Oil and Gas get massive subsidies every year, but a huge part of it are the very popular heating oil subsidies that keep people alive in the winter. Could these be reduced or replaced if instead the government gave money towards families purchasing electric heaters and spending their money on that?
Edit: USA but i assume the problem is not uniquely ours
Yes, my state has incentives for heat pump installs and a special electric rate for heat pump users (for those who heat with electric only)
I got a smaller incentive for installing a heat pump in my family room but still keeping my gas furnace. Electricity is pretty expensive here so the tradeoff is about 45°F. Above that the efficiency of the heat pump wins out, but colder than that the furnace is cheaper.
I did try the heat pump when it was cold, and it still produced a respectable amount of heat at 20°F
Yes, actually. Up here in Canada we’ve been running subsidies for electric heat-exchangers (think like an air conditioner that can work in the opposite direction when it’s cold) for a couple years now. It is absolutely possible to offset oil subsidies with electric subsidies.
Yup, I’m almost through the process right now. $0 cost to me (they’re paying me a $250 bonus as well). My home is more than 30 years old, contrary to what another comment said about the feasibility of such a program in the US. It’s definitely possible in Canada!
Yes rebates on heat pumps, especially inexpensive air to air heat pumps drive adoption. They are efficient and now work in almost any climate.
mmm…so they claim. I know people with heat pumps who needed to install secondary heating. Entirely depends on house size.
Of course it depends on the house; just like you wouldn’t put a moped engine in a tank, a heat pump needs to be sized for the space to be heated (or cooled).
If you’re installing the right sized heat pump for the space you’re heating, they’re great. If you try to heat Buckingham Palace with a space heater, you’re going to have a bad time.
Not just size, location. The best heat pumps stop working at around -20. Where I live it gets colder than that for a few days every couple years so I must have secondary heating.
The common heat pump in the US is only good to 25. There is no reason for this, but I don’t know how to fix it.
The other thing we need to do is investigate why they charge so much to install heat pumps. I can buy a mini-split for around $1500 (depending on size), but they will charge me $4500 to install it - which seems unreasonable for the labor.
Because there are inevitably licensing and especially permit application costs, the major cost there being the time and aggravation required to get the permit from your local authority which is usually an intentionally dysfunctional Kafkaesque bureaucratic edifice to hell that makes the DMV look like the teacup ride at Disney World.
Fun fact: In my county you are required to pull a permit (with a three to six month typical application wait time) to “install” any heating or cooling equipment, which technically also includes plug-in space heaters and window mounted air conditioners. To rub salt in the wound, you also need to pull a new permit to “uninstall” said equipment, that is to say to unplug it and put it away for the season. Yes, the system is certainly working as designed! (You also need a permit to install or replace a water heater. I’m sure every homeowner with a water tank that just blew and is now standing in a basement 12" deep in water with every other resident of the house screaming at them that they can’t take a shower is absolutely thrilled at that prospect. I predict the compliance rate with both of these requirements is as close to zero as mathematics will allow.)
because it takes a lot of labor to install them.
that’s a low estimate. my estimate was $10,000 to install it for a single condo unit. I’ve seen many as high as 30-40K for mid-sized homes.
What do you think it should cost? $300?
the only places i’ve seen cheap installs are like, <5 housing with all the duct work already ready go and it was basally built with an upgrade in mind.
If a single person working alone can install them in a weekend - which happens all the time - a pro who has experience in doing this often should be able to do it for $1000 or less. It is a lot of labor but not more than $4000 worth. At least not the normal case.
ok, so why don’t you go around installing them for $1000?
seems like there is a big market for it, no?
installing a heat pump is a one-day job, even with just one person. people deserve to be paid for their labour, but $400+/hr is excessive
It could help but gas heat is cheaper per BTU than heat pumps in most of the USA due to low gas prices caused by a glut of gas from the fracking boom.
This would be one barrier. Hopefully the government could justify the cost differences in light of the climate crisis. With the conflict in Iran, the cost of oil is rising anyway.
Definitely not likely under the current drill baby drill administration, but energy wise it would be the smarter play for energy security.
Resistive heating is a waste of energy. If you people can use your AC units as heat pumps, then we’re getting somewhere, if your grid can survive that
An AC unit is a heat pump. The heat is pumped out.
If the grid can run the AC it should be able to handle the heat pumps, arent they basically the same machine?
Almost, but the temperature difference is generally much greater in winter than summer meaning there is more demand for energy in winter. Also solar (and sometimes hydro) power is less effective in winter. Both factors mean that a grid that can handle summer might not be able to handle winter heat.
Remember, the above are factors. Your local grid’s exact energy mix matters here, some will have no problems.
They are, but in some places peak winter load is worse than peak summer load and with ACs running in reverse replacing oil furnaces things can get worse than expected
Functionally, yes. I mean, it needs to be the kind that have the reverse switch so you can switch it to heating in the winter, but it’s effectively the same power use.
Our tax on natural gas is already higher than electric. If we buy the same amount of heat in a whole year (not accounting solar panels) we would save about €200 per year (almost 20%).
We have also bough an heatpump for €7000, of which we get abour €2300 as subsidies for a heatpump.
To answer your question, yes it could. But a knife will always cut on both sides, and people will always be unhappy about a change. But in this case the world would benefit from it so I think we should but more tax on non-renewable and put less on renewables
No, because they cost too much. Heat Pump installation costs 30K in my city.
How are you going to make that affordable for poor folks w/o a massive subsidy? like 25K? much cheaper to give oil subsidies that cost a thousand bucks per family.
They already offer subsidies in my state, but they are like 5K, which means they benefit rich people who can afford the 30K price tag, and wait a year or two to see the rebate on their taxes. Just like with electric cars, overwhelming helps wealthy folks.
electric heaters are also horrible inefficient compared to fossil fuels. electric heating has much higher costs than oil and is far less efficient.
You’d need some sort of massive federal program to massively expand production and installation to bring costs down so they became affordable for average people.
Also a large number of homes can’t accept heat pumps at all. They are basically need to be on oil/gas heat, or be demolished/refurbed entirely for a heat pump system to work for them. Heat pump installation in my city is usually done during a gut renovation and typically you can’t install them in a home that is older than 20-30 years… which is the majority of the homes.
electric heaters are also horrible inefficient compared to fossil fuels. electric heating has much higher costs than oil and is far less efficient.
Wait until you hear about the efficency(Coefficient of perfomance) of heatpumps.
I know all about heat pumps. I’m a homeowner. the tech has been around for decades but it wasn’t usable in cold climates until recently when it became efficient enough to perform at below freezing temps.
But good ole lemmy doesn’t like facts of reality and it’s difficulties being discussed. they’d rather think real world problems can just magically be solved by good intentions, because they don’t have much real life experience.
it thinks 50 year problems can be solved in 6 months if you just ‘do it’. when realistically upgrading everyone to heatpumps would take 50+ years, and by then there will be better tech anyway.
