I don’t get the point? They point out two issues: picking an installer and adding insulation to the home. How are these hard or disruptive?
We switched to a heat pump last year and couldn’t be happier. It was quite expensive but Federal subsidies are now available with the Inflation Reduction Act in effect.
The real issue here is that the HVAC industry is quite conservative and still commonly recommends against heat pumps. This is the real political difficulty to overcome and the IRA’s buckets of money will do it. Europe needs the same.
One way to combat conservative HVAC is require installing heat pumps instead of central ACs. My impression is that heat pumps, at least the warm-temp ones, are only little more expensive than ACs since they are similar designs. Requiring heat pumps means that the customer has the option to use it now or later.
I got AC installed a few years ago and regret not getting a heat pump. I didn't think about it until it was too late.
I did this recently when replacing our failed central AC, it was an extra $500 over the AC. It’s tied into the existing natural gas furnace.
The main issue is your basic 14 SEER heat pump needs larger capacity to be able to be the sole heating source than it does for just AC, so in my case in the northeast US the heat pump can’t economically be run in Winter, just spring/fall & probably can’t keep up with the coldest winter days at all. But it does provide flexibility if gas prices spike in the future, and saves a very small amount of money per year (< $100)
If you’re the type to buy a high efficiency system going with a heat pump over central AC seems like it’s maybe more worth it from a return on investment standpoint
You don’t want to oversize the unit because then the cooling runtime will be too short to properly dehumidify.
The solution usually is like in your case to include an auxiliary heat source such as electric or gas for those extreme cold days the heat pump can’t keep up.
Not really an issue to oversize anymore if the system uses inverter based compressors and multi speed fan systems. That said, those are unlikely to be used in the cheapest heat pump systems.
Question: I recently got an “inverter” based A/C and I see it has very smooth start up. Is that basically what I would call a brushless motor? Maybe the term inverter is being used because the original source is A/C?
Nope, nothing to do with that. The difference is: older style have either the compressor either on or off. They turn on or off using a contactor (basically a special relay).
Inverter refers to the drive circuitry for the compressor. The inverter basically concerts AC to DC, then it's inverted back into AC, however the AC output can be variable frequency. This allows for slower speeds of the compressor, at lower power consumption.
As far as I'm aware the compressor design can be exactly the same, the only difference is the drive for it.
A brushless motor is a 3 phase motor without brushes. A brushed motor is a dc motor with brushes.
I say that because both can spin up very aggressively.
What you’re seeing is not really because it’s brushless- it’s a “soft start” feature… most likely. It could also be that your unit is a variable speed.
Now — I may be completely misunderstanding what you’re asking. If so apologies. I went from an old unit to a newer variable speed, and the starting does seem very smooth, even when cranking up to full vs the jarring and faster spin up of the old unit.
I don’t think older A/C units used brushed motors, but A/C induction motors. A/C induction motors often have a clunk when they start, because doing speed control is more expensive than just turning them on all at once. Once you have a brushless motor, you don’t need a clunk anymore to start it, you necessarily have enough control to smoothly start and stop it. But my question is why do they call it an “inverter” motor and is that the same as an brushless motor?
Your typical AC unit has a single solenoid that physically makes or breaks the connection across your 240v line. That's the big clunk you hear when the compressor kicks on. This type of control is either all the way on or all the way off.
An inverter topology uses a bunch of electronics to convert your incoming 240v to a lower voltage or even frequency. This gives the electronics very fine control over how the motor works. You can start up slow, or run the motor at 50% or anything you want.
This doesn't really have anything to do with whether the motor itself is brushless. All brushless motors require advanced drive electronics. This usually ends up being pretty similar to an inverter topology, but not necessarily. A brushed motor doesn't care, you can just jam some electricity in and get motion out.
What you think of when you say "brushless motor" is categorically -not- the kind of motor in an AC unit. AC compressors use larger induction motors which may not have brushes, but they are not 'brushless motors'
A brushless motor specifically refers to a particular type of DC motor which uses phased, stationary coils to move a rotor with a ring of magnets. An AC induction motor may use either an iron core in the rotor, or a coil of wire that produces a magnetic field for the stator windings to push against.
I'm also in the northeast US (more specifically New England) and that's the issue I couldn't get around when I looked into it.
My AC unit is only 1.5 tons but my furnace is 40k BTU and, unlike the 75k BTU furnace it replaced, is appropriately sized for the space. (Why someone previously installed such a massively oversized furnace I will never know.) If I remember correctly a 1.5 ton heat pump is roughly equivalent to 18k BTU, so it might be useful in the all too brief cool but not cold periods in spring and fall but in winter I'd still mainly be relying on the gas furnace.
Split system heat pumps at least are almost exactly the same as a regular AC condenser, only difference being that there’s a reversing valve to reverse the flow of refrigerant.
