What role should the HVAC industry play in solving the climate crisis?

The time to act on climate change is now, and the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) industry has a major role to play. With rising energy costs and strict regulations to meet, the challenge is huge — but it also brings an opportunity to create better products that offer consumers, and society at large, a viable solution and way forward. Midea, a leading global home appliance company, teamed up with The Verge at the MCE 2024 trade show in Milan for a panel discussion between industry experts about how we can all move toward effective and accessible climate action and a more sustainable future. Read on for the five biggest points of discussion from this important conversation.

“We are in the decisive decade for the green transition,” says Daniela Lionetti, Sustainability and Innovation Manager at ANIMA Confindustria, a trade group representing companies in the mechanical engineering sector. “We don’t have much time left, so we have to consider our actions and we need to do it right now.”

Regulators and industry leaders largely recognize the need to work together to implement effective solutions to the climate crisis, Lionetti says, and then must educate and support consumers as they make purchasing decisions that will actually have an impact.

“Residential heating of homes in Europe contributes to more CO2 emissions than all of our petrol-based cars,” says Hannes Palm, COO and co-founder of DREM, a Swedish start-up focused on accelerating the deployment of residential heat pumps. “This is an obvious place where we need to start.” Ultimately, the solution will be a combination of many things, such as adding insulation, rooftop solar and batteries, electric vehicles, and efficient heating and cooling systems in as many homes as possible.

New environmental regulations are coming out of the European Union with high frequency, says Lionetti — like those that require certain synthetic refrigerants that power heating and cooling products to be phased out entirely by 2050.

“We will have to switch to a new refrigerant,” says Manuel Seethaler, Head of Midea RAC Product Strategy Europe. “But it’s an opportunity because we can create new products — for example, those using R290 propane. It’s a challenge and an opportunity at the same time.”

These changes will require the industry and consumers to adapt. “We have, as consumers, the responsibility to change our habits,” says Alberto di Luzio, General Manager of Midea Italy. “As an industry, we have the responsibility to produce products and provide solutions to our consumers that are sustainable.”

There are many challenges ahead that stand in the way of reaching climate goals: the price of gas, effective consumer education, the strength of the electrical grid and infrastructure, the inefficiency of current buildings, and energy poverty, to name a few.

The grid needs to be stabilized in order to withstand the effects of climate change and future energy usage. To do this, we need heat pumps, says Seethaler. Palm agrees that heat pumps need to become “the first and obvious choice for every consumer getting a new heat source.”

Part of making something an obvious choice is making it the more economical choice. “In Italy, we have 12.5 million buildings and around 60 percent of these are inefficient,” says di Luzio. But consumers aren’t ready to invest because it’s too expensive. The government, he says, needs to create incentives that will enable consumers to make buildings more efficient, and the industry needs to provide more accessible and affordable solutions.

Energy poverty, where an individual or community can’t afford clean energy or can’t cover all of its energy needs, is also a widespread problem. According to Lionetti, nine percent of the population in Italy is in energy poverty. “People in energy poverty are the ones that suffer the most because they can’t access new technology,” Lionetti says. “They rely on obsolete technologies, which consume more and perform worse.”

These big challenges point toward a way forward: New policies need to lead to quality products that are capable of helping both consumers and the environment.

Seethaler says it’s an opportunity to think differently across the board. “How can we save energy even during the development process and during manufacturing? How can we make products more compact?” By looking at the whole value chain it’s possible to do things like make something smaller so there’s less packaging, less logistics, and a more efficient installation process.

Midea’s suite of R290 products proactively abide by the upcoming F-gas regulations and use a naturally-occurring refrigerant (propane) to power heating and cooling products. “Now we not only have the water heat pumps with propane, we also have the heat pump water heater,” says di Luzio. “This is going in the right direction, and being more sustainable with the right refrigerant.”

Other innovative products from Midea include the CirQHP line. The CirQHP series can meet all cooling, heating, and hot water needs with just one outdoor unit and even offers a Heat Recovery Function to produce hot water. It can also or be used in conjunction with a gas boiler, automatically switching to the most economical heating mode. This system is especially well-suited for areas with cold climate and high electricity prices, allowing users to make the first step toward heat pump technology.

The solutions are there, but we all need to make sure that they are deployed at scale — and fast. As Seethaler noted, “There can be a tradeoff between affordability and sustainability. We must ask, how do we put solutions into place? Nobody wants to be poorer because of being sustainable.”

The CirQHP hybrid series which prioritizes efficiency could be one solution to help address this conflict. Palm thinks that consumers also need to be educated about the truth and understand the choices available, and that installation and purchasing of technology like heat pumps needs to be as affordable as possible. These new technologies can be both more economical and better for our environment, he says, especially over the product’s 15- to 20-year lifespan. Ensuring both of those things is key to enabling people to make decisions that will make the tangible differences the planet needs.