States, including CA and NY, sign heat pump memorandum
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The solution isn’t more regulation or incentives, IMO. It’s to fix the utterly broken electricity market.
(This is a great example, BTW, of how public-private partnerships can be dramatically worse than full public control. Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Los Angeles are doing quite a bit better.)
There are tax advantages allocated to fossil fuel exploration, but not specifically for gas - and mostly just exploration.
So it doesn't really matter - it might if we build some nuclear or whatever, but right now, it doesn't.
When consumers must pay for the externalities of their fossil fuel consumption, it's no longer economically competitive. If you can't pass carbon taxes, have to outlaw new gas service like many jurisdictions are attempting to do. High level, looking at the cost of natural gas alone is insufficient for these discussions; you have to look at the entire supply chain and externalities to arrive at a true "apples to apples" comparison.
(matters now, but won't as the blended cost of renewables and storage [firm generation] declines below the floor fossil gas needs to sell at to keep the infra running, and that infra already leaks like a sieve [3])
[1] https://energypost.eu/new-u-s-study-damage-per-ton-of-co2-co...
In California, for IOU customers, electric rates are pushing $600/MWh. You can figure out how exactly you want to apply the emission factors:
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
But you will have a hard time making the math come out in favor of electricity. Unless you have a really nice heat pump, your electricity is 100% carbon-free, and you rule out gas-fired heat pumps [0] or cogen [1], you’re probably better off burning natural gas and using the money you save to offset your carbon usage in some more effective manner than throwing it at your local utility so they can burn it.
Fundamentally, carbon pricing can work when CO2 emissions are expensive and the clean alternatives are reasonably priced. California has a major problem with the latter requirement.
[0] They exist but seem very rare.
[1] Reputable companies make these, but the devices are large and are not friendly for residential installations.
1 metric ton of carbon is about 19 Mcf of gas burned.
19 Mcf of gas contains about 1.65MW of electric power (assuming combined efficiency of generation and transmission of 30% - if you can provide a framework for better electricity efficiency I'm open to it).
It'd add about $121 to the price per MW or 35 cents per 10,000 BTU
It'd add about $10 to the price per Mcf of gas or about 10 cents per 10,000 BTU
Assuming that 50% of your power has a carbon surcharge on it, we can halve those numbers - 17.5 cents per 10,000 BTU.
So once I plug those into my HP Calculator - that raises assumed electricity prices to 90 cents per 10,000 BTU and gas prices to 24 cents per 10,000 BTU.
The heat pump still ends up being more expensive over the entire operating range - note that HP efficiency goes down with temperature.
So at 40f it costs 35 cents on my 5T HP to generate 10,000 BTU of heat, at 10f 65 cents per 10,000 BTU of heat. Gas however is steady at 29 cents per 10,000 BTU of heat - no matter the operating temp.
The "but fossil fuel externalities!" crew can't seem to comprehend just how efficient, cheap and abundant fossil fuels are, and that we can't simply shut them off or double their price tomorrow without massive economic consequences.
But fossil fuels are not going anywhere, and no one (but me) seems to have any great appetite for nuclear construction.
For a fossil fuel plant that might convert fuel to electricity with ~35-40% efficiency, a heat pump with a CoP of 2.0 will be less efficient overall than a 90% gas furnace.
* More precisely, on the spread between the OAT and the indoor temp, but since the latter is basically a fixed figure...
1 kWh of electricity run thru a resistive heater will generate 3412 BTU
1 Ccf of gas contains the equivalent energy as 29 kWh, but will only generate 8.7 kWh when run thru thermal generation (assuming 40% efficiency and 10% transmission losses).
If you're just trying to make heat, directly burning the gas will consume much less energy - and make fewer emissions - than gas > electricity > heatpump > heat.
In the end, the HP will be up to 30% more efficient than strip heat (in my case the crossover point is under 10f where strip heat is cheaper to operate).
I built a breakdown chart showing cost per kWh for both heat pump and strip heat, then added gas to it as a comparison.
CA needs to get its incentives aligned to meet any of these goals. You want people to electrify? Just make it cheaper to run in the long term, and everybody will just do it by default.
As much as I think the state is inefficient, a cost plus regulated monopoly is even worse. Municipal power companies in CA run $0.10-0.20 per kwh, while PG&E is $0.40-0.50 cents, and going up.
That's how you get exorbitant taxes on the alternatives
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/11/california-solar-...
The climate should take precendence over everything else. Incentives for rooftop solar should increase, incentives to help lower income people should increase, electricity record profits should not be a thing.
