The cool thing about heat pumps are, you already have one. It's an AC with a reverser valve. Instead of having the cold inside the house and the hot outside, the AC can reverse in winter put the hot inside the house and the cold outside. When your current AC breaks, buy one with a reverser valve, buy a heat pump. They are damn nice.

Edit: The article is apparently talking about geothermal heat. Which is not normally how the term 'heat pump' is used. Seems to be why there is so much confusion in this thread, including from my reply. Anyway, I haven't heard much negative about geothermal heat in the past. I think it's normally not used just because of the up-front investment costs.

[–] Buffalox 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Aside from the fact that these are geothermal.
IDK how it is in Austria, but AC is generally much less widespread in Europe than it is in USA.
Probably because we normally don't have heat waves like the American south, and electricity is heavily taxed.
But to be fair heat waves have gotten worse due to climate change, so AC is becoming more common than it used to be.