You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Silicon Valley is betting better design will bring heat pumps to the masses.
Gleaming solar panels, soaring wind turbines, sleek electric cars. These are the Avengers of the climate technoverse, the most widely recognized symbols of the fight to kick fossil fuels and halt global warming. But the lineup is incomplete. Clean electricity and transportation are covered, but what about heat?
There’s a clear emerging hero waiting in the wings to warm our buildings without emissions. It’s called a heat pump, and it’s a technology that’s been around for decades. The problem is that heat pumps are still largely unfamiliar to most Americans, and the process of trying to get them installed can be a nightmare.
A new cohort of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is trying to change that by applying a proven formula. The idea is not just to build a better heat pump, but to make one that’s as attractive, convenient, and envy-inducing as a Tesla.
“That’s the only way you win, right?” said Paul Lambert, the founder and CEO of the startup Quilt, which recently raised $9 million in seed funding from Lowercarbon Capital and other investors. “You almost need, like, this Trojan horse. You need to be able to convince people who are skeptical. It needs to be better on its own merits.”
Heat pumps are key to tackling climate change because they run fully on electricity, are far more energy efficient than furnaces and boilers, and function as air conditioners in addition to heaters. Rather than warming a room by means of an electrical current or a flame, they move latent heat around, transferring it either inside or outside of the building, depending on the season.
Only about 16 percent of American homes use heat pumps today, according to the advocacy group Rewiring America. In a recent report, the organization estimated that in order to achieve the U.S. climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, heat pump sales need to grow three times faster than they’re expected to by 2032 and to take over the entire residential heating market by 2035. New federal tax credits and rebates created by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act will help, but likely won’t be enough.
“It's going to require lots of new choices for people and continued improvement in all aspects of product design,” Rewiring America’s head of market transformation Stephen Pantano told me. “So the more people investing in this and paying attention to this, the better.”
Despite their technological wizardry, heat pumps are rather dull looking. Some are big metal boxes that get hidden in an attic or closet and push hot or cool air through ducts and vents, while other models require mounting a rectangular hunk of plastic on the wall of every room. Quilt is redesigning the latter.
It’s unclear whether a heat pump could ever achieve the cultural capital of a sports car, no matter how nice it looks. Pantano recalled the scene in Home Alone where Kevin goes looking for his parents in the basement, and the glowing maw of the furnace sends him running. “I think that represents the way a lot of people think about their heating systems, which is that they don't, until they have to, which is usually when it breaks.”
Nonetheless, the heat pumps on the market now aren’t exactly turning heads.
“Whenever we do want to put a unit on the wall, we always get pushback from the consumer regarding the aesthetics,” said Larry Waters, the president of Electrify My Home, a heat pump installation company in Northern California. That’s one of many reasons Waters prefers selling systems that use ductwork. But every building is different, and that isn’t possible in all cases.
That’s especially true for small apartments or for renters who have no power over their HVAC system. Another startup, Gradient, is trying to serve those segments of the market with an attractive heat pump that sits in the window like an air conditioner. It doesn’t require a professional to install, and hangs over the sill like a saddle, solving a key drawback of the average AC by allowing continued use of the window. Last year, the company won a contract to provide 10,000 units for New York City public housing developments.
A Gradient heat pump.Courtesy Gradient
When I spoke to Gradient’s founder Vince Romanin in the summer of 2021, he also compared his approach to Tesla’s. “People didn’t start off buying electric cars because they’re better for the environment, but because they provided a dramatically different and better experience,” he told me.
Gradient’s heat pump recently hit the market. Emily Grubert, a civil engineer and sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me she got one for an unheated and un-air conditioned room in her house where her pet rabbits spend most of their time, and where the temperature fluctuates from below freezing in the winter to more than 100 degrees in the summer. It cost $2,000, took about an hour to install, and so far has maintained a comfortable temperature “through multiple days of 90-plus degree weather.”
A third design-forward heat pump startup, Electric Air, was founded by a former Tesla thermal engineer, and is literally advertising itself as “The Tesla of home heating and cooling.” The company’s other selling point is that it plans to combine regular heat pump functionality with improved air purification.
Electric Air heat pump.Courtesy Electric Air
I recently visited Quilt’s headquarters just south of San Francisco to see how the company’s device was shaping up. There I met Lambert along with his two co-founders, Bill Kee and Matthew Knoll. The trio got acquainted while working at Google, and also all recently became fathers, which they said was a big part of what inspired them to leave the tech giant to work on climate solutions. They guided me over to a wall mounted with a few iterations of heat pump designs, as well as a Mitsubishi mini-split, one of the most popular models currently on the market.
Lambert praised the unit’s efficiency, near-silent operation, and ability to heat and cool a room very quickly. “On the other hand, it’s kind of cheap plastic,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the casing. “And it’s quite tall, which is an issue because in a lot of American homes you can’t fit this in the place where people most want it.”
Quilt’s design is certainly more sleek, but it’s by no means a total overhaul. The company doesn’t plan to make its design public until early next year, so I can’t share much, but the improvements are subtle: A slightly smaller frame, a customizable aesthetic, and a few other bells and whistles added based on feedback from focus groups.
