BUILD UP is hosting a webinar organised by BEUC (Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs) and Ressorts on Decarbonising on a massive scale through the deployment of heat pumps and the challenges and levers for speeding up deployment. The event will delve into the role of heat pumps in decarbonisation, sharing the insights and experience of two partner projects, CLEAR HP and LIFE STREET HP. 

CLEAR HP

The CLEAR HP project kicked off in September 2023, and has been running for three years. The aim is to guide consumers through the process of switching to a heat pump – ensuring their home is “heat pump ready”, through purchase and installation. This will be done through a series of collective purchase campaigns run by national consumer organisations across seven countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.  

The project comes at a time when the EU is focused on shifting consumers all across Europe to renewable energy and particularly renewable heating. The focus at the Member State level shifts to the implementation phase of the Fit for 55 package, including ensuring adequate funding and financing schemes open to the public to encourage them to shift to renewable heating devices.

LIFE STREET HP RENO  

The project aims to deploy collective purchasing approaches for energy systems replacement by heat pumps for individual homes at the scale of entire streets, and will present :  

• The context and the barriers/risks we have to think about (= why)
• The solution: main goals of the project (= for what)
• How we proceed

They will work on 3 axes with all relevant stakeholders:

1. Characterise and qualify the typologies of individual housing on the scale of entire streets to better target the buildings adapted to the collective purchase of heat pumps, while integrating it into a deep renovation process in line with the energy efficiency and decarbonization objectives by 2050 (local authorities, housing organizations and residents).

2. Develop and make available to stakeholders a set of financing packages and collective buy-in-scheme contracts, based on a consumer panel survey to better understand their expectations and on viable and widely replicable economic models.

3. Raise awareness :

• Among local authorities
• Involve installers and solution providers in the process by encouraging them to develop adapted, packaged, prefabricated and industrialised solutions, less expensive, and more qualitative, with possible new services fitted to the ecological transition
• Conduct a marketing campaign among residents to trigger a viral effect, thereby significantly increasing the interest towards this approach. This will lead to the emergence of pilot/test projects that will provide feedback for future projects.  

All of this will lead to a reduction in costs and to the mass deployment of heat pumps in renovation, as a lever for decarbonising heat in existing housing.