The goal is one million heat pumps, provided that individuals adopt them

Faced with soaring gas prices due to the war in the Middle East, the government wants to accelerate the electrification of France by calling on the sector to install one million heat pumps (HP) each year by 2030. But is the market really there?

The sector, brought together on Tuesday by President Emmanuel Macron, assures that it is capable of producing this million PACs on the territory, to turn the page on dependence on fossil fuels whose prices have gone haywire with the war in the Middle East.

This objective primarily encompasses air-to-water heat pumps, which have the advantage of using the existing heating water network - but also geothermal heat pumps and thermodynamic water heaters.

"On air-to-water heat pumps alone, we could double sales and manufacture them all in France, so we could go from 170.000 units today to 300.000 units," a figure that has not been reached since 2022, explains Arnaud Kautzmann, secretary of the French Association for Heat Pumps (Afpac), to AFP.

But that depends on whether the customers show up.

According to the government's working group on building electrification, there are nearly 17 million homes in France that need to be decarbonized, a majority of which are detached houses, where it would be possible to install air-to-water heat pumps for 80% of them.

On the other hand, in co-ownership, scaling up heat pumps is likely to be "a little more complex" according to Corina Osadciuc-Mahé, head of energy renovation at Foncia, which provides condominium management services.

In Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine), a small condominium of four apartments is now heated with an air-to-water heat pump after a difficult struggle to carry out the necessary and costly insulation work.

"We have a clear gain in comfort" and "a crazy difference" compared to the fuel bills we paid before, reports one of the co-owners. "But we're not out of the woods yet" given the total cost of nearly 200.000 euros for the renovation, of which 23.400 euros remains to be paid by each owner after government aid, "which has not yet been fully paid out," laments Céline.

For condominiums like Céline's, which already have collective heating, the main constraints of an air-to-water heat pump are to find a location that does not create too much noise or aesthetic pollution and to have an insulated building.

But if each dwelling has its own individual boiler, the installation of a heat pump would require "colossal work to run the piping of a water distribution loop into the building", explains Maxime Ledez, a researcher at the Institute for Climate Economics (I4CE).

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.