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Those aren't "difficult to replace" at all. Instead replacing the systems in dozens or hundreds of homes, you're replacing just a few. And because those plants

Those aren't "difficult to replace" at all. Instead replacing the systems in dozens or hundreds of homes, you're replacing just a few. And because those plants usually use multiple boilers for redundancy and load scaling, you can replace them without interrupting service. Also, banks understand and finance that sort of stuff more easily than they will Joe Homeowner. The Coefficient of Performance for a fossil-fuel heating plant is about .8. The COP for a large building / campus sized heat pump is nearly ten times that. They're well understood, too, as millions of office and apartment buildings and campuses use them. All that it takes to turn a cooling system into a heating system is switching where water is routed...

mschuster91 2y ago
Large city-scale heat pumps are pretty new technology - the currently largest build in Denmark is from 2023 [1]. Even if you have hot water available, it will take a city like Munich many MANY years [2]. Don't get me wrong: it's high time to switch heating and cooling to district systems, where producers of heat like datacenters can add to the supply. But it's at the same time not as easy and fast to switch a many-hundred-megawatt block to heat pumps as it is to switch a single building. [1] https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/fernwaerme-groesste-waermepumpe-der-welt-heizt-100-000-daenen-ein/ https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/fernwa... [2] https://www.swm.de/magazin/energie/geothermie https://www.swm.de/magazin/energie/geothermie