How expensive? I live in a old terraced house in the UK (no cavity wall, wooden floors open to cellar below). Adapting the house to be suitable for heatpumps is going to require cladding the whole of the house, redoing the floors, replacing the external front door and replacing all the radiators. It's going to cost tens of thousands of pounds.
To me (Eastern Europe) this sounds like a standard stuff done by default when a building is renovated, due to energy savings. Done since long time ago, before heat pumps. Insulation also increases indoor comfort in the continental winters (prevents cold draft) and recently summers too. Seems both of these are coming to the UK, get used to it. For whom it's expensive either DIY or live in apartment instead.
A lot of the UK's housing stock is comprised of victorian buildings from before the advent of electricity. They have high ceilings, large windows, large gardens, traditional red brick walls and beautiful period features like carved exterior stonework.
They are also extremely badly insulated and costly to heat, having solid brick walls, large windows and high ceilings. We've already picked the low-hanging fruit like loft insulation and double glazed windows.
What's left to do is things like exterior cladding. I looked at getting external insulation applied to a victorian terraced house, and was quoted £30,000 - more than the UK's median salary.
The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.
As someone who lives in the Nordics, I always go "heh" when people say they have "double-glazed windows" like it's something modern.
Even my grandma's summer cabin has double glazed windows and it's not liveable during winters in the least. =)
Over here triple-glazing is the minimum and has been for decades, I don't see why it wouldn't be useful everywhere else too. They keep the heat out during summers and the heat in during winter.
I recently had to replace the majority of windows in my home in the US. I was appalled at the options and gimmicks and downright shady sales tactics. I ended up having custom windows made to get what I wanted. Maybe it's a "grass is greener" thing, but I'm envious of how it seems people are just more honest in the Nordics.
I've gone through the same in Australia and the "modern double glazing" in practice meant importing windows from Poland. Literally shipping around the world was the most reasonable option a few years ago (hopefully it's better today) while really crappy houses burning energy to heat/cool every room are still being built as a default idea.
In South Africa, double glazed windows are usually imported too (the parts) but they are assembled here so that they can get your measurements exactly right.
This completely misses the point - we are talking about easy wins. There is zero point putting triple glazed windows in a 200 year old house that isn’t otherwise insulated
Like they said, that's the minimum. Usually those are efficient enough so you can have a single window unit with a pane in the middle, but quadruples are common too.
Unfortunately, having more panes of glass does not automatically mean you get more energy efficiency.
The triples with very good insulation and coatings (eg. heat rejection) can be better than old quadruples. My parents have quadruple windows from the 80's, and energy efficiency is much better in a modern triple single unit than with the two doubles they have.
> The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.
That would be what, like 7% return on investment? We just had a period of ~0% interest rates and <2% mortgage rates.
It is not realistic to expect ROI of only a few years for upgrades to buildings or infrastructure. Lifespan of these things is like half a century or more.
Coming from eastern Europe, the age and condition of housing here was a bit shocking.
There used to be a grant in UK for insulating housing, and it was cut by conservative government. Our rate of insulating homes dropped form 2 million houses a year to basically zero. Without favourable credit, maybe zero interest credit, avaliable, of course individual homeowners will find it difficult to afford.
I have a heat pump in such a house, even worse actually since it is a semi-detached. I did not need to do any extra work, and it works fine. My savings are not great, but that is also mostly because I don't have a hot water tank so I still need gas for my hot water. We just replaced 3 radiators, one of which is actually still permanently shut and I am still doubtful about the need for the other twos.
For the walls, it can become quite expensive to insulate it. But at least for the wooden floor, you have a cheap option: lay a new laminate flooring with proper underlay. It will cost typically less than £1000, you'll avoid damaging your wooden flooring, and also improve the thermal confort by removing the air leaks and insulating more.
Is that really the bottleneck, though? They are already dramatically more efficient than combustive or resistive heat. But they are usually not drop-in replacements, and it's harder to retrofit older single family homes with them, vs a smaller apartment where you can just drop in a mini split and take out the old furnace.
Isn't that basically increasing the surface area? It makes sense at scale, but couldn't you reach same effect with 50% bigger area anyway? And I would expect that the surface area is already optimised to be close enough to what is needed. So for residential I wonder if there is any real gains there.
Question for anyone that knows the answer. Where do we actually get these subsidies? My mom’s house has an old fuse panel and I’ve seen it said that she can get a subsidy to upgrade it to breakers. How would I actually get this for my mom?
It's also an article from the Economist, so they are unlikely to be favourable to any kind of investments like this that don't have immediate obvious ROI.
A practical problem with heat pumps is that they keep changing the damn refrigerants.
I've got an old heat pump and the refrigerant it used, R-22, stopped being using new systems about 10 years ago, and production was banned a few years ago. It is still legal to sell existing stock and to use it in existing units, but the price has skyrocketed.
I'd like to replace it, but the refrigerant that replaced R-22, R-410a, is now being phased out. Manufacture and import was banned starting this year. It is being replaced with R-454b. Systems cannot be retrofitted to use R-454b, so getting an R-410a system means getting a system with an already doomed refrigerant.
