Heat pumps: tightening in sight on aid, soon limited to certain models

Will you still have the right to it? Part of the financial aid for the installation of heat pumps (PAC) will soon be reserved for models of “good quality and produced in Europe”, the Ministry of Industry announced on Friday.

From September, aid allocated by the energy savings certificate (EEC) mechanism will be redirected towards “heat pumps which are produced in Europe, efficient and of good quality”, explained the ministry to the press.

Created in 2005, the EEC mechanism obliges energy suppliers to finance operations or work aimed at reducing energy consumption and/or improving energy performance. This aid now makes it possible to finance energy renovation operations, the purchase of an electric vehicle or the installation of a heat pump, to replace an oil or gas boiler, energies almost exclusively imported.

Less polluting, this equipment is however expensive: around 15,000 euros.

Do as for cars

For the purchase of an approved heat pump model (air/water, water/water or ground/water types), households will be entitled to aid of 3,500 euros on average – the same amount as today. But for non-approved models, the aid will only be 700 euros.

According to the ministry, the European preference criterion assumes that the heat pump has its refrigeration circuit (the central part) assembled in the European economic area.

“The idea here is to replicate for heat pumps what has been done for electric vehicles”, through the ecological bonus, conditioned on a European manufacturing criterion, explains the ministry.

A French sector in difficulty

With this measure, which must reconcile “ecological transition and industrial development”, the government intends to revive the French heat pump industry, which is seeing its sales decline. Groupe Atlantic, the French number one in heat pumps, is for example in the process of being bought by the Japanese-American group Paloma Rheem

According to Ademe, the heat pump sector employs nearly 66,000 full-time equivalents (2023 figures). The majority of jobs are in installation and distribution (80%), with the remainder in manufacturing (7,600 FTEs) and maintenance (5,700 FTEs).

Heat pump manufacturers have until the end of February to submit their application for approval on an online platform. The list of approved PACs will be known in July.

According to the ministry, France has an existing production capacity of 300,000 units, which could be increased to 500,000.