![]() But as the pandemic changed the world - and me - the TikToks she sent changed too. My mom was on TikTok before I was, sharing recipes and places to buy incense. “This agreement between this many states really sets the stage for doing that.Lifestyle My mom sent me to TikTok therapy - and it kind of. “We need to be sending these unmistakable signals to the marketplace that heat pumps and zero-emission homes are the future,” says Casale. With states collaborating like this on heat pumps, the idea is to lift the device from an obscure technology cherished by climate nerds into ubiquity, for the good of consumers and the planet. ![]() To help there, last year the White House announced the formation of the American Climate Corps, which aims to put more than 20,000 people to work in clean energy and overall climate resilience. In addition to the technicians working with the systems, the country needs way more electricians to retrofit homes to go fully electric beyond heat pumps, with solar panels and induction stoves and home batteries. “We do need to put a lot of money and energy and resources into making sure that we have the workforce available to do it.” “If we’re pushing heat pumps and more installations, and we don’t have enough electricians to do the job, we’re not going to meet the goal-period,” says McIlwain. To that end, the memorandum calls for workforce development and contractor training. There’s also the less-talked-about challenge of the green energy revolution: training enough technicians to actually install the heat pumps. “We have homeowners who are getting ready to replace their furnaces, and if they're not aware, they are not going to replace it with a heat pump.” “We really need consumers to move away from dirty to clean heat, and we really want to get the message out that heat pumps are really the way to go,” says Serena McIlwain, Maryland’s secretary of the environment. You can even install a heat pump system that also warms your water. They’ve gotten so efficient that even when it’s freezing out, they can still extract warmth from the air to heat a home. Even if you have to run a heat pump with electricity from fossil-fuel power plants, it’s much more efficient than a furnace, because it’s moving heat instead of creating it.Ī heat pump can save an average American household over $550 a year, according to one estimate. Because the system is electric, it can run off a grid increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar. Run it in the opposite direction, and it can cool the inside of a building-a heat pump is both a heater and AC unit. Instead of burning planet-warming natural gas, a heat pump warms a building by transferring heat from the outdoor air into the interior space. ![]() 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.” “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, which facilitated the agreement. (“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. 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. ![]() 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. Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace-and its killer is the humble heat pump.
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