If I buy a new system in the next year or so, when R-454b systems become available, is that a refrigerant that should remain available new for the lifetime of the unit, or is it too going to get banned in 10 years?
R22 was banned from new HVAC units in 2010, and was only banned from import in 2020.
R410a isnt even banned from new HVAC until 2025, and they've stated they'll permit importing until 2037 for maintenance purposes.
Seems pretty straightforward that you can easily/cheaply service the unit for at least 10 years, then after that you're going to need to potentially pay a lot more.... which seems entirely reasonable, given that the service that requires lots of additional refrigerant is exactly the problem the EPA is trying to solve: refrigerants leaking into the atmosphere.
Honestly, I'd be much more worried about being able to find parts for the complicated heat pump systems (electronics, mostly) 10+ years down the road than I would about being able to find refrigerant.
You can't keep getting consumers to buy new equipment though. It should be lifetime approved. The same way old cars don't have to meet new environmental standards.
It is, though. You're free to continue using an HVAC system with R22 today. You can even refill it with R22, albeit at the expensive price of current R22.
This actually just like a car. At some point maintenance cost exceeds the value of the car and it is no longer feasible to continue keeping it. So you scrap it, or sell it to someone else.
If you're frequently refilling an old HVAC (R22 or otherwise) it means that it has a leak. And that's precisely the thing that the EPA wants people to not do, since it's damaging to the environment. HVAC units should never leak, ever, if they are working properly.
Something I don't quite understand about the article: Why is insulation tied to the heating source?
In any given house, per unit of heat generated is going to leak out at the same rate no matter how that heat is produced, no? Whether that heat comes from a gas boiler, a heat pump, or a resistive heater shouldn't matter...?
No you're absolutely right, a poorly insulated home does not
make any qualitative difference to a heat pump's effectiveness, you just need to buy a bigger heat pump.
I think the way costs scale is important - a big gas boiler doesn't cost that much more, you're just burning more gas, but a big heat pump costs more. Heat pumps put more of the cost up front and less down the track.
So if the uninsulated homeowner is facing a $10k bill for a massive heat pump they can say "ooh what if I spend $1k on insulation" and they could get the sizing down and spend $6k.
There's really no fundamental difference. The heat pump itself doesn't know whether you've got a massive house that's well insulated or a tiny house that's poorly insulated, it's just a heat load.
In the context of the article, they are talking about replacing old boiler systems which were generally designed at the turn of the previous century. During that time, steam systems were designed to provide heat in buildings where the windows would be open to allow fresh air in (due to the idea that sickness was caused by “bad air”, so opening windows was considered a health thing), so they blasted heat at full tilt without any regard to efficiency. Those same buildings also weren’t designed to be airtight or insulated.
With a heat pump, you really need to make an effort to keep the heat inside, as the heat output can’t match a boiler. So you need to redesign the whole building.
If I'm understanding you right, heat pumps can't match the BTU (peak power) output of a traditional furnace? You can't just get a bigger heat pump (or several) sized for a larger building?
I can’t speak for every situation, but basically: yes. It’s not the heat pump itself that’s the limit, it’s the energy source that feeds it. The skinny gas pipe going into my home can deliver vastly more energy than the crappy old wires and breaker box can. Upgrading the breaker box is certainly not impossible, but it is enormously expensive. The expense is mostly the expert labor required. If we really cared about making this transition, we would set up collective action and utilize economies of scale by having the utility company come through a neighborhood and upgrade service to every house at the same time to massively reduce the labor costs per home, and amortize the cost of the work. I don’t expect to see that happen in my lifetime, however.
as far as I understand, the challenge with heat pumps compared to traditional boilers is that they operate on a much lower heat. now older homes will often have radiators that are too small to dissipate enough heat given lower-temperature water. in newer setups, this is often solved by using bigger radiation surface (i.e. floor heating)
You can size up your heat pump, but you still need to bring the temperature into your room, which requires a big enough surface for the heat to move from the water to the air.
It depends on what you mean by “traditional furnace” since there are many generations of technology in play here. The article talks about “boilers”, which are huge tanks full of fire and steam, usually in the basement of a large office or apartment building, made out of cast iron and attached to cast iron radiators in the living area. They don’t run on a thermostat and just pump out as much heat as possible. These are the type of systems you see in movies where they handcuff someone to the radiator.
They’re not at all what most people living in a typical single family dwelling would think of as a furnace, which may be a forced air or water-based baseboard radiator setup.
A heat pump can keep up with a traditional furnace type system just fine, but not a boiler system because the buildings with boilers are so old they don’t have much insulation at all.
“Boiler” is British English, “Furnace” is American English.
In Britain a boiler is a device in a single family home that provides heating by using gas or electricity to heat water which is then piped to radiators. It is also used to heat water for showers. Boilers can be quite small, many modern boilers are “combi” boilers that heat water on demand without a separate hot water tank. My boiler is the size of a suitcase.
