Is heating the future of Cooling? | Cooling United Live
Hi everyone and welcome to this session on is heating the future of cooling the building industry is responsible for about 36% of co2 emissions and about 50% of energy is is consumed by either heating or cooling in our buildings today. With renewables and decarbonization strategies from governments from states from cities, we we have to look at how we we decarbonize the heating and the cooling industry and that's why we're talking today about bringing those two together. My name is Jonas Hamann and i have with me today Matilde Kaae Pedersen who's going to explain a bit in a bit about how we see it from a Danfoss perspective. And I have with me uh Kevin Lane who will who will talk about it from the IEA's perspective and dive a bit more into to these numbers that i just mentioned Kevin he's a policy analyst at the international energy agency with a focus on energy efficiency he has more than 25 years experience in the field and he has an education in statistics and climatology. He is amongst other things worked on on the cooling synthetis report and he works for the Montreal Protocol the energy efficiency task force so Kevin with that i'll leave it to you.
Okay thank you for that kind introduction Jonas. I'd like to take this opportunity to say good afternoon and welcome to all the delegates as well. I hope you're well in this strange time with this our economic and health crisis going on at the moment but what i'd like to talk to you today is more about the climate imperative. We have and talk about the role of heat pumps
within heating and also cooling. If we look at the world today we're currently emitting something like 30 to 33 gigatons of carbon at the moment and from energy related emissions and if we want to be on a path towards reaching our Paris climate goals we basically need to decarbonize by the middle towards the end of this century. And at the moment our emissions are probably still going up. However, there are policies in place that we expect might stabilize some of these emissions and that's one of our scenarios that we run. However, if we want to reach our sustainable
development goals and also access to clean cooking and access to energy across the world so the sustainability development goals we run something called our sustainability development scenario. And to get there we're going to need a whole range of measures to get there ranging from increasing the use of efficiency renewables and other measures such as material efficiency and the like. So it's not going to be just one technology or measure that'll get us there. There'll be
a whole suite of them. And at the IEA we track these clean energy developments in our track and clean energy progress report. Here we track something like 46 technologies and one of those is heat pumps and here specifically we're looking at heat pumps for heating in buildings which consume a significant part of the energy and responsible for a lot of emissions around the world. However, heat pumps are also used in other sectors as well whether that's um appliances in industry and transport as well but the focus initially is just going to be on heat pumps in buildings. And at the moment when we look at all these different technologies most of them are off track in terms of meeting our sustainable development goals. If we look at heat pumps for heating around the world we already have a technology that's already quite effective so if we look at it compared to say a a very efficient gas condensing boiler a heat pump's already going to be more effective in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact
probably 90 percent around the world is probably more carbon efficient to use a a heat pump. If you'd asked this question 10 years ago that figure would have been about 50 so in those last 10 years our electricity plies become more or less carbon intensive and heat pumps have become more efficient as well. So if we look at heat pumps around the world so it is one of our key technologies for buildings at the moment they selling in the order of millions so quite a low level at the moment and a lot of them will be in places like the U.S and northern hemisphere and some of these have been driven primarily through government programs so in China say there's a coal to electricity conversion programs to try to get this cleaner energy in for cleaner air reasons. In the us it's been driven by federal tax cuts to try and install more ground
source heat pumps. So there are heat pumps are becoming more important but still quite a low level. Importantly the efficiency of them are also rising as well so they're quite magical products and that you put maybe one unit of energy in and you're getting three four maybe even more energy coming out of them in the form of heat so um the performance of them is increasing so that's the special part about heat pumps. However, we need to do more too we need to sell more of them and make still make them even more efficient. If we to look in our sustainability scenario going up to 2050 and beyond so by 2070 we basically need maybe a third or more of all the heating in the world to be coming from heat pumps. That might be different in different parts of the world so the united states might be a bigger proportion than say India where maybe more renewables might be used.
So why isn't the uptake of heat pumps happening more quickly and well there's probably a few reasons the typical ones are that's at the moment the upfront cost is still quite expensive although it can be repaid by lower running costs. But the life cycle cost is still relatively high also we have split incentives so that say a landlord might be buying the equipment and the tenant might be paying for the electricity bill so there's different incentive to install these heat pumps. Also there's probably older buildings there's the skills required to put these in and perhaps importantly i think we're missing opportunities by looking at heating and cooling separately. This is recognized by a lot of policy makers and i suppose some of the typical responses are to provide regulations to mandate more efficient equipment going in and also to provide information so you have these maps minimum energy performance standards and also labels to help consumers.
