Heat pumps: Why Germany's heating revolution is stalling
signature project of Germany's environmentalist Greens: Instead of heating hoIt's a mes with fossil fuels, Germans should use Heat Pumps based on air or groundwater. But demand for these devices has plummeted.
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck is desperately trying to promote the use of heat pumps for heating German households. The Green politician is convinced the technology has the potential to create jobs in Germany while saving the climate.
Heat pumps, which utilize ambient air or groundwater heat, are low-emission — especially when The Heat Pump is powered by green electricity from a private photovoltaic system.
When Habeck and his Green Party became part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-party coalition government in 2022, they successfully launched a campaign to change how Germans heat their homes, which caused production and sales of heat pumps to soar, setting a record for the technology last year.
How the confusion began
Over the next six months, sales of heat pumps "virtually collapsed" to merely 90,000 units between January and June, the German news agency dpa reported in August. According to data from the German Heating Industry Association (BDH), the figure marked a 54% decrease compared with the same period a year ago.
The drop in demand has dealt a big blow to the government's ambitious goal of installing 500,000 heat pumps annually starting in 2024.
Malte Bei der Wieden from the green think tank Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut), says more attractive subsidies announced by the government last year for 2024 may have caused homeowners earlier this year to hold back on investing in a new heating system. "Applications for people living in their own homes have only been available since the end of February 2024. For landlords and homeowners associations, applications have only recently become available," he told DW.
Critics of the new regulation say the law is a bureaucratic nightmare and has caused a lot of confusion. BDH chief Markus Staudt has called on the government to ensure greater planning security for investors. "It is of central importance that the government sends a signal of trust to the citizens," he told news agency AFP recently.
Bei der Wieden says investors' reluctance at year-end was also influenced by inadequate media coverage of the new rules, which had led to confusion and "uncertainty." He accused some German media outlets of spreading "false information about heat pumps that wouldn't work in unrenovated buildings or that the entire house would need to be insulated first."
