Carl Johnson’s heat pump was photographed at his home in Spokane on July 15th. (Taylor Thomasland/Spokesman commentary)
Carl Johnson was just trying to find a way to make his home in Corbin Park, which he built in the early 1900s, comfortable.
The gas stove was about to fail, and his central air conditioner was broken. To cool the house, Johnson runs several portable devices over the summer that blow hot air back into the room, adding to his electricity bill every month.
So he began researching central air conditioning systems online and chose a heat pump for his home, a combined heating and electrification system promoted by politicians and the White House as a method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Democratic Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate narrowly 51-50 on Sunday, included a major push for a climate-friendly energy system, including heat pumps.
The bill includes discounts and benefits for the purchase of heat pumps for air conditioning and water treatment in residential buildings. According to Bloomberg, the law provides discounts of up to $8,000 for installing heat pumps in homes over the next decade. Those who are not eligible for a tax refund can still receive up to $2,000 in tax credits.
The inflation bill also builds on President Joe Biden’s decision in June to stimulate domestic production of equipment that helps curb carbon emissions, including heat pumps, by providing $500 million in funding, The Hill reports.
Johnson turned the thermostat 66 degrees to display the fans on his smartphone, which he said worked like a dream.
“When you put your hands behind the sofa, you see two air vents and it’s actually quite cold in there,” he said. “Sometimes we have to cover ourselves with blankets.”
The Washington State Building Code Board — after pushing for the mandatory use of heat pumps in new commercial buildings — has previously put forward a proposal to install the same heat pumps in new homes built in 2023 and later, with a few exceptions. At the end of June, the commission voted to bring the proposal to a public hearing this fall.
Any amendments to the rules, including the requirement for residential electric heating, must be approved by December 1 to take effect next year.
Proponents point to research showing that the move, even with a back-up system that provides heat with conventional natural gas during a drastic drop in winter temperatures, could result in a home in Spokane County cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% annually over the next decade. But the price of these savings could be an immediate increase in network load and possibly higher tariffs to cover the increase in transmission and generation, not to mention maintaining gas transmission lines that households may not even use after switching.
“As I discuss these issues with employees and policy makers, I want to remind them that we must consider the unintended consequences,” Jason Thaxton, senior vice president of energy resources and environmental compliance officer at Avista Corp., said in a recent interview.
Thackston said the utility expects that if all natural gas customers in its service area are required to switch to electric heating during the winter, utility rates will have to double to pay for new infrastructure and production capacity to keep up. when the thermometers drop. . Inner Northwest.
Of course, the conversion doesn’t happen that way. This will start with contractors building new homes using primary electrical heat, and then people like Johnson continuing to incorporate the technology into existing homes. This is the key to gradual environmental change, says Brian Henning, director of the Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society and the Environment.
In fact, in the 1950s, when most homes in the area were heated by oil, Washington Hydro (later Avista) was already testing such devices. Early returns show potential cost savings of 25% to 35%. in the comments of the press secretary.
A traditional air-to-air pump works exactly like an air conditioner, but in reverse. The bypass valve in the car in winter turns the outdoor unit into an evaporator, expelling cold air and extracting heat from the outside air to heat the house.
This can lead to problems that are exacerbated in cooler climates. If temperatures drop to near freezing temperatures east of the cascades during the winter months, ice can form on outdoor evaporators. To melt the ice, the machine changes its function again, essentially becoming an air conditioner when the air outside is at its coldest.
This solution has been and will be solved by introducing auxiliary energy. Typically this is either an electric coil inside a heat pump or a traditional gas stove used to heat the air in your home while outside equipment de-ices.
The Johnson pump has a back-up gas furnace that costs more to install than the pump itself. Like his temperature, he can control the start-up temperature of the backup gas on his smartphone.
New rules being considered by state officials would allow supplemental heating under certain conditions and allow existing non-electric heating systems to be replaced as long as the power rating is the same or less.
Johnson’s heat pump was installed by NORINCO Heating and Air Conditioning. Company owner Len Pedersen said he still recommends homeowners install a back-up gas system because of the cost and the need for electric furnaces, which will run more frequently in colder parts of the state than in other parts of the state. Cascades to the east of the mountains.
“Once we get down to 10 degrees and then you turn on the backup electric oven, it’s like having 6 to 10 air conditioners outside,” Johnson said.
