‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold

Device installed in two-thirds of households of country whose experience suggests switching to greener heating can be done

When Glen Peters bought a heat pump for his home in Oslo he wasn’t thinking about the carbon it would avoid. Convenience played a role; a fireplace was too much of a hassle – the effort of having to buy, prepare and store the wood – and the wall-mounted radiators are too dusty. “They’re a pain in the ass to clean,” said Peters (who is actually a climate scientist).

But the main factor, according to Peters, who had recently swapped to underfloor heating, was money.

In most of Europe, fitting a heat pump is one of the most powerful actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint. But in Norway, where clean-yet-inefficient electrical resistance heaters have long been common, upgrading to a heat pump is often a purely financial decision – one to which Peters came late. Two-thirds of households in this Nordic country of 5 million people have a heat pump, more than anywhere else in the world.

For many years, Norwegians and their neighbours heated their homes with fossil fuels. But during the 1973 oil crisis, when prices shot up, the country’s political leaders made a conscious choice to promote alternatives, and, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they did not back away from that decision once the crisis eased.

Denmark rolled out an extensive district heating system. Norway, Sweden and Finland moved more towards heating with wood or electricity. They began to price carbon in the 1990s, and a mix of grants and taxes tipped the balance further away from oil long after the crisis was over…