And one of the interesting ones Canada is already looking for a minimum efficiency of 100 efficiency for heating equipment which effectively means you have to have a heat pump for your heating. There are other options of course one of them is to maybe classify heat pumps as a renewable heat which will allow other options maybe tax rebates on the fuel and similar. There are other fiscal measures that could happen maybe some of them is removing the subsidies on fuels.
And that'll provide a level playing field and also make it more cost effective to install heat pumps. In the current climate perhaps one of the most interesting one are COVID recovery packages. So governments are spending lots of money to try and boost the economy and i think efficiency particular is one of the key areas that governments are looking at. So efficiency is very useful because it's a clean energy but also generates a lot of jobs maybe 15 jobs for every 1 million dollar invested. Whereas fossil fuels would be substantially less so it's one area where governments are very keen to try and spend some of their money. So if you look at the eu
green recovery package there's maybe 750 billion and a third of that maybe is going to go to clean energy. I think we have a great opportunity in the short term and incumbent on us to try and make sure that some of these technologies are coming through. Importantly we should also be trying to set targets whether that's through nationally determined contributions or national cooling plans to try and signpost where we'd like to go to in these types of technologies. And of course as well as the technology there's also building codes which can be used to make the fabrics of the buildings better so we require less heating. So most countries around the world are improving their building codes to make sure that you can have a better fabric of the building but that might also imply that you may need more heat pumps in the buildings as well.
Okay so um i've talked mainly about heat pumps for space heating however they can be used in a whole range of other applications as well and on the top right you can just see a typical vapor compression cycle that's used in a a refrigerator or an air conditioner and just to briefly explain what it is basically putting refrigerant into a loop which is going clockwise in this diagram. You put a little bit of electricity into a compressor that compresses your refrigerant and that raises the temperature of that refrigerant as it's going around then to the right hand side that refrigerant goes over some very large coils and these with an electric fan can then push off the hot air to the outside of a building if it's a seamless unit or inside a building if it's for heating. That then cools down a little bit and once it goes through an expansion valve the refrigerant will cool down even further as it expands. And again it goes through some a big set of calls evaporator coils and that can then be blown off with a fan as well so you blow the cool air off and that warms it up and it goes back to the compressor again so this cycle just goes round and round. So it's used in multiple applications so the obvious ones are refrigerators so there's maybe a billion or more of these in the world in space cooling there's already about two billion air conditioning units in the world and by 2050 there could be say six billion. So compared to the millions of heat pumps air conditions are substantially greater in the stock and this is where a lot of the development will happen they're improving in efficiency and their costs are also falling all the time. In the residential sector we see heat pumps
becoming more common and they might use about half the electricity of a conventional dryer. In industrial sectors as many uses it can be used in so perhaps say water heating and pulp manufacturing and actually lots of water eating and drying process across all of this industry. A nice example is pasteurization where you're both heating and cooling during the different processes so you've got very good opportunity for moving heat around with heat pumps to try and do that very very efficiently. But importantly there's also two big areas of district heating can also make use of such technology and especially heat recovery I think there's a very large potential there for greater development of heat pump technology.
So in conclusion just like say we have a climate imperative which is to try to substantially reduce our energy-related CO2 emissions .So within that we'll need a whole host of technologies but heat pumps have got a huge role to play for heating of buildings and we'll need to deploy them a much greater level even at higher efficiencies and the way we're going to do this is basically through from a government perspective of better regulations more information and also financial incentives. I would also highlight then from this the takeaway message is that heat pumps are really a key technology for heating but actually there's a whole host of other applications and one or two of which you'll hear about shortly. So at this point i'd like to hand back to you Jonas. Thank you very much for that presentation Kevin and i thought it was very interesting to hear about the the outlook that you have on decarbonization for for 2050 and what part that heat pumps play in that picture. I heard you saying that the technology is ready and that we have many different applications for the technology. But what i also noticed was that you mentioned that for heating and cooling from a policy perspective we have to look at them separately but from a technology perspective we have to start thinking them more and more together and i think that's quite interesting.
