Heat pumps are widely seen as the most important technology when it comes to decarbonising heating. Organisations including the International Energy Agency and McKinsey see heat pumps providing most of our heating needs in the future, on the path to net-zero emissions. Until recently, heat pump sales had been struggling to take off, but this…
The cost of heating leaves many European households feeling burnt. Three-quarters of our heat is still supplied by expensive fossil fuels, and heating homes is Europe’s biggest gas user, which creates a twin dilemma: How do we clean up heat, while lowering costs for those who can least afford it? There is good reason for…
The EU’s renewables directives count what fuel is burned for heating, as opposed to the amount of heat produced. Never has the spotlight shone so brightly on Europe’s heating and cooling sector. And for a good reason. Fossil gas makes up around 39% of the energy used to heat buildings and much of Europe wants…
Time is of the essence if Germany hopes to meet its ambitious net-zero emissions target by 2045. To achieve this goal, the country will have to rapidly transform how it heats its buildings while ridding itself of Russian gas. Alongside increasing the renovation rate of buildings and rolling out clean district heating, heat pumps are…
Experts see heat pumps as one of the main solutions for tackling the carbon emissions associated with keeping buildings warm, both in the UK and internationally. Yet sales of the technology, often likened to a fridge running in reverse, have remained stubbornly low in many countries. The latest figures, collated in this article for Carbon Brief, show the tides…
