Global warming is happening because of large amounts of energy that humans produce and use. As our energy needs grow, so too does our dependency on fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal). These fuels – all with high CO2 emissions – now account for some 80% of EU energy consumption.
 | Global warming is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today. Unless we act quickly to change the way we use and produce energy, the damage could be irreversible. The EU has set three key targets which it hopes will put Europe on the right track - towards a sustainable future.
In March 2007, the European Member States agreed on three common objectives for tackling today's energy and climate challenges until 2020: the so-called “3x20”.
By 2020, the European Union should:
|
Installing heat pump you can contribute „3x20” objective in all 3 areas.
Heat pumps are an energy-efficient method of domestic heating and cooling. They use electrical energy to reverse the natural flow of environmental heat from cold to hot or from hot to cold in a clearly advantageous relation.
Heat pumps make a significant contribution towards solving the problems associated with increasingly scarce and evermore expensive energy resources – supplying more energy than they consume by tapping into the freely available, inexhaustible solar energy stored in the earth, the ambient air or water and converting this for use in a heating system.
Heat pumps have a relatively low carbon dioxide output: less than a half of the CO2 output produced by electric, fuel or gas residential appliances. Ancient heat pumps used ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), but current equipments use HCFC liquids, with a much lower ozone-depleting effect, or refrigerants with no ozone-depleting effect. |  |