I think it's also very good to hear you know that you're focused on upskilling and and creating jobs and you also say that heat pumps will play or renewable energies will play a quite important factor in this and so on. On that note and on the exact note that you mentioned about using the waste heat from processes i think that is an excellent segway to our next presenter Matilde Kaae Pedersen. Matilde she has been with Danfoss for more than 13 years and she has held a very a long range of different positions within product management in relation to compressors in relation to heat pumps and system solutions or condensing units and today Mathilde is the global director for refrigeration. So with that Mathilde, i'll leave it to you. Thank you Jonas so yeah very interesting Kevin and i think i'll be echoing some of your messages as well here but the yeah. Is heating the the future of cooling i think we have already seen that for years the cooling players so both for components and units they have been going into this sector and especially in the residential sector we have seen a lot of the heat pump manufacturers actually coming first from the cooling world moving into heat pumps and for sure also for the components. And now with the development of this district heating and the way that it is changing which we will look at at the next slide. Then it's the even the district heating sector is becoming
much more accessible for the cooling players. And the fantastic part of this heat pump is as you also mentioned Kevin that with the technology of the heat pump but also heat recovery we can really significantly reduce the environmental impact of our heating consumption. So if we now have a look here at the at the district heating. So basically district heating is a flexible thermal infrastructure you could say so where different kind of energy sources can be plugged in or connected to the system and then the energy in form of either hot or cold water is then distributed into buildings and can be either used immediately or stored in tanks. So it can be stored for some hours or days or it's even possible to store the heat
for several months in some special very large storage facilities or even in some large pits. This way the district energy network can provide a kind of two-fold flexibility to the energy systems because it is providing both the storage and it's enabling to switch between different energy sources such as the last scale heat pumps or waste heat solar thermal and so on. And by implementing renewable energy sources and utilizing the waste heat generated from the industry the environmental gain from these district heating plants become our district heating networks become even more evident and i think it's actually moving more and more in the direction of the focus decreasing from building the energy plants or the heating plants these very large scale plants to actually much more being about managing the the different energy sources and also heating sources being connected into the district heating. And here on the graph you can
see an illustration of what has happened over the years with the district heating networks and we're now at the fourth generation of district heating and this is where it becomes feasible to implement more different energy sources because the building heating demands are lowered but also the ability to supply lower temperature heating is now more feasible. So therefore these networks as they develop they become more and more useful for connecting different energy sources and therefore also reducing the the environmental impact. Because we can move to more or less energy intensive systems. If we have a look at one of these networks on the next slide so
in Drammen in Norway here we have it. In Drammen in Norway they had a district heating plant and and they decided they needed to change it. They wanted to go for a non-fossil fuel solution it had to be with a natural refrigerant and not impacting the global warming as well as they wanted a max or a high energy efficiency. So this led to them deploying this ammonia short sourced heat pump and this heat pump is able to heat the water up to 90 degrees which is really quite high but for those kind of high temperatures ammonia is really a fantastic refrigerant for that. The heat plant is annually providing 67 gigawatt hour of heating and it is
right now at least it's covering more than 60 percent of the heating demand in Drammen. When it was installed some years back it was actually covering 85 percent of the heating demand. So it's really a significant coverage of the demand that they have for this heat pump. And
they obtained a 2 million euro saving per year making their payback much faster than what it would have been with other solutions. Due to the heat pump as Kevin also mentioned being much less energy intensive that was of course part of the reason for these two millions and as you explained Kevin you have this input of one and an output of free which is magical as you say. I don't know if they're going to make a Norway's Got Talent for technology soon because then i think this would be a good winner candidate in this in such a TV show. Anyway, if all nordic municipalities that
have district heating plants close to the sea they implemented this then we could actually reduce the CO2 emissions by almost 1.5 megaton and this is a a big number so just to bring it down to earth and compare it to number of cars then it would be the same as if we removed 300 000 cars from the road for a year. So this is really very significant for the for the environment impact. If we have a look at the next slide here. Where we look at a different kind of structure for a heat pump so this is the distributed heat recovery heat pump systems which is smaller compared to the more centralized ones. Examples of this can be for example in an industrial manufacturing process it can be in a supermarket or co-location data center or maybe a refrigerated warehouse they would have these kind of systems. So these applications they
