The biggest heat pumps

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c17p44w87rno

by rayhaanj • 7 months ago

130 194 7 months ago

bbc.com

BoppreH• 7 months ago

The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($2.3m; £176m).

Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.

unwind• 7 months ago

Heh came here to post the same comment, I was somewhat shocked by the alleged power of the almighty dollar ... but it's just a typo of course. Phew. :)

According to Google's built-in exchange rate calculator it should say $235m.

PunchyHamster2• 7 months ago

At that rate the article will be eventually correct, give it few years

esskay• 7 months ago

Looks like its already been corrected

octocop• 7 months ago

Dumb question, why is the water in the Rhine warm?

PunchyHamster2• 7 months ago

It isn't. It's just warmer than air in winter

alextingle2• 7 months ago

The air temperature isn't relevant.

Someone• 7 months ago

It not warm as in ”warmer than the typical living space”, but it is warmer than zero Kelvin, so heat can be extracted from it.

Doing that takes energy, that’s why it is called a heat pump. That moves heat from the water to an already warmer place, against a heat gradient, just as a water pump moves water against a gravity gradient.

If the water were warmer than your typical living space, they wouldn’t need a heat pump; a water pump to pump the water closer to where heat is needed would be sufficient.

kijin2• 7 months ago

Practically, the water would need to be somewhat warmer than 0℃ because you don't want it to freeze and clog the plumbing after you have extracted a useful amount of thermal energy. :)

greazy• 7 months ago

The river is not warm or warmer than the air. Heat pumps are amazing at extracting thermal energy. I think water is very dense compared to air, thus making the processes more efficient in such a large scale.

alextingle2• 7 months ago

The best thing about using watercourses as your heat source for heat-pumps - the water flow naturally takes away your "colder" output and brings you more "warmer".

Ground source heat pumps are limited because the ground they have chilled stays stubbornly in the same place, so the only way you can extract more heat from it is to make it even colder, which gets less efficient. Watercourses don;t have that problem.

crote• 7 months ago

It has a decent bunch of thermal mass, so it takes quite a long time for it to reach air temperature during a cold snap or heat wave. This makes it a decent heat source during the winter and cold source during the summer - especially for short-term peaks.

You could get an even better result using the earth itself, but that is way harder to scale.

calaphos• 7 months ago

heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity

Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.

willvarfar5• 7 months ago

In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.

Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...

Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.

PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D

jack_tripper3• 7 months ago

Sign of a rich and very developed country.

A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire.

Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.

wkat42424• 7 months ago

Yes heat pumps are expensive and you need different radiators and more insulation than with traditional gas central heating. That's why it's an issue in Holland too. Not many people have the investment for all that. It's mainly worth it when you have solar panels but that requires another big investment.

I'm lucky to live in Spain where it's not that cold so I just have one little plug in radiator I use a few months a year lol.

Ekaros2• 7 months ago

Air-to-Air heat pumps can be quite affordable. Or even cheap if you find no name deals. There is install, but even that is not really that significant. This is at least in Nordics.

stephen_g2• 7 months ago

Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though - a fridge is just a heat pump, and an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps aren’t that much more complicated, nor should they be any less reliable.

It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge.

I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.

bratwurst30007• 7 months ago

air conditioning is also a heat pump. they cost way less then the air/water heatpumps and are easy and cheap to install. Since two years I heat with air conditioning and its super effective and cheap.

edit// Hot water is generated by electric solar panels. 1200w are sufficent to have enough hot water for two persons

jabl5• 7 months ago

Sign of a rich and very developed country.

You need to find another reason. Looking at IMF 2025 GDP per capita figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... ):

Norway: $92k

Denmark: $77k

Sweden: $62k

Germany: $60k

UK: $57k

Finland: $56k

So yeah, Denmark and particularly Norway are a bit richer than the others, but the others are in the same ballpark.

If I had to bring up some particular reason, gas grids are more or less non-existent in the Nordics, and electricity is cheaper than in central Europe or UK.

