Heat pumps are essential to ditching fossil fuels, but they rely on powerful greenhouse gases to work. Here’s how to tackle that problem.

Heat pumps are essential for ditching fossil fuels. The appliances are many times more efficient than even the best gas furnaces, and they run on electricity, so they can draw power from renewables like wind and solar.

But the very thing that makes them such an amazing climate solution is also their biggest challenge. A common refrigerant called R-410A pumps through their innards so they can warm and cool homes and offices and anything else. But that refrigerant is also liquid irony, as it can escape as a greenhouse gas over 2,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. (This is known as its “global warming potential,” or how much energy a ton of the gas absorbs over a given amount of time compared to the same amount of CO2.) Leaks can happen during the installation, operation, and disposal of heat pumps.

But this year the industry is rolling out alternative refrigerant formulations like R-454B and R-32, which have around 75 percent less global warming potential. That’s in response to Environmental Protection Agency rules mandating that, starting this year, heat pump refrigerants have a global warming potential of no more than 700. Manufacturers are looking even farther ahead at the possibility of using propane, or even CO2, as the next generation of more atmospherically friendly refrigerants.

  • Noerknhar@feddit.org
    0·
    9 hours ago

    In Germany, R-32 will phase out by 2030, they are replacing it with R290. R-410a can’t be installed in new heatpumps starting 2026.

    It’s confusing that other countries are apparently years behind, especially considering that technologies are apparently available.

    • Steve@slrpnk.netOPM
      0·
      8 hours ago

      Thanks. That’s useful information for the uncertain years ahead. For now the article says

      “Our math shows R-32, plus good refrigerant management, those two things combined solve almost all of the refrigerant problem,” said Romanin. “Because of that data, Gradient believes the industry should stay on R-32 until we’re ready for natural refrigerants.”

      It may not be useful to make country by country comparisons given that each has its own set of obstacles in the way of green energy. Not all solutions are collectively adaptable yet, it’s true.