“The easiest way to think of this as your backyard is a battery,” said Ryan Dougherty, president of the Geothermal Exchange Foundation, a trade association that advocates for geothermal heat pumps. “You can unplug that thermal battery in the winter and you can heat your house with the energy that’s right in your yard. And then in the summer, the processes are just reversed: You take the heat out of your house and you put it back into the battery. “
The downside of heat pumps is that you can’t install them yourself, unless you’re really handy. Whether using air or geothermal energy, installing a heat pump is no more difficult than an air conditioner, but you still need a professional. But the flip side of it is that heating and air conditioning companies (disclosure: my aunt owns one) have been installing these for years, so just contact the businesses local for a quote.
Cool the planet by heating your home
The installation will leave you running between $4,000 and $8,000but a heat pump pays dividends by its efficiency: It uses half electric electric furnace and fireplace on baseboard. “Even if your heat pump runs on coal power, it’s still a big deal,” said Duncan Gibb, lead heating and buildings analyst at REN21, a renewables advocate. major upgrade. “There is really nothing to lose by making buildings more efficient as quickly as possible and deploying heat pumps. I think the government should really take this seriously now. “
The long-term idea, of course, is to run the heat pump with energy generated from renewables, not fossil fuels. But economics is a bit tricky. Buying a heat pump is an upfront expense, and fossil fuels like furnace gas are still cheap. But as heat pumps become more and more popular, prices will drop, as it happened with solar panels. So it would be cheaper to heat and cool a clean home, says New York University climate economist Gernot Wagner, who sees both technologies as investments. “It’s like a solar panel,” he says of the heat pump. “First you spend a lot of money, right? Of course much less now than ever, but you spend money and when you have it you are printing electricity for free. “
To make heat pumps more affordable, especially for low-income people, governments need tax breaks and heavy subsidies to incentivize homeowners and building owners to switch. (Honestly, if billionaires really cared about saving the planet, they would pay people to get heat pumps.) But officials can also ban new gas connections, as cities like New York City and Berkeley doing. “Let’s cut the gas line, put in a heat pump,” said Wagner. “It makes a better indoor climate, it makes a better home. No wisdom. “
Another option is “heat as a service,” in which the homeowner will pay a monthly fee to a company to install and maintain a heat pump. (Such programs are starting pop up all over Europe.) “It’s like a phone plan,” says Gibb. “This is obviously great as it not only eliminates upfront costs for consumers but also reduces their risk related to fuel price fluctuations.” So if your local power plant is still running on fossil fuels and the prices of those products spike, you won’t have to bear the brunt of your heating bill.