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

Get an ERV - it will most likely have air filter. Such a life improvement to a point I'm actually waiting for winter now (in summer you have a problem of mosquitoes, house doesn't cool quickly enough by itself and if you close shades for sleeping - you don't get adequate ventilation).

mos87• 7 months ago

LMAO good one.

hexbin0105• 7 months ago

From the PDF at your link:

"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"

Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.

In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades

DrScientist• 7 months ago

Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible.

The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.

Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.

zzbn002• 7 months ago

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.

moooo992• 7 months ago

As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.

looofooo011• 7 months ago

Well Norway (Hydro), Sweden (hydro and nuclear) and Finland (Nuclear Wind Hydro) all have cheap electricity which seems to be the main driver for adoption.

lnsru3• 7 months ago

Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again. The monthly bill is the same.

enaaem• 7 months ago

Imagine if things were the other way around. That we already had heat pumps and someone suggests we should pipe this toxic and explosive gas into our homes and burn it. That would be an insane idea.

jgalt212• 7 months ago

Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps

To me, living in US Northeast, this is astounding. I've read heat pumps lose efficacy below 25F. My family would never forgive me if I made our house cold. But then I see 70% of the Nordics's house are "warm enough", or dealing colder than room temperature houses.

I've asked half-dozen contractors and HVAC people in my area, and none of them have recommended a heat pump. But, I'm just as suspicious of their motives as I am of the science and environmental populizers on YouTube.

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

A lot of the Nordic heat pumps are ground source, that is to say you drill a hole a couple of hundred feet down into the bedrock where it's always a bit above freezing and you circulate your heat exchange fluid down there and back up again. Air-source heat pumps are mostly a thing in the southern parts where the climate is relatively mild.

Phenomenit• 7 months ago

You never go below 1 in efficiency. Worst case the water is heated directly with electricity.

Scoundreller5• 7 months ago

Don’t let the 15 degree+ differences in latitudes fool you, a lot of the Nordic population lives near the sea, so low altitude and plenty of sea current temperature moderation.

January temps in Oslo aren’t much different than Boston. Absolute record low temps are similar too.

Coldest temp ever in Oslo is -30C in the 1800s.

Coldest in Boston was -28C in 1934.

Still doesn’t explain the poor adoption in USA but helps explain why they still work so far up north. The nordics can be relatively balmy to Wisconsin or upstate New York.

tzs• 7 months ago

That's old heat pumps. Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps designed to work well in cold weather in 2007, with Fujitsu and Daikin adopting similar technology by 2012, and others following within a few years.

These remain 200% efficient down to -4℉ and 150% efficient down to -22℉. Their capacity starts dropping at 23℉ going down to 76% capacity at -13℉.

There's only a few towns in the continental US that cold enough for long enough that it can't be heated well by one of these. You just need an installer that will size it properly for the climate in your area.

OptionOfT3• 7 months ago

Interesting that district heating is so popular there.

IIRC in the Netherlands people don't like it, because it because it means that there is a single company supplying my heat, with

    * minimum amounts of 'heat' purchased 
    * no incentives to maintain their infrastructure above the bare minimum
    * no competition

fy20• 7 months ago

I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c).

The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and there are very little network losses in comparison. I think it only makes sense if the network has a cheap energy source, for example by using waste energy from industrial processes or utility-scale geothermal.

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

Most district heating systems in the Nordics are publicly owned, in part or in full. There are also price controls for the privately owned ones.

cyberax2• 7 months ago

So $235 million for 162MW, or $2.35B for 1.6GW

A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.

pjc508• 7 months ago

.. those are somewhat unrelated things, though?

willvarfar5• 7 months ago

A heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it.

The article describes how there will be a water battery.

So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide plan and grid?

masklinn• 7 months ago

These are… completely unrelated ratings?

The heat pump generates 162MWt, at the cost of around 50MWe.

The nuclear reactor produces 1.6GWe alongside 4.5GWt.

