As electric and natural gas costs increase and cities and states pass energy standards and renewable energy tax credits, sales of energy-efficient technology — like heat pumps — get a boost. In the U.S., shipments of air-source heat pumps increased 14.8 percent from January 2016 to January 2017, 12.9 percent from January 2017 to January 2018, and 9.1 percent from January 2018 to January 2019, according to the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI). Ground-source heat pump sales rose 37 percent from 2017 to 2018, due largely to the reinstatement of federal tax credits for geothermal — although geothermal remains just 1.7 percent of the market, according to Doug Dougherty, president and CEO of the Geothermal Exchange Organization (GEO). “We’ve had excellent feedback with our ground-source customers,” said Brian Houchin, vice president/general manager of Bratcher Heating and Air Conditioning in Peoria, Illinois. “They’ve all seen energy savings, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year. Versus propane, they’re saving $1,000 to $1,500 a year. I go back to some of my first customers, and they’ve saved $40,000. They’ve paid for their system twice over.” WHEN THE MATH WORKS OUT John Ciovacco is president of Aztech Geothermal in Ballston Spa in upstate New York. The company installs heat pumps mostly in single-family homes and in some small commercial buildings. About half of Aztech’s work is in new construction, and half involves existing homes. “Heat pumps can be used for 100 percent heating, 100 percent air conditioning, dehumidification, and other applications,” Ciovacco said. “Air source, water source, geothermal … all of those really do the same thing.” Ciovacco sees a lot of interest in heat pumps from homeowners who don’t have access to natural gas. “They have to use oil or propane, and it costs two or three times as much,” he said. “We’ve been able to help homeowners realize tremendous savings [through installing heat pumps].” Heat pumps account for about 15 percent of Houchin’s business. “Heat pumps are just another way to heat your home,” he said. “When we’re quoting a customer, we’re looking at: Does the customer have natural gas available to them, or propane, or is the alternative fossil fuel? It’s the cost per Btu that the system’s going to provide, versus the alternative fuel source. What’s our primary fuel source if they don’t want propane? Is the option to go electric, or go heat pump? “We’re evaluating the cost savings,” he continued. “For example, with geothermal versus propane, we know where the energy savings are, and we can show them what the energy savings would be. Obviously, straight resistance electric heat is a straight ratio; it’s 1 COP, whereas [geothermal] is 5 COP. It’s five times more efficient to be geothermal than straight resistance electric.” In Houchin’s market, natural gas is very prevalent in the municipalities and towns, and he does a lot of dual fuel with air-source heat pumps, using natural gas as the backup. Out of town, he does ground-source heat pumps. “Because in our market, we spend most of the winter at less than 55°F,” he said. (The rule of thumb goes that ground temperature is 55°.) “An air-source pump is just what it says: taking heat from the air and putting it into the home, and ground source is putting heat from the ground into the home. There’s a point where an air-source heat pump can no longer provide the Btus to maintain the temperature.” WASTE NOT, WANT NOT The second big driver in the heat pump market is people’s increasing concern for the environment — both at the personal level and at the state level. “Increasingly, we need to think about not creating new energy and not wasting energy that could be used somewhere else,” Ciovacco said. “In New York, there’s a big push to reduce fossil fuels. With that, we’ll see a big reduction in heating and hot water in buildings. Heat pumps will be the big player to fill that void: from the air, from the ground.” With new construction, heat pumps are not commonly done in big developments, but more of that is taking place, he said. Often, new construction means putting heat pumps in individual new homes where the homeowner doesn’t have access to natural gas for heating and cooling, and doesn’t want to use propane or oil. It’s the same with retrofits: people who show interest. As natural gas lines are run to a decreasing number of new developments, and states adopt energy policies and goals, more homes will be converted, and a lot more heat pumps will be installed upfront in big developments, he predicted. “We really need to look at having heat pumps share energy between buildings, in campus environments and urban environments,” Ciovacco asserted. “Some do refrigeration, some do heat … We need to figure out how to get energy from one place to the other. If we can eliminate boilers and cooling towers [where energy is being thrown off, as opposed to being used somewhere else], that’s the way we need to go.” For example, in situations where there’s a larger system — a server room that’s throwing off heat and a dorm that needs heat — the ground loop might exist solely to facilitate the exchange. “We’re not going to do all skyscrapers in New York City as geothermal,” he continued. Air-source pumps work well for a small home with an open floor plan, or a setting (like a high-rise apartment) where getting down to the ground just isn’t feasible. One of Ciovacco’s customers lived at the top of a winding mountain road. Drilling wasn’t feasible, but the homeowner wanted to get off fossil fuels. Ciovacco put