The U.S. Department of Energy has launched a program to turbocharge the manufacture and deployment of next-generation heat pumps for commercial buildings.
Heat pumps aren’t just for homes. They can help decarbonize big-box stores, schools, grocery shops, offices, hospitals and hotels, all of which fall under the commercial building umbrella, said Maria Vargas, director of the DOE Better Buildings Initiative, which leads DOE’s new Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator program.
The accelerator — a public-private partnership bringing together manufacturers, commercial building owners and the DOE national labs — aims to hasten the development of more cost-effective and efficient, cold-climate heat pumps that sit on flat commercial roofs, a type of packaged rooftop unit.
“We’re partnering now with almost all the manufacturers of these units [in the U.S.],” Vargas said. AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies and York International Corp have joined the program. They’ll work to develop and test new rooftop heat pumps to bring them to the market in 2027, Vargas noted. “That’s a big lift.”
But it’s a crucial step for getting buildings off fossil fuels. Less than 15 percent of the roughly 6 million commercial buildings in the U.S. use heat pumps for heating and cooling. And adoption of rooftop heat pumps is generally limited to mild climate zones and areas served by all-electric utilities that don’t have gas lines. Typically, commercial spaces use conventional fossil-gas rooftop units for heating instead.
Compared to these fossil-fired units, heat pumps reduce carbon emissions and energy costs by up to 50 percent, Vargas said.
Wildly efficient and able to run on clean electric power, heat pumps are essential to meeting national climate goals. They’re also a key part of the first-ever national blueprint to decarbonize buildings by 2050, a roadmap DOE unveiled this month, which also calls for a 25 percent reduction in building emissions by 2035. Buildings — in their energy use, materials and construction — are responsible for about 35 percent of total carbon emissions in the U.S., with commercial buildings specifically accounting for about 12 percent of total U.S. emissions, according to the DOE.
Once heat pumps are deployed on commercial rooftops nationwide, the department estimates they could save in aggregate $5 billion on utility bills every year.
Ten commercial partners have joined the accelerator, including retailers Amazon, Ikea, Target and Whole Foods, as well as the Los Angeles Unified School District. They’ve promised to be early adopters, and may well be test beds for heat-pump prototypes, though they haven’t yet made any firm commitments as to how many newly developed offerings they’ll purchase, Vargas told Canary Media.
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