Abstract for: Electrifying Away Climate Change: Heat Pumps’ and Retrofits’ Effects on Efficiency, Load, and Emissions in Massachusetts

The adoption of electric heat pumps for residential heating presents a promising strategy to mitigate climate change by electrifying home heating. However, heat pumps have not been widely adopted. Moreover, because they are less efficient in colder temperature, widespread adoption may overwhelm grid capacity on the coldest days of the year, though this may be avoided by incentivizing energy efficiency retrofits. This paper presents a behavioral dynamic model that is one of the first to include the dynamics of heat pump adoption, homeowners’ decision-making as it depends heterogenous attributes like area, and current federal and state subsidies. We parametrize our model to Massachusetts, given its challenges in promoting heat pumps as a cold climate state and the availability of subsidies to encourage adoption. Initial findings indicate that current subsidies lead to a significant increase in heat pump sales and a 25% reduction in emissions from residential heating by 2050, but Massachusetts is unlikely to meet its electrification targets. Though these results are tentative given significant uncertainty in our parameters, they demonstrate our model’s unique ability to analyze the impact of subsidies on grid load and emissions. Our work also highlights the need for future research to estimate cost parameters and to examine other solutions to promoting heat pump adoption.