The heat pumps are coming! (Well, eventually)
The long journey to lower-carbon polluting homes
New England dealt with a terrible cold snap last week (after a record warm January), with temperatures dipping into sub-zero, made worse by the wind chill. The weather’s impact on energy costs and switching over to non-fossil fuels has been on my mind recently, because if nothing else, I’m currently sitting in my weirdly drafty office with a space heater going.
Despite the dust up over gas stoves last month, by far the largest factor that contributes to carbon emissions from buildings is gas and propane-fueled heating. It’s why local building codes about banning or discouraging gas hookups in new construction have been so heavily fought over.
But the main alternative to fossil fuel appliances are something that still feels less mainstream than even EVs: heat pumps. Despite the name, heat pumps work for both heating and cooling in houses.
The common wisdom around heat pumps for a long time was that they were unable to deal with cold temperatures. What may have been true years ago is far less so now, especially with a proliferation of cold-weather specific models. In Maine, a state not known for its mild winters, the state’s heat pump rebate program has been wildly successful, as detailed in this Washington Post article:
The state agency has also established a pilot program to see if heat pumps could replace furnaces in mobile and manufactured homes. Marianna Casagranda is one of 10 homeowners in the town of Freeport who signed up.
“Oh, hell no,” Casagranda said, when asked recently if she missed her propane furnace. As part of the experiment, the agency promised residents they could have their fossil fuel-burning systems back if they didn’t like the results. So far, none of the homeowners have wanted to go back, according to agency officials, and Casagranda said she is more than satisfied.
The numbers on Maine’s program are particularly eyepopping:
“If they really didn’t work in the cold, you would think people would stop buying these things, but they haven’t,” said Michael Stoddard, executive director of Efficiency Maine.
In a state with fewer than 600,000 occupied housing units, the agency has already given out rebates for 116,000 heat pumps, blowing past its original goal of helping residents install 100,000 units by 2025.
That’s not to say heat pumps work exactly the same in Maine as they do in South Carolina, where nearly 50% of all homes use the technology. At sub-zero temperatures, heat pumps are less efficient, using more electricity than they would in warmer temperatures. But heat pumps are already more efficient on average than electric baseboard heaters or electric furnaces. Maine’s embrace of the heat pump is especially notable given it’s relatively high electricity prices.
A lot more heat pumps could be coming, thanks to a mix of tax credits and up-front rebates from the Inflation Reduction Act. But even with this money, there’s a lot of uncertainty about whether there will be major wave of switching off of gas fuel furnaces, especially for older houses. So what are these current obstacles?
Insulation & Upgrades
A heat pump works best in a well-insulated house and energy efficiency projects by themselves are great climate projects.
But in Minnesota, a new Minneapolis program found this a dispiriting fact: 2/3rds of the homes put up for sale in the city since 2020 have insufficient insulation. It’s both harmful in the state’s cold winters and for switching over to heat pumps. Minnesota’s Center for Energy & the Environment recommends weatherizing houses before switching to a heat pump, and they offer rebates for that too, but even the program’s backers have trouble convincing homeowners to get it done, Energy News Network writes.
“Even though CenterPoint Energy offers rebates for insulation and the center’s staff promote it heavily to homeowners, insulation remains a hard sell, a thing people should do — like auto maintenance, flossing, and vacation budget planning — but often neglect.
“Insulation doesn’t really speak for itself in a way that a lot of other home improvements can,” Arbor Otalora-Fadner, program coordinator from the center, says.
Older homes may have an electricity gap as well. A heat pump will need a circuit breaker of a similar size as a traditional AC unit or a washer/dryer. Older houses with only 100amp electrical panels are likely to need an upgrade to 200amps. That’s an additional cost (but one partially accounted for in the IRA funding).
Timing
One of the crucial elements of the package is upfront discounts (not tax credits) for homeowners switching away from fossil-fuel appliances and needing electricity upgrades to do so. But those funds are not exactly ready for prime time yet, Maria Gallic from Canary Media writes:
“Americans who want to electrify their homes will soon have access to billions of dollars in federal incentives under the High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Act (HEEHRA). Low- and moderate-income households specifically will be able to fetch discounts that sharply reduce the cost of replacing polluting gas stoves and furnaces with cleaner electric appliances and heating systems.
The problem is, nobody knows exactly how soon those incentives will be made available. Congress passed HEEHRA last summer as part of the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act. But the U.S. Department of Energy isn’t expected to issue guidance on how states should implement the program until later this year. After that, state energy offices will still need to develop their own systems for administering benefits to eligible residents.
In the meantime, there are still things a homeowner considering taking advantage should do: checking eligibility (“moderate-income” households is a lot higher than I thought, and is region-specific), researching state incentives and yes, figuring out where your home’s insulation and efficiency gaps are and doing that work.
Some good additional resources:
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Consumer Reports: How to choose and properly install a cold-climate heat pump
- A study estimates about 30% of emission reductions from the IRA will come from consumer choices enabled by new federal incentives.
More local climate action stories:
- Minnesota passes law to require utilities to get 100% of their power from carbon-free sources by 2040. North Dakota sues them
- “I’ve often had this fantasy that we should have Fox News, by which I mean news about foxes”: A delightful interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native scientist and author who writes about joyful environmental actions.
- All of this has happened before: The forgotten gas stove wars
- “At a local high school basketball game, someone told her the [solar] project could give her cancer”: Meet the man spreading disinformation against renewable energy developments in Michigan
- Idaho introduces a ban-on-gas bans law
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