The Ecodesign framework is undergoing review in order to adapt the energy performance requirement and the labelling of applicances for heating and cooling in particular to reflect changes in technologies.
Ecodesign and Ecolabelling are the EU regulations where standard testing conditions and performance requirements are set for a wide array of technologies to ensure the consistency of products across the EU internal market. For heating and cooling equipments, this aims for instance to ensure that promised energy performance is indeed delivered, and to create a degree of comparability for widely different technologies in terms of energy performance.
For the geothermal sector, there is a major challenge in the current Ecodesign framework where geothermal heat pumps are not considered in the same manner as other energy technologies (i.e. testing conditions to define energy performance of geothermal heat pumps is not modulated by climate zone, which is the case for other technologies, notably air heat pumps). This sets a framework where the actual energy performance of HP systems is not well reflected for temperate and warmer climate zones.
Thanks to a mobilisation of the shallow geothermal sector, notably represented by EGEC in stakeholders meetings, the final report that provides the European Commission with the pathways to update the Ecodesign legislation, considers that different brine temperature should be considered in the testing conditions of geothermal heat pumps, to better reflect the energy performances of systems accross various climate zones.
The proposed brine temperature are as follow:
More details can be found in the report:
Ecodesign study report
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