Heat Pump Programme success

The International Energy Agency (IEA) launched a Heat Pump Programme in January 2003, which ended in May earlier this year. Ten countries participated in the programme: Austria, Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, UK and USA. They joined together under Annex 28 (see www.annex28.net) to harmonize their research and to assess, develop and propose methods regarding test procedures with minimum requirements and calculations of the Seasonal Performance Factor (SPF) of residential heat pumps with combined space and domestic hot water heating. CETIAT and EDF represented France. Amongst the recent developments in this field using CO2 as a refrigerant is the development of a CO2 heat pump by Denso and the development of a high-efficiency compressor running on CO2 by Matsushita.