Cheap bills and easy to run: why the Norwegians love their heat pumps

But something specific happened a couple of years ago that gave heat pumps yet another big boost. 

It did not rain. Yes, a dry, hot summer prompted Norwegians to invest in more efficient, environmentally cleaner heating. 

How come?

Now, as most readers will know, southern Norway’s climate is not crazily different to our own. So wet and cool.

This, combined with hilly terrain, has given even big cities like Oslo a natural advantage: plentiful cheap electricity from hydro-power stations.

Except when it does not rain. Remember the hot summer of 2022? When Scotland set a record temperature of just over 34 degrees in the Borders. Well, the same thing happened across the North Sea.

Europe’s heatwave brought drought to Norway. Its hydropower stations - the country’s main source of electricity - did not quite dry up. But they - including pump storage systems needed to maintain supply from other renewables - had far lower accumulations of water. Bluntly, there was not enough of the wet stuff to keep generators buzzing the way they normally do.

Suddenly a country used to ready supplies of power had shortages. It imposed export controls. But this was 2022, shortly after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when world energy prices, including those for gas, were soaring. There were no cheap imports to be had.

Wholesale prices for electricity - as in the UK - jumped, tripled in fact, from 84 euros per megawatt-hour in February 2022 to 246 euros per megawatt-hour in August. Sure, prices do fluctuate from year to year and season to season - they had been as low as two euros per megawatt-hour in 2020. 

But the shooting prices of summer 2022 gave consumers a fright. So they looked for ways not to cut their bills - but at least to mitigate against huge rises. 

Read more: 

Can the national grid take heat pump and EV Scotland?

The carbon footprint of heating, from heat pumps to networks

The most obvious move: to switch to more efficient systems like heat pumps. The technology was already popular - and there was some pent-up demand after Covid.

Installations of heat pumps in Norway really took off in the last two quarter of 2022. In 2023 a total of 151,260 were put in place. That was up from 57,620 in 2014. 

And it compares - sorry, bottom of the league Scotland - with 6,388 installed in this country in the same 12 months.

The latest numbers from Novap, Norway’s heat pump lobby, suggest sales in the first quarter of this year are off their peak. But still the second highest on record.

Norway’s love affair with varmepumper began after a previous spike in energy prices, back in 2003. Something like 60% of households in Norway now have the technology fitted. In Sweden, Finland and Estonia the market share of heat pumps is 44%, 41% and 34% respectively.

In Scotland, according to the latest housing conditions report figures, published earlier this year, the equivalent figure is 1.3%.

This country - the whole of the UK -  is a remarkable outlier in our region.

Installations of heat pumps in Norway really took off in the last two quarter of 2022 (Image: Getty)

Oslo daily paper Dagsavisen earlier this year reeled off the reasons why Norwegians - even in the colder north of the country - were turning to heat pumps, especially air-to-air ones. Their main answer: money. The technology is not just cheaper to run, it is also more reliable, meaning fewer repair bills and maintenance costs.

But cheaper than what? Norwegians are often weighing up the advantages of heat pumps against less efficient (if environmentally clean) direct electric heating. 

How so? The country, despite the discovery of North Sea oil and gas, moved to wean itself off fossil heating fuels yonks ago, or, to be more precise, gradually after the oil shock of 1973. 

Scotland, and the rest of the UK, went in the opposite direction, installing a vast network of pipes to pump natural gas to millions of individual household boilers. 

Norway is also a lot richer than Britain - GDP per capita is at least half as much again. 

Its government and its citizens have more money to make initial outlays on green energy in their homes. 

Moreover, the houses getting heat pumps are already, on average, far better insulated.  

Read more: Heat pumps: Myths, truths and costs – find all articles here

Can you fit a heat pump in an old Glasgow tenement flat?

All this means Scottish and British householders have to make different calculations when deciding on how to warm up their houses - even if they don’t want to do the same to the planet.  

There are - as if it needs to be said - lots of variables about the best heating system, in whatever country you live, in whatever kind of home.

Yet another nuance is that Norwegians have been less keen on efficient district heating systems than other northern countries. Which might explain why their take-up of heat pumps is higher than in other advanced Nordic nations.

Norwegian heat pump advocates are very aware that their record rolling out clean and efficient individual systems is helping to scotch some myths.

Rolf Iver Mytting Hagemoen, of Novap, has noticed the foreign media attention Norway’s heat pumps get. 

Speaking to TU, an engineering magazine, Hagemoen claimed the “gas lobby” was mobilising against the technology. “They run targeted campaigns that heat pumps don't work when it's cold,” he said. “This is, of course, nonsense.”

Norway, especially its often frigid north, proves Hagemoen's point. Norwegian heat pump fans happily acknowledge that decades ago their tech used to struggle when it got very, very cold. 

Crucially, in deep-freezing temperatures heat pumps outperform oil and gas boilers, according to engineers.

Norwegians have fallen in love with their heat pumps (Image: Getty)

In the summer of last year, just as Norwegians were bingeing on new heat pumps at record levels, a Scottish businessman and peer declared the technology wrong for our climate. 

Willie Haughey claimed that heat pumps “don’t work as efficiently in Scotland as they do in other countries”. He had made similar remarks before - including in The Herald. 

But by 2023 heat pumps had become an unlikely battleground in the culture wars.  And Lord Haughey was presented as an expert in the topic. 

The millionaire, after all, had made made so much of his fortune by chilling produce that cheeky reporters had long dubbed him Scotland’s “fridge magnate”.

The Daily Express, for example, reported his claims as a “humiliation” for the Scottish Greens, then still in government and pushing decarbonisation. 

Actual experts were less impressed. Mitsubishi Electric, which makes heat pumps, published a blog in which one of its trainers, Ben Bartle-Ross, let rip at the peer. “I am appalled that opinions rather than facts are still given public airtime,” he said.

But Lord Haughey’s take was not in a vacuum. 

“There are a lot of false myths out there about heat pumps,” Caroline Haglund Stignor, a researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, told Euronews at the end of last year.

“Some oil and gas producing countries such as Russia, some people, some sectors, some businesses don't want to see this transition.

She concluded: "Yes, heat pumps work in cold climates. Yes, heat pumps work in old buildings.”

Norway’s heat pump champions have another point. The shock of 2022, with its dry summer and sky-high energy prices, might not be a one-off. The long-term rise in energy prices means, they reckon, that countries and individuals should be investing in efficient, clean heating. 

Heat pumps are designed to counter global warming. They are also supposed to mitigate against its costs. But will Scots learn to love varmepumper as much as Norwegians?