Efficient and Sustainable Solutions to Heating and Cooling

“The heating and cooling sector is finally getting the attention it deserves at the centre of the EU energy policy debate”, said Frédéric Hug, Euroheat & Power President at the opening of a session on “Sustainable Local Thermal Energy Systems” organised this afternoon in the framework of the European Commission’s High level conference on “Heating and Cooling in the European Energy Transition.”

Frédéric Hug further explained: “It is now time to make the right choices for sustainable heating and cooling supply. District Heating and Cooling networks are designed to pull together local resources and provide a vital route to market for a wide range of efficient low carbon technologies such as large-scale heat pumps, which could be otherwise difficult to integrate into the dense urban environment.”

Thomas Nowak, Secretary General of the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA), which co-organised the event, added in his concluding speech “I would have been delighted to see that heating and cooling deserved the same attention in the Commission’s package on the Energy Union as it is given during this week’s conference days. Let’s not forget that the Energy Union debate gained momentum with the gas supply crisis, which is a heating crisis. In this context our event gave proper attention to efficient, sustainable and available solutions to heating and cooling.”

He also insisted on the untapped potential of heat pumps and District Heating to meet EU’s main energy policy objectives: “Heat pump technologies can be used in a variety of mature applications in distributed and centralised systems. The combination of large heat pumps and District Heating grids is an appropriate choice to increase the share of renewable heating in densely populated areas. Both contribute to meeting all the objectives of the Energy Union.”

The event was organised by Euroheat & Power and EHPA under the title “Sustainable Local Thermal Energy Systems: The case of large Heat Pumps and District Heating”. Speakers included Henrik Lund (Aalborg University), Nicolas Monneyron (Cofely Réseaux), Dave Pearson (Star Renewables) and Jonas Cognell (Götebog Energi). The main messages covered the need for an integrated energy system – bridging both electrical and thermal systems, the positive experiences of different European cities with large-scale geothermal applications linked to their District Heating and Cooling networks as well as the huge potential of industrial heating and cooling.

Download the press release.