Can heat-pumps provide routes to decarbonization of building thermal control in the US Midwest?

Climate change mitigation demands rapid decarbonization; in cold regions such as the US Midwest, building thermal control (BTC) presents a potential for significant cuts in emissions by combining renewable energy with heat pumps. Trends in natural gas and electricity pricing over the period 2007-2020 have significantly upended economic feasibility of this decarbonization approach. Heat pump-based BTC has moved from being cost advantageous in operations but higher GHG emitting (in 2007), to the exact opposite-higher cost but lower emitting (in 2020). Due to energy price fluctuations, the coefficient of performance required of a heat pump to breakeven on operational cost with high efficiency natural gas heating has doubled, changing from 2.25 to 4.5 over the period 2007-2019. The value of 4.5 is infeasible for all available cold-climate heat pump systems. Thus, while electrification via both air-source and ground-source heat pumps is a commonly identified component of decarbonization plans in the region, actual implementation has declined. Improvements in heat pump performance, overcoming adoption barriers, and adopting policies that buffer long-term climate solutions against short-term price fluctuations are all needed. In part due to continuing decreases in carbon intensity of electricity, heat pump climate benefits can be substantial over project life cycles; however, there is no current policy mechanism to enable this benefit to be considered relative to short-run economic considerations.

Automated summary

In cold regions, building thermal control (BTC) can reduce emissions by combining renewable energy with heat pumps. However, fluctuations in natural gas and electricity prices have affected the economic feasibility of this decarbonization approach and resulted in a decline in implementation.