Why are electric bills so high? If your monopoly utility spends $10 million on wires and transformers, your state will let them increase prices to recover the $10M plus ~$1M per year, every year for the foreseeable future. You and your neighbors will pay ~$35M for ~$10M of infrastructure.

As long as we’re all autism experts now, here’s an actual study showing links to air pollution and fossil fuel hsph.harvard.edu/news/air-pol...

Today I learned that I’m also scaling drone based analytics. No thanks, installing heat pumps across California is hard enough! (If something in this post made you pause, view it as your sign from the universe to replace your rusty old furnace a heat pump! If you’re in SF or LA, I can help) 🔥 ❄️

breaking from me: the trump administration just suffered its first major loss in court over its onslaught on offshore wind the revolution wind project can now resume construction after a federal judge found its developer orsted was likely to win against the trump order to stop work @heatmap.news

This is what energy independence looks like. Solar, heat pumps, induction stoves, and electrified everything are how you achieve it!

Technologically advance a band: Earth, Wind, & Heat Pumps

Is electricification really going to work? Yes. 1. Watch this engaging video on Sankey Diagrams and wasted energy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJk... 2. Then read Michael Liebrech's discussion of ambient heat energy and heat pumps.

TL;DR? It's because of this:

Check this out, Canadian friends! PS - if any Los Angeles folks looking for a heat pump want me to host something similar, give me a shout. I’ve been wanting to pull together an event like this for a while

It doesn’t matter if you’re working class or a billionaire: climate change will hurt your grandchildren. That’s why I cannot understand oil executives who sacrifice the planet’s health for their short-term profits We must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels NOW.

"People will pick one skillset that they're best at and think that can carry the business. And we're all guilty of it. Everyone's a hammer in their own way." 🧵 🔌💡

#2wayAC!

I kid, I kid; America is totally gutting the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, so that stove won’t even be running.

France: we are increasing the subsidy we pay to citizens for them to install heat pumps by 6x America: have you considered just opening your stove to heat your home this winter?

You can buy a heat pump at Costco... They just won't install it for you. 🧵🔌💡

Let’s talk about the HVAC industry’s dirty little secret. Between a heat pump being made in the factory & it being installed at your house, there are a lot of layers. (Yes Shrek, just like that) 🧵(1/x) 🔌💡🧪

California's challenges with electricity cost are mirrored in other parts of the world. This op-ed about heat pump deployment in the UK reads almost identically to the one I authored in @sfchronicle.com a few weeks ago www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

Does someone need to come to your house to properly size a heat pump for it? Probably not. In fact, a virtual assessment with the right math behind it might yield a more accurate calculation! We'll be featuring a more in-depth piece on @heatpumped.org about this soon, here's a preview🧵🔌💡🧪

We almost exclusively do virtual heat pump estimates at @vayu.pro! You can get a pretty accurate gauge of heating loads based on historical utility bills. I've been working on an article about our methodology with my team and it'll be in a future issue of @heatpumped.org

Solar, batteries, heat pumps, induction stoves. An electrified home is the best path to energy independence (unless you have a way to generate natural gas in your backyard?)

Is there a good filter list for all of these bot accounts spamming amazon affiliate links? PS: for most people, buying a heat pump off amazon and trying to get a handyman or contractor to install it is a bad idea. This is why: www.heatpumped.org/p/byoe-bring...

Glad to see the California Heat Pump Group Buy highlighted! ICYMI, it's your opportunity to get a high quality heat pump installation at a fair price (and take advantage of the federal tax credits, before they expire at the end of the year!) More details here: www.heatpumped.org/c/groupbuy

There is a bug on the Science website right now that all of our story headlines are ALL CAPS. (Our dev team knows.) So if you've ever wanted to be berated by Science, now is the time to read.

More than 85 scientists say that a recent U.S. Department of Energy report is full of errors and misrepresents climate science.

"But they had 5 stars on Yelp!" Just a friendly reminder - it's really easy for companies to game online reviews. 5 star reviews are one datapoint you can use to evaluate a heat pump contractor, but don't let that be the only criteria you use in your search. 🧵 (1/x)

Solar panels are basically wireless receivers for a nuclear fusion power plant.

Shying away from confrontation with a ruthless and better funded opponent hell-bent on your destruction doesn't have a lot of historical precedent for success I like McKibben's framing. "People think renewable energy is like Whole Foods when it's really like CostCo - cheap and available in bulk"

A local columnist seriously misunderstands why climate legislation fails in the California legislature — it's not that we have weak evidence or bad arguments — it's that the oil companies are major campaign funders decade after decade, which buys them real power. www.mercurynews.com/2025/08/29/e...

