BDR Thermea starts project in single-family houses

Hydrogen boiler in a residential building in Holland

A Remeha employee converts the heating to the new technology.

Dusseldorf How can houses be heated in a climate-friendly way? In the midst of the energy crisis, the gas supply industry is looking for new answers. On Thursday, the company BDR Thermea started what is probably a unique project: In the future, it will supply twelve listed single-family houses in the Dutch city of Lochem with hydrogen via an existing natural gas network. It is used in hydrogen boilers and thus heats houses.

BDR Thermea is a heating and air conditioning manufacturer based in the Netherlands. In Germany, the group operates under the Remeha brand. BDR is working with the gas network operator Alliander on the hydrogen project.

Heating with hydrogen is a topic that heating manufacturers and network operators are increasingly concerned with. Gas is still one of the predominant energy sources in Europe. In Germany it is used in more than half of the households.

Effort for hydrogen switch according to BDR “manageable”

But the conflict in Russia is making gas scarce and expensive. In addition, climate change is increasing the search for cleaner alternatives. Companies that have previously made a large part of their sales with gas heating or pipes are under pressure.

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It seems an obvious solution to fill existing pipes and boilers with climate-friendly hydrogen instead of fossil gas in the future. The head of BDR Thermea, Bertrand Schmitt, says: “The existing lines and gas boilers can be converted for hydrogen transport with manageable effort.”

A hydrogen heater costs 10 to 15 percent more than a gas heater. According to Schmitt, craftsmen can easily be retrained to work with hydrogen.

The existing lines and gas heaters can be converted for hydrogen transport with manageable effort Bertrand Schmitt, head of BDR Thermea

According to BDR Thermea, the switch to hydrogen can be particularly advantageous for listed houses such as those in the pilot project. This is because they cannot be renovated and insulated as easily as other buildings and may therefore consume too much energy for the gas heating to be replaced by a climate-friendly heat pump.

Schmitt already has bigger plans: “In the long term, we want to make all of our gas boilers hydrogen-capable,” he says. BDR Thermea is ready for large-scale conversions. “The heating industry has the necessary technologies, we could go into series production within two to three years,” says Schmitt.

Expert for energy efficiency: “There will not be enough hydrogen in Germany in the near future”

But that’s still just theory. Because there is currently not enough demand for hydrogen solutions for heating. The topic is not high on the agenda, either for energy suppliers or in politics.

From Ramona Mittag’s point of view, there is a reason for this. The specialist for supply technology and energy efficiency at the consumer advice center in North Rhine-Westphalia says: “We’re starting to have to be honest: in the near future there won’t be enough hydrogen in Germany for us to literally be able to burn it in buildings.”

For the special case of listed houses, there are already solutions: “The protection of monuments has been relaxed in order to protect the climate in NRW, so that it is possible, for example, to install photovoltaic systems on listed buildings,” she says.

>> Read also: That’s what experts say about the conversion of the natural gas network to hydrogen

For the rest of the housing stock in Germany, however, the following applies: “We have to renovate, renovate, renovate – so that we have to heat less and less.”

In well-insulated houses, significantly less energy is required for heating than in poorly insulated ones. This was shown some time ago by a study by the Research Institute for Thermal Insulation in Munich. According to this, with a consumer gas price of 25 cents per kilowatt hour, heating costs of 12,000 euros per year can arise in an uninsulated single-family house. In a very well insulated house it would only be 1400 euros.

Mittag sees the heat pump as an important future alternative to gas heating. She refers to a planned regulation by the federal government, according to which from 2024 every new heating system is to be operated with at least 65 percent renewable energies. Heat pumps make this possible if the electricity they use comes from wind or solar generation.

References from heating engineers and gas network operators to future heating with hydrogen on a large scale are therefore also signs of a “struggle for survival by industries”.

More: EU Commission Vice Frans Timmermans in the Handelsblatt interview: “We will show the Americans that we know exactly how to build a hydrogen economy”

Handelsblatt energy briefing

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