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It’s official: In 2023, for the second year in a row, heat pumps — highly efficient, electric space heaters — were more popular than natural gas furnaces.
That’s according to the most recent data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association for appliance manufacturers that publishes shipment data for heating and cooling equipment every month.
Though the number of shipments in the data is technically defined as “when a unit transfers ownership,” it is a rough analog for sales. AHRI’s count for 2023, published Friday, showed that even as overall shipments were down in 2023, 21% more heat pumps were shipped than gas furnaces, up from a 12% lead in 2022.
Climate experts see heat pump adoption as a key pillar for getting the country off fossil fuels and halting global warming. It’s one of the most effective choices an individual can make to reduce emissions — even today, when the electric grid is still largely powered by fossil fuels. One recent study by University of California, Davis, researchers looked at the emissions savings of switching from a gas furnace to a heat pump in 99 cities around the country. It found that homeowners would likely cut their carbon footprint between 13% and 81%, depending on where they lived.
The new shipment data may be an indicator that state and federal policies designed to convince homeowners and developers to make the switch are working. A number of states offer subsidies for heat pumps. Starting last year, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government also began offering a $2,000 tax credit for heat pumps.
What this data does not tell us is how many of these shipments were for new buildings and how many were for retrofits. According to the most recent government data, some 60% of existing homes are heated by fossil fuels. But while heat pumps are often a more economic choice when they are integrated into a new building from the start, installing them in an existing building that has a natural gas furnace or boiler is a much more expensive and complicated endeavor.
A number of states — especially those in colder climates — are working on additional policies and incentives to solve this. Earlier this week, environmental protection officials from Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island signed a non-binding agreement to have heat pumps make up 65% of their residential heating equipment sales by 2030, and 90% by 2040.
It’s an ambitious set of goals. Emily Levin, a senior policy advisor at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, an association of air quality agencies, told WBUR that heat pumps currently make up only about 25% of heating equipment sales in the nine participating states. As part of the commitment, the states agreed to develop an action plan within the next year outlining policies and other strategies to achieve the goals.
Additional funding is also on the way. Later this year, the Department of Energy will distribute funds from the IRA to states to create new or expand existing rebate programs for electric appliances. Electrification advocates are also eyeing other grant programs in the law, like the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, to develop additional ways to help homeowners pay for the switch.
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The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.
IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)
“Urgent: IREC Needs You Now,” begins Nichols’ email, which was also posted to the organization’s website in full. “I need to be blunt: IREC, our mission, and the clean energy progress we lead is under assault.”
In an interview this afternoon, Nichols told me the DOE funding added up to at least $8 million and was set to be doled out over multiple years. She said the organization laid off eight employees — roughly a third of the organization’s small staff of fewer than two-dozen people — because the money lost for this year represented about half of IREC’s budget. She said this came after the organization also lost more than $4 million in competitive grant funding for apprenticeship training from the Labor Department because the work “didn’t align with the administration’s priorities.”
Nichols said the renewable energy sector was losing the crucial “glue” that holds a lot of the energy transition together in the funding cuts. “I’m worried about the next generation,” she told me. “Electricity is going to be the new housing [shortage].”
IREC has been a leading resource for the entire solar and transmission industry since 1982, providing training assistance and independent analysis of the sector’s performance, and develops stuff like model interconnection standards and best practices for permitting energy storage deployment best practices. The organization boasts having worked on developing renewable energy and training local workforces in more than 35 states. In 2021, it absorbed another nonprofit, The Solar Foundation, which has put together the widely used annual Solar Jobs Census since 2010.
In other words, this isn’t something new facing a potentially fatal funding crisis — this is the sort of bedrock institutional know-how that will take a long time to rebuild should it disappear.
To be sure, IREC’s work has received some private financing — as demonstrated by its solar-centric sponsorships page — but it has also relied on funding from Energy Department grants, some of which were identified by congressional Democrats as included in DOE’s slash spree last week. In addition, IREC has previously received funding from the Labor Department and National Labs, the status of which is now unclear.
It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.
The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.
Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.
When Esmeralda 7’s environmental review was released, BLM said the record of decision would arrive in July. But that never happened. Instead, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Departments of the Treasury and the Interior to review their treatment of wind and solar, part of a deal with conservative hardliners in Congress to pass his tax megabill — the same bill that also effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act’s renewable electricity tax credits. This led to a series of subsequent orders by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that effectively froze all federal permitting decisions for solar energy.
Flash forward to today, when BLM quietly updated its website for Esmeralda 7 permitting to explicitly say the project’s status is “cancelled.” Normally when the agency says this, it means developers pulled the plug.
I’ve reached out to some of the companies behind Esmeralda 7. A NextEra spokesperson provided me a statement from the company after this story’s publication saying it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.”
This article was updated after publication to include a statement from NextEra.
A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.
A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.
The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”
In a two-page ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Orsted would presumably win its legal challenge against the stop work order, and that the company is “likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction,” which led him to lift the dictate from the Trump administration.
Orsted previously claimed in legal filings that delays from the stop work order could put the entire project in jeopardy by pushing its timeline beyond the terms of existing power purchase agreements, and that the company installing cable for the project only had a few months left to work on Revolution Wind before it had to move onto other client obligations through mid-2028. The company has also argued that the Trump administration is deliberately mischaracterizing discussions between the federal government and the company that took place before the project was fully approved.
It’s still unclear at this moment whether the Trump administration will appeal the decision. We’re still waiting on the outcome of a separate legal challenge brought by Democrat-controlled states against Trump’s anti-wind Day One executive order.