(Washington, D.C.) – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced results of an analysis highlighting that, deployed at mass scale, geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) could decarbonize heating and cooling and save energy in U.S. buildings while reducing the need for new grid transmission.
The analysis finds that retrofitting around 70% of U.S. buildings with GHPs could reduce electricity demand by as much as 13% by 2050 versus decarbonizing without GHPs. This reduction in demand would avoid as much as 24,500 miles of new grid transmission lines by 2050—enough to cross the continental United States eight times. Most GHP equipment for the U.S. market is manufactured domestically, so increasing GHP deployment can also expand domestic industry and create local jobs to install and maintain the systems.