in a three-headed air-source heat pump, which the customer loved. “I think that more and more people want to find electric heat pump solutions, especially in New York and Massachusetts,” he said. Jens Ponikau is an owner at Buffalo Geothermal Heating in West Seneca, New York; vice president of the New York Geothermal Energy Association; and an accredited International Ground Source Heat Pump Association (IGSHPA) geothermal installer and geoexchange designer with a doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg. “People want to get off fossil fuels, and get off high bills,” he said. “There are advantages [to installing heat pumps] not only for the homeowner but also for the grid.” That means significant savings for utilities that need to add additional capacity. For an example, Ponikau pointed to Tompkins County in New York, near Cornell University. The public service commission had approved an extension of gas pipelines. “Then the county legislature said, ‘No, we object to that. We have alternatives which can fulfill all those needs.’ Normally, the community is begging to be on cheap gas, and the municipality is dragging their heels on getting financing … Here was the financing, and the town said ‘We don’t want it.’” That’s because utilities don’t want to make the investment anymore; they finance their infrastructure with 60- to 80-year bonds, and governmental agencies like the state of New York are no longer willing to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure. “This is where air-source and ground-source heat pumps really do shine,” Ponikau said. Another example: In the suburbs of New York City, utilities ran into a problem. When dirty No. 6 heating oil was outlawed, customers tried to hook up to natural gas. But on the coldest day of the year, the gas pipelines were not big enough, and would never be big enough, to add future customers. “They needed resilience: the capacity to serve everybody under all the circumstances,” Ponikau said. A new pipeline would cost $110 million. The utility, Con Edison (the largest New York state utility), wasn’t ready to pay that. “They said, ‘We don’t want to invest into this infrastructure any more, which serves only the purpose of helping a technology that, at the end of the day, we’re trying to get rid of. It doesn’t make sense,’” Ponikau said. Putting out a bond for the work would get in the way of hitting certain state goals and mandates, like reducing fossil fuels by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050. Moreover, if the state did hit those goals, the question would become: Who would pay off the bonds for all that fossil fuel infrastructure? Con Edison decided this would be detrimental to the ratepayer and proposed to instead put 8,800 geothermal heat pumps into the area where the pipelines would not be extended. The cost: $65 million, or just over half the cost of extending the pipelines. “They realized that putting in the geothermal systems would be cheaper than putting in the new pipeline but would essentially end up at the same result,” Ponikau said. That result means everything is reduced: the cost to the utility, the homeowners’ heating and air conditioning bills, and the carbon emissions put into the atmosphere to maintain the quality of life we have come to expect.

In 2017 the volume of units sold worldwide also jumped 32% to over 4.5 million compared to 2016. Asia remains the largest world region in terms of heat pumps sales, driving 84% of the total sales volume. Chinese heat pump suppliers are “optimistic” about the future performance of the market and that it will continue to expand. There is also a positive attitude toward heat pumps overall in Europe even though the volume of sales is considerably lower than in China. Aline Breslauer, Senior Market Intelligence Analyst, BSRIA, said: “The global market was pushed by a strong performance in China. Since the implementation of the Coal to Gas and Coal to Electricity Policies in the RPC we have seen a sharp move towards more environment-friendly heat generators such as gas boilers and heat pumps. “Sales claimed by heat pump suppliers amounted to a value estimated at €2.5bn factory-gate price in 2017 equivalent to a volume of three million units in China. The majority is split types but it is worth noting that, while they have generally been used for domestic hot water, increasingly the Chinese used them for space heating too. “This is largely motivated by health reasons as end-users prefer hydronic to air-based heating. In Beijing city only, 30,000 heat pumps for space heating were sold in 2017. The surge was related to the generous financial incentives allocated by the central and local governments but also because environmental concern has been growing in the country.” In Europe, public awareness towards more environmental-friendly heating system has been on the rise too, but the recovery of the new construction industry and rising oil prices are the major factors to which the 2017 can be attributed. The sales across Europe accelerate by 12% in volume terms in 2017 compared to a 6% increase a year earlier. The air-water heat pump segments posted another year of significant rise, particularly monobloc and split system types; the sales volume grew 19% and 14% respectively. Under the EU Climate Policy for Carbon Emissions reduction, both unit types enjoyed sustained expansion, notably as a way to provide heating in new residential buildings. The top three fastest growing monobloc markets were Spain, Czech Republic and UK and Spain, the Netherlands and Poland for split units.

