Nine states are teaming up to accelerate adoption of this climate-friendly device.
Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch.
Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. (“Shipments” here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island—are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.
“It’s a really strong signal from states that they’re committed to accelerating this transition to zero-emissions residential buildings,” says Emily Levin, senior policy adviser at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), an association of air-quality agencies that facilitated the agreement. The states will collaborate, for instance, in pursuing federal funding, developing standards for the rollout of heat pumps, and laying out an overarching plan “with priority actions to support widespread electrification of residential buildings.”
I looked into it very seriously, but where I am we regularly get to -40 and are often -20 or lower. All’s good up to about that point, but you’ll need a gas furnace to assist much past -20. In which case, you are into it for a gas bill anyway of which 2/3 is deliver costs, so you might as well just use a furnace.
And before anyone comes apart on me, I ran off a spreadsheet using very pessimistic gas prices, all the green grants I could come up with and probably overly optimistic heat pump efficiencies at cold weather, and I couldn’t make the whole system come in at a price that broke even in less than 20 years. At which point you’d be starting all over again.
So if you’re in most of Canada outside of the Lower Mainland and the Niagra Peninsula, and probably a good chunk of the US, no.
Are we talking Celsius or Fahrenheit? -20 F is pretty cold. I think the vast majority of people in North America never experience weather like that. For most areas, occasional supplemental heating by traditional electric heating should be sufficient and avoid the gas hookup issue. It’s not very efficient but only needing it a few times per winter that should be acceptable.
Celsius
It’s not about being efficient. If it were just that, no problem, a few nights of expensive heat isn’t going to change the equation much over a year. It’s a matter of not freezing because there’s no way it can keep up whether inefficient or not.
So if you’re going to be spending 5k on a furnace anyway, and have to keep a gas bill active, it’s just not going to save enough money to pay the heatpump back, especially since you’re buying a particularly expensive model in order to have one that works at middle cold temperatures.
I think a powerful enough heater of any kind should keep your warm—so economics is the main question. Perhaps an electric heater that powerful would be too expensive or use too much power.
But regardless, it sounds like you live in an exceptionally cold climate so you may have challenges that the rest of us don’t. I haven’t really heard heat pumps recommended for arctic climates, mainly for temperate ones. My climate is borderline subtropical so I think it will be economical for me.