I think you are misunderstand where most of that energy comes from. Say I have some refrigerant in liquid form at a low pressure. That refrigerant will have a b

I think you are misunderstand where most of that energy comes from. Say I have some refrigerant in liquid form at a low pressure. That refrigerant will have a boiling point of say, -20 degrees F. I use the ambient air, which is say 0 degrees F, to boil the refrigerant into a gas. The internal energy of the refrigerant goes up significantly, but it's temperature does not change. Then, I compress the gas so that it goes up in temperature. This change in temperature does not correspond to a large change in the internal energy of the gas. The same energy is pushed closer together, resulting in a higher temperature[1]. Then, I condense the gas at it's new boiling point, say 100 F, into a liquid. Then you decompress the resulting liquid and the cycle repeats. Most of the energy is coming from the ambient air, only a small amount of electricity is used to change what temperature that energy is available at. [1] A very simple mental model you can use to understand the difference between temperature and energy for a gas is that temperature is the number of times the gas molecules bump into each other in a second, while energy is how fast the gas molecules are moving. So if you have a very low pressure gas, even all of those molecules have a ton of energy in the form of motion, the temperature of the gas will be quite low because the gas molecules won't interact often. But compress that gas down to a small volume, and the molecules will bump into each other all the time even though they don't have much more energy.