Over the past two years, Poland has become a remarkable success story for deployment of clean heat systems, especially heat pumps. Its progress is due to strong policy support for phasing out coal for individual heating. However, Poland’s dependence on fossil fuels for heating is still high, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that countries heavily reliant on fossil fuels are exposed to extreme price risk.

Duncan Gibb and Monika Morawiecka show that investment in a heat pump makes sense for Polish households from an economic, environmental, climate and energy security standpoint. This analysis investigates two current economic cases and makes several recommendations to make sure that policies for clean heating consider long-term objectives of decarbonisation, air quality and social impacts. These include properly pricing externalities into fossil fuels, strengthening clean air legislation and effectively regulating to decarbonise heating.