Britain is rock bottom in the OECD league for heat pump installations. At the risk of eco-heresy, this is not such a bad thing.

The heat pumps installed across the world over the last decade rely on F-gas refrigerants, mostly R410a with a greenhouse gas potency 2,100 times higher than CO2 over a 20 year span. These hydrofluorocarbons leak, which is why the European Commission wants to ban them.

Air Source Heat Pump Sales in the UK

Better, cleaner, hotter heat pumps are on the way, able to replace a gas boiler without having to tear out existing radiators. The coming generation uses CO2 or helium as the working medium instead of F-gases. Others rely on exotic new designs harnessing advances in electrochemistry. The technology is in ferment, like solar 20 years ago.

Helium pumps promise much higher temperatures while retaining the same magical conversion of one unit of electricity into three to four units of heat achieved by standard models today – its “Coefficient of Performance” (CoP).

Norway’s Olvondo Technology is already installing helium heat pumps for dairies, pulp and chemical plants, although once you get to 200 degrees for industrial use, the CoP falls to 1.7. The mechanism is based on the Stirling cycle of compressing and expanding gas, invented by a Scottish engineer in 1816.

Helium gives the extra lift. “When you compress helium it gets really hot. It’s non-toxic, non-flammable, and easy to work with. We could use hydrogen but that’s more tricky,” said Olvondo’s Roger Myrvang.

The UK is Strangely Resistant to Heat Pump Technology

Heat Pumps Sold in Europe by Country
Heat Pumps Sold per 1,000 Households

Two start-ups in Europe are preparing to roll out helium heat pumps for households by next year, both using acoustic waves that manipulate the gas. You modulate the heat by dialling up and down the Hi-Fi speaker inside the closed system.

The French group Equium says it can produce 80 degree hot water without loss of CoP efficiency using helium enclosed at a pressure of 30 bars. It remains a gas for a very wide range of temperature, giving the heat pump more energy leverage.

BlueHeart Energy in the Netherlands says its compact thermoacoustic heat pump can drop in as a direct replacement for gas boilers, reaching temperatures high enough for existing radiators in old homes with bad insulation. It can equally be used to cool buildings in summer.

Both companies are betting that we are on the cusp of a radical disruption of today’s vapour compression technology for heating, air-conditioning, and refrigeration. “There is no limit to large-scale development. It’s just a question of time, scaling, and industrialization,” says Equium.

They have rivals, or course. The US Energy Department’s ARPA-E programme – origin of many of the world’s moonshot advances – is funding a heat pump based on ionocaloric technology.

Put crudely, you add salt to remove heat; you take salt away to release heat. In this case, it uses a sodium iodide salt mixed in a solvent of ethylene carbonate. A tiny amount of electricity can produce a large spike in temperature.

“We can heat as easily as we can cool, and we can pump it up to 100 degrees if we need to,” said Drew Lilley, the project leader at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Calion Technologies.

Most of the components can be bought off the shelf. His secret sauce is to change the melting point of the liquid by moving ions around by an electrochemical process. “We hope to have the first prototype ready within twelve months. The Inflation Reduction Act has been a godsend to us. It’s a huge accelerant for clean technology,” he told me.

Other ideas are bubbling away. France’s research institute CNRS is working with natural rubber. It heats up when it is stretched, and cools as it compresses.

I have no idea which technologies will prevail. Winners will have the lowest costs. What is clear is that we are rushing towards a world where heating and cooling will be so cheap that we stop noticing utility bills, just as electric vehicles with GaN onboard chargers will soon cut EV charging costs to a tiny fraction of what it takes to fill a car at Mohammad bin Salman’s petrol pump.

If Britain is to surf this wave and avoid locking further into an obsolete and expensive energy system, it first needs to detoxify its national debate. Nowhere else in the developed world has there been such a revulsion against heat pumps. Germany has succumbed to the Kulturkampf to some degree after the government botched its boiler ban, but it nevertheless has five times more heat pumps per capita.

Americans bought more heat pumps than gas boilers last year, even before the IRA kicked in with subsidies, and even though gas is cheap in the US. Poles are installing heat pumps as fast as the supply chain can cope with exploding demand, despite a neo-Trumpian alignment in climate politics. It is almost a patriotic duty to replace boilers that once depended on Russian gas.

Even the US is Switching to Heat Pumps Despite Cheaper Gas

Heat Pump Sales vs Gas Furnace Sales in the US
Sales of Heat Pumps vs Gas Furnaces in the US

The highest ratio of heat pumps per household is in Norway (60pc), Sweden (43pc), and Finland (42pc), all in the frigid fringe in case somebody told you that they don’t work in cold climates. France is going gangbusters. So is Italy, despite historical reliance on gas infrastructure. 

The mystery is why Britain lags so far behind and why the Putin gas shock has changed so few minds. Heat pump sales have been dribbling along at an annual pace of around 40,000 this year, though the £5,000 Boiler Upgrade Scheme is available to all homeowners and is among the world’s most lavish. It is a long way from the official 600,000 target set for 2028.

Perhaps the energy bailout went too far in protecting Britons from the brutality of the global gas market. Perhaps there have been too many sloppy installations.

Nathan Gambling’s BetaTalk, a deep-dive podcast on heat pumps, exposes just how many cowboys are giving the technology a bad name. The UK’s Alice in Wonderland mechanism of marginal pricing plays a role. Gas prices set electricity prices, corrupting the market signal and reducing incentives to electrify.

Above all, hats off to the Energy and Utilities Association (EUA), the lobby of the gas boiler industry. An impressive number of stories in the British press attacking heat pumps track back to its publicity handlers WPR, who stated with refreshing candour on their website that the objective was to “spark outrage”, a phrase later toned down after being revealed by DeSmog. Rarely have I seen a PR company do such a masterful job.

The Government in turn should stop trying to ban things. It should instead make the polluter pay for CO2 emissions. It should tax the sale of gas for home heating beyond 2030 to reflect the cost of direct air capture and storage of carbon. If people still want a new gas boiler knowing that the free ride will be over, let them enjoy privilege.

Ambrose Evans Pritchard
Ambrose Evans Pritchard