Furthermore the listed costs are also unrelated: the 235 millions are for the bare units (and an estimate for something a few years out), while the 8bn are turnkey (of what exactly I’m not sure: the beleaguered Olkiluoto 3 and flamanville 3 cost 11~12bn, while Taishan is estimated at under 8 for two reactors).

looofooo011• 7 months ago

1.6GWe gives you 3.2GWt max alongside. In more modern this is even less. Of the 100% energy produced 33-38% will end up in the electric grid.

cyberax2• 7 months ago

I'm just comparing the magnitudes here. A nuclear reactor powering dumb cheap resistive heaters is just several times more expensive than the heat pumps.

But unlike these heat pumps, the reactor doesn't need electricity.

ErroneousBosh• 7 months ago

... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.

Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.

There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.

looofooo011• 7 months ago

Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.

Maledictus• 7 months ago

Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore. The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.

looofooo011• 7 months ago

No, this is a lie. It is also funny because Germany was so depended on Russian Gas that nuclear fuel even if fully depend on would be laughable.

Germany has its own fuel enrichment and production, and it is still running https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau

And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!

MrBuddyCasino2• 7 months ago

This problem could have been solved by breeder reactors. Now China is doing it instead of us.

jwr• 7 months ago

That is such a bad explanation. One, Russia is not the only supplier, two, Germany still buys fossil fuels from Russia.

holowoodman3• 7 months ago

We did buy Uranium from Russia because it was cheap, but they are far from the only suppliers. Half the world can mine uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

Even Germany had Uranium mines in the Erzgebirge. They just were closed due to environmental concerns and the iron curtain falling, which is also why there are no more "official" reserves. There was no exploration done after 1990, so known exploitable reserves in Germany are low. But that's just because nobody went looking.

Uranium isn't rare and it isn't really expensive. We just need so little of it that there are not a lot of running mines.

triceratops4• 7 months ago

It's the year 2135. Discussions about energy anywhere in Europe begin with the customary lament for Germany's shortsighted decision to cease nuclear energy production sometime in the 20th century. Nobody knows where this tradition originates from but it is rigorously upheld.

oceanplexian3• 7 months ago

At this rate by 2135 Europe will have returned to feudal society, most people will be living without electricity, and the primary source of heating will be wood and coal.

looofooo011• 7 months ago

You mean if Germany still exists and the mongols did not have take over Europe.

john612• 7 months ago

There is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019:

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...

a bigger one is planned:

https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...

xg15• 7 months ago

A bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?

jimmaswell• 7 months ago

If we all went full-in on nuclear we could use resistive heat and air cool datacenters all day with no concern for the cost. It's a shame.

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

We couldn't since all the capacity would go to AI, not to your home heating.

AndrewDucker• 7 months ago

Except that nuclear power is extremely expensive.

john612• 7 months ago

In Vienna, a hospital is heated by a neighboring data center using a heat pump, while the hospital cools the data center.

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A...

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.

jabl5• 7 months ago

Interesting. In Helsinki the municipal energy company has a plant with 7 heat pumps which is slightly smaller at 160 MW heat and 100 MW of cooling. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2023/Waste-heat-plays-a-signifi...

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

Looks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!

fsckboy2• 7 months ago

energy from treated sewage

wouldn't untreated sewage, still fermenting, be warmer?

renhanxue7• 7 months ago

Maybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).

rsynnott4• 7 months ago

I am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.

dzhiurgis3• 7 months ago

I keep wondering if instead of moving water they could use "solid state" heat pipes instead. Especially for geothermal where you could just drive them into ground, no need to actually drill or circulate water.

yetihehe• 7 months ago

Pipes moving water are cheaper than heat pipes, which are not "solid state", typically heat pipes contain a lot of water in liquid and vapour form under low pressure. If you wanted to move a lot of heat, you would need bigger pipes, which would need to withstand more force, so thicker. It's cheaper to just move that water with pump and if you place your inlet in proper place (higher than your machinery), you could even get some energy from flow of water.

haeberli• 7 months ago

archive.is paywall bypass link: https://archive.is/nQP9A

acheron• 7 months ago

I've lived in a couple houses built in the 80s that had heat pumps. why do people keep acting like heat pumps are a new thing? i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.

The biggest heat pumps

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