There’s an exploding market demand for giant heat pumps that seem a world removed from the modest little units that you might be familiar with from single family homes or even multi-unit buildings. The manufacture and implementation of such gargantuan units seems to be developing into a bit of a global competition. These massive heat pumps take up whole rooms and can provide, in the case of one recently brought online in Esbjerg, Denmark, water heated to 90 C that can supply a district heating system for 27,000 homes.
As the BBC article suggests, another neat aspect of these giant heat pumps is that they can also be used to supply heat “for industrial applications, to provide heat in pharmaceutical, food or paper factories, for example” - at least for temperatures up to about 200 C - this allows companies to switch to heat pumps instead of using natural* gas. The price of natural gas has skyrocketed since the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine and so this ability to use another energy source is not only better economically for us but also healthier for the planet but removes the dependency on a hostile nation for energy. Watch this space for even bigger and better heat pumps to come!
*as has been noted elsewhere in other The Daily Difference emails the term ‘natural gas’ is not-so-subtle greenwashing - ‘natural’ gas is primarily methane and a more accurate term for it would be methane gas or fossil gas.