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.”
An additional argument I’ve heard is that economies of scale come into play with power generation. The argument is mainly used around electric vs gas cars when electricity is generated from fossil fuels, but apparently larger plants are generally more efficient at generating energy. This may not hold up when heat is the desired form of energy compared to a gas car where it’s a waste product.
Yeah heat is different because converting fossil fuels to motion is inherently inefficient, but converting them to heat is very efficient. But others correctly pointed out that heat pumps are actually more than 100% efficient because they move heat around rather than making it directly.