Heating our homes with cold water! Sounds absurd? It’s not. Heat pumps are revolutionizing the way we heat and cool our homes and cities. We went to the German city of Mannheim to find out how.
#planeta #heatpumps #energy
We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
Credits:
Reporter: Tim Schauenburg
Camera: Simon Baingo
Editor: Frederik Willmann
Superivising Editors: Joanna Gottschalk, Michael Trobridge
Read more:
IEA: The future of heat pump globally:
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/4713780d-c0ae-4686-8c9b-29e782452695/TheFutureofHeatPumps.pdf
Heat pumps potential in Germany:
https://static.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2022/2022-04_DE_Scaling_up_heat_pumps/2022_Scaling_up_heat_pumps_in_Germany.pdf
Fraunhofer IEG: On large scale heat pumps in Germany:
https://www.ieg.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ieg/deutsch/dokumente/ver%C3%B6ffentlichungen/Rollout_Grosswaermepumpen_Angora_Fraunhofer%20IEG.pdf
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:43 What’s the problem?
01:04 What my ice bath has to do with heating
01:37 Heat from the river
02:08 This is how it works
04:32 It all started with a fridge
05:40 Substituting coal, oil and gas?
06:30 Environmental risks
08:46 Smaller units and the money question
10:32 Conclusion
Being a climate journalist is never all laughs, but this? Ok, lets do it! I’m doing this for you! This is beyond next level! I want to show you how to heat entire neighourhoods with water as cold as this! It’s like a thousand of needles in my legs. The answer – with a heat pump.
A very big one. But even the small ones are indispensable when it comes to de-carbonising housing. These gadgets can convert seemingly infinite amounts of energy from the environment to warm our homes – even in winter. But how is that done and why aren’t they everywhere yet? Nothing requires more energy worldwide
Than keeping houses warm and providing heat to industry. Heating accounts for half of the global energy consumption. And 72% of our heating comes from burning fossil fuels. Long story short: To limit global warming, we need to bring heating emissions down. But before we get to that, we need some cold facts. I mean, really cold.
Ok, I’m not ready at all. Oh, god. It’s -1 degrees Celsius outside, and the water is only slightly warmer. Thank you, Planet A! Why am I doing this again? It’s unbelievable but here in the city of Mannheim in South-West Germany, this ice-cold water is used to heat thousands of homes!
We are going to find out how this is possible! Mannheim is a mid-sized city of about 300,000 inhabitants. It sits directly on Germany’s biggest river, the Rhine. And you guessed right, the river plays a key role in this story. The magic is happening in this. The local energy provider is producing electricity and heating
Through a mix of fossil fuels and cold water. Until today, the region relied heavily on the most climate-harming source for heating: coal. This is Felix Hack. He’s Energy Manager at energy company MVV, the magic-machine we’re about to show you is his baby. This single power plant is responsible for
About 6.8 million tons of CO2 every year. That’s almost 1 percent of Germany’s annual emissions. But this is changing for the better, right now. So this deafening giant is in fact a heat pump for rivers. By pushing through 800 liters of river water per second, it can provide heat for 3500 households all year around.
Ok, wait a second! Let’s take a step back! This is what happens in all those pipes: The water seem cold to us, but it’s easily warm enough to turn a liquid refrigerant into gas, as this can evaporate at extremely low temperatures. The gas expands. An electric pump then compresses this gas. This generates heat.
It’s a bit like with a bicycle pump. The longer you pump, so the higher the pressure, the hotter it gets. Try it out! The heated gas is used to warm up water or air, for example. The refrigerant gives up its heat and becomes liquid again – and the process can restart.
This mechanism is so efficient, you can generate 3 times as much heat with the same energy as with a gas boiler. It doesn’t just work with river water, you get the same effect with heat from air and the ground. Ideally, the electricity for the pump comes from renewable energies.
But even if it comes from fossil fuels, it’s still more sustainable. The principle of a heat pump isn’t new at all. It’s based on a concept which has existed for a very long time, and on a technology which most of us have at home. A refrigerator! Back in the 19th century the demand for cooling
Was much higher than for heating. Ice was carried from far away as there was no possibility to keep things cold. In 1859, the Frenchman Ferdinand Carré designed the first commercially successful ammonia absorption cooling system. It works the same way as a heat pump but the other way around, carrying heat from inside to outside.