Design wasn’t the only factor in Tesla’s success, and Quilt is working on a number of other upgrades, like user experience. Today, when people install wall-mounted heat pumps in multiple rooms in their house, they each come with a separate remote control that has a ton of buttons and looks straight out of the 1980s. In addition to building a more convenient app to control the settings, the company is developing software that will help customers optimize efficiency based on how they use their homes.
“The areas of efficiency that have been exploited in this space have largely been at the mechanical level,” said Kee. “But we think there's a major gain to be made in efficiency by managing the system with intelligence.”
Quilt is also trying to improve the sales process. In addition to being new fathers, Lambert, Kee, and Knoll all recently went through a great deal of trouble trying to get heat pumps installed in their own buildings. “I had people telling me categorically that they wouldn’t work, or that I had to use my ducts, or that I couldn’t use my ducts,” Kee said. “I was totally disempowered. I just became obsessed with the idea that like, this has to be easier for people to do.”
They hope that the direct-to-consumer model, with transparent pricing and predictable scheduling, will help. But it hinges on building an army of ace partner contractors who know the systems inside and out, which could be quite a challenge. The team at Electrify My Home runs heat pump trainings for other contractors in California. Alex Sloan, the company’s vice president of business operations, told me it’s already an uphill battle getting the workforce to adopt existing technology, and to learn to do higher quality installations.
That just may be the one issue a Tesla makeover alone can’t solve.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
As Republicans’ budget priorities stack up, the numbers are starting to turn against America’s landmark climate law.
Since Donald Trump was reelected president, the climate community has retained a kind of fragile optimism about the Inflation Reduction Act, the historic climate law enacted in 2022 that Trump has vowed to repeal. The oft-repeated mantra is that the IRA is stimulating billions of dollars in investment in red districts, so why would Republicans want to put that at risk? Even if parts of the legislation were killed, surely some of it would remain intact.
But recent events have shifted the calculus. The ballooning price tag of Trump’s tax cut wishlist and preliminary budget negotiations on the Hill are pointing toward a budgetary showdown in which many of the law’s benefits could become fiscal casualties. D.C. veterans, including former GOP Hill staff, say that even the most bipartisan parts of the IRA could be sacrificed.
The reason has to do with the rules of budget reconciliation, the process Republicans in the House and Senate will use to carry out Trump’s agenda over the next several months and the same process Democrats used to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. One of Trump's biggest legislative priorities is extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, much of which expires at the end of this year. He also wants to make good on campaign promises to eliminate taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security, and remove the cap on the state and local tax liability deductions.
To do this through the normal legislative process would subject the bill to a potential filibuster in the Senate, which would require 60 votes to override, a margin Senate Republicans lack. Budget reconciliation, however, requires only a simple majority. But there’s a catch: The bill can only contain policies that modify federal spending or revenues. It cannot contain a single provision that doesn't pertain to the federal budget. And before lawmakers can decide what policies to put in it, they must agree on how much the bill will affect the federal budget. Once they set that topline number, they can’t change it.
“Reconciliation math is at least as important as the merits of reconciliation policies,” Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, told Heatmap. Flint was previously a Republican staff director on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and top government affairs executive at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “I think a lot of people with specific interests in the tax code fail to look at the scale of the issue that tax writers have to deal with,” he said, adding that whether IRA money has been spent in a given district will probably be a “second or third order factor” in that representative’s vote.
Congress is still at the beginning of the reconciliation process. The next step is for the House and Senate to negotiate a topline number and issue instructions to the committees that will write the final bill on the levels of spending they’re allowed to include. That’s where the punishing math for the IRA comes in. The Congressional Budget Office, as well as third-party groups like the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, have estimated that an extension of the 2017 tax cuts would cost between $3.7 and $4.5 trillion through 2034. If all of Trump’s additional proposed tax cuts were enacted, the cost would jump to $6.8 trillion, according to Penn Wharton.
The dollar amount assigned to each committee is a ceiling, and it’s calculated on a net basis. So if the Ways and Means committee, which oversees tax legislation, is assigned a $4.5 trillion deficit ceiling, as it was in the version of the reconciliation instructions that recently passed the House, it’s going to have to find several trillion dollars worth of spending programs to cut. Fully repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax credits — which, according to new modeling from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, would raise about $850 billion — will start to look harder to avoid.
In a recent talk hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Jason Smith, a representative from Missouri and Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, indicated that his party was committed to achieving Trump’s entire agenda through reconciliation. “These are items that he campaigned on, and these are items that will be addressed in any tax package that we move forward on,” he said.
Tax credits related to electric vehicles and green buildings are already almost certainly on the chopping block, but cutting those would raise just $300 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. Lawmakers have other options to achieve significant deficit reductions without fully eliminating the IRA, however. The Tax Foundation’s analysis found that Congress could preserve the nuclear power production tax credit and the carbon capture tax credit — two IRA provisions many Republicans support — as well as a stripped-down version of the renewable energy production tax credit and still raise a respectable $750 billion.