Spokane County Commissioner Al French, who served on the state’s building code board and opposed the electrical requirements, noted that such a change would also require an increase in electrical capacity in the home or apartment building. He said the additional costs would be passed on to tenants who would not have a source of heat in the event of a winter power outage.
The French believe that this requirement will hit low-income tenants and people of color most directly by raising their cost of living.
Efforts to change building codes requiring electricity have bypassed the legislature, which refused to introduce a bill in the current session to ban the expansion of new natural gas services in the state, the French said.
Installing a heat pump and oven system also doesn’t offer cost savings compared to a traditional oven and air conditioner, Johnson said.
However, proponents of this proposal argue that any cost analysis must include the social costs of continuing to burn natural gas and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They argue that the problem is more existential than economic, and the evidence does suggest that this shift will surely benefit the environment over time.
During the pandemic, Teresa Pistocini watched as the local utility dismantled and replaced underground gas pipelines in her area.
“I wanted to say, ‘Can’t you do it? “I don’t have the right to vote.”
Pistocini has personally moved away from natural gas, and her professional work has shown that switching from a traditional stove to a heat pump system will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In April, the journal Energy Policy published a peer-reviewed paper by Pistochini and others at the institute quantifying how much emissions can be reduced by using heat pumps in homes.
The study took into account the energy needs of specific homes and simulated emissions reductions based on the climate of six different US regions. The decline was mildest in the Midwest, where extremely cold winters require more frequent use of auxiliary power. They are highest in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast, with an estimated decline of 62% to 68% in Spokane.
These calculations over a 15-year period are based on utilities like Avista reducing their carbon footprint. The utility said it aims to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030, provide 100 percent clean power by 2045, and stop funding upgrades to Montana’s Colstrip coal-fired power plant starting in 2025.
Earlier this summer, state regulators approved the utility’s latest clean energy plan.
Avista’s Thackston said increased demand on the power grid could force utilities to look in the meantime to other production methods, including gas-fired plants, that could undermine emissions reduction efforts.
“We view the energy ecosystem as a whole ecosystem,” Saxton said. “We’re committed to standing up for the right fuel in the right application and giving our customers the choice.”
Saxton added that supplying homes with electricity from natural gas-fired power plants is also less efficient than allowing individual homeowners to continue burning natural gas in their stoves.
As more homes move to electrified heating, utilities digging replacement pipes present another challenge: a maze of natural gas lines that will eventually need to be replaced or repaired. Reducing the number of people using and paying for gas could lead to a shift, Pistochini said.
“As gas consumption falls, this will drive up costs,” she said. “Who will pay for all the infrastructure? It’s very confusing.”
Henning acknowledged that, in the short term, utilities may need to rely on natural gas to meet growing demand for electricity from the grid. But in the long run, state laws are pushing them toward other sources of energy, as reflected in Pistocini’s findings on future greenhouse gas emission reductions.
The need for new construction will also be less disruptive and give utilities time to build the network and increase storage capacity, Henning said.
“The more we can do these things in stages over time, the lower the cost,” he said.
While heat pumps used in homes are usually heated by outside air, there are other examples of non-natural gas heating in the city if you know where to look.
“We saw the writing on the wall before these building codes were published,” said John Gillett, director of facilities at Spokane Community College.
That’s why Spokane Community College’s main hall on Mission Avenue uses water from the Spokane Aquifer to cool the building during the summer.
These types of geothermal systems have also been around for decades. Anthony Sean, head of mechanical systems at MW Engineers in Spokane, said their new app demonstrates a shift in how society thinks about heating and cooling air. The company developed a similar system at Gonzaga University’s John J. Hemmingson Center in 2015.
Sean compares this shift to what happened in Spokane, when Washington Hydro (now Avista) stopped providing steam heating to customers in the 1980s, and large double chimneys above the downtown skyline became a beacon for beer and commerce, not energy production. Or when the coal pans in the basements of homes built in the early 20th century were boarded up and replaced with oil and gas systems.
Since the 1990s and 2000s, new heat pump technologies have improved, Sean says, resulting in products that can increase efficiency and reduce utility costs to less than half of what some users pay for gas heating, and almost to the equivalent for commercial properties. heating costs.
The cost of electricity to use a heat pump depends on the efficiency of the system. Depending on the design and choice of equipment, utilities using electric heating can be more expensive because the cost of natural gas is lower in the inner northwest, or use more efficient equipment for as little as half the cost of natural gas equivalent, Sean says.