Global heat pump sales by country are tabulated in this data-file, for 14 countries/regions. Developed world heat pump sales rose at an 11% CAGR over the decade since 2012, reaching 7M units sold in 2022, but then unexpectedly fell by -10% in 2023, including YoY declines in 7 out of the 14 countries we are tracking.
How are heat pumps defined? In the broadest sense of the term, a heat pump is any small-medium sized modular device that evaporates a refrigerant against a heat source (absorbing heat), then re-releases that heat elsewhere by compressing and re-condensing the refrigerant (releasing the heat). Strictly, therefore, all air conditions are heat pumps.
However, in this data-file, we are hoping to tabulate global heat pump sales by country, defining a heat pump as a system that is largely used to transfer heat into a space or a system, and competing with other forms of boilers and heating systems.
This exercise is relatively challenging, as some regions do not report heat pump sales at all, and others report heat pumps with different definitions. For example, Australia sold an enormous 1.4M heat pumps in 2023, including air conditioners; but of this total, only c160k were linked to hot water heating systems, and therefore we have estimated true heat pump sales somewhere closer to 300k.
Across the developed world, we think that heat pump sales reached 7M in 2023, or around 6 heat pumps sold per million inhabitants, then fell back to 6M heat pumps sold in 2024, with YoY declines in 7 out of the 14 countries/regions in our data-file (the US, Canada, Italy, Spain, Sweden, other Europe, and Japan). This is another data-point warranting caution over drawing S-curves in new energies.
Europe has some of the highest heat pump sales among regions in our database, with sales of around 10 units per year per thousand inhabitants in France, and 20-30 units per year per thousand inhabitants in Northern European countries such as Norway and Sweden.
The largest category is reversible air-air units (45%), reversible air-water (30%), while only c10% of the sales in Europe have been ground-source heat pumps, based on data from the European Heat Pump Association. Projections for European heat pumps are found in our European natural gas model.
US residential and commercial HVAC system deployments are available from AHRI. There was a surge across gas boilers, gas water heaters, air conditioners and heat pumps in 2021, linked to higher home construction. Heat pumps rose from 30% of cooling solutions to 40% from 2013 to 2023, and rose from 15% to 23% of heating solutions (ex electric heaters, where AHRI does not report data) (chart below).
Heat pump sales are estimated in other regions based on public data sources. Heat pumps are clearly more efficient than combustion-based heating, as they can generally convert 1 kWh of electricity into 4 kWh-th of heat transfer. However, we think that high costs and challenging practicalities may still be a hurdle for heat pumps, and rather than following an S-curve, sales may, like EVs, follow a saturation curve.