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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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Berkeley-based Copper was selected to supply 10,000 stoves to the New York City Housing Authority.
Last year, New York City went shopping for 10,000 induction stoves so it could ditch gas in its public housing. Now it's ready to make a purchase.
The New York Power Authority and NYC Housing Authority have selected Copper, a Berkeley, California-based startup that was formerly known as Channing Street Copper Company, as the winner of their Induction Stove Challenge, Heatmap has learned. The agencies are planning to award the company a $32 million, seven-year contract to design, prototype, test, and install its stoves in apartments throughout the city.
As I wrote when I covered the launch of the contest in 2023, the goal is not just to improve the lives of NYC public housing residents by helping them avoid the toxic fumes of cooking with gas, but also to spur a larger market transformation that lowers the barriers to induction stoves for everyone.
These aren’t just any induction stoves. Manufacturers were challenged to design an appliance that’s compatible with a standard 120-volt outlet so that it doesn’t require an expensive electrical upgrade to install. Most products on the market require a 240-volt outlet.
The news of the winner was buried in the minutes of a NYPA Finance Committee meeting that took place in July, when Authority staff submitted a request to the committee to recommend that its Board of Trustees approve the award. The Trustees approved the award at a meeting on July 30.
It’s unclear whether the contest ultimately fostered much innovation. The meeting minutes say that only four companies submitted proposals. I’m aware of at least two startups — Copper and Impulse Labs — that were already designing induction stoves for 120-volt outlets prior to NYPA’s challenge. Both companies solve the issue with a similar solution — their stoves come with built-in batteries that can supply extra voltage as needed.
In response to a question about why NYPA selected Copper, a spokesperson pointed to the fact that the company has already designed, developed, and manufactured stoves with similar specifications to what the contest was calling for. “From the competitively procured proposal and interview, the company demonstrated their deep understanding of both residential electrical systems as well as battery equipped products,” they told me.
Still, the award has the potential to make this technology more accessible by bringing down the cost through economies of scale. Currently, Copper’s least expensive stove sells for $5,999; NYPA said the stove delivered for the program is expected to be below $3,000, but NYCHA is still negotiating the cost and other aspects of the product before fully awarding the contract. (Copper was not able to respond to questions about the award as it has not been officially announced yet.)
That price also doesn’t take into account the avoided cost of redoing the electrical work in the buildings. Ultimately the order could also be much more than 10,000 — NYPA has said that 12 other housing authorities representing more than 300,000 housing units have signed up to support the initiative. There’s also a good chance that the stoves will be eligible for at least a 30% tax credit.
Once the contract is fully awarded, the next step will be for Copper to produce a single unit for testing before moving on to the pilot stage, where it will produce and install 100 stoves. If the pilot is successful, the agencies will purchase at least 10,000 units.
The same agencies are in the pilot phase of a similar contest called Clean Heat For All, which aims to bring new heat pumps to market that can be installed in a window rather than requiring costly construction work. Last winter, they ran a pilot in two dozen NYCHA apartments with the winning units — models from the startup Gradient and veteran manufacturer Midea. NYPA reported this summer that the units “provided consistently comfortable temperatures throughout the pilot period, with residents reporting high levels of satisfaction,” and said it planned to study the tech’s cooling capabilities next.
They may not survive a full challenge, though.
The Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward with its rule restricting climate pollution from power plants on Wednesday, meaning that one of the Biden administration’s key climate policies can stay in place. For now.
The high court’s decision will allow the EPA to defend the rule in a lower court over the next 10 months. A group of power utilities, trade groups, and Republican-governed states are suing to block the greenhouse gas rule, arguing that it oversteps the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s new rules, which were finalized in April, would be the government’s first successful effort to regulate climate pollution from the power sector. The electricity industry is the second most-polluting sector in the American economy.
The Obama administration previously tried to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from the power sector. The Supreme Court blocked those rules from taking effect in 2016, before striking them down completely in 2022.
This time, the agency has written the rules within a framework laid out by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in that ruling. In that now landmark case, the court ruled that the EPA could restrict greenhouse gas pollution from power plants only by requiring new technology, such as carbon capture equipment, to be installed at the plant itself. The agency couldn’t require utilities to stop burning fossil fuels and build more renewables.
In the near term, whether the Biden administration’s new attempt at regulating climate pollution will survive depends on the outcome of next month’s election. The Trump campaign has said that it will overturn the EPA’s new climate rules. During his first term, Donald Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental and climate protections.
Should Harris win, the rule will still have to survive the lower court challenge. That case is scheduled to be heard in front of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this term.
“The high court made the right call,” Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “Given its rulings in recent years undercutting environmental protections, the refusal of the majority on the Supreme Court to block this vital rule is a victory for common sense.”
Not all the news from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was good for climate advocates, though.
In the same decision that let the new rules stand, the high court’s conservative justices signaled that they might block the rules next year.
“In my view, the applicants have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of their challenges” to the rule, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a short statement attached to the stay, which was cosigned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
But because the rules don’t require utilities to start complying until next June, there was no reason to grant an emergency stay, the two justices added.
Justice Clarence Thomas would have gone further and stepped in to block the rules immediately. Justice Samuel Alito, another reliable conservative vote, did not participate in the deliberations.
That suggests that four justices could be ready to block the rules as soon as next year. They would need only one more vote — from Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Amy Coney Barrett — to stay the protections from taking effect.
The statement didn’t provide any hints to what Roberts or Barrett are thinking.
The trash mostly stays put, but the methane is another story.
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.