Heating our homes with cold water sounds crazy! But it's not. Heat pumps are revolutionizing the way we heat and cool our homes and cities. We went to the German city of Mannheim to find out how.
04:01It works just like a heat pump, only the other way around.
04:05It transports the heat from inside to outside.
04:09Later, another machine made the headlines, the air conditioner.
04:13It was originally invented to solve moisture problems in the paper industry.
04:18It wasn't until later that the heat pump had its big moment.
04:22The pride and joy of the man of the house is the weather control center.
04:27A center that puts you in charge of the electric heating and air conditioning
04:32and the electronic air filtering of the entire house.
04:36After the Second World War came widespread electrification and new lifestyle expectations.
04:42Heat pumps fit into the picture well.
04:45But as many people still used cheap oil and gas for heating, they didn't really catch on.
04:50Today it's different.
04:52So now we're going to see the heat storage from where the heat is being distributed over the entire city.
04:59That's the thermos flask. 43,000 cubic meters of water.
05:05Okay, wow. How much is that in liters?
05:0843 million liters.
05:12That takes a while to fill.
05:16In Mannheim, most of the heat still comes from coal, only 3% from the river.
05:21However, that will soon change as the coal-fired power plant is expected to be shut down by 2033.
05:30We want to go even bigger.
05:32We want 50,000 households to be supplied with river water heat pumps.
05:37That means a tenfold increase in the next few years.
05:42From an environmental perspective, there is a theoretical problem with river heat pumps.
05:47If heat is extracted from the river, cooler water is returned later.
05:52However, the quantities here are so small that the temperature in the river only changes minimally, according to MVV.
05:59But now imagine all along the river Rhine, all the major cities there, wanting to cover their entire heat demand,
06:05including industrial plants such as the BASF or covestro plants along the river Rhine,
06:11that might use water for heat pumps for their processes.
06:16And suddenly you get an issue.
06:19In Mannheim, the heat is distributed above and below ground via a district heating network.
06:25In Germany, around 15% of all buildings are now heated in this way.
06:30And the largest part of this could be covered by large heat pumps that make coal and gas redundant.
06:36But it's still a niche market.
06:38The model is the Swedish capital Stockholm, where around 90,000 homes are heated with wastewater.
06:44In Mannheim, the city's climate targets and state subsidies for the construction of the plant were decisive factors for the changeover.
06:52Their goal is to produce almost completely clean heat by 2030.
06:57The heat pumps won't cover all of that, but will be one important component to eventually shut down the dirty coal power plant behind me in the near future.
07:06Whether large or small, heat pumps are sustainable and can make regions, cities and individual buildings less dependent on fossil fuels.
