According to Efficiency Maine’s online comparison tool, electricity (with geothermal heat pumps) is the cheapest way to heat your home. One reason so many people are switching from oil boilers to heat pumps is that electricity is efficient. Another reason is that electricity is clean. You don’t have to worry about fuel leaks, fumes, or ashes. But is electricity clean at the power plant?
Some environmentalists hesitate to switch to electric heat because they have a false belief that most power plants burn coal. In fact, every year North America is generating more of its electricity without burning any fuel at all. Switching your heating system from fuel to electricity
saves money, prevents pollution, and taps growing sources of renewable power. The United States produces between 300 and 400 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per month.
Hydropower was our first source of electricity; as a clean, renewable resource it will never run out. For the past several decades, flowing water has provided a small fraction (between 18 and 32 TWh per month) of our total energy needs. But recently we’ve added two more clean and inexhaustible sources of electricity: wind and solar.
For our nation, these two new everlasting power supplies are now providing more than 50 TWh of electricity per month – and this amount is growing quickly.
As a country, we’ve already achieved four significant milestones on the pathway to a sustainable clean energy future:
• In 2014, we started generating more electricity from wind than hydropower.
• In 2015, we started generating more electricity from natural gas than coal.
• In 2019, coal fell below nuclear as a source of electricity.
• In 2022, we started generating more electricity from solar than hydropower.
Four major milestones are left as we transition to a clean electricity supply:
• Retire all coal power plants.
• Generate more electricity from solar than nuclear fission.
• Generate more electricity from solar than natural gas.
• Retire all nuclear fission reactors.
As we build more solar farms and very large batteries to store electricity, we’ll be able to retire our coal boilers and eventually our nuclear reactors, too, saving enormous amounts of water that we currently use for cooling those thermal power plants. Coal has become uneconomical as a source of electricity.
Nuclear power and natural gas are better ways to generate electricity today, and one day solar power with battery backup will be unbeatable.
Using electric heat pumps to heat your home offers an interesting environmental benefit: as our power grid transitions away from coal, gas, and nuclear power toward solar, the energy to heat your home will become cleaner and cleaner. You can install heat pumps, and let other people do the work to clean up the grid. Or, if you’d like to control your own energy destiny and help accelerate the transition to a healthier, safer, and more powerful world, you can install solar panels to power your heat pumps. You may find that changes to the tax laws make it cheaper for you to generate your own solar electricity and send that power to a heat pump or to the grid for credit, than to buy and burn natural gas, propane or heating oil in a furnace or boiler for your house.
You’ll probably get the best return on investment if you take steps to remove all fuel-burning appliances from your home so you can safely seal it up tight against air leaks, insulate it well, and then install heat pumps that are sized correctly for your needs. When you can save money, prevent pollution, and keep your home at a comfortable temperature all year round using clean energy you generate yourself — that really gives you a warm feeling inside!
Fred Horch is principal adviser at Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”
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