Older properties generally have a boiler and insulated hot tank. This means that you need to plan your showers and heating requirements in advance by “putting the water on” to ensure there’s enough hot water in the tank.
Forced air heating is rarely used in the UK and people are generally not familiar with the concept.
A boiler essentially means the same thing in American English. And they do occur in America. They are just usually rare, and only remain in larger older buildings, or very old residential homes. Most buildings are forced air heated (gas or electric usually) or those more recently installing heat pumps.
> But it’s quite stupid: In both countries you need AC, [...]
Almost no residential building in Germany has AC, and I'm unsure what you mean by "need". Also the buildings are built to last, so no remodeling every few years like in the US.
That means one is stuck with most of the utility built into the house from the start. Remodeling a regular central European brick-and-mortar house to accommodate floor heating or duct vents is difficult and expensive.
Speaking from Switzerland: most building until recently were clearly built for cold winters, not hot summer. They are often insulated quite well and well heated, but recent summers showed that they aren't suitable for hot weather: they lack AC, rely simply on open windows for ventilations and frequently have too many large windows that can't be darkened enough, hence letting a lot of heat in
I agree with that take. Being like "look at Germany, we don't need ACs" is outdated bs. I absolutely suffer for almost 2 months a year because I don't have an AC including lack of sleep etc. We will see a rise, even though some people feel like that's the wrong thing to do with the climate change.
There's a fine line: if you have green energy, why would you care? Consuming more green energy actually improves the overall situation, as more money is available to build out green energy in the first place (especially with things like Green Planet Energy). It's just the need for moral superiority for some folks that's stopping AC distribution in central Europe imho.
I agree with you on the energy use. Even more so because the peak of cooling demand corresponds very well with the peak of PV energy production. If the system is well designed, cooling using an efficient split AC unit will be almost free. Besides, if they really don't want people to adopt AC it's high time to start adapting buildings and cities for hot summers , which means reducing the amount of paved surfaces, planting more trees, adding forced ventilation to buildings and blinds that really darken rooms.
Oh yeah good point! I always wonder why no one sees the very simple things you can do in a city. It shouldn't cost much to add trees etc. to a city with such a big impact
They are starting. We had a referendum in Zurich last Sunday to to finance a project to adapt the city to hotter summers. It was a complex situation, with the municipal government recommending people reject the initial project in favor of a similar project organised by the city environment department. It all looks good on paper, but I fear another case of money being spent most on planning instead of using it to adopt simple measures.
If you are interested, you can read all about it here:
https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/portal/de/index/politik_u_recht...
So as I understand it's rejected? Fingers crossed it works out! But at least you can vote on something ;) In Germany you just feel left out and stuff happens (in either direction). That doesn't feel good at all.
The original plan was rejected because it was too vague regarding who would implement it. The counter-proposal from the city was accepted, therefore they will now start to work on how to best implement it. Unfortunately a large sum of the money will just be spent in planning and hiring, which is kind of typical for these public projects
Maybe a generation gap? I think the younger folks, who are only barely entering government, tend to take climate and livability much more seriously than the old generations who "got along fine without all that". Times are changing...
I've been running mine for about a month. Depends on your house, how much it traps heat, etc.
Really it's besides the point - you might not need a plunger to unclog the toilet or a fire extinguisher or a first aid kit often, but when you do, you really need it!
What about portable units? They're pretty popular here in NL, but I suppose people are also rapidly installing mini-splits, at least here in the south.
Portable units in general are just bad. Not very efficient, noisy and not that performant. And sadly it seems most only have single pipe, not two that would fix lot of issues.
They are just terribly inefficient. Now a lot are sold here, but it's just not a feasible solution to make living in summer more tolerable. A mini split or even better centralised AC for the entire building is much more efficient
From Nordic viewpoint Air-to-Air heatpumps are affordable and easy enough to install. Couple thousand for unit and professional installation. For single-family and even terrace no brainer. Next step up is more complicated and expensive, but still possible.
And for rest district heating is common enough. And there a centralised solutions make sense, even real efficiency gains like using waste heat from factories and datacenters.
It seems you are a decade ahead of Switzerland, where the most common heating system is still an oil/gas furnace and installing a split AC unit requires permissions from the municipality. In some places they are even subjected to restrictions on operating times,as a tenant you can forget about AC unless you move to a very new Minergie unit. Now people are warming up to heat pumps but it seems the wider public fails to understand split AC units are nothing but mini heat pumps
I'm really baffled as an Australian. I admit, our climate is mild but we do have 4 degree C nights and 44 degree C days sometimes. I spent AUD$10k (US$6k I think?) on split system aircon for my entire house and they work totally fine. In fact I must have slightly oversized because they have easily performed in the most extreme conditions. Installation took all morning.
It's not about the technology. It's about how electricity is priced very highly compared to gas in the UK. Our electricity in Western Australia is only double the cost per kWh compared to gas, but one kWh of electricity generated three kWh of heat in a reverse cycle air con so it's a no brainer.