are typically providing both cooling and heating and and therefore they have a dual revenue stream you could say and and also helping to shorten the payback period. And as Kevin also mentioned then these kind of systems are really breaking with this pattern of a mono function design practice where in the past we were really designing only for cooling refrigeration or heating. So here it's combining the systems and getting the best out of both. The size of these kind of systems the distributed heat recovery heat pumps are generally driven by the load that is needed in the facility so this can for example be the cooling load that is needing for a data center or a supermarket and and typically it will be the in the range of the 2 to 10 megawatt. And then the heating if it is a cooling application then the heating becomes the the second output of this system. So what happens is that when there is the infrastructure of a centralized district heating system then such systems that are actually built for a facility can be connected and provide that additional input into the heating system. So they can be an hour
of course already being used by the district heating utilities to replace more and more the fossil fuel heating systems. And it's for these kind of systems that the oil-free technology we believe it becomes very interesting because with the oil-free technology it is reducing the complexity of the system as you don't need to have oil separators or oil coolers and so on but also for the maintenance part of it because as there is no oil you no longer need to do oil checks change the oil filters or even add additional oil to the systems. And then on top the technology offers a very quiet operation with a very high efficiency and you also have still the choice of selecting a low GWP refrigerant so improving even more the environmental benefit for subsystems. Then if we have a look at the next slide which is heat recovery. So heat recovery is probably already one of the most known opportunities to improve the energy cost in a supermarket because heat is basically a byproduct of the refrigeration process so it's for free in in the system you could say. And with the CO2 refrigeration systems we're able to recover fairly high temperatures of heat and combining that with an appropriately dimensioned low temperature heat equipment then we are actually able to recover or cover the need of 30 to 50 percent of the demand that that is needed in the facility and that is without increasing the discharge pressure because if we increase the discharge pressure then there's actually even more to gain on the heating side from the system and in the areas where there is a district heating system these heat recovery systems can of course be connected to that but if they're in conjunction with some kind of multi-use buildings or apartments then or offices a shopping mall or whatever they can be then this the supermarket can actually become the heating center you could say for this whole building. To add on top of
that it also shows that supermarkets are often not using the full compressor capacity for the refrigeration need so if these compressors that are idle are being exploited for a heat pump usage then the heat pump output can of course be even greater than what we see it today and the supermarkets can really become a decentralized heating supplier or if the district heating infrastructure is there they can of course provide this heat into the district heating. If we look at the graph here on the on the right side then you can see the savings in CO2 emissions by implementing these different technologies that we have been looking at and also in combination either stand alone or in combination with the district heating and what we have added here also is together with the scenario of using fossil fueled base electricity or a more volatile electricity mix or energy mix for the electricity so with the more volatile mix which the district heating can manage then we can get even more reduction in the CO2 emissions. So i think the the technology shows that there's clearly benefits not just for reducing the operating cost but the but in reducing the CO2 emissions this is really the way to go to move away from the very mono function design practice and look at the full potential in fact of of these systems. So with that being said
i think i can conclude that from our side heating is definitely the future of cooling and over to you Jonas thank you very much Matilde and thank you Kevin for two very interesting and and good presentations Matilde from your presentation i thought it was very interesting and how you build upon what Kevin said in terms of the district energy system and how maybe the heating and the cooling sector should start talking more together as there lie an opportunity for both parts in doing that and how these low-temperature district energy systems allows for new business opportunities both for the supermarket owner as you mentioned here at the end but also for a data center or other buildings that the benefits from both using the cooling and the heating side and in some it can help decarbonize our buildings and it can help decarbonize our societies and so i think it's very interesting and. And just the last point that also noticed was you know how the heating and the cooling sector and heat pumps more specifically can help balancing the fluctuating renewables that comes in and again as you showed on the graph we can actually use that as a benefit for for decarbonization so with that i want to to thank both you Matilde and and Kevin for for the presentations and i want to thank the listeners and and the viewers for following this presentation and and enjoy the rest of the conference.
2021-01-24 07:50
