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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.
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Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On tough questioning from the Senate, LA’s fires, and EV leases
Current conditions: Odd weather has caused broccoli and cauliflower plants to come up far too early in the UK • Another blast of Arctic air is headed for the Midwest • An air quality alert has been issued in Los Angeles due to windblown dust and ash.
Firefighters in Los Angeles are scrambling to make progress against the ongoing wildfires there before dangerous winds return. The Palisades and Eaton fires have now been burning for almost a week, charring nearly 40,000 acres, damaging more than 12,000 structures, and leaving at least 24 people dead. They are 13% and 27% contained, respectively. Residents who lost their homes are desperately trying to find new properties to rent or buy in a tight market, with reports of intense bidding wars as landlords hike rents. The economic toll of this disaster is estimated to be between $135 billion and $150 billion. Red flag warnings are in effect today, with critical fire conditions and extreme wind gusts forecast through Wednesday.
Red fire retardant on pool furniture. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A few updates on the incoming administration: President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ed Russo to run an advisory environmental task force. Trump said Russo will oversee “initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER. Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Russo is a longtime Trump loyalist who served as an environmental consultant to the Trump Organization and wrote a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero”.
Trump also announced his deputies for some key environmental and energy Cabinet positions over the weekend, including:
More than a dozen of Trump’s Cabinet nominees face Senate confirmation hearings this week. Doug Burgum, who is up for interior secretary, has a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources tomorrow. Energy secretary nominee Chris Wright has one on Wednesday. EPA nominee Lee Zeldin has one with the Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday.
Affordable EV leases are “the car market’s hottest deal,” according toThe Wall Street Journal. Car companies are changing the way they pitch EVs to buyers, offering short-term leases with low monthly payments. These deals are attractive to first-time EV shoppers who are still a little bit hesitant to commit, as well as people on a tighter budget. Roughly 45% of EV transactions at the end of 2024 were leases, much higher than the auto industry as a whole. And a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act means leased cars can more easily qualify for the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. “The proliferation of lease deals has made EVs more accessible to buyers who couldn’t afford their higher sticker prices,” the Journal said. “For the automakers, it is helping get more EVs into customers’ hands after a choppy start for their electric-car operations.”
Wind power could overtake coal in Europe for electricity generation for the first time this year, according to the energy think tank Ember. At the end of 2024, wind power was closing in on coal, coming in at just 4% below the fossil fuel in power generation as the continent’s coal plants close. “That output gap could easily be made up over the course of 2025 by an increase in regional wind generation capacity or by higher average wind speeds at turbine level, or by some combination of both,” Reutersreported. Last year wind power accounted for 20% of electricity consumed in the EU, and the goal is to get that up to 50% by 2050. But as Electreknoted, the same problems plaguing projects in the U.S. – permitting delays and connection bottlenecks – are slowing things down. The EU accounts for 4.6% of global power sector emissions.
The World Health Organization’s European Centre for Environment and Health has issued a callout for “examples of interventions to protect and promote mental health in the face of climate change.” The group wants to take stock of these interventions so that it can identify gaps in mental health care and share some best practices. The callout is aimed at Europe only, but it is indicative of a growing awareness of how the worsening climate crisis is taking a toll on mental health worldwide.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem. We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.” –Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, speaking to Heatmap about the spread of misinformation around the LA fires