Europe is overheating. This climate-friendly AC could help. [View all]

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Europe is overheating. This climate-friendly AC could help.

Heat pumps are efficient and eco-friendly. So why are they so rarely used?

By Pranshu Verma
Updated July 21, 2022 at 10:56 a.m. EDT|Published July 21, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT



A row of terraced houses in Guilford, England, taken with a heat-sensing camera in December. Brighter areas show where higher amounts of heat are emitted. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg News)

The United Kingdom declared a national emergency this week during a historic heat wave that’s melted runways, snarled train travel and shattered temperature records. The devastation has been particularly acute in a country like England, where 95 percent of the population lacks air conditioning. ... Amid that, the British government has provided grant money to a little-known solution: heat pumps.

Bearing a misleading name, heat pumps are two-way air conditioners that move warm air from inside a home to the outside, keeping dwellings cool in hot months. In winter months, they do the reverse, taking heat energy from outside and pushing warm air in.

Energy officials, lawmakers and scientists tout the devices as inexpensive, energy-efficient systems that significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions over traditional heating and cooling devices.

Estimates show that 90 percent of Japanese households use heat pumps to heat and cool homes, contributing to a 40 percent drop in the country’s electricity consumption over the past decade. In Italy, the government effectively pays citizens to use the technology; homeowners can get 110 percent of their heat pump cost reimbursed.

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By Pranshu Verma
Pranshu Verma is a reporter on The Washington Post's technology team. Before joining The Post in 2022, he covered technology at the Boston Globe. Before that, he was a reporting fellow at the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Twitter https://twitter.com/pranshuverma_