German Heating Milestones

Germany is making impressive progress in its drive to increase the efficiency of home and commercial heating, a number of recent studies indicate.

Price comparison website check24 says that there are now more than one million environmentally friendly heat pumps installed in the country, while sector association BWP estimates that pumps have lowered CO2 emissions by nearly 17 tons. Further shifts in this direction are to be expected, with Germany needing two million installed heat pumps in the next two years if it is to live up to its stated climate goals.

Meanwhile Germany’s state owned developmental bank KfW says that 20 percent of German households now use smart home technologies to lower energy consumption. That’s an increase of one hundred percent since 2018. Heating was the area where this technology was most often deployed.

Experts say home heating offers great potential for reducing CO2 emissions in Germany, which has a high proportion of older oil-fired heating systems waiting to be replaced. Heating units in Germany’s more than 40 million homes account for in excess of nine percent of such emissions.