From there, another familiar machine evolved. The air conditioner: invented to solve hot air and humidity problems in the printing industry. Only later, the heat pump had its big moment. “The pride and joy of the man of the house is the weather control center. A center that puts you in charge of the electric heating
And air conditioning and the electronic air filtering of the entire house.” With Western economies booming after World War II, bringing widespread electrification and new lifestyle expectations, heat pumps fitted right in. But as most people were happy to burn cheap oil and gas for decades, they didn’t really catch on – until now.
So, now we are going to see the heat storage from where the heat is being distributed over the entire city. At the moment by far the largest proportion of this is still heated with coal. Only 3 percent of the heat comes from the river. But that will soon change,
As the coal-fired power station will probably be shut down by 2033. As energy-efficient and sustainable a river heat pump is, taking heat from the river means, that the water is being discharged 3 degrees colder after the process. With potentially negative impacts on a larger scale. “Luckily, at the moment most of our waters are overheated
Due to climate change. So it’s beneficial to a point. And beyond that you will have an adverse ecological effect that you might want to avoid.” This is Fabian Ahrendts, scientist at Germany’s Fraunhofer IEG and expert for large-scale heat pumps. However, due to the small quantities of water being discharged,
The temperature in the river only changes by less than one ten-thousandth of a degree, according to MVV. “But now imagine all along the river Rhine, all the major cities are there, wanting to cover their entire heat demand, including industrial plants such as the BASF or Covestro plants right along the river Rhine
That all might use water for heat pumps for their processes. And suddenly you get, you get an issue.” Another issue are the refrigerants. They can be terrible greenhouse gases. Watch our video on F-gases if you want to know more. There are alternatives on the market, which have less global warming potential.
But some have other issues such as being easy to ignite and manufacturers tend to produce business as usual. In Mannheim, the generated heat is distributed via district heating over and underground. In Germany, around 15% of all buildings are now heated in this way.
And most of it could be met by large heat pumps, cutting out coal and gas. They are still a niche but installations have started to pick up. A role model is the Swedish capital Stockholm where about 90.000 apartments are heated from wastewater. And the Norwegian city of Drammen
Provides most of the heat for its 65.000 residents with heat from its cold sea water. And communities don’t even need district heating. Heat pumps can be directly attached to a building or industrial site where temperatures up to 200 degrees Celsius are needed. Heat pumps can extract energy from almost anything:
Air, wastewater, steam and even from the ground. And they don’t need to be huge They can be pretty small too. and be used in almost any residential building, like this one. By 2030, heat pumps could save as many emissions as all cars in Europe produce per year.
With smaller units taking a central stage. Especially as heat pumps can also turn from heating into cooling mode. and are more energy-efficient than classic air conditioners. But there is a catch. Of course, it’s the money! “Particularly when we’re installing our first heat pump, switching from a different heating system
Is always going to be more expensive than we are right now.” This is Louise Sunderland, she’s a policy expert at non-profit Regulatory Assistance Project. She has a heat pump herself and loves it. Right now, in 2024, heat pumps can cost two to four times more than natural gas boilers.
It’s a big outlay, especially for low-income families. On the other hand, long-term they could save you money as heat pumps need less energy. In Europe, households currently save on average $900 per year and in the U.S. $300. But the advantage over fossil fuel heating depends highly on… jepp, energy prices.
“Before the recent energy price crisis, when prices became unpredictable and volatile, on average across Europe, electricity was around 3, 3.3 times more expensive than gas. So you can see if you’re having an efficient heat pump, getting a 300%, 400% efficiency, you might be saving some money there.
In the UK where I live, before the price crisis, electricity was five times more expensive than gas. So you can see there that you would really struggle to be saving some money.” So if heat pumps are more sustainable and economically viable depends highly on your government’s energy policies
Whether they favour cheap green electricity over fossil fuels. In Mannheim, the prospect of high CO2 taxes, local climate targets and state subsidies for the construction of the plant were decisive in the switch to river heating. Their target is to provide almost 100% clean heat by 2030.
The heat pump won’t cover all of that, but will be one important component to eventually shut down the dirty coal power plant behind me in the near future. No matter if small or large scale: heat pumps are more sustainable and can make regions more independent from fossil fuels.
And they do work in winter, I hope you appreciate the effort I put into showing that! I can’t say I can enjoy it. Are heat pumps popular where you live? Let us know in the comments, subscribe to our channel and hit the like button. We have new videos for you every Friday.
And I need to get out of here now! Alright. I made it!
27 Comments
Are heat pumps popular where you live? Note: At minute 1:14 it should be +30F, not -30F. Sorry for the confusion✨
I think on the topic of cooling your homes in the summer the refrigerants need to be replaced with greener versions that don't ruin the environment like ammonia. Also, I think the cost effective way of introducing something new for heating our homes is to integrate it into existing infrastructure to drive down costs.
