Positive climate and health impacts from upscaled use of heat pumps and solar panels in technology packages in EU-27 by 2050

Abstract

Achieving the European Union's (EU-27) climate targets for 2050 requires moving away from fossil fuels, for which the necessary heating and cooling (H&C) technologies are mostly already available in the domestic sector. These H&C technologies, such as heat pumps and solar panels (photovoltaic, thermal and hybrid photovoltaic-thermal), reduce air pollution and thus have positive climate and health effects, but require the increased use of limited materials. Although the integration of such technologies into technology packages (TPs) further increases energy efficiency, monetary values of the climate and health effects of these TPs have not been assessed from a life cycle perspective including the production phase. Therefore, we monetize the full impacts of adopting such innovative H&C TPs in refurbished and new residential and tertiary buildings in the EU-27. With that aim, we combine an analysis of air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions from the life cycle assessment of the TPs with long-term scenarios of H&C demand, to generate country-specific emissions (2030 and 2050). Accordingly, climate and health impacts are estimated using the Greenhouse gas and Air pollution Interactions and Synergies and Alpha RiskPoll models. The total estimated monetary benefits of TP implementation in the EU-27, including its health effects (dominated by reduced premature mortality) and climate impacts, are approximately 15–49 billion €2015 in 2030 and 34–123 billion €2015 in 2050. Furthermore, the benefits are 13 %–15 % higher if the health effects on all European countries are considered. These substantial benefits can justify the broader deployment of TP technologies in the future.