2023-06-03 21:30:01
Even more subsidies for heat pumps in single-family homes are of little use
Only very few heaters that will be replaced this year are fossil. The situation is different for large apartment buildings.
A heating engineer installing a heat pump. He and his colleagues have their hands full, because many single-family homeowners want one.
Foto: Getty Images/iStockphoto
With the Climate Protection Act, which we will vote on on June 18, the federal government wants to promote environmentally friendly heating systems with even more subsidies. In the case of single-family homes, however, this hardly makes any sense, as figures from the Swiss heat pump association show: Last year, 21,000 new heating systems were installed in old and new single-family homes in Switzerland. Of these, only 7.5 percent were oil or gas heaters.
91 percent of the heating systems newly installed in single-family homes were heat pumps. In addition, there are 2 percent wood heating systems. They are also considered climate-friendly.
This year, the proportion of newly installed dirty heating systems in single-family homes is likely to be significantly lower. This is indicated by figures from the first quarter. Between January and March, only half as many oil and gas heating systems were ordered as in the same period last year. As a result, the share of new fossil heating systems in single-family homes should fall to around 3.5 percent.
Stephan Peterhans, Managing Director of the Swiss Association of Heat Pumps, confirms: “Fossil heating systems are hardly ever installed in old or new single-family homes.”
This puts single-family homeowners on course for CO₂ neutrality by 2050. A simple calculation shows that. The service life of oil heaters is 25 to 30 years. Because practically only environmentally friendly heating systems are installed in single-family homes today, almost all oil heating systems will be replaced by 2050.
The existing subsidies for installing environmentally friendly heating systems already offer owners of single-family homes a sufficient incentive. Additional subsidies provided for in the Climate Protection Act might hardly speed up the transition.
A lot of smoke from big houses
On the other hand, it looks bleak for buildings with a heating capacity of over 100 kilowatts. These are apartment buildings with more than twenty apartments and large commercial properties. If their owners do not change their behavior quickly, the large properties will continue to emit large amounts of CO₂ well beyond 2050 due to the lifespan of the heating systems.
Money seems to be more important to many than the environment. A total of 1,890 new heaters were installed in large buildings last year. Almost three quarters of these run on oil or gas.
Although the number of these large buildings is small in relation to single-family houses, their energy consumption is very important. The performance of the heating systems in large houses that were replaced last year is twice as high as that of single-family houses.
Stephan Peterhans from the Swiss heat pump association suspects that many administrations of large buildings continue to install fossil heating systems because the incentive to switch is too small: heat pumps still cost more than fossil heating systems. However, the owners cannot fully pass on the investments to the tenants. For economic reasons, many therefore opt for oil or gas heating.
There are a total of 1.8 million residential buildings in Switzerland. Almost a million are still heated with either oil or gas. A total of around 40,000 heat pumps were installed last year.
Who gets the biggest chunk from the state?
The authorities now have it in their hands to set the incentives sensibly. The climate protection law wants to increase the subsidies for environmentally friendly heating systems by 2 billion francs.
It is unclear who will get how much of the 2 billion if the climate protection law is adopted. The law only states that “in particular” owners of larger properties should be supported. The Federal Council and the cantons will regulate in ordinances how much single-family home owners get and how much the owners of large apartment buildings.
Not only those who replace their fossil heating should benefit from the new climate protection funds, but also owners of electric heating. These need a lot of electricity. If they were all replaced by heat pumps, electricity for tens of thousands of households in Switzerland might be saved.
From the point of view of the security of the electricity supply, it would make sense if a large part of the new subsidies were used to replace the electric heaters. Because their owners have little incentive to switch because the conversion costs are often particularly high there.
In Switzerland there are currently a good 250,000 electric heaters in operation. They need around 5 percent of the electricity produced in Switzerland. The rapid replacement of electric heaters might significantly defuse Switzerland’s impending winter electricity problem.
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