Heat Pump Blog

The Heat-pump way to sustainability

With increasing CO2 emissions and fossil-fuel prices, and a broader renewables footprint in the electricity mix, industrial heat pumps will be a key factor in achieving a more sustainable heat-generation approach in the future.

Learn more about industrial heat pumps

The industrialization of much of the world over the past few centuries has been predicated on an abundance of fossil fuels as energy sources. There has been, however, a major price to pay: burning fossil fuels to power modern industry is the main cause of climate change, experienced in extreme weather, poor air quality, and species extinction across the planet.

In recent years, however, attitudes to fossil fuels have started to change, and there is a growing consensus that green sources of energy must urgently replace fossil fuels if we are to continue to power modern societies. On the back of this, the potential of heat pumps has been gathering greater attention.

A major advantage of heat pumps is that they generate much more usable heat from the same amount of electricity compared to other technologies. Moreover, if green electricity from the sun, wind, water, nuclear power, or other low-carbon sources is used, no CO₂ is emitted.

Illustration of a heat pump used in district heating

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A heat pump functions in a similar way to a normal refrigerator: a liquefiable gas refrigerant is evaporated in a cyclic process at low pressure, compressed, and condensed at a higher pressure. During evaporation, the refrigerant absorbs heat, typically from inside the refrigerator or from a low-temperature environmental or process heat source.

The gaseous refrigerant condenses after compression at high pressure and high temperature. Rather than this heat being released into the ambient air, with a heat pump, it is put to practical use, such as for process heat and district or domestic heating.

Heat pumps offer enormous potential to save CO₂, as seen in Scandinavia today, where since the 1980s several large heat pumps with Atlas Copco Gas and Process turbocompressors have been in operation. The process uses wastewater from a sewage treatment plant as the heat source and the urban district heating system as the heat sink. The systems have rated thermal outputs of over 60 MW per unit. There are also two Atlas Copco Gas and Process heat pumps installed in Stockholm’s heating network. Both have 40 MW thermal output and compared to the previous use of heating oil they save 90,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions a year.

Although it has existed for decades in the shadow of fossil fuels, the heat pump as an industrial technology has actually been mature for decades. Now, however, with sustainability demands and the price of fossil fuels, it is fair to say that the age of the heat pump is beginning.