Tesla’s next growth curve – heat pumps

A new area that Tesla may consider entering is home heating, which echoes the recent policies promoted by European countries for heat pumps to replace traditional burner boilers.

 

What is a heat pump?

According to Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, a heat pump is an air conditioning system that works in reverse.

In layman’s terms, a heat pump does not generate heat, it is just a transporter of heat. Heat can spontaneously transfer from a high-temperature object to a low-temperature object, but not in the reverse direction.

 

 

The working principle of a heat pump is to “force” heat to flow from low-temperature objects to high-temperature objects in a reverse cycle. It first obtains low-grade heat energy from natural air, water or soil, and then provides high-grade heat energy through power leverage.

Therefore, heat pumps are also divided into air source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and ground source heat pumps. Among them, air source heat pumps are the most commonly used, and in the next few years, they may become the mainstream of global heat pumps.

According to Musk’s vision, he not only wants to install heat pumps in every Tesla car, but also eventually install heat pumps in thousands of homes.

 

Trends

At present, heating basically relies on fossil fuels to provide heat through burner boiler systems. With the energy crisis caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, heat pumps have become a new energy technology that has attracted much attention, accelerating the adoption of heat pumps.

Heat pumps could reduce gas demand by nearly 7 billion cubic meters by 2025, almost as much as the Trans-Adriatic Gas Pipeline will deliver in all of 2021.

If EU climate targets are met, annual gas savings will grow to at least 21 billion cubic meters by 2030, by which time the global heat pump market will reach $81 billion