Poland has been Europe’s fastest-growing market for heat pumps for the last three years, a process accelerated further by the war in Ukraine. It is also now becoming a major manufacturing hub for the devices.
The Polish Organisation for the Development of Heat Pump Technology (PORT PC), an industry group, reports that 2022 saw a record rise for the Polish heat pump market, with a 137% increase in air-to-water heat pumps – the most common type – sold.
In total, more than 203,000 heat pumps of all types were sold in Poland in 2022, only 33,000 less than in Germany, which has a population over twice as large. The growth in sales of heat pumps in Poland has been the fasest in Europe for each of the last three years, notes the European Heat Pump Association.
An energy-efficient alternative to furnaces, heat pumps—like an air conditioner in reverse—use electricity to transfer heat from a warm space to a cool space. The most common pump is an air-source heat pump, which moves heat between a building and the outside air. By replacing gas boilers, the newest generation of heat pumps can reduce energy costs by as much as 90 percent, and cut emissions by about a quarter relative to gas and three-quarters relative to an electric fan or panel heater. As carbon prices climb higher, gas will become ever more expensive, and in the long run, heat pumps will be the less costly buy.
According to the World Bank Group, 36 of the 50 most polluted cities in the European Union are in Poland.
At the centre of this transformation are two technologies: heat pumps, which extract environmental heat extremely efficiently using electricity, and district heating, where large-scale plants produce heat for an entire community.
Until recently, heat pump sales had been struggling to take off, but this is changing rapidly. In a previous Carbon Brief guest post we reported double-digit growth in 2021.
Since then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the resulting energy crisis and related policy interventions have boosted installations in Europe even further, to unprecedented new highs.
For the first time in 2022, heat pump sales in Europe reached 3m, up 0.8m (38%) from a year earlier and doubling since 2019. Sales doubled in a single year in Poland, Czech Republic and Belgium.
Post time: May-13-2023