“It doesn’t bode well for automakers in North America and Europe unless they learn from China and commit fully to electric vehicles”

Bay Area rules phasing out the sale of gas furnaces & water heaters in homes will drive a transition to heat pumps, yielding big health & environmental benefits. SPUR recommends four actions to strengthen the rules' rollout.

Are you or your loved ones worried about solar farms? Have you heard scary things about solar panels turning the countryside into an industrial hellscape? Fear not! We at Carbon Brief have just published the definitive article debunking solar myths ⬇️ interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/so...

Good news! You don't have to burn stuff anymore! Batteries+Renewable electricity for the win! You can choose electric transportation. You can choose 100% renewables from your utility. You can choose to heat and cool your home with a heat pump. Yay! 👍

So I get to pay extra (~30% increase) for AI features that I don't use and don't work well, and there's no way to opt out? Plus, they're building out a bunch of polluting gas power plants to run the data centers? Great. cc @edzitron.com

Brandon nailed it here. There is so much hidden costs in running a home service company. It is completely normal for an HVAC company to charge $400 to install a $25 part. In many cases, they might still barely be making any money on that project.

Their antipathy appears limited to the technologies that pose a near-term threat to an unnecessary gas expansion. Existing hydro has mostly already been uprated. SMR, conventional nuke, new hydro, marine kinetic energy sources will all take years to develop. Wind, solar, storage — not so much.

NorCal friends! Check out this great event that my friend (and @vayu.pro customer!) Alan Peevers is helping organize in Santa Cruz. EVs, solar, batteries, heat pumps, and great music and snacks! Electrify everything!! 🔌💡

Amazing new idea. A single heatpump for winter heating and summer cooling. From Scientific American April 1978.

How did we normalize sacrificing 90k people a year in the U.S. when renewable energy is safer and now cheaper? When people talk about the inconvenience of public transit, biking, installing heat pumps, electrifying our grid, please remind them of the sacrifice we make by not making the transition.

I thought we had an energy emergency? www.theguardian.com/environment/...

These nonprofits are incredibly important. TURN (www.turn.org/about-turn), for example, is one doing the work in California. They sponsor regulation, analyze new rate structures, and do community organizing. And these are not new problems.

The asymmetry of financial resources and information access, as well as the susceptibility of human regulators to corrupt influence, makes these negotiations wildly skewed in favor of the utility in most rate cases. Beware wonks who bloviate about electricity prices without mentioning these things.

The usual form of those netotiations is: Monopoly utility representatives ask to raise prices (or, VERY RARELY, lower prices); regulators ask why; utility presents outputs of analyses whose equations and input data are usually opaque and unvalidated; ratepayer advocates dispute; regulator says yes.

Bingo. We touched on this in our recent op-ed: www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

I will say (per a few commenters): the one area where tech really is vaulting ahead & doing mind-blowing, amazing shit every year ... is cleantech. Solar & batteries & EVs. But US culture seems weirdly resistant to celebrating those!

Finally got around to doing a quick update on the eternal question of Texas vs California: which state is doing better on decarbonisation of power? Not only is it still Cal, the gap is widening. Texas' data centre boom is incentivising coal and gas MASSIVELY. ketanjoshi.co/2025/08/19/t...

“Increasing CO2 levels will boost agricultural production, like a massive jolt of plant food” m.youtube.com/watch?v=GFD2...

Er, sorry to burst your bubble. If you run a electrical heat pump, even using electricity fired by fossil fuels, you’ll use less fossil fuel overall than otherwise. HPs run run at 3-5x efficiency, but let’s assume 3. Gas power plants are about 50% efficient from gas to electricity.

American Lung Association: Replacing 33,500 combustion-based boilers with heat pumps nationwide could: avoid 77,200 premature deaths avoid 33 million asthma attacks & 200,000 new asthma cases save $1.1 trillion in health costs prevent $351 billion in climate damages grist.org/energy/insta...

📢 New report drop: Heat Pump Rates in Massachusetts Heat pumps could cut bills for thousands of MA households—but only if the state gets the rates right. Right now, many heat pump users are being *overcharged* for their share of the grid. 1/🧵 🔗 www.switch.box/mahprates #energysky #climatesky

is there anything you can’t solve with a heat pump