California wants millions of heat pumps. High power bills might get in the way
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If you’re a California homeowner and you’ve been feeling chilly this winter, there are plenty of reasons to go get a heat pump.An all-electric, energy-efficient alternative to gas-burning furnaces, heat pumps are widely seen as the climate-friendly home heater of choice.They can do double-duty as both home heaters and AC units and are pretty good at maintaining a constant temperature inside a home without the blast-then-cool-off cycle typical of a furnace.What about a guaranteed lower monthly utility bill? Not in California.Call it California’s heat pump conundrum.On the one hand, California has hyperambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to curb the worst effects of a changing climate.Most experts see the electrification of buildings — swapping furnaces, water heaters, stoves and ovens that run on burning fossil fuel with appliances plugged into California’s increasingly green electrical grid — as a necessary step toward meeting those goals.California has built one of the most aggressive heat pump strategies in the country.
The state aims to install 6 million heat pumps in homes by 2030.Lawmakers are also moving this year to boost heat pump adoption — proposing to streamline permitting, and make it easier to electrify homes.On the other hand, California’s residential electricity prices are among the highest in the country — expensive even compared with its also pricey natural gas.
That makes heat pumps a tough sell to many Californians.A new Harvard University study maps exactly where that reality bites — and tries to explain why some places are more heat-pump friendly than others.The public is “overwhelmed with these sorts of plans now for decarbonization: ‘This by 2030,’ ‘this by 2050,’ ” said Roxana Shafiee, an environmental science policy researcher at Harvard University.“But then you scratch the surface a bit more...