Glimmers of hope in 2024
By
David Tuft
Experts Agree: Heat Pumps are Magic
When you’re an energy nerd, nothing says ‘I love you’ like the MIT Technology Journal calling out heat pumps as one of 10 Technology Breakthroughs of 2024.
That’s how our New Year started.
MIT recognized the potential of heat pumps to cut 500 million tons of CO2 by 2030 with 600 million installs worldwide. That’s a lot of heat pumps!
What’s more exciting for Harvesters is how much of that market thermal storage will capture. Because Harvest dynamically shifts energy use, we can double those emissions reductions (more or less, or achieve them with half the installs). That’s a lot of impact on the bottom line for emissions.
Next year, we’re angling for thermal storage on the MIT list.
Emissions are down, for real
Another headline that caught our eye was a report from Rhodium showing US CO2 emissions declined by nearly 2% in 2023 while GDP expanded. That is crazy, and a reduction in American emissions hasn’t happened since 2020, when the pandemic forced our hand.
That good news was even better on closer inspection. Emissions from buildings went down by 4%, second only to emissions from the power sector, which went down by 8%. While we'd like to think it was all homeowners installing Harvest, that was not the case. Still, buildings make a difference–and Harvest inside the home can go a long way toward meeting our climate goals.
Take it from an Expert: Harvest is cheaper than gas
And finally, one of our customers, Evan Mills, wrote an opinion piece in the LA Times that mentioned our tech, along with many others, that helped his family to save $11,000 per year and reduce his energy use by 88%. And he would know - Evan is a senior scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in the building space.
The article mostly talks about the hurdles to electrification – as in “it ain't’ easy being green” (which most of us can relate to). But there was this juicy tidbit:
“Thanks to such factors, alongside incentives under President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it would actually have cost more to install a conventional gas furnace and water heater than the high-performance and climate-friendly electric heat pump system that does both jobs.”
Yup, that’s Harvest saving money on upfront costs as well as monthly bills. Thanks Evan!
These glimmers give us hope for 2024.
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