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Peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese and now warmth pumps and renewable vitality. These two applied sciences pair completely collectively and are crucial to decarbonizing our nation. On my warmth pump water heater tour throughout America I couldn’t assist however discover and be impressed by how collectively they’re remodeling our world for the higher.
Throughout the handfuls of states on my journey, I noticed photo voltaic fields glistening within the solar, harvesting all these free photons from our nearest star 90 million miles away. I additionally noticed wind generators gracefully spinning over corn fields on the Nice Plains. All this renewable vitality exhibits us what our future appears to be like like, a world that runs on clear, cheap, renewable electrical energy.
Electrical energy is the best success to date within the local weather motion. Emissions have fallen by 40% since 2005 and we’re shortly shifting away from fossil fuels like coal. We’re additionally utilizing electrical energy extra effectively on a regular basis; we’ve added 30 million extra individuals, tens of millions of EVs and 1000’s of knowledge facilities and but we’re nonetheless utilizing the identical quantity of electrical energy as we did 20 years in the past.
All this renewable electrical energy have to be paired with warmth pumps to warmth our properties, our water, dry our laundry and maintain us and our meals (sure, a fridge is a a method warmth pump) cool. Warmth pumps are magical machines that transfer warmth from one place to a different and in doing so use electrical energy so effectively that we’ll be capable to convert all of our properties and buildings heating from fossil fuels over to warmth pumps with out overwhelming the grid.
My Tour Throughout America is supposed to rejoice and name out one explicit sort of warmth pump, the warmth pump water heater, which doesn’t but get sufficient love. This nifty invention is a water heater with a warmth pump on prime that solely makes use of round a thousand kilowatt hours of electrical energy per yr to create all the recent water a house wants. 1,000 kilowatt hours is an extremely environment friendly use of electrical energy, a 3rd of what it takes to energy electrical resistance water heaters and a sixth the quantity of vitality wanted to energy fossil gas gasoline water heaters.
On a sunny day driving by way of Iowa, passing miles and miles of wind generators that had been rotating gracefully within the breeze, this easy equation struck me onerous. Warmth pumps in all of our properties + renewable vitality over our cornfields and rooftops = higher future. One of many wind generators behind me within the picture beneath can energy 6,000 warmth pump water heaters yearly!
So let’s proceed to rework our nation round this easy equation — extra clear electrical energy, and extra clear warmth pumps that may use that electrical energy effectively.
Take a look at a video of me in my costume hanging out with some wind generators in an Iowa cornfield and be part of us on warmth pump water heater day October 23 to rejoice and study extra about this crucial decarbonization expertise!
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