This is entirely due to regulatory capture, not some "good will towards poor people" that the electricity industry is pushing.
Power companies have a fixed margin of 10% and a captive market.
If power costs them $1, they make $0.1. If power costs them $5, they make $0.50.
Rooftop solar costs 10X what commercial solar does. Every kw of rooftop power they buy means 10kw of commercial solar isnt built.
Unless the electricity consumption is falling faster than inflation, I'd expect the regulated-profit electric utility to be having record profits essentially all the time.
That's an argument for moving from rooftop solar subsidies into storage subsidies, because its already at the point where renewable output sometimes exceeds 100% of demand. (And the strong solar mandates will contnue to add supply without subsidy, especially—and this adds to the pile of reasons that this needs to happen—if housing construction stops being held back by zoning constraints.)
there's nothing more evil than forcing people to pay flat rate for services (electricity) that we should all be cutting back on, not using even more.
They wanted the state to impose a tax on people using solar panels.
https://krcrtv.com/news/chico-residents-on-possible-solar-pa...
Net metering can only form a small part of the retail market before the fixed costs of distribution get concentrated on remaining customers in a death spiral. A population that is generally less able to take advantage of tax credits (because their tax liability is not high enough), and has less access to capital in the form of homeownership or financing for the solar system.
This is analogous to the "problem" of fuel efficient car owners paying less fuel tax. Some states have added higher registration fees on hybrids and EVs to offset the "lost" revenue. Another similar situation is water utilities that encouraged efficiency through higher rates. Customers saved water and then the utility had to increase per unit rates to maintain enough baseline revenue to cover fixed expenses of maintaining the distribution network to every home.
Homeowners may get paid less than their panels cost, but rooftop solar is tremendously expensive and there is no way that it would recoup the cost at actual market prices
There are absolutely no savings from an unreliable local power source.
Home construction work is really interesting, because the transaction costs are so high around locating and comparing the service providers.
It is easy to say there isnt enough competition, but im not sure that is actually true. I think more likely is that most consumers dont collect 10+ quotes and compare, so the price signal is weak.
First biggest is high rents drives up the cost of labor.
Tell me about it. I just got quoted 80k to landscape my residential backyard.
For 1 year of my take home salary.. I'll do it myself.
When regulation serves to limit via licensing and multi-year apprenticeships is where you get into market distortions that sometimes serve consumers and sometimes harm them. This happens to some degree in licensed trades (price out a drywall crew, painting or carpet [not licensed or at least licensed without apprenticeship in most places] vs a plumber, electrician, or HVAC).
Also in Seattle, only an HVAC company can pull a permit for refrigeration, even though plenty of heat pumps/mini splits are pre-charged and you'll never need to touch refrigerant.
I’ve bought refrigerants online several times over the years without showing any license (even though I hold an EPA 608 and 609). It’s legal to buy for resale, which is probably how suppliers get around checking.
My experience having installed one a couple of months ago is that the installer charged around 1.5k AUD just for the installation(by my calculation using retail prices) for a back to back "simple" install for the same brand and size mentioned. This is in Melbourne, Australia.
I did get multiple quotes that were the same and this was before peak summer season. The ones that were lower were either not licensed or wanted to do it for cash - meaning they wouldn't declare and pay taxes on it so the customer gets it for cheaper. It also means they won't give you an invoice and good luck claiming damages without evidence.
They blame the high cost of living but knowing some insiders, the margins are huge.
But we also need to stop waiting for intractable economic problems to be solved to address climate change. In the long run, the economic and human cost of not addressing this will far outstrip short-term costs.
Orthogonal, but I point this out all the time re: electric vehicles, when people claim "they are so cheap to operate!".
Do you really think that will continue to be the case when they are 10%, 25%, 50% of the market? The government will squeeze every dollar "saved" out of you. If you're lucky it will be equivalent to what you used to spend on gasoline.
Also, I can get ground source heat pumps installed including vertical wells for about 50k out of pocket, at current energy rates I'd recoup in about 12 years. Not sure where 50 years comes from, unless you are talking about geothermal and not ground source, in which case I have no insights in to as it's not a reasonable option around here.
Both in terms of cost and efficiency. You get all the advantage of heat pump, and the cheaper defrost cycle from gas furnace.
Consider how much of power generation wherever is gas.
If you can get residential power below 10c/kWh then HP always wins in cost, but most of the country has high electricity costs, low gas costs, and the ability to use gas when the grid is stressed.
The AUX heat is just a thermostat relay closing, so it can activate an electric-resistive coil (as is typical) or it can turn on the circulator pump for a gas fired boiler for a hydronic loop in the air handler.
