People are going to be very disappointed by their heating bills. Electric heating is expensive as hell, and gas is usually included in rent.
My small studio a few years back was +200$ in winter months with crummy electric heat.
My small studio a few years back was +200$ in winter months with crummy electric heat.
Air heat pumps are cheaper to heat with than gas in most situations. It takes rather extreme cold and cheap gas to out compete the 400%+ efficiency of heat pumps.
Technology is pretty awesome.
A heat pump moves heat from outdoors to indoors. The outdoor heat lost is ignored in the efficiency calculation (as it should be), and thus the efficiency question is how many watt hours of electricity does it take to move a watt hour of heat (joules) from outside to inside. Depending on the temperatures involved, it's usually a multiple, for example, 1 wH of electricity moves 4 wH equivalent of heat indoors, ie: 400% efficient.
If you consider the whole system, much of the electricity for a heat pump may come from burning natural gas elsewhere, which involves losses along the way. This is still usually better than 100% overall efficiency.
Direct natural gas heating is less than 100% efficient too. Most furnace systems are about 20% loss in exhaust, though they can be much better. This is still usually better than burning the gas at a plant, converting to electricity and then heating with resistive electrical in your home.
And comparing AFUE efficiency to HSPF is not really a thing, you can not look at a gas furance that is 95% AFUE, and a Heat Pump that is "400%" claim that the gas furnace is must less "efficient" that is not how any of those works. To be clear a heat pump at temps above 25 degrees Fahrenheit is more efficient but comparing the metrics in this manner is a bit misleading
Further heat pumps are good to 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, under that a gas furnace is normally used to supplement a heat pump in colder climates. Most heat pump manufacturers do not recommend operating a heat pump in below freezing conditions
Just wanted to chime in that they do make a lot of low-temp heat pumps, going down to -30f now. The efficiency drops dramatically at temps that low, the best site to look at cold-weather models is https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product_list/
If you look though, the "COP @ 5 degrees F" for a lot of models is above 2.0, which from my understanding means you'll be using 1/2 the electricity someone with baseboard (resistance) heat would. And above those temps the COP gets much higher.
They can use 100 watts of electric energy to move 400 watts of heat from outside to inside.
The downside is that the colder it is outside the less efficient they get (since there is less heat outside) so it only works in relatively temperate climates.
Plus you save the $30/mo meter fee from the gas company.
The Daikin in my building runs at 100% capacity down to -4F. The last time NYC recorded below -4 was 1943.
Heat pumps aren't a panacea, they have an appropriate use. Usually in a warm climate but they don't really work well (from my direct experience) in freezing temperatures or below. Something I assume NYC gets rather regularly.
If anything America is a victem of HVAC "specialists" who use their skills to install the bare minimum systems. Over in Japan everyone just buys a featurefull mini split and pokes a hole in the way and plugs it in. The net effect is Japan has a competitive market for featureful yet cheap minisplits. While Americians are forced to pay more for less.
So I have a heat pump. In central Indiana. Temp ranges from -15F in the winter to 100F in the summer. Today it was in the mid 50s. My across the street neighbor has the same floorplan house, but he has gas. When we compare bills, I pay about $40/mo more for heat. He pays about $40 more for AC... so it ends up being a wash, except my HVAC plant cost about twice what his conventional electric AC / Gas forced air setup. As a bonus, the electric that I use comes from a giant gas plant so... Would feel better about electric if it wasn't just shifting production to a giant facility on the other side of town.
Yes, however, that won't be the case for long (hopefully).
Ok, so, what are we going to generate energy with? Nuclear is a non-starter, coal is dirty, so without gas, wind and solar are simply not capable of getting the job done in a cold snap.
The first option has the benefit of being generalised and applying to everything. But it hurts in the short term. The second option has the benefit of being a painless transition for everyone but could result in sub optional choices being made by the government.