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
There is an archived copy of the article on archive.today
If you buy heat pumps for the house, and make the electricity with gas, about half the energy making the electricity is lost, but when the heat pump heats the house, it's 5 times more efficient.
So the net result is that it requires less than half the gas to heat the house with heat pumps, even if the electricity is made with gas.
Heat pumps are brilliant. 🥰
It doesn't matter how the electricity is made. Heat pumps are crazy efficient. What matters (for the typical consumer) is how much it costs to heat up the home via traditional methods vs that in the electricity of heat pumps. That said, your toaster, or electric oven/kettle all generate heat at ~98% efficiency with some energy lost as light and due to resistance in the wires. A heat pump transfers heat at well over 100% efficiency. You get more heat energy than it requires in electricity. 💪
Efficiency degrades the colder it gets though which is its only drawback. Some places are too cold and would require deep deep monster backyard installations to work well, but here 'too cold' is ~ -16oC.
A side benefit of heat pumps using electricity is that it can be supported with modern green energy tech. Don't want to be dependent on the grid either electrical or gas? Add solar panels to your roof and boom you're good to go (this is obviously reductive).
Edit: I'm talking about direct home heating/cooling solutions. I know nothing about industrial grid energy production. For me the benefits of heat pumps are clear particularly for individual purposes.
Resistive heat is 100% efficient minus the tiny bit of heat lost in the wires inside your walls. The light will eventually convert to thermal enegry once it is absorbed.
Better yet I live in an area where wind supplies most of the energy for my heat bump.
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.
