Heat Pumps & Renewable Energy,  Perfect Pairing for  Better Future

OPED by Joe Wachunas, October 2024

Peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese and now heat pumps and renewable energy. These two technologies pair perfectly together and are critical to decarbonizing our country. On my heat pump water heater tour across America I couldn’t help but notice and be inspired by how together they are transforming our world for the better.

Across the dozens of states on my journey, I saw solar fields glistening in the sun, harvesting all those free photons from our nearest star 90 million miles away.  I also saw wind turbines gracefully spinning over corn fields on the Great Plains. All this renewable energy shows us what our future looks like, a world that runs on clean, inexpensive, renewable electricity.

I noticed renewable energy everywhere on my trip. From solar panels in the Grand Canyon to wind turbines in Idaho.

Electricity is the greatest success so far in the climate movement. Emissions have fallen by 40% since 2005 and we are quickly moving away from fossil fuels like coal. We’re also using electricity more efficiently all the time; we’ve added 30 million more people, millions of EVs and thousands of data centers and yet we’re still using the same amount of electricity as we did 20 years ago.

All this renewable electricity must be paired with heat pumps to heat our homes, our water, dry our laundry and keep us and our food (yes, a fridge is a one way heat pump) cool.  Heat pumps are magical machines that move heat from one place to another and in doing so use electricity so efficiently that we’ll be able to convert all of our homes and buildings heating from fossil fuels over to heat pumps without overwhelming the grid.

Heat pumps to heat your water and home are critical to a low carbon future

My Tour Across America is meant to celebrate and call out one particular type of heat pump, the heat pump water heater, which doesn’t yet get enough love. This nifty invention is a water heater with a heat pump on top that only uses around a thousand kilowatt hours of electricity per year to create all the hot water a home needs.  1,000 kilowatt hours is an incredibly efficient use of electricity, a third of what it takes to power electric resistance water heaters and a sixth the amount of energy needed to power fossil fuel gas water heaters.

On a sunny day driving through Iowa, passing miles and miles of wind turbines that were rotating gracefully in the breeze, this simple equation struck me hard. Heat pumps in all of our homes + renewable energy over our cornfields and rooftops  = better future. One of the wind turbines in a field in Iowa I visited, can power 6,000 heat pump water heaters every year!

Heat pumps and wind turbines — two technologies that will win the future!

So let’s continue to transform our country around this simple equation — more clean electricity, and more clean heat pumps that can use that electricity efficiently.

Check out a video of me in my costume hanging out with some wind turbines in an Iowa cornfield and join us on heat pump water heater day October 23 to celebrate and learn more about this critical decarbonization technology!