No cyclic device can have as its sole effect the transfer of heat from a colder thermal reservoir to a hotter thermal reservoir. The word “sole” includes the surroundings: the device must return to its starting state, and there must be no net supplied work, depletion of a stored resource, or accompanying change elsewhere. The statement excludes a self-running refrigerator, while allowing an ordinary refrigerator or heat pump supplied with work.[ref]
For a proposed transfer from a fixed cold thermal reservoir at to a fixed hot thermal reservoir at , with no other effect, the total entropy change would be
The first law of thermodynamics permits this energy balance; the Second law of thermodynamics forbids the negative total entropy change. For , and , it is . Direct heat transfer in the opposite direction has positive total entropy change. A powered heat pump has a different budget: it supplies work and delivers more heat to the hot side than it extracts from the cold side.
A short equivalence argument links this restriction to the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law. Couple a hypothetical device that moves from cold to hot with no other effect to the heat engine illustrated above, which absorbs , rejects , and delivers . The cold-side transfers cancel; the combined cyclic device takes from the hot thermal reservoir and delivers exactly of work, violating the Kelvin-Planck statement of the second law. Matching transfers is an ideal composition argument, not a claim that such a device exists.[ref]

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