The biggest heat pumps

In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps.

Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...

Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the countryside where many houses have small woodland attached, people I know have moved to heatpumps for convenience and because its affordable.

PS: shoutout to to the JRC, found their reports when doing a super quick dig for stats. Those reports were super easy to read :D

Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.

> heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity

Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.

There is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019:

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...

a bigger one is planned:

https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...

I've lived in a couple houses built in the 80s that had heat pumps. why do people keep acting like heat pumps are a new thing? i feel like i'm taking crazy pills.

A bit OT, but since this article also mentions district heating: Are there any efforts to attach any of the recently built AI data centers (and their power plants) to district heating networks?

Dumb question, why is the water in the Rhine warm?

> The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($2.3m; £176m).

Browsing on mobile, I saw no way of contacting them about the mistake.

I am unsurprised that the big heat pumps are in Germany, because Germany as a country seems to be really into heat. As far as I can see, what is considered normal room temperature is about five degrees higher there than anywhere else.

archive.is paywall bypass link: https://archive.is/nQP9A

I keep wondering if instead of moving water they could use "solid state" heat pipes instead. Especially for geothermal where you could just drive them into ground, no need to actually drill or circulate water.

> ... modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.

Okay, so that clears up the question I had, then. Not enough to make any appreciable difference.

There used to be a coal-fired power station on the east coast of Scotland, a little south of Edinburgh, Cockenzie, where the cooling loops dumped a huge plume of warm water into the sea. It was well-known as a local fishing spot, with surprisingly clean water flow detectable even a mile or so out from shore. That was several degrees warmer and definitely had a (possibly positive) influence on the ecology of the area - there were certainly a lot of interesting things swimming around there.

So $235 million for 162MW, or $2.35B for 1.6GW

A 1.6GWe nuclear reactor is around $8B.

Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.