Out of gas: EU is €70 billion away from making renewable heating affordable for all
To enable consumers to overcome the upfront cost for switching to clean heating, EU governments will need to increase subsidies by €70 billion, a new Coolproducts study reveals.
Also available in Italian 
The switch from gas boilers to renewable heating solutions is still out of reach for many European households.
Households willing to install renewable-sourced heating face a common problem. In general, the upfront cost of installing a heat pump is much higher than a gas boiler, but heat pumps are three times more energy efficient. After some years, the upfront cost of a new heat pump can be offset by savings on energy bills – but significant investment is needed at first.
To measure the affordability of switching to heat pumps and solar thermal, we must look at the period needed to cover their upfront cost through the savings on energy bills, which is known as the “payback time”.
With the existing incentives and prices, an average middle-income family of four members will only find a reasonable payback time (8 years or less) when switching from a fossil fuel boiler to a heat pump in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Cyprus, Malta, Austria and France.
Simply put, 19 out of 27 EU countries either don’t allocate enough subsidies for families to overcome the upfront price of renewable heating solutions or have disproportionate tax regimes on electricity. A lack of public support is hampering the uptake of heat pumps and solar thermal in Europe.
However, solving this problem would be more feasible than ever for EU governments.
To make heat pumps affordable for everyone, member states must increase subsidies by at least €70 billion, an extra mile that could be reduced to €20 billion if a CO2 tax of 100 €/ton was introduced. Such are the estimations of the latest study carried out by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) on behalf of the Coolproducts campaign.
Only about 17.3% of the heating appliances installed in European homes are powered by electricity or use clean technologies.
Time is running out to push gas out of a sector that is responsible for 12% of the EU’s total CO2 emissions, equivalent to the emissions of all the cars in the EU, and 28% of the EU’s annual energy consumption.