Terrific commitment on your part. Terrific job and well explained.
Liquid Ammonia could also be used for Heating Homes.
We have a ground source heat pump
I built a new house with an air source heat pump, well insulated, triple glass windows, everything electric. My electricity consumption is low (>5MWh/year) and cheap, but all of this was not cheap to built, while some of my neighbours still burn lignite or wet wood for heating, which is cheap for them but enough to destroy breathable air for an entire village. They also have parallely installed gas boilers as well, but they want to save some money by rather burning smelly polluting stuff instead of using a bit more expensive natural gas. I am wondering how much money they save by this. I suppose it is not much and it is the cost for clean air in my neighborhood. We live in Czechia, common people are not that wealthy as people from Western Germany. But I must admit that almost all new houses built here in recent years have air source heat pump as their main heating source👍
What do you mean heat pumps are more efficient than air conditioners? Air conditioner IS a heat pump. Maybe more efficient working fluids can be invented, but the device still works in same way
Do you think we can cool down buildings using a similar method? Yes, 100% possible. The real question is why it's not being done in Germany where we suffer from heatwaves every year?
Just build nuclear power plant…
01:15 when a minus added incorrectly could change everything: -30°F = -34°C. It's not that cold. But Fahrenheit people might belive you.
The correct conversion is -1°C = 30°F
You cannot heat your home with cold water. You can heat some homes with a gigantic, complex, electrically powered machine as in this video.
I want the reverse. I want cheaper cooling in the tropics.
In my corner of the UK, they've only recently started installing gas pipes and gas boilers etc. by default 🤦🏻 it used to be all oil heating. Basically no heat pumps. Also insulation of houses in the UK is absolutely abysmal. Most windows have double glazing by now, but wall insulation is horrible. And no ones ever heard of triple glazing. So…. we're lagging behind quite a lot, which is really annoying (read: expensive) if you want to have those things work for you.
Who knew that cold rivers had a secret talent for warming up homes? Talk about giving a warm hug to the environment! 😄🌊🏠
ban fossil heating now
Is there also a possibility to store summer heat and use it in winter?
If 50% energy use is for heating, then
Global warming is the
problemsolution3-400% efficient sounds good but I wonder if that means that less coal will be burnt to heat the water by using heat pumps rather than heating the water directly with the coal in the first place? My guess is that at 300% efficient, more coal will be burnt to make the electricity than to heat directly. Maybe at 400% you could make a slight improvement over directly burning the coal, but is that slight improvement worth all the trouble?
I am much more impressed with Sweden and Japan burning garbage to create district heating. No coal or cooling the river involved
Can you dub the contents of this channel for DW Turkish channel?
We are loving our Vaillant heat pump that was installed in November.
We've been sharing our journey on our YouTube channel!
I did this with a private lake on my property. Cheap, green, high quality heat year round for my house. It is glorious.
Useiing sand to store heat is also a great idea
Your can't even correctly convert Celsius to Fahrenheit 🤦
It would be correct to use word compressor for compressing gas rather than pump. Video is good. ❤.
And yet, all people move to Heat Pump, Germans have Coal power plants as the Serbia does, so bada bum coal to heat pump=grean? And in the next phase, when eclectic grid goes down. what then!? How much power can you store? So Battery, Solar Panels and heat pump is like 100k Euro. So too much money to make Banks more profitable. The only visible solution is something else….
Cutting back on oil, gas and coal will inevitably reduce the total amount of electricity needed.
– One pumpjack consumes 9800 MWh/month of electricity.
– Oil Refineries consume 15-20% of annual electricity consumption for the whole continent (just in the US).
– Offshore platforms burn 20-30 tons of diesel per day for their generators.
– Thousands of kilometers of pipelines. Each section with a pump consuming 50-250 kW and working 24/7.
– Tankers, each of them burning 200-250 tons of fuel oil per day.
– Land transport with semi trucks – ~ 40 liters of diesel / 100 km.
– Gas stations with all their pumps and energy consumption.
… and we haven't touched on shale gas and coal mining yet. … nor have we paid attention to oil spills, vented gas, pollution of rivers and groundwater, deforestation and wars for resources.
On top of that it will reduce the waste of taxpayer money:
– The petrol industry generates $10 Billion in profits per DAY and receives $11 Million in subsidies per MINUTE globally.
I've been wondering if it's possible to attach a device that turns heat into electricity for the summer months… is it?