Produce one million heat pumps in 2027: Équilibre des Energies calls on the Government to also stimulate demand

Équilibre des Énergies, represented at this event by its president Brice Lalonde, offers additional recommendations to stimulate demand for heat pumps.

Équilibre des Énergies welcomes the Government's announcements which aim to enable the mass distribution of heat pumps in the housing, tertiary and industrial sectors, based on the million pieces of equipment produced in France by 2027.

In the residential sector, Équilibre des Énergies is confident in the ability of heat pumps to position themselves as the reference solution in a large number of segments. Indeed, its study “How to decarbonize France: a massive plan for the deployment of heat pumps is necessary”, published in November 2022, estimated that 10 million homes could be heated from heat pumps in 2030 and around 20 million in 2050.

However, the market downturn observed since 2023, mainly due to the economic context, puts at risk the ability of heat pumps to penetrate the market. Therefore, without specific action on demand, there is a risk that these projections will not be realized, to the detriment of achieving energy-climate objectives which imply that a large number of fossil heating systems will be replaced by pumps. with heat[1].

Two Energy Balance proposals to stimulate demand for heat pumps

• Promote avoided greenhouse gas emissions in the energy savings certificate (EEC) system to better economically support heat pumps

The 2019 energy-climate law opened up the possibility of weighting the number of certificates allocated, and thus, the level of economic support, according to the greenhouse gas emissions avoided. Today, the CEE sheets relating to the installation of heat pumps do not include this climate component. Équilibre des Energies calls for taking into account the climate component in order to improve support for heat pumps via CEEs. This measure has no impact on public finances.

• Reflect the energy savings of heat pumps more accurately in the energy performance diagnosis (DPE)

It is accepted that with its coefficient of performance (COP) of 3, heat pumps reduce energy consumption by 75%, i.e. the share linked to renewable heat, when they replace an inefficient gas or oil boiler. . However, these gains are not reflected identically in the DPE which only retains 42,5% energy savings. In fact, the DPE penalizes residual consumption, the part linked to electricity, by multiplying it by 2,3. Équilibre des Energies calls for reducing this penalty which reduces the interest in installing a heat pump to improve the ranking in the DPE scale.

[1] According to the consultation file “Accelerating the decarbonization of buildings”, to reduce emissions from the building sector by 30 MtCO₂ by 2030, it is necessary in particular to move away from fuel oil for 3/4 of buildings heated with this energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from gas-heated buildings by 60%, by changing the boiler and strengthening the insulation.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.