In particular, half the houses in Britain have no insulation in the walls at all.
In fact older houses tend to handle heat better - they are naturally drafty, there is a loft taking the heat, they have high thermal mass, and maybe they are even damp and have a leak and mould. All that takes away from the heat.
But now we get newbuild apartments without AC's, and that should be a crime. These buildings are air tight, have zero ventilation, trap heat, no thermal mass so they don't stay cool from the night, and in some of them you can't open windows. And you are not allowed to install a split system because the landowner will never give permission.
“Need” = decide right? They want to reuse the existing radiators, but it comes with a bunch of disadvantages. You either need to replace the radiators with modern low-temperature convection radiators or place radiator ventilators. Air/water heat pumps are better suited for floor heating. You often can’t cool either, at least not with hybrid heat pumps, or you can cool a limited amount in this ever hotter getting climate.
Just guessing but maybe heat pumps have a lower max power rating, so that you'd need better insulation to reach a desired temperature during colder days.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my experience with different kinds of heating tell me otherwise. Using AC (or any kind of air heater) has terrible efficiency, in the sense that when you turn it off, any small leak will drain all the hot air and you are left with a cold room. On the other hand, using radiating heat means the heat is "stored" in thermal mass in the room, so opening doors or windows have little effect.
Seems like the article is addressing two orthogonal issues — home insulation and heat pumps. They are suggesting that heat pumps depend on improved home insulation. Why?
Is the idea that heat pumps don’t pack enough punch to replace boilers on their own, and they need to be combined with a more efficient building envelope in order to be sufficient?
Gas heating in old construction heats up the water to 80+C. Heat pumps typically result in lower temperatures. This is not an issue in new construction, which often has floor heating or special radiators. But old construction has radiators that struggle to heat up the interior at these water temperatures -- unless you improve the insulation, which is sensible anyway.
The problem with insulation is retrofitting it is expensive and carries a huge risk because older houses are designed around the idea that they breath.
The current practice of insulating inside the envelope is just so blindly stupid I can't wrap my head around why people think it's a good idea. If you work it out, insulation should go on the outside of the envelop. Think insulated siding and roof panels. Granted I'm now seeing that,
And with insulation you quickly run into the problem that the benefits rapidly diminish while the cost is linear. R30 doesn't save you three times R10.
At some point it's be cheaper to put solar panels on the roof to run a heat pump than add more insulation.
> retrofitting it is expensive and carries a huge risk
Because construction industry is shockingly incompetent and corrupt.
Lived in a few newbuilds, they are full of fuckups - walls aren't straight, the hole for a fire sprinkler is not where the sprinkler is, so in case of fire it won't actually work. The hot water plumbing was not up to spec and has discharged a swimming pool of boiling water into someone's apartment, they are lucky no-one died.
They will not get something as complex and humidity control right.
I'll add I'm suspicious of insulation since all the modern stuff is foamed petroleum. I feel that's both a fire hazard[1] and has the potential to be classified as toxic waste. See lead paint and asbestos.
That's not true. Heat pumps are cheaper to run than gas heating, I removed my old single room gas heater for a ducted split system total cost reduction was 30% even before Russian invasion caused gas prices to spike. And house is much warmer.
Gas boilers generally produce much hotter water, so the radiators they use tend to be small.
Heat pumps gain more efficiency if you can reduce the output temperature. So running a heat pump at max efficiency through radiators designed for a gas system, won't put out as much heat into the room.
So you have two options, increase the size of the radiators or increase the insulation.
It's better to increase the insulation as you gain the benefit of both warmer room and less energy required to heat a room.
I can assure you it is true, but for transparency’s sake I will say that I have no idea what a single room gas heater is.. I’m pretty sure it isn’t what we are talking about here. Neither do I no what a ducted split system is.
I think that depends a lot on location dependend prices. I am in denmark and my ehat pump is significantly cheaper to run than the gas boiler that it replaced, even if you compare it with pre ukraine/pre covid gas prices.
which begs the question - why would anyone switch from a gas boiler to heat pump then, if they only consider economic utility, and none of the externalities?
I doubt anyone here has planted a tree. We talk of action and do nothing.
Every time I mention trees, I am told that instead we need expensive contraptions made out of mined materials, that usually require an external source of power. Instead of putting a tree in the ground and letting nature do its job, we have tricked ourselves into thinking that nature doesn't know enough.
In our hubris and delusion we will end our species and the rest of nature will scratch its head and wonder why.
I only own a half acre of property and it’s chock full of them. I live in the United States, there isn’t any land that I would plant on in my county that isn’t owned public or privately, that the gas and oil or electricity companies won’t cut down, much less the commercial timber industry which takes up about 50% of the land, anyway, I’d love to plant trees but what would you recommend, trespass on private company and hope the owner doesn’t clear it out?
