).
Gas and fossil fuel is also not about the environmental
This is starting to sound like trolling. At this point if you still have a bug up your ass about Geothermal/Heat Pump power generation I'm asking you to cite sources for your claims and avoid the nonsense tu quoques.
You are asking it in the wrong place. Consult an environmentalist community, or at least provide citation to a report that shows your 'concerns' have some foundation otherwise you're making a false equivalency to frakking with nothing but your ignorance to back it up.
Drilling holes for geothermal heating is not in any way like fracking.
The transport of thermal heat for the heat pumps is a closed system, and does zero harm to the environment.
At least that's how it usually works.
The cool thing about heat pumps are, you already have one. It's an AC with a reverser valve. Instead of having the cold inside the house and the hot outside, the AC can reverse in winter put the hot inside the house and the cold outside. When your current AC breaks, buy one with a reverser valve, buy a heat pump. They are damn nice.
Edit: The article is apparently talking about geothermal heat. Which is not normally how the term 'heat pump' is used. Seems to be why there is so much confusion in this thread, including from my reply. Anyway, I haven't heard much negative about geothermal heat in the past. I think it's normally not used just because of the up-front investment costs.
Aside from the fact that these are geothermal.
IDK how it is in Austria, but AC is generally much less widespread in Europe than it is in USA.
Probably because we normally don't have heat waves like the American south, and electricity is heavily taxed.
But to be fair heat waves have gotten worse due to climate change, so AC is becoming more common than it used to be.