Los equipos de aerotermia, que extraen hasta un 75% de su energía del aire de la atmósfera y solo un 25% de la electricidad, se han propuesto ganar la batalla a las calderas de gas natural y gasóleo y convertirse en el sistema estrella para calentar las viviendas españolas. Pero están haciendo méritos para ocupar un lugar bastante más importante y ambicioso. Estos aparatos de última generación funcionan igual que una bomba de calor tradicional, pero con el plus de ofrecer tres funciones distintas: refrigeración en verano, calefacción en invierno y agua caliente sanitaria todo el año. "Hoy en día, no hay ninguna otra tecnología disponible con las mismas capacidades y funciones", dice Carlos Gómez Caño, director general Toshiba Calefacción & Aire Acondicionado, que recuerda que estas bombas de calor aire-agua multifunción no son calderas, "no generan residuos ni humos de combustión contaminantes, porque no hay combustión". La firma Toshiba ha elaborado un estudio comparativo en diversas zonas geográficas de España donde las necesidades de calefacción son muy diversas. Su conclusión es que los sistemas de calefacción por aerotermia son capaces de calentar los hogares, como mínimo, un 25% más barato que el gas natural y su precio es un 50% inferior si se compara con los costes de calentar las viviendas con calderas de gasóleo. Este sistema "puede llegar a proporcionar un ahorro anual cercano a los 125 euros para una vivienda media española de 100 metros cuadrados", señala Nuno Lourenço, director de ventas de aire acondicionado de LG España. Hay que tener en cuenta que el gasto medio anual en energía de los hogares españoles es de 990 euros y que la mitad (495 euros) se destina a cubrir los gastos en calefacción, porcentaje que puede llegar hasta el 71% en una casa unifamiliar aislada en una zona fría de España, según los últimos datos publicados por el IDAE. Renovable y desconocida Tal ahorro tiene su origen en la aerotermia, una de las energías renovables y limpias menos conocidas. A diferencia de una caldera de gas natural convencional, su funcionamiento está basado en transportar el calor en vez de generarlo, "por lo que resulta cuatro veces más eficiente", apunta Lourenço. Además, funcionan con radiadores de baja temperatura, fancoils o suelo radiante. "Precisan de una temperatura del agua de 45 o 50 grados, pero no de 60 como es el caso de los radiadores convencionales que funcionan con calderas de gas", explican en la firma Panasonic. Este fabricante recuerda que "esta tecnología está reconocida como fuente de energía renovable por una directiva europea (2009/28/CE), y en la mayoría de países europeos se está incentivando su instalación con el objetivo de reducir la factura energética y consecuentemente las emisiones de CO2". Además, la aerotermia encaja con las políticas de descarbonización europeas para 2020 y con el paquete de medidas recientemente publicado por la Comisión Europea que fomenta el uso de tecnologías limpias, concluye Pilar Budi, directora general de la Asociación de Fabricantes de Equipos de Climatización (AFEC). El funcionamiento es como el de cualquier bomba de calor tradicional: intercambia la energía del aire con el refrigerante que hay en su interior para extraer el calor de la habitación en verano y acondicionarla o tomar la energía del aire exterior en invierno para calentar el interior, incluso aunque fuera haya 25 grados bajo cero. Pero el ahorro energético no es la única ventaja de estos aparatos, que se componen de una unidad interior (que sustituye a la caldera), otra exterior (igual que cualquier bomba de calor) y un depósito de agua. Los costes de mantenimiento y propiedad son prácticamente nulos y no necesitan revisiones periódicas, como en el caso de las calderas de gas y gasóleo. Estos equipos, que cuestan entre 5.800 y 10.000 euros sin incluir la instalación, no son unos desconocidos en el mercado español pero la mejora de sus rendimientos está haciendo que su comercialización esté creciendo a gran velocidad. "Es un mercado que está en plena expansión, que en los últimos años ha experimentado crecimientos de dos dígitos y que, previsiblemente, seguirán registrándose en próximos ejercicios gracias a la apuesta por la descarbonización liderada por la Unión Europea,", apuesta Nuno Lourenço. Según las estimaciones de Toshiba, se han instalado en torno a 100.000 aparatos en las viviendas españolas entre 1996 y 2016. El pasado año se vendieron más de 7.000 unidades, con un crecimiento superior al 40% respecto al año anterior. Y de cara a 2020, se comercializarán más de 40.000 unidades anuales. Pero sigue siendo un mercado minoritario comparado, por ejemplo, con el francés: solo en 2016 se vendieron en Francia más de 100.000 equipos de aerotermia para climatización y agua caliente sanitaria, una cifra 15 veces superior a los 7.000 equipos vendidos en España. "Nos acercamos a un mundo eléctrico sin quema de combustibles y la calefacción vivirá la misma revolución que otros sectores, aquí protagonizados por la bomba de calor, la aerotermia", considera Carlos Gómez, de Toshiba. Estos equipos se enchufan a la red eléctrica, pero son capaces de transformar una unidad de electricidad en tres o más unidades de calefacción o refrigeración, explican en AFEC.