The Emerging Electrical Markets for Copper


Figure 110: Advanced Scenario Smart Ageing Copper Use in Europe



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Figure 110: Advanced Scenario Smart Ageing Copper Use in Europe

While we consider the Base Case scenario realistic taking into account the lack of any sign of major government initiatives to ensure full development, it is possible that smart ageing programmes might accelerate much faster than we assume. To reflect this, in Figure 110 we show an advanced smart ageing copper scenario for Europe. In this we indicate a European market of 41 kt in 2020.


To achieve such a high rate of installation towards the end of the decade would have to be very high indeed. In our forecast we show 9.1 kt per head of population addressed in 2020. Bearing in mind that full smart ageing installation would give us an incremental 16 per head, to achieve such high levels of copper use there would need to be a huge and well resourced programme of installation starting mid-decade, or earlier.
Whichever forecast is taken to be more accurate, the bulk of the potential is in energy cables. There will be a significant additional market in winding wire in motors, and also mill products (primarily strip) in switches, sockets and electronic devices.
Non Wiring System New Premise Markets
Some of the systems required to enable green technologies can have a copper content that considerably exceeds that required just for the wire content.
The technologies are mainly concerned with the exchange of heat between the outside of the house and the inside, and the capture of heat within the property, in order to regulate the temperature of the living space. The components required include motor driven systems (pumps and compressors), heat exchangers and piping. The motors and systems will include a significant amount of winding wire, while the heat exchangers may contain copper tube, and the piping may also be of copper tube.
An air source heat pump, for example, consists of four main components: the compressor, expansion valve, and two heat exchangers, one to absorb heat from the heat source and one to reject the heat. The enclosed cycle utilises liquid refrigerants to ensure a high level of heat transfer. The heat thus captured is transferred to the water circulating in the under-floor heating, radiators or fan coil units and also to the domestic hot water tank.
To work effectively as a water heating system, the heat pump may be associated with a specially designed water tank, incorporating a heat pump heat exchanger. Air source heat pumps can work best in association with solar panel-based heating, allowing the system to switch to heat from the panels when available. This requires a separate pump and piping from the panel to the water tank. Alternatively, solar panel water heating may operate separately from an air source heat pump.
Geothermal heat pumps are similar in principal to the air source heat pump, in this case capturing the heat differential between ground and air. In this case, in addition pipes into the ground are required. These are typically 200 mm diameter, and around 40 m long, buried at 1.5 m in the soil. Although potentially a market for copper, the corrosive environment of the soil makes stainless steel the preferred option for these pipes.
Alternative heat recovery systems based on internal heat sources, for example refrigerator exhaust, again require motors and pumps, as does rainwater recovery. Additionally, there is some market for copper in building insulation materials, designed to minimise heat loss and overheating of the building. Swiss company Atmova has recently released a copper-alloy roof covering that uses solar energy to provide heating and hot water.
Longer term, copper may have a much greater role in heat management through the selection of building materials. Copper foam combined with phase change material has been proposed as a means to improve energy efficiency in buildings by storage and release of thermal energy for constant heat with reduced energy input. Also on the drawing board, should copper film based CIGs solar panels become much cheaper, is a standard installation of CIGs panels as part of the fabric of new buildings. Such developments, however, are a long way off commercialisation.
In the heat pump market, also, there is one interesting development that as yet is some way from commercialisation. This is the use of copper micro-channel tube for heat exchangers in air source and geothermal heat pump systems. Micro-channel tube offers an advantage in improved efficiency, but at present the technology is only commercialised for aluminium. The refrigerants used in heat pump systems make the use of aluminium inappropriate, hence the interest in copper. A copper based micro-channel systems was developed in Norway around ten years ago, the patent for which has been bought by the Japanese company Denso.
In the following forecasts, we look only at the established technologies, which are based around pump systems. Much of this market for copper is associated with non-electrical items, in particular copper tube in heat exchangers and for distribution. We therefore identify the market for heat pumps separately from the total non wiring system new premise market.
Figures issued by the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA) provide a base line for estimating the size of the market for heat pumps. The industry association estimates that in 2007 a total of 393,000 heat pumps were sold in eight countries of Europe. This was 6% than in the previous year. As some major markets were missing from the figures, including the UK, we estimate the total number of heat pumps sold in Europe in 2007 was nearly 600,000 units.
Of the heat pumps identified by the EHPA, slightly over half (55%) were reversible air to air units, which are generally small in comparison to other types. The remainder of the market is comprises of other air to air and air to water systems (22%), ground to air systems (25%) and exhaust systems (8%). Sweden is the biggest market in Europe, with large sales also in Norway, France and Germany. The Scandinavian systems are generally for heating only, while in hotter countries many systems are used for cooling also.
While the heat pump market is well developed in a few countries (especially Sweden) and in the single family new build residential sector, large potential markets are virtually untapped. These include multi-family residential new builds, all residential renovation and all commercial building markets. With the development of better heat retention in the home as Passivhaus concepts penetrate, an especially large potential is seen in exhaust system heat pumps, using heat generated in the premise.
Our estimates of heat pump market size for copper, and forecasts, are based on an assumed 3 kg of copper per heat pump. This gives us a current market in Europe of 2.9 kt, conservatively estimated to rise to 4.8 kt by 2020. Worldwide, the market is forecast to grow from 11 ktpy to 23 ktpy.
The strictly electrical market for heat pumps identified in Figure 111 is dominated by winding wire. Looking at the broader heat pump-based system market, we forecast a doubling of current global copper use from 37 kt in 2010 to 82 kt in 2020. Most of the additional copper is accounted for by copper tube (see Figure 112).
Figure 111: Forecast Copper in Heat Pumps (kt Cu)



Figure 112: Forecast Total Copper Use in Heat Pump Based and Other Green Technology Systems (kt Cu)






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