Paper No 329 – TECH Clean California: Paving the Way to Heat Pump Market Transformation – 14th IEA Heat Pump Conference, Chicago, USA
In the United States, over 90 percent of direct residential carbon emissions come from fossil fuel-fired space and water heating [1]. A critical strategy to decarbonize this sector is scaling adoption of high-efficiency, electric heat pumps for space and water heating. However, the market share for heat pumps for both is less than 10 percent in most states in the U.S. and will need to scale exponentially over the next decade to meet greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals. TECH Clean California is a $120 million, multi-year market transformation initiative focused on accelerating adoption of heat pump technology by driving down costs, finding new value streams, and scaling successful approaches through market and policy changes. The initiative includes three concurrent efforts: 1) motivating the supply chain through midstream incentives, providing accessible workforce training, and driving consumer demand; 2) demonstrating scalable solutions to key market barriers; and 3) using data from TECH installations to create a public database that can inform policy. This paper provides an overview of the initiative’s theory of change and illustrates the relevancy of its results to resiliency, efficiency, and the heat pump industry at large.