Also it’s more than just planting, they need careful tending for the first few years, whether fertilizing or fighting aphids or disease, I don’t want to just volunteer to plant trees in some far away place nobody tends to, lots of those “plant a million trees” programs become “maybe a hundred thousand survived” stories, especially if care is not taken to use an appropriate tree for the conditions it is planted.
Anyway I’d just like to know what you think about “gorilla growing” because very few people own more than an acre, and, especially where I live, people are very hostile about trespassing, it could get you killed
It's always easier to choose the option that costs less to install but more to use. That's why lots of homes have poorly insulated pipes and lots of people use cheap printers that require expensive ink.
Heating with gas doesn’t cost more to use (at least now), and doesn’t require the insulation either.
Thermal heat from gas is cheap, even when gas is expensive. Gas has a LOT of btus. Furnaces are also far simpler to make and maintain than heat pumps, which is why they are still so popular.
Yeah as far as residential building tech rehabs Europe is at least 50 years behind. To go into a use an infrared camera and plug it with insulation is easy. There are also geothermal heat pumps that work fine.
Edmond, OK incentives geothermal installs in homes as its lowers the city's peak electricity costs. That said Edmond's average household income is $108k for a 31k households city in one of the cheapest metros in the country so they can afford it.
New construction in Germany is insanely well insulated -- by law. But we have a huge existing base of old construction that takes ten times as much energy to heat up or more.
You can't just hear all that down, and improving the insulation is expensive, more expensive than just installing a new heating system. Think at least 50k EUR for a small house, five to ten times as much for a typical inner city large, multi tenant building.
I'd also think so. Better insulation should mean lower energy demand for heating (and cooling, but as you might imagine residential AC is almost non-existing in central Europe)
> Green policies had seldom required private citizens to roll up their sleeves and make big, disruptive changes to their lives. Now they are starting to, and many people do not like it.
This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem but are being asked to account for much more.
What do you mean? Aren't consumers usually on the trailing end of these sorts of things?
In the US at least, and especially the West Coast, things like SEER (HVAC efficiency) and CAFE standards (car fuel economy) have been steadily rising, at least until Republican officials push back. Building codes include better and better rules for renewable energy production, insulation, etc. In the private sector things like LEED encourage buildings to utilize better materials, passive heating and cooling, water management, etc. Those are all constraints on the manufacturers and companies. Where consumers are encouraged to change to newer appliances, grants usually help cover the costs of new fridges, LED lights, HVAC equipment, sprinklers, etc.
Heat pumps as a consumer phenomenon didn't even catch on until very recently, decades after regulations spurred market innovation.
Maybe it works differently in Germany, but here at least it seems like we go way out of our way to incentivize consumer behavior over decades instead of forcing through overnight changes.
Could it be a marketing issue, where governments and manufacturers making these iterative changes don't really broadcast them to the public at large, such that when the changes finally hit the average homeowner, they are still caught by surprise? To them it might seem like a sudden change even though it's been happening behind the scenes for years?
It depends on how you want to attribute carbon emissions.
If Brits want to hear a Taylor Swift concert, and Swift's private jet crosses the Atlantic twice emitting 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process - are those Swift's emissions?
Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles?
What about if, instead of Taylor Swift tickets, we consider electricity? More consumption directly increases the power plant's emissions - but consumers can't control whether coal, gas, nuclear or solar supplies their power.
If you take the view that corporations' emissions are attributable to the corporation, not their customers - then corporations are much, much less green than consumers. And we'd need to focus more on emissions by giant corporations, and less on plastic straw bans.
> Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles?
The real answer for this situation is that it doesn't matter. For the 70 (not 700) tons, flip a coin between assigning Swift an extra $14000 on her already expensive flight, or assigning each concertgoer a pence. Either way it's a trivial amount.
I get what you're saying, but I think it's less about assigning blame in a "us vs them" situation and more of a "how can we clean up the whole system lifecycle" question.
The CAFE model seems to work for that. It doesn't really matter whether it's the driver or the car manufacturer, taxpayers front the regulatory research and costs, manufacturers moan and whine then eventually comply to some degree, consumers buy cars with slightly better mileage each year, over time things get better. Then Tesla comes around and makes electrification a reality, etc.
Similarly with the solar market, subsidies spurred investment and research and deployment and helped foster growth, until there is so much of it that (say) California's grid can hardly keep up, China saw the market and took it over, etc. These days it's a commodity. Government carrots do work, is all I'm saying.
You can create demands and markets through planned public investments.
Sometimes, though, we do blame fossil fuels companies, whether they're using tankers or oil rigs or pipelines. Sometimes those controversies can help spur better protections and safety regulations and whatnot, but at the end of the day your point stands: from a climatic standpoint the emissions are there whether we attribute it to a single company or a million individuals. Maybe the accounting is different and helps different political players, but the atmosphere doesn't care how we divvy it up.
IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using, or Larian spending a bazillion CPU and GPU hours to make Baldur's Gate, or some politico flying back and forth to attend climate meetings. At the other extreme, Greta sails low impact and has great marketing, but that only goes so far. We still need everyday solutions that mid size companies and governments can implement on actionable timescales. That typically means low hanging fruits like more solar, more batteries, occasionally nuclear, incremental standards, etc. Is it enough? No, not nearly. But I think it's more than we've gotten from, say, Greenpeace or PETA. People generally respond better and faster to carrots than disciplinary punishments...
> IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using
I actually chose that example partly because there's an immediately actionable lower-carbon substitute: flying first-class on a normal commercial flight.
But that same logic can apply for many people and our lifestyles... why not take the train across the country instead of flying? Why not arrange carpools to/from work, or take the bus and subway? Why not stop eating meat? Ride your bike more often? Turn up the AC by 5 degrees? It's just a losing battle... imo we're genetically disinclined to do things that may vaguely benefit the species as a whole over a period of 20 years when the alternative benefits ourselves in the here and now. Maybe we celebrate that sort of altruism precisely because it's so rare and difficult for most people to do.
That's why I think steering the market towards better alternatives using a not-so-invisible hand works better than trying to coerce (or even convince) people into behavior change.
> But that same logic can apply for many people and our lifestyles... why not take the train across the country instead of flying? Why not arrange carpools to/from work, or take the bus and subway? Why not stop eating meat? Ride your bike more often?
Some people feel the whole "why not stop eating meat and ride a bike" narrative is PR by huge polluters like coal power plants and private jet owners, hoping to shift responsibility away from themselves.
Even if that's true, what does it change? We can't just regulate fossil fuels away without alternative infrastructure and markets in place. If we shut down all the coal tomorrow (or even just the private jets), whichever government forces that through is going to get voted out ASAP if they're lucky, murdered in their sleep if they're not. The laws would never survive more than a few months.
I don't disagree that big fossil fuel companies and billionaires are evil. But their evil has the tacit (and often explicit) approval and support of millions, if not billions, of average individuals who value their own comforts and convenience more than our collective well-being. Sure, not everyone's like that, but enough are such that unpopular punitive climate programs don't really have a chance of surviving long enough to matter.
That's not a matter of blame accounting, just humans being humans, a much harder problem to solve...
Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem. Not a drop of oil gets pumped from the ground without the consumer demand.
And the thing about climate change is that consumption is much more equal than financial wealth. A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
The average net worth of someone who flies private is $190M, and flying private has an outsized carbon footprint. Okay if we tax those miles and pay Climeworks (direct air carbon capture is currently the only legitimate carbon offset mechanism) to suck the CO2 back out of the air? This is not even hard, we can bill based on their ADS-B broadcast flight track.
Agree that the problem with the investments of the wealthy driving climate change is consumer demand that needs to be destroyed (EVs, heat pumps, solar, factory farming protein, etc).
I think that's a great idea. But taxing private flights won't do that much on its own. From googling the other day, flying is 2% of total carbon emissions and private jets are about 1% of that, for 0.02% total.
The problem is there is no one single solution, but a bunch of them executed in parallel. Which makes sense when everyone globally is treating the atmosphere like an open air burn pit for combustion.
It definitely isn't the only offset mechanism. But it is the only reduction method, by definition. Reduction not in production rate obviously, but total levels.
We definitely should be funding research (because systems aren't good enough yet) into these systems because we're not acting fast enough and CCS has the advantage of acting on the lag effect. But this is no excuse to not also reduce emissions. They're coupled: we need less CCS the less we produce which is nice especially considering nuclear is a cheaper option than CCS at this point.
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person.
Found the millionaire coping with his excessive consumption.
No really, I don't own a car, don't fly, don't go on cruises, don't go on vacation three times a year any other way, live in a 50 sq m flat without anything but the most basic amenities. And you know why? Because I'm poor, that's why. Like most of Earths population. So don't try to tell me my carbon footprint is the same as Gordon Geckos, it simply can not be true.
Consumers don’t demand “products manufactured from fossil fuels”, they demand products (full stop). Indeed, I suspect most consumers have an environmental bias which isn’t reflected in the market for lack of transparency (how do you tell if a product is green or merely green washed?) and also because fossil fuels are and have long been heavily subsidized.
Yes and if you change what's on offer you'll see the demand change. Consumers are good and service takers, the only person that can stop releasing carbon is the person actually releasing the carbon.
You will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
> Consumers are ultimately the ones that account for all of the problem.
You got this backwards. It's like trying to clean up a river by only picking up trash at its mouth. You're not going to do a great job.
Consumers can only buy what's available. Most people are too poor to make choices other than that on price. Capitalism can work great for price reduction but one way to do price reduction is quality reduction. If the whole non-luxury market is focusing on price reduction and the easiest way is to achieve that is quality reduction then guess what happens. On the other hand, if quality has to hold constant -- which happens when consumers are less price sensitive and won't go for a slightly cheaper option when competitor tries quality drop -- you have to research and build better and/or cheaper. BUT if most major players try the same strategy of quality reduction at the same time then consumers never get the chance to indicate to the market that they value quality.