Alex Brill, a former Republican chief economist to the Ways and Means Committee and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Heatmap that we might see efforts to “rightsize” or “reform” certain tax credits rather than repeal them. Lawmakers could keep the clean electricity tax credits in place for a few more years as an apparent compromise, for example, but phase them out in 2029 or 2030, which is when the Congressional Budget Office estimates they’ll start to be more heavily utilized, and therefore more expensive.
“There's this possibility that they may be looking at the timing and the duration of some of these provisions,” Brill said.
The IRA prescribes no end date for those credits, which as of now will stay in place until U.S. electricity emissions fall to 25% below their 2022 levels. Jason Clark, the former chief strategist at the American Clean Power Association, told Jael in October that an earlier phase-out would drastically undercut U.S. renewables deployment. “I don’t think a lot of folks appreciate just how long-range some of this planning is — how long it takes to permit something, how long it takes to figure out the interconnection queue. Companies aren’t just thinking, what are we going to build this year? They’re thinking, what will be put online in 2035? So if the government changes the stability of that, companies start to pull back.”
There is another scenario on the table that could save a significant chunk of the IRA, but it would come with its own nontrivial drawbacks.
Republican leaders in the Senate are trying to change the baseline against which all of these budget calculations are made. They argue that the tax cut extensions should be viewed as avoiding a tax increase, not enacting a new tax cut. By this logic, the extensions don’t cost anything, and $6.8 trillion in total tax cuts looks more like $2.8 trillion. That would give Republicans more room to increase spending on a range of other priorities, including defense and immigration enforcement, without having to make tough trade-offs.
This has never been done before, and to call it controversial would be an understatement. Deficit hawks on both sides of the aisle oppose the maneuver, calling it a “gimmick” and “magic math.” A recent Politico article declared that moving to a current policy baseline approach would “break the Senate, upend the federal budget process and explode the national debt.”
Before Republicans can move ahead, they need guidance from the Senate Parliamentarian, an advisor to the Senate tasked with interpreting the rules that govern the body. If the Parliamentarian doesn’t approve, the Senate is technically allowed to ignore or fire her. But this would create a new political firestorm.
Flint said that however this baseline debate plays out will tell us how much danger the IRA is facing. Brill had a slightly different perspective. He said he would expect Congress to set the topline budget resolution numbers lower if it moves ahead with this fuzzy math. But he agreed that assuming the IRA will be saved by its Republican beneficiaries fails to see the whole picture.
“They will be looking at the revenue consequences of changes, and they'll be looking at the efficiency of these policies,” Brill said. “Are they operating as intended? Are they the size and scope and scale that seem reasonable and appropriate to lawmakers? I think they're going to be thinking about this in a lot of different dimensions.”
While some oil and gas majors such as Exxon and Occidental have lobbied the Trump administration to keep at least some of the IRA in place, other fossil fuel industry players are trying to convince lawmakers that the clean energy tax credits do more harm than good. More than two dozen energy executives penned a letter to House and Senate leaders last week asking for a full repeal, arguing that the subsidies encourage “less efficient production,” raise costs for consumers, and increase the national debt.
But renewable energy researchers at the Rhodium Group and Energy Innovation published modeling last week making the opposite case. Rhodium found that rollbacks of power plant and vehicle emissions rules, combined with repeal of the IRA tax credits, would increase annual household energy costs by $111 to $184 in 2030, compared to keeping the law as it is. The modelers also found that energy spending throughout the industrial sector would increase by $8 billion to $14 billion from 2030 to 2035. Energy Innovation, which also modeled repeal of key tax credits, found this would lead to higher energy bills, as well as nearly 800,000 job losses in 2030.
Some D.C. figureheads are still bullish that full repeal of the IRA is unlikely. Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap he’s heard the argument that Republicans’ magic math could help the IRA, but he’s not sure there’s much there, there. “I do think that there's strong momentum for keeping the tax credits, and honestly, I think that's true regardless of whatever budgetary baseline they use,” he said.
Earlier this month, 21 House Republicans came out in bold, public defense of the law. This likely does not reflect the level of support latent in the party, however. Fishman said that many of the tax credits in the law historically had bipartisan support, before the Inflation Reduction Act “painted them with a partisan brush.”
“I think at the end of the day, that is actually really relevant — the fact that so many members have co-sponsored or sponsored some version of these tax credits in the past,” Fishman said.
It’s too soon to judge whether Republican support for the IRA means anything, Josh Freed, senior vice president of the climate and energy program at Third Way, told Heatmap. “IRA is uncertain until the dust settles,” he said. “It is hard to know what trade-offs are going to be asked for by the authors and by different factions within the Republican caucus until decisions on whether there needs to be pay-fors, and how much, are made.”
The timeline for when the Republican caucus will make those decisions — and set the rules of the game — is hard to predict. In that talk hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, Congressman Smith said the plan was to get the final reconciliation bill on Trump’s desk before Memorial Day.
The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.