Austria: Heat pump market
Austria has an area of 84,000km² and a population of 8.3million. Of the 3.57 million principal residences, 26% are heated with natural gas, 23% with heating oil, 20% with wood, 7% with electricity, 2.1% with district heating and 1.5% with solar heat pumps. About 35,000 new homes are built per year.Technologies for using renewable energy represent a major and above all sustainable economic mainstay for Austria, which can be further developed in future in terms of both the inland and export markets.
After 18,138 heat pumps were sold in 2009, the market for heat pumps in Austria fell in 2010 by 3.1%, to 17,578 plants.
As you can see above, sales of heat pump for heating dropped by 1.8%. Ground-source heat pumps (brine-water, direct expansion) still hold the largest share here with 54%. Water/Water systems saw their share of the market drop slightly, while brine/water systems have fallen sharply since 2007.
Sales figures for 2010 continue the trend of the last few years, which shows a clear move to air/water heat pumps. The number of air-source heat pumps have increased their share to 46% – of these ~90% were air/water and 10% air/air heat pumps. Direct vaporization was the dominant system in the 1990s, but it was replaced by brine/water systems in the 2000s. Though it enjoyed a long history of popularity, direct expansion is today just a niche market.
For heating only heat pumps, the sector with up to 20 kW holds the largest share with 91%.
According to the results of a market study, in 2010 there were 80,705 domestic hot water heat pumps, 90,637 heat pumps for space heating, 4,026 ventilation heat pumps and 1,893 heat pumps for de-humidifying swimming pools in operation in Austria in 2010 – a total of almost 177,000 heat pumps.
These heating pumps produced ca. 1,960 GWh of useful heat, of which about 1,381 GWh was renewable energy.
The use of heat pump technology in Austria is currently focussed on the areas of space heating, domestic hot water, and multi-function devices in residential buildings. These are almost exclusively compression heat pumps, whereby their heat-source systems they use are usually air heat-exchangers, ground collectors, down hole probes or ground-water springs. These heat pumps are run by electricity for the most part.
Sources:
Market Development of Renewable Energy in Austria 2010 (see bmvit)
www.nachhaltigwirtschaften.at from 30 August 2011
www.lgwa.at (in German)
www.bwp.at (in German)
IEA-HPC Conferences in Zurich 2008 and in Tokyo 2011
European Heat Pump Summit Nuremberg 2009
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