Heat Pumps in Alaska

A 2023 Data Science for Social Good summer fellowship project at the University of Washington

© 2023. All rights reserved.

Motivation

Background

Decarbonization, a pressing global issue, necessitates the transition from carbon-intensive power to net-zero sources. The Arctic is an area of particular concern, where warming occurs at double the global rate and thermal energy, primarily fossil fuel-based, represents about 75% of energy consumption. Replacing traditional heating sources like boilers, furnaces, electrical resistance heating, and wood burning stoves with heat pumps will contribute to decarbonization goals due to their superior efficiency. Because heat pumps extract heat from the environment, they are 2 to 5 times more energy efficient than traditional electric resistance heating. Heat pump adoption is synergistic with a broader movement towards electrification, greener energy consumption, and increased reliance on renewable sources of electricity generation that is ongoing in Alaska. Less than 1% of of Alaskan buildings have a heat pump installed, trailing behind the US national average of 15%. Increasing the percentage of heat supplied by heat pumps in Alaska presents an immense opportunity to contribute to decarbonization efforts.

Our project provides a macro-perspective that examines the potential for heat pump adoption in Alaska. We want to make this information accessible to a wide audience via interactive visualizations. This contrasts with previous and ongoing research which either focuses on technical aspects of heat pumps, or heat pump use in a specific building. Scientists focus on the static efficiency of heat pumps under different temperatures and thermal loads. Studies show that heat pumps can perform reasonably efficiently even in a very cold condition, with the caveat that manufacturers often overestimate their performance. Energy specialists focus on modeling the economic and energy savings of a particular building if it adopts a heat pump. Tools such as the Heat Pump Calculator have been built to help building owners precisely determine whether a heat pump makes economic and environmental sense in their particular building. Local groups in Alaska also have contributed substantially to the advocacy and promotion of heat pumps adoption at a community level. Alaska Heat Smart, for example, offers various assessment and incentive programs to assist Juneau residents in installing heat pumps. Our project builds on these important efforts to offer an Alaska-wide perspective on the potential for heat pump adoption.

Questions

This work seeks to answer the following question: Where should heat pump adoption efforts be targeted in Alaska? We investigate this question by region across three dimensions:

  1. Feasibility: What proportion of heating needs can a heat pump meet?
  2. Economic: How much money can be saved if heat pumps are used as the primary heating source?
  3. Greenness: Compared to current fuel sources, what amount of carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by the use of heat pumps? What percent of energy used to power heat pumps comes from renewable energy sources?

Using these dimensions, we imagine two different possibilities for heat pump adoption in Alaska for the next ten years: a scenario in which 5% of the population adopts heat pumps and a scenario in which 15% of the population adopts heat pumps. We distributed heat pumps throughout the state according to feasibility, and we present regional and statewide aggregates for feasibility as well as economic and environmental impacts.

This work fills in the gaps of previous work regarding energy and heating in Alaska by refining existing tools to incorporate granular data and consider future projections. Additionally, we develop the first map-based visualizations that tell the story of heat pump adoption across the entire state. Expanding upon previous work by incorporating more granular data about temperature will provide a better, more accurate understanding of the potential for heat pumps in Alaska. Future projections modeling fuel prices, electricity sources, and climate change are essential for understanding the benefits and drawbacks of heat pumps. Each of these factors impact lifetime costs and efficiency of heat pumps. Our interactive visualizations are accessible to technical and non-technical audiences and present a wide range of information. Our visualizations capture state-wide and regional trends allowing housing authorities and legislators to discern where heat pump targeting efforts and incentives will be the most effective, workforce development organizations to meet anticipated demand, and Alaskan residents to make informed decisions about adding heat pumps to their homes, businesses, and community buildings. Our visualizations are interactive, allowing the viewer to see the impact of future projections. This complements previous work which has focused on individual observations of heat pump efficiency, especially for a particular building or under particular lab conditions, by combining these individual observations into regional and state-wide trends.

Stakeholders

To gain a deeper understanding of the complex energy landscape in Alaska, and to identify gaps where we can make effective interventions, communication with key stakeholders was a critical aspect of our project. Across research, planning, implementation, and prototyping stages, our team held a series of meetings with energy and heat pump experts to learn more about both the technical and social aspects of this work. We met with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, leaders from non-profit organizations such as Alaska Heat Smart and Renewable Juneau, and the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. Through these stakeholder engagements, we gained a deeper understanding of ongoing research efforts in heat pump technology and efficiency, climate and cost-related barriers to heat pump adoption, ethical implications of the work, and areas of opportunity in translating research into policy in Alaska.

We are building our visualizations to be accessible to a range of stakeholders for our project. First, we aim for our visualizations to communicate regional macro-trends to government officials and housing authorities, to inform where heat pump targeting efforts and incentives will be the most effective. Second, we aim for our visualizations to serve as a resource to empower local non-profit and advocacy organizations in their sustainable energy and heat pump adoption efforts. Third, we aim for our data and analysis pipelines to serve as a resource for researchers to adapt or extend this work. Finally, we aim for our visualizations to be informative for Alaskan homeowners, renters, and the general public seeking an understanding of the bigger picture.

Ethics

The ethical concerns we considered as team while working on this project were:

  1. Questions of equity for small, underrepresented groups such as renters, rural communities, and indigenous communities:
    1. Who bears the burden of installing, maintaining, and operating heat pumps? Heat pump installation costs thousands of dollars and costs increase in remote locations. Depending on the current price of alternative fuel sources, heat pumps may have higher operating costs which can burden Alaskans who are already facing some of the highest electricity prices in the US. We cannot directly address this concern, but by presenting accurate information about the true costs, we help policy makers and organizations decide how to best allocate funding.
    2. Further, we face the problem of balancing population with area. Alaska is the largest state by area, but the third smallest by population. How do we communicate our results in a way to minimize bias introduced by the handful of urban centers and Alaska’s low population density? We explored and carefully examined numerous visualizations to ensure that we appropriately address population density. Additionally, we present multiple visualizations that present Alaska as a whole, zoom in on specific regions of Alaska, and present information in ways that are not skewed by area such as cartograms.
  2. Heat pump performance drops in extremely cold weather, which makes a secondary heat source necessary in some regions of Alaska. How do we responsibly communicate the risks, limitations, and benefits of heat pumps, while maximizing the adoption of heat pumps across Alaska? Will our work be misinterpreted as advocating for completely replacing traditional heating systems with heat pumps when we really intend to advocate for the addition of heat pumps to spaces while maintaining a back-up heat source? We address this concern with consistent messaging and careful consideration of our language surrounding heat pump adoption efforts.
  3. Heat pump adoption promotes electrification of heating, and because heat pumps are more efficient than all other forms of heating, it also promotes decarbonization. But electrification is not synonymous with full decarbonization – electricity can still be generated from fossil fuels. To address this concern, we have chosen greenness measures as one of our three main outcomes that takes into account the sources of electricity generation.
  4. Throughout our project design, implementation, and reporting, we are committed to transparency, openness, and reproducibility. We commit to documenting and sharing our data sources, methods, code, and other research materials; report study findings within the scope of our study; freely acknowledge limitations and potential sources of error in our results; and disseminate research outputs via open access outlets.