You could go with a combo-boiler that does on-demand hot water and a single AUX zone rather than a 2-zone with a storage tank. However on-demand DHW doesn't do well with managing the temperature with pressure changes (someone flushes a toilet or puts the laundry on or both! and you'll get a few moments of either freezing or scalding water as it adjusts). I think it's better to have a superstor type DHW tank. They only lose about 1℉ per hour so with no DHW use, the boiler only needs to run about once a day for a few mins to keep it hot.
But in fairness, I live in DFW - I need air conditioning more than heat most of the time.
Of course this is all dependent on your home's specific heat loss calculation that's based on a ton of variables including location and construction methods, rooms above below, # of windows/doors etc. So in DFW, you won't need as much as in Concord NH. The (winter, 99%ile) ASHREA design temp for Concord NH is about 2F, but for DFW it's 27.5F, so the 10K BTUs for NH might only need to be 6K BTUs for DFW.
So a heat pump based forced hot water system might work well for you in DFW, but not me in NH because I don't have enough wall space for all of the baseboard needed at 120F -- I'd be better off with radiant heat with a heat pump because there you mix the hot water with the return to keep it (the water) no more than 100F or it'll either crack the concrete, or be uncomfortable to walk on. Also up here we typically have multi-story homes and also need basements because the frost line is 4-5' below grade, so radiant slabs are harder to build/install on a "joisted" floor than a slab-on-grade ranch home.
If I was building from scratch (in NH), it'd be a ground source heat pump with forced air system with radiant in the basement slab and a 2-zone high efficiency (propane/oil) boiler (unless Natural Gas, but that's rare in NH) with a super-stor type storage tank and hydronic loop off the boiler as AUX heat. There's a pretty good chance in NH you already have a suitable artesian well for the GSHP (just needs a variable speed pump).
The GSHP systems do have a "de-superheater" that can provide some hot water in the shoulder seasons so the boiler probably is only used in the winter (or if there's excessive DHW use).
Market adoption is already rising. Seems like a good way for the states to get good PR riding on the back of existing momentum.
Particularly in the North east you are going to find steam or forced hot water systems fired by gas or oil (most likely #2 heating oil or possibly kerosene).
In a new build yes. A forced air with (air or ground source) heap pump should be required (although it still doesn’t really solve the DHW issue).
Our house had an oil furnace, we added an air source heat pump. There are periods in the winter where the heat pump can't keep up, but in the months early and late winter it's all we need. The net result is that it has significantly reduced our oil consumption. Add to that fact it's an A/C unit in the summer, and it's wins all the way around.
At 30f - until you exceed 15-15.5 cents per kWh, heat pump is cheaper to run than median oil price.
It’s not that a heat pump isn’t more efficient it’s that if you have forced hot water or steam radiators you are looking at an additional $40K to retrofit forced air ducting to your house. Oh and you still need a solution for domestic hot water, probably you’ll just end up with a resistive heater (or a hybrid/heat pump unit like the Aerotherm but the heat has to come from the room).
https://www.energy.nh.gov/energy-information/nh-fuel-prices
Actually right now #2 heating oil is now somewhat cheaper per MBTU than propane. Also Natural Gas is slightly cheaper than heat pump per MBTU (YMMV on efficiency!)
I’ve never seen propane cheaper than heating oil here!
EDIT: It’s probably worth pointing out that the North East of the US is the largest heating oil market in the world.
The cheapest rate is 38c/kWh, the most expensive is 62c/kWh..
The problem is most oil or gas fired heating systems are forced hot water (or steam) so a heat pump isn’t going to help you unless you want a mini-split in every room.
Even if you have ducting for cooling with AC it likely won’t have enough CFMs for heat in the winter unless it was specifically sized that way (but you likely wouldn’t be still using forced hot water or steam in that case).
I have an electric water heater. It’s hybrid, so I run the heat pump mode in warm/humid weather and regular electric mode the rest if the year.
Mini-splits are not uncommon for cooling in the summer, but then again you only need them in the main living areas and bedrooms.
You don’t actually need it in every single room. A lot of rooms, you can get away with like radiant floor heating or electric baseboards.
Literally nothing about "pump" implies it generates heat. That being said...
> In colder climates, an electric heat strip can be added to the indoor fan coil for additional capabilities.
That would just be... electric heating, but with more steps? I mean, at that point you just have a heat pump _and_ electric heating; a hybrid system. It's better, sure, but it's not really just a heat pump anymore.
Thanks to improving refrigerant technologies, the “extremely cold” threshold is getting lower and lower over time.
