Heat Pumps: What I Imagine an Environmental Community Could Do

A friend pointed me to a recent Wired magazine story, "The hunt for the most efficient heat pump"

https://www.wired.com/story/heat-pump-maximum-efficiency/

Seems that friendly competition is generating interest in heat pumps in the UK and elsewhere with nearly 200 installations connected to real-time monitoring systems trying to score the highest Coefficient of Performance [COP] or Seasonal Coefficient of Performance [SCOP] at HeatPumpMonitor.org (https://heatpumpmonitor.org/).  Heat pumps with higher COPs and SCOPs provide more heat output for every input of electricity.  Standard installations are now at 2-4 COP, for every 1 kW of electricity in 2-4 kW of heat comes out.  There are some on the  leaderboard (mostly UK but at least one Danish and one USAmerican system) with COPs and SCOPs of 5 edging toward 6.

The International Energy Agency published a global estimate that heat pumps could reduce CO2 emissions by 500 million metric tons, the "equivalent to taking every car in Europe off the road."  

I dislike comparing everything to cars.  Since it's heating and cooling of houses, let's measure emissions reductions in terms of households:  "each home emits 10.97 metric tons of COS per year from all energy use combined, versus 7.27 metric tons of CO2 per year from electricity alone." 

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/energy/frequent-questions-epas-greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Calculations%20and,per%20year%20from%20electricity%20alone.

So 500 million metric tons is about 46 million households (and there are 127 million households in USAmerica).  Heat pumps could remove the annual CO2 emissions of more than a third of all households in USAmerica.

Switching from gas and electrical resistance to heat pumps will reduce the necessity to burn fossil fuels and reduce the demand for electricity due to their (much) higher efficiencies.  Natural gas boilers typically have COPs between 0.7 to 0.9 and conventional electric resistance heaters have a COP of 1.0.  Heat pumps would use at least half of the electricity we generate for HVAC now if not a quarter, fifth, sixth... as heat pump installations attain higher COPs and we build a better future.  

Of course, CO2 emissions is not the operative consumer criterion but cost per square meter, usually what homeowners are most concerned with, will go down as more installations and installers come into the market.  Heat Geek has an online tool to help you think through your own heat pump conversion at https://upgrades.heatgeek.com/;  and, if you want to participate in the COP monitoring race, a typical monitoring setup costs between £500 - 700 ($640 - 897, given current exchange rates).

I can imagine the environmental community speeding the heat pump transition.  Filling the HeatMonitor with more and more efficient heat pumps, speeding the hunt for the most efficient ones, training the HVAC professionals and the public about the advantages, economic, ecological, and social.  A report every Friday from the Future, a practical act of Extinction Rebellion.  

This is what I call a positive protest and the experience of Safecast (https://safecast.org/), developing citizens' science radiation monitoring equipment and a monitoring network in Japan after Fukushima, is one example that could be followed.  Safecast continues their work today.

There is another, additional energy efficiency aspect of heat pumps that I saw when I visited Vietnam in 2020, just before COVID-19 began.  In the apartment in one of the new high-rises in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where I stayed, my cousin's, there were air to air heat pumps in every room.  The living room was next to the kitchen and that heat pump exhausted into the laundry room helping to dry the clothes hanging there.  I wonder if that use of energy is included in the present calculation of COP and SCOP.

Heat Pump Monitor is a project of Open Energy Monitor (https://openenergymonitor.org/) and more on Heat Geek at https://thenextweb.com/news/heat-geek-startup-heat-pumps-brits