Socioeconomic potential for introducing large-scale heat pumps in district heating in Denmark

Denmark has a national political goal of a 100% renewable energy supply in 2050. This requires a comprehensive transition of the energy system. For some decades, district heating in Denmark has been contributing to high fuel efficiency as well as to the integration of the electricity and heating sectors. Large-scale compression heat pumps would improve the integration between the district heating and power sectors by utilising the fluctuations in the supply from wind power, solar photo voltaic and other sources. Previous studies indicate that the introduction of heat pumps in Denmark will have a positive impact on the total costs for energy supply in the transition towards 100% renewable energy. In this paper, this is further investigated to assess the feasibility of heat pumps in the Danish energy system. The assessment is made by applying two different energy system analysis tools, named EnergyPLAN and MODEST. The comparison and discussion of these tools is a secondary purpose of the study. In general, the results show a potential for introducing heat pumps in Denmark between 2 and 4 GW-thermal power and a total potential benefit around 100 M€/year in 2025.