The U.S. Is Addicted To Gas Heating. A New Bill May Make Going Electric The Easy Choice.

When it’s hot, an even bigger percentage of households switch on electric air conditioners.Heat pumps ― essentially two-way air conditioners ― can do both, warming homes without spewing fossil fuel pollution into the air. The Department of Energy found that heat pumps use roughly half as much power as traditional electric systems like space heaters or baseboard heaters.“There’s very little difference from a hardware perspective between a one-way air conditioner and a two-way heat pump,” said Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University who researches heat pumps.The bill, he said, is calibrated to make up the difference in hardware costs on the assembly line, making it cheaper to just manufacture two-way heat pumps instead of air conditioners. “This isn’t so much to make heat pumps cheaper than incumbent options but to make heat pumps more prevalent.”But the efficiency of electric heating makes it less sensitive on average to price spikes from shocks in the fossil fuel markets even though most of the U.S. grid is still powered with gas and coal. Some 12 million U.S. households already use heat pumps. This month, the Netherlands ― once Europe’s top gas producer ― announced plans to ban new gas-only heating by 2026 and make heat pumps mandatory in most buildings.