Heat Pumps and Capacity

This is too long for Twitter.

It's not clear whether the need for new generation capacity could be eliminated by installing heat pumps in everyone’s homes and businesses. I know from my own experience and from others who have installed them that there is a significant reduction in the energy required to heat your home over time.

From a capacity perspective, our system is getting close to capacity limited in the winter peak, hence the need for new generation. This is also when air-exchange heat pump systems, like the mini-split system I have, would be working their hardest to draw sufficient energy from the cold outside air. Some systems also have energy hungry electric furnace elements which kick in to supplement the heat pump energy when needed, again at peak times. My system does not have such an element and I believe ground based systems would be more immune to this.

Based on the above I don’t believe heat pumps will help a whole lot at peak times though they do help in the long run. There was a report from the provincial government last year on residential energy efficiency which stated this but I can’t find it anymore. If I find it I'll link it here; otherwise this just ends up being my opinion.

As for cost, my mini-split cost ~$10k installed as a retrofit onto my existing house which has baseboard heaters. Others that I know have paid roughly the same for comparable systems. Rough estimate on retrofitting say half of Newfoundland Power’s 250,000 customers would be $1.5 Billion. You can argue with me on that price, it's just off the top of my head.

Ground based systems are considerably more expensive up front and ducted systems lose a fair amount of energy in the duct making them less effective than ductless systems like mine.

Here's my system.