I feel like I started talking about heat pumps a long time ago. I'm unable to find evidence for this before 2021. Anyway, it's certainly hit the cultural mainstream really fast over the last couple of years, and the story on the street is... manufacturers are running at capacity, installers have long waiting lists, some people are getting systems installed that aren't right for their space (too big or too small) and regretting it.
It's good that we're doing this, but it feels like a microcosm of our general cultural impatience. There's a limit to how much government subsidies can speed the adoption of a new technology. There are going to be issues with hiring a bunch of technicians to install heat pumps really fast if they suddenly don't have as much work in five years. The Spanish solar-energy debacle of the early 2010s rings in my head.
Maybe instead of setting big, distant, ambitious-sounding targets, we should set shorter, smaller, more gradual targets, and update every couple of years to accelerate in a sustainable way. It's pretty easy to say that the way to decarbonize the economy is "as fast as reasonably possible"; forecasting how fast that will be is hard, unnecessary, and potentially distracting.
I feel like I started talking about heat pumps a long time ago. I'm unable to find evidence for this before 2021. Anyway, it's certainly hit the cultural mainstream really fast over the last couple of years, and the story on the street is... manufacturers are running at capacity, installers have long waiting lists, some people are getting systems installed that aren't right for their space (too big or too small) and regretting it.
It's good that we're doing this, but it feels like a microcosm of our general cultural impatience. There's a limit to how much government subsidies can speed the adoption of a new technology. There are going to be issues with hiring a bunch of technicians to install heat pumps really fast if they suddenly don't have as much work in five years. The Spanish solar-energy debacle of the early 2010s rings in my head.
Maybe instead of setting big, distant, ambitious-sounding targets, we should set shorter, smaller, more gradual targets, and update every couple of years to accelerate in a sustainable way. It's pretty easy to say that the way to decarbonize the economy is "as fast as reasonably possible"; forecasting how fast that will be is hard, unnecessary, and potentially distracting.