I have a geothermal system (a ground-sourced heat pump) that also has electric resistive heating as a backup. I I've had to use it twice in the ~5 years I've lived in this house. The first time it was something like -15°f outside, so we just figured that was beyond what the system could handle. The second time, a year later, it wasn't quite as cold out and we had someone come look at it who found that it was low on refrigerant. (I've only been here 5 years, but the system was at least 15 years old.)
So, I've been happy it to have it there as a backup. From what I understand, it's also fairly straightforward and inexpensive to add to the system.
Expensive but falling as scale increases and government subsidies help drive scale.
Reliant on the grid - natural gas relies on the grid to move the air too. Not sure if this is the case all the time but mine won’t run at all without power, so unless you are referring to wood fired stove, natural gas furnaces are also reliant on the grid from what I can tell.
The blower motors are pretty power hungry, on the order of about 330 watts, give or take. For a 12V system that is about 30 amps, or about 2 hours of output from a typical deep cycle batter before you risk depleting it to the point of damage. An ~$300 12V Lifepo4 battery might get you 4 hours of runtime, but not much more than that. In most cases, an outage of less than 8 hours won't get things so cold in a decently insulated house that you need to worry about it, and IME, an outage that lasts more than 8 hours has high probability of lasting much much longer.
TL;DR - Your deep cycle battery approach may not prove to actually be worthwhile, consider working out the car-as-generator hookup plan in advance.
Ha yep, learned that the first time and was ready to go with an extension cord the second time I needed this setup. First time, I had a stash of 3 batteries but I didn't realize how much power the blower motor would draw, so I was charging on the car and swapping out batteries as needed. Did that the first day then rigged up cords for day 2. Halfway through day 3 we got power back.
Radiant in-floor heat is pretty efficient (and it's nice not to have an ice-cold floor first thing in the morning), just need power for the circulation pumps and the boiler. My back up heat is a wood-burning stove - and we have lost power for several hours when the temps are -20F or so...
If the boiler is in the basement would you not be able to treat the circulation tubes as a thermosiphon, with the hot water rising from the boiler, creating pressure to push water through the loop?
This is 2-4 hours of run time though. My experience is that the blower turns on for a period and then off for a period. It would depend on your heat loss rate which is situation specific, but you can probably get significantly more than this in time coverage with the blower only running periodically.
Gas/oil furnace can be powered by a small generator, solar panels or even a backup battery system, which is not the case for a heat pump. Oil / propane with local power generation can be fully off the grid.
Edit: the lower capital cost means you can also _afford_ a backup power supply.
Also, the largest heat pump in my house (I have a 6 kW and a 3 kW split system and a 5 kW air to water) also only uses about as much power as an electric kettle (~2 kW) most of the time here, I’m sure that could be powered off a small generator…
Natural gas heating relies on nothing more than convection to move hot water or (in older setups) steam from the boiler to the radiators. The only part of the setup where electricity is required is for electronic thermostats, and those can have a battery backup.
I wish residential-sized gas-fired cogeneration systems were a thing.
I was worried the bedrooms would get too cold when the doors were closed but it turned out not to be an issue. The bedrooms do get colder but this actually is better for sleeping.
We still have the forced air system as a backup.
Another way to say this is "the consumer does not matter at this point" .. meaning that the game plan and expansion of the central corporate (or govt) operation is "more important" than the consumer benefit or choice.
Sadly, more than one thing can be true at once. If dramatic energy savings are "required" due to real structural problems, and also the well-capitalized and aggressive central entity can negotiate and implement the changes.. then it is a collective social situation.. End result - many advantages that small home owners have enjoyed in the USA for so long, are going away in real time right now, on a large scale.
A heat pump is basically just an air conditioner with a handful of extra parts to allow it to work in reverse. In the US they currently are significantly more expensive to install than AC, but I don't think it will stay that way for ever.
I think part of cost issue is that heat pumps tend to put an extreme focus on energy efficiency, leading to higher up-front costs, whereas AC units tend to balance a little more towards lower initial costs.
Any home that has both gas heating and air conditioning could replace the AC with a heat pump and get more efficient heating for most of the time, while still keeping their existing heating for situations that call for it.
I'm hopeful that AC manufacturers start shifting towards bi-directional units for their lower-cost "regular" segments instead of reserving that for only the fancy super-high-efficiency (expensive) units.
Mini splits for primary heat.
Steam radiators with oil furnace as backup.
A ton of space heaters for backup backup.
Oh, and a wood burning stove in the living room for backup backup backup. If shit really hits the fan, I can crank the wood stove and surviving.