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
Maybe don't guess and check first. We're on the internet, you don't have to respond immediately and state something that is verifiably false. While we don't have good refined data on specific jobs, there is strong correlation with wealth levels and specifically consumption rates. But if you're modeling a Wall Street banker as someone who works all day, takes the subway, sleeps, and never takes vacation then sure, that's lower. But don't confuse the mean and the median.
Edit: Taking our analogy from above: if all producers simultaneously have to do "x" then all consumers automatically also choose "x". This is where regulation can play a role since you can do things like "all cars must get at least 50mpg" or have a more market driven approach like "$100 fee per ton CO2eq" and use that fee to perform such actions like sequestration and/or research to make sequestration effective and cheap.
We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
> We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
The whole “corporations are the real polluters” is absolute political nonsense that people lie to themselves about to justify their own lazy resistance to change. It’s not like Shell pumps oil out of the ground because they think it’s fun, they do it because people buy the oil to transport themselves and heat their home. It’s not like coca-cola wakes up every morning and thinks “wow I wish there was more plastic litter” they make beverages that people purchase and drink. It’s not like steel companies just really get their giggles from turning rocks into liquid by using a ton of energy, they are making washing machines and stoves and trains that people use to live their life.
That’s not taking into account that there is a vast difference in how much pollution is emitted by different oil producers during extraction and refining. Some companies have invested into cleaning up their operations, while dirtier oil sources emit a full 1/3rd of their total pollution before the fuel even arrives at the gas pump.
The personal responsibility theory of pollution was made up by these corporations you are defending. The reason that companies make products is to sell them yes. But the reason the products are made in polluting ways and with essentially unrecylable materials is cost cutting. Regulate industries to use the more expensive but less impactful production methods, and you find that pollution will actually go down in a way that matters. Tell individuals to stop buying plastic bottles and you'll get a subset of the middle to upper class to somewhat comply. Make plastic bottles illegal (or at least mandate that the company buy them back to really recycle) and the problem becomes moot, it's not like individuals can make plastic. Same for fuel, waste disposal, etc, etc.
The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard. The companies that you are trying to absolve lobby to make that harder.
> The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard
Spoiler alert, life is going to get rather hard for a whole lot of people over the next few generations because we’ve been ignoring “the personal responsibility theory of pollution.”
> This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on.
Between space heating, transportation, water heating, and cooking, about 42% of energy-related emissions are things that consumers have some control over in their homes. We have to decarbonize both the supply side (which is happening super rapidly with wind/solar) as well as the demand side (which is much harder because it requires coordinated action across millions of people). And we have to do this incredibly swiftly to keep a livable climate.
“Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem” is only true if you believe 100% is a small percentage.
This is the attitude that shows that “fixing” climate change is doomed. Everybody can find somebody else who’s “worse” to blame the problem on and so they justify doing nothing themselves.
Solving huge geoengineering problems require full lifecycle participation, not a fight or passing the buck. We can't individually recycle or plant trees our way out of this with significant CC&S that must be done with economies of scale.
Isn’t the main problem the cost of heating? In the UK at least a kWh of electricity cost 4 times what a kWh of gas costs. Even if a heat pump is twice as efficient as gas heating, the cost of heating is still twice as high.
Part of the problem is getting the right advice, the right people to do a job and the cost.
Lots of UK houses are built <1930 and have suspended floors. I was told in various quotes for floor insulation because of tongue and groove floorboards, they'd get damaged when lifted and would have to be replaced. I managed to keep them having insulated the floor with 300mm rockwool just this past month.
Not only is there the benefit of heat retention, but hopefully it will kill a lot of draught entering the house also.
The wholesale gas price spike meant this would have paid for itself in around 5 years (I have a combi boiler), but will perhaps be closer to 10 now.
Cost all in: £400 for insulation, £1000 labour, £800 flooring replacement £200 various.
If I'd went through an accredited installer I could've received a Home Energy Scotland grant of £1500.
I'd still need to insulate my (600mm whinstone solid) walls for an air pump to be economical.
i bought a gas water heater this year. my old one was leaking with no way to stop the leak without turning off water to the house. to put in a heat pump water heater ($5-6k) and get the subsidies ($4-5k) i would also need to hire an electrician. and get permits. to run a high voltage dedicated line. this would have taken weeks to schedule and complete and cost nearly $10k upfront with maybe half getting paid back later. not exactly a good solution with leaking water
I am now getting the impression that any collective action in the West, that is harder than downloading an app, gets called 'hard', 'impractical', etc.
We switched to a heat pump last year and couldn’t be happier. It was quite expensive but Federal subsidies are now available with the Inflation Reduction Act in effect.
The real issue here is that the HVAC industry is quite conservative and still commonly recommends against heat pumps. This is the real political difficulty to overcome and the IRA’s buckets of money will do it. Europe needs the same.