This story was originally published by Canary Media.
Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing
According to data from the
Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute
released last week, Americans bought 21% more heat pumps in 2023 compared to the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces. This marked the biggest lead heat pumps have opened up over conventional furnaces in the two decades of data available from the trade group.
As electric appliances, heat pumps help reduce planet-warming emissions from a major source — space heating — while also enabling consumers to eliminate the health-harming fumes from gas and heating oil in their homes. They are also significantly more energy efficient, producing the same amount of heat as a fossil-fired system using just a third or a quarter of the energy.
Heat pumps’ growing popularity compared to furnaces is “really good news,” said Alex Amend, director of communications at pro-electrification advocacy group Rewiring America. According to Amend, the U.S. is “absolutely moving in the right direction.”
Last June, Rewiring put together a year-by-year sales growth trajectory for heat pumps that would be fast enough to take adoption from the 16% of U.S. homes they’re installed in as of 2023 to all projected 140 million homes by midcentury. Sales for both heat pumps and fossil gas furnaces were down relative to 2023 due to supply-chain bottlenecks and other factors. However, heat pumps continued to widen a lead that first emerged in 2022, when they surged ahead of gas furnaces by 12% and topped 4 million units sold for the first time.
It’s important to note that the data does not unequivocally mean that more U.S. homes are now installing heat pump systems than gas furnaces, but it does suggest that the growing popularity of heat pumps could be opening up new markets across the U.S.
The Biden administration is galvanizing the move to heat pumps by offering federal tax credits and incentives, and leaders at the state level are also setting ambitious clean-heat targets. At the same time, consumers are getting more curious about the technology, as evidenced by the doubling of Google searches for the term “heat pump” in the last five years. Climate advocates are increasingly pushing policymakers to incentivize homeowners to replace their broken-down ACs with heat pumps.
Despite the strong showing for 2023 overall, heat pump sales fell behind gas furnaces in the last quarter of the year. This could be due to consumers not being prepared to switch to a heat pump when their gas furnace breaks, according to experts. Educating consumers and alleviating supply-chain constraints are crucial in making it easier for consumers to choose heat pumps.
