A new study from RMI shows that cleaner winter heating doesn't have to come with exorbitant heating bills, and it points toward fuel-switching heat pumps as a practical way to get there.
The study challenges two common misconceptions:
The U.S. electrical grid is too strained to handle added load in the winter.
Electric heating is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel heating.
By debunking these long-held ideas, the study makes the case that electric heating is not only a viable option, but an increasingly appealing one in an economy where people are highly sensitive to their utility bills.
The Grid’s Capacity: What Does That Mean for Electric Heating?
Headlines about grid strain appear every year without fail, but they are usually about summer air conditioning. As extreme heat events become more common across the U.S., AC usage surges and pushes the grid to its limits.
Because a grid failure would be catastrophic, the grid is built to handle these extreme peaks. Those peaks are rare, though, so for most of the year the grid is underused.
In fact, the grid nears full capacity for only about 40–100 hours a year. The rest of the time, it runs at roughly 40–55% utilization, according to Ian Magruder, founder of the Utilize Coalition. In other words, outside a handful of days, much of the infrastructure we have already built sits largely unused.
As the RMI study points out, this headroom is a major opportunity for efficient electric heating. According to the study, roughly 109 million U.S. homes could heat and cool with heat pumps within the grid's available winter headroom. In milder states, where headroom is even larger, nearly every home could go all-electric.
The exceptions are telling. Many states in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest have almost no winter headroom, because so many homes there already use electric resistance heating, which is notoriously inefficient. These regions stand to gain the most from switching to modern, more efficient equipment.
The Cost of Going Electric
A common worry is that if everyone switched to electric heat, winter demand would overload the grid the way air conditioning threatens to in summer. What this overlooks is efficiency. Heat pump technology has improved dramatically in recent years, including in cold climates, so even widespread adoption would not strain the grid the way summer AC does.
That means widespread heat pump adoption would not necessarily trigger expensive grid buildouts. In some states, it could even help keep electricity more affordable for all customers.
Ryan Shea, the study's co-author and a manager on RMI's carbon-free buildings team, compares the grid to a toll bridge with few cars on it. When only a handful of drivers split the toll, each one pays a large share. Add more drivers, and everyone's share goes down. As Sarah Tresedder, a senior climate and energy organizer with the Sierra Club, notes, this approach also makes better use of infrastructure that already exists.
There is a catch. Widespread electric heating would bring down the cost per kilowatt-hour, but a home that heats entirely with electricity also uses a lot more of it. Even at a lower rate, the monthly bill could end up higher than a gas bill, especially in colder climates.
So how can buildings take advantage of existing grid capacity without driving up their utility bills?
The Solution: Fuel-switching Heat Pumps
To return to the toll bridge analogy, fuel-switching heat pumps offer a practical answer. Adding more heat pumps to the grid helps bring down the cost per kilowatt-hour. At the same time, buildings keep the flexibility to switch to their fossil fuel system, like natural gas, on the days when electric heating is less efficient or more expensive to run.
This is where Kelvin's Adaptive Electrification comes in.
Adaptive Electrification is Kelvin's fleet management system for fuel-switching heat pumps, designed for multifamily buildings. A fleet of window or through-wall heat pumps is installed and networked to Kelvin's IoT platform. The system handles fuel switching automatically, so building managers never have to decide when to fall back on their legacy system.
Managers set the heating and cooling parameters, and residents control their own comfort within those limits. Because the heat pumps are networked, Kelvin can also enroll the building in its utility's demand response program, generating passive income from the coordinated electricity use.
And when the building's boiler finally fails, there's no scramble to get replacement heat in place. Adaptive Electrification gives owners time to weigh their options and choose the most economical, feasible path to a fully electrified building.
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