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Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

wired.com

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Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#651

Post by ChatGTP »

rconti wrote: post #39

Bay Area, just beginning a remodel+expansion of our home. We've never had air conditioning, and our gas furnace is well over 20 years old. We'd likely need to upsize the furnace anyway, and for resale reasons if nothing else, adding A/C (and the attendant larger ducts or whatever else) is a no-brainer while we have the house apart. A heat pump is absolutely a no-brainer in our case. I like being able to get away from…

Honestly, just make sure you’re spending as much money as you can afford in insulation and double or tripled glazed windows. It makes all the different. We used cellulose fiber on our latest renovation , even between the slab in the ground and the floor, it’s wild how warm our place is.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#652

Post by ChatGTP »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #28
mikeyouse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uh, you still need a furnace (though it could be electric) if you live somewhere that ever really gets cold, right? For now - and only in part of the country. Most of the newest models can output 100% of their rating down to something like -5ºF -- they're easy enough to oversize as well, so if your 99% heating load is e.g. 48,000BTU, a 60,000BTU heat pump that's only outputting 80% of rated BTUs due to the extreme…

I like the redundancy of natural gas. So far, in less than 40 years, I have been kept warm for multiple days on 3 separate occasions by having access to gas while the electricity did not work. Also, I was able to keep cooking. One of the states in the article is Oregon too, where I have family that just a few weeks ago lost electricity for 4 days, but were able to use an electric generator to keep the air handler goi…

It sounds like your house is poorly insulated too ?

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#654

Post by bamboozled »

kccqzy wrote: post #478
bamboozled wrote: post #376

It’s so strange why we’re doing all this now. Why not 20 years ago? Better late than never but it’s a shame…

20 years ago the best heat pumps still weren't good enough for cold days.

Do you really think it took twenty years to bring them up to speed ? Honestly ? I’m mean if the interest and investment were there innovation would’ve happened sooner ?

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#656

Post by creatonez »

justinzollars wrote: post #584

Wired is owned by Condé Nast. Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications. Advance Publications, a private, family-held business that owns and invests in a broad range of media, communications, technology, education, and live entertainment companies, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Charter Communications and Reddit. This is corporate propaganda. Its expensive and won't be adopted. Expensive technology is stupid. Pe…

Heat pumps represent roughly the same goal as nuclear -- the physics makes it possible for great efficiency gains and just needs engineering & clever management of installation lifecycles to get the cost down.

To be clear, digging up your yard is for highly specialized geothermal heat pump installations. We should be skeptical of these projects because the geologic sites that allow it to be cost effective are quite rare. Normal heat pumps are just an air conditioner with a reverse configuration (not to minimize some of the difficulties of both implementing and then successfully retrofitting this)

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#657

Post by sokoloff »

10u152 wrote: post #645
Scoundreller wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously depends where you are & your use, but most of the gas bills here are everything but the actual gas. Transportation, distribution, storage, taxes, standby charges...

What on earth is a standby charge on gas?

The monthly meter rental/connection fee/whatever your local utility calls it. Mine calls it "customer charge".

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#658

Post by sokoloff »

gmerc wrote: post #637
horns4lyfe wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well good luck trying to get people to lower their standard of living in pursuit of an abstract solution to a problem that can only be represented with predictive modeling.

Nah, failure to act on climate change will also reduce their standard of living unless they are rich enough to buy their way to a bunker in NZ.

That's a large part of the issue: it probably won't. It will reduce the standard of living of future generations, but for people in the prime earning and consuming phase of their life (say 40-65 years old), climate change isn't going to have anywhere near as detectable, let alone large, effect on their life as spending $20K on heat pumps, giving up a car and taking more public transit, taking fewer tropical vacations, or even setting the heating thermostat to 69°F rather than 71°F.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#659

Post by jillesvangurp »

jbarham wrote: post #570
smcleod wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas won’t stay cheap. It was cheap here in Australia 10 years ago and now it’s so expensive no one can afford to run gas heating and it’s only going up. Now (thankfully) the government has banned the installation of new gas heating and a lot of people are getting rid of gas cooking, hot water heating etc… it’s for the best.

The only reason that natural gas prices in Australia have gone up in the past 10 years is that gas producers in the eastern states were able to start exporting gas as LNG. As of 2023, Australia is the world's second largest LNG exporter (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262074/global-lng-expor... ) after the US (take that Russia!) and ahead of Qatar. Great for the gas exporting cartel but not so great for…

Interesting. Of course transporting gas across the Australian continent and selling it cheaply is a lot less lucrative than selling it abroad in lng form. So, I can see why they would focus on exports rather than a relatively small domestic market that is on the other side of the continent.

Anyway, Australia has no excuse for not using solar energy. Which is exactly what they are doing over there despite conservative governments trying to slow that down for the last decade or so. I doesn't need to depend on fossil fuels.

Re: Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps

#660

Post by hardolaf »

tsimionescu wrote: post #638
idiotsecant wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the correct strategy to wait to regulate gas usage until every country on earth does the same? That doesn't seem like a winning strategy. Someone always has to be last.

If you want to help the environment, you regulate both gas usage and exports. The goal is to keep gas in the ground, where it belongs, not to move it to other countries.

Except gas exports are largely being used to retire brown coal burning which is even worse for the environment than LNG. This isn't an all-or-nothing deal even with exports. The richer countries should take on the costs of better efficiency first and we can trickle those technologies down to other nations as they become cheaper than LNG and coal.
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