Because meeting our nation’s climate goals requires electrifying the U.S. economy, the Center for American Progress and Rewiring America teamed up to propose a policy roadmap for federal infrastructure legislation that will enable the electrification of U.S. households by equalizing replacement costs with that of fossil-fueled appliances. The report, To Decarbonize Households, America Needs Incentives for Electric Appliances, calls for new consumer rebates for the purchase and installation of four electrified household appliances: heat pump space heaters, heat pump water heaters, induction cooktops/ranges, and breaker boxes.
The proposed rebates would remove the barriers to home electrification for all income levels, help U.S. residents save money on energy bills, create new jobs, and lower electric appliance prices.
To Decarbonize Households, America Needs Incentives for Electric Appliances
By Trevor Higgins, Ari Matusiak, Bianca Majumder, Sam Calisch, and Debbie Lai
June 2021
Residential building electrification must be a major pillar of any federal infrastructure strategy and is an essential step on the path to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. For U.S. households, electrification of heat and cooking appliances is centered around the adoption of just four appliances: heat pump space heaters, heat pump water heaters, induction cooktops/ranges, and upgraded breaker boxes. Because these machines last 10 to 20 years or more before needing replacement, completing the transition by midcentury requires the mass mobilization of U.S. markets and manufacturing today. In order to fully electrify these appliances—and all 121 million American households—before 2050, the United States must replace more than 80 million of these appliances across more than 50 million households over the next decade, setting the electrified appliance replacement rate on a path to 100 percent of installations by some time in the 2030s.
In this report, the Center for American Progress and Rewiring America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the electrification of the economy, propose new consumer rebates for the purchase and installation of the four aforementioned machines.
Recently on Twitter