Heat pumps are often touted as an efficient way to decarbonize home heating. But a new approach to driving their adoption is on the rise in the U.S.
Over the past few months, federal energy-efficiency regulators and state and city building-code overseers have begun to promote policies aimed at encouraging people to replace their existing central air-conditioning systems with heat pumps.
Although heat-pump sales already outpaced gas furnace sales last year, new research from Rewiring America shows that U.S. heat-pump sales need to grow more than threefold from current trends by this decade’s end to fully replace fossil-fueled home heating by midcentury.