Re: xkcd: Neighbor-Source Heat Pump

On 6/10/2025 4:29 PM, Scott Lurndal wrote:

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> writes:

On Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:00:49 GMT, scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal)

 

I refer you to this informative article:
>
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-barriers-cold-climates-energy-poverty=
.html
>
Granted, this is from Southeast Michigan and is comparing costs with
natural gas.

 I think a study of a handful of 60-year-old homes in one corner of
a northern state is not particularly indicative of a general trend.
 The actual study (although it is really a partially a meta-analysis
of other papers) is here:
 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344924002933?via%3Dihub
 The find the median payback is 24 years, including weatherization of the 60
year-old homes.  Unattractive to low-income homeowners, thus they
recommend government incentives to aid such homeowners.
 However, the vast majority of homes, even in Michigan, likely
are either much newer (built after 1975) with better weatherization
or have been weatherized already and would likely benefit from
a heat pump system.
 It's useful to consier that reversing the trend towards
higher carbon concentration in the atmosphere doesn't necessarily
require elimination of all fossil fuels, but rather reduction to
a point significantly low enough to cause the atmospheric carbon
fraction to decrease.   So it is entirely feasible that there will
always be some homes heated with carbon-intensive sources
(although the price of such sources will likely increase as the
supply diminshes simply due to economies of scale).
 The paper doesn't discuss the impact of owned solar (e.g. rooftop
panels) when considering the end-user[*] cost difference between
CH4 and a heat-pump; rooftop solar can significantly reduce the
electricity cost to run the heat pump compressor.
 [*] I would guess because the homeowners in the study were all low income
     and thus not likely able to afford rooftop solar.
 In your particular case, the price of heating oil can be rather
volatile, peaking at $4.26 in 2022 (currently less than $2.00);
as a fundamentally limited resource, it won't remain that cheap
forever.
 https://www.macrotrends.net/2479/heating-oil-prices-historical-chart-data

The production of crude oil in the USA is probably going to drop in 2026 due to reduced capital investment in oil wells (we are in a oil bust again since 2009).
The USA natural gas production will meet of all the USA's needs easily for the next 100 to 200 years as we are flaring about 1/3rd of our natural gas right now due to lack of customers and/or storage.  Most of the 100% natural gas wells are closed in at this time.
Lynn