Europe’s heat pump market has hit a slump, industry data shows, holding up the continent’s efforts to heat its homes without polluting the planet.
Manufacturers in most markets sold fewer heat pumps in 2023 than they did the year before, according to the lobby group European Heat Pump Association (EHPA). Total sales fell 5% over the 14 countries for which data exists, bucking a trend of accelerating growth that peaked in 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices soaring.
Thomas Nowak, head of the EHPA, called on the EU to put together a promised action plan to build more heat pumps and install more of them in buildings.
Heat pumps, which act like refrigerators in reverse, use electricity to move untapped energy indoors. Their sales last year dropped 36% in Italy, 42% in Finland and 46% in Poland as gas prices fell and interest rates rose. Governments in some member states also cut support.
Newly released figures from the UK, which were not included in the EHPA calculations, show sales of the device grew 4% last year.
Germany, which saw heat pump sales jump 59% in 2023, was also one of six EU countries in which the market grew. The EHPA said this was partly a hangover from high demand the previous year, when orders could not be filled and customers were left waiting months to have heat pumps installed. The effect had run its course by the second half of 2023, the EHPA said.
The European slump in sales “is an extremely challenging setback for the EU’s efforts to decarbonise heating,” said Duncan Gibb, an analyst at clean energy thinktank Regulatory Assistance Project.
The European Commission aims to have about 60m heat pumps by the end of the decade but the current pace of installations – about 3m a year – will only get it to about 45m by then, said Gibb. “The EU needs a rapidly growing heat-pump market, not a shrinking one,” he said.