I recently stumbled upon a surprising headline for a LinkedIn post that has sparked considerable engagement for its “Clean Energy Strategist” author:
“Engineers Just Solved Winter’s Biggest Energy Problem (And It’s Better Than Anyone Thought Possible)”
Wow! Fantastic! All that fussing and hand-wringing about people having sufficient energy to heat their homes in the winter, and presto! Those brilliant engineers have just solved the problem!
And there is no doubt keeping warm in winter is a big problem. The European Union tracks the number of Europeans unable to keep their homes adequately warm in the winter, and the numbers are shocking (Figure 1). About one-fifth of households in Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Greece, Turkiye, and Bulgaria were cold in winter 2023 – and 10.6% of EU households overall. The situation seems to be deteriorating rapidly, as it was only 9.3% of households in 2022, and 6.1% in 2021.
Figure 1 – Percentage of people in the EU unable to keep their homes adequately warm in 2023. From: Key Figures on European living conditions
Why can’t people heat their homes? Because they cannot afford to buy sufficient fuel, whatever their fuel of choice (or necessity) might be.
- Natural gas prices have risen sharply and erratically over the past few years as cheap Russian gas imports have been cut off, most European nations have restricted domestic gas and oil exploration and production, and there is a mad scramble to build re-gasification facilities so that LNG (liquefied natural gas) can be imported from the Middle East and United States.
- Electricity prices have risen sharply and erratically as Germany shut down their nuclear power plants, coal-fired generation has been retired or discouraged, and grids have been unable to manage intermittency of wind and solar generation – particularly during the long, cold, and still winter periods that are so common that they have their own name – the Dunkelflaute
So, the short answer is that people cannot heat their homes because of poor policy choices by European governments that include both misguided energy planning and failure to anticipate adverse geopolitical events.
So how, you might ask, has the problem of inadequate winter heating, affecting tens of millions of households, been solved overnight? According to the promoter:
“Until now, heat pumps had a crucial weakness: they struggled in extreme cold, exactly when you needed them most. Below certain temperatures, they would freeze up and switch to expensive backup heating, leading many homeowners to stick with fossil fuel furnaces.
This new system works down to an astonishing -57°F (-49°C). Even more remarkably, it maintains high efficiency at these extremes – something engineers previously thought impossible. … No more defrost cycles, no more back-up heating, no more compromises. Just reliable, efficient heating no matter how cold it gets.
This isn’t just about staying warm; it’s about making clean heating practical everywhere:
– Could cut heating bills by 70% compared to gas furnaces
– Works in any climate on Earth
– Uses climate-friendly refrigerants
– No back-up system needed
– Longer lifespan due to reduced wear and tear
Here’s why this is bigger than just one product: It removes the last major barrier to electrifying home heating, a crucial step in addressing climate change that previously seemed decades away.”
The miracle cure is, apparently, a new type of heat pump. Of course, people who know about such things asked questions about exactly how this new miracle heat pump would work. The promoter’s responses:
“I wouldn’t expect we’ll see the full performance details until it’s available for purchase.
It’s not even available for purchase yet, so there isn’t any engineer that can recommend it for projects. The post is just sharing awareness on the progression of [heat pump] tech and capabilities.”
So, we have gone pretty quickly from a global solution to winter energy problems to “sharing awareness about the progression of heat pump tech.” That is absolutely no surprise, at least to me, because there is no such thing as an overnight engineering revolution. Heat pumps have been around for decades; nobody is going to revolutionize them overnight. Another example – as I sit here working on my desktop computer with the knowledge of the world at my fingertips via the Internet, I can reflect back on the engineering research and development that took place over the past 50+ years to put these capabilities into place.
But let’s imagine – what if an engineering miracle had happened, and all of a sudden there was a fabulous new heat pump that could function efficiently at -30 or -40 without gas-fired backup? Would that solve Europe’s winter heating problem – overnight?
Well, no. For several reasons:
- Lots of Europeans run heat pumps already. Nobody in Spain, Portugal, or Greece is going to buy a new heat pump that performs at -40 when they cannot afford one (or the electricity to run one) that can already manage 0 or -10, or whatever the coldest winter temperature is in those places.
- If you cannot afford sufficient electricity to run your existing heat pump, how will a new heat pump help?
- Lots of people are running gas furnaces or boilers now, and either cannot afford the capital expenditure to switch to a heat pump, or do not want to.
- Getting regulatory approvals to install new heat-pump technology takes time. Manufacturing the new miracle pumps takes time, and will likely face supply-chain issues to source new miracle materials. Even if they were the best and the cheapest thing ever, it would take years to manufacture and install enough of them to make a difference.
So, the promoter advertised a miracle, was called out on it, and at least had the decency to admit the miracle is little more than a concept.
But we are inundated with news of miracles every day. Stopping climate change. Cheap electricity for all. No more pollution. And all we have to do is to “break free from fossil fuels” as one of the more vacuous promoters would have it.
Unfortunately, people who are far too smart to fall for miracle health cures are willing to believe that there are engineering miracles that will solve humanity’s climate, energy, and pollution problems overnight if the good guys are just allowed to work their magic.
Perhaps you think – “Oh well, someone is always promoting something. What harm can it do?” The answer is that these promotions have done enormous harm already. Look again at the European households that go under-heated in the winter because their governments have shut down nuclear power or prohibited domestic natural gas development because they were convinced that wind/solar power was the miracle that would power their economies.
There is no such thing as an energy miracle. We will solve energy problems only with hard work, sound engineering and technology, and decades of intelligent policy and investment.
(Brad Hayes – BIG Media Ltd., 2025)
