Educate yourself gun insurance, and more detail than you probably could ever want on heat pumps.
A primer on gun insurance, and no, not against theft: what it is and the legality of it.
I have yet to see a definite bill, but I have been hearing rumors about a Colorado bill to require gun owners to get insurance for every. single. gun. they own. Quite a high amount too.
Unless and until a bill comes out on the topic, it's hard to discuss much specifics (and I will be watching, as are other groups, so if you want to get in on this bill, please either sign up for mailing lists on Colorado Shooting Sports Assn cssa.org or watch here).
What I want to do with this post is to help you with some background and some legal analysis if you're not familiar with the topic. The video below (of a podcast) is a good introduction to the subject.
Worth a watch if you're not familiar: the host and his guest discuss the difference between this and homeowner's insurance.
Worth a watch even if you are familiar because the hosts debunk some common arguments made for the legality of such insurance (which would be handy to know if you plan to advocate on the topic if the chance arises).
Heat pumps part 1: how do this gentleman’s claims hold up to scrutiny.
Reasonable, thinking people land somewhere between "heat pumps will not work when it's cold" and "heat pumps can replace natural gas furnaces and boilers with absolutely no consequences or change to our standard of living".
I had an exchange with a gentleman on twitter recently about his heat pump during that cold snap in late December, the one on 12/22 - 12/23. As a part of that he sent me some data that he pulled off his heat pump, making three claims:
1. Yes, his heat pump worked during the cold snap.
2. His heat pump did use more power during the cold snap.
3. Even at that his heat pump has cost less to run than a natural gas furnace.
I am not going to give you the name or twitter handle of the gentleman who sent the following because I didn't ask for permission and also because it's not about who he is (it's about the data). I do, however, want to look at what he sent in some detail with regard to the claims above.
Screenshots 1 to 3 are copies of the pictures he sent to me in Twitter. They outline his house's electrical consumption by date, the electrical consumption overlayed with daily high (red) and low (blue) temps, and his energy usage for Winter 21-22 (NG furnace), Winter 22-23 (heat pump) and an estimate of what Winter 22-23 would have looked like with his gas furnace.
Note the circling in screenshot 1 is not mine, it was this man's. He recycled his diagrams and I have no idea why or what he circled that for.
Looking at his data and taking his word that the heat pump worked (no reason not to), claims #1 and #2 are easy to see. Look at the spike in the usage (with a corresponding dip in temperature) over the 22nd and 23rd. Clearly his heat pump was soaking up electricity like nobody's business (more later), but it was heating.
Claim #3 is a harder one to make and I'm going to elaborate as to why.
By reading this gentleman's graph, I made an Excel spreadsheet and put in the numbers for electrical usage and daily low temperature. I used the spreadsheet to calculate an average electrical usage and an average daily low. I didn't do any comparisons with the daily high because I'm interested in the cold temperature behavior of the heat pump.
I then had Excel plot the electrical consumption vs. the daily low temperature on a graph. This is screenshot 4. Other than a huge spike in energy usage (see the two data points in the upper left), do you see a pattern?
I don't. This becomes even more apparent when you look at screenshot 5. In that screenshot I put a blue vertical bar for average temp and a red horizontal bar for average electrical usage. Do you see how the data points are pretty uniformly spread across all for quadrants made by the red blue cross? That tells me that there's not a real strong trend here.
***Note: a strong trend would look like that in screenshot 6. I put the same horizontal and vertical average lines in. See how most of the points are clustered in the #2 and #3 (see black numbers) quadrants? That kind of pattern indicates that as one goes up, the other tends to go up as well (because we don't see many points in quadrants #1 and #4.
In other words, there seems to be (again, excepting the two really cold data points) no real trend in this gentleman's usage and daily temperature.
This is why I'm a little wary of this gentleman's claim that his heat pump would cost less than a furnace (see screenshot 3 again for reference). It is possible that it would, but I'm skeptical.
This also makes me wonder how good a job the professional forecasters are going to do. After all, the problem is not in how smart the person looking at the numbers is. The problem is in human behavior. We're just all kinds of complicated an inconsistent. This is layered on top of the inconsistency in, for example, the weather.
So, let's talk about forecasting usage. One way or another, to extrapolate from one year to the next, you need a way to forecast your future consumption. If you want this to be more than just a quick guess, you need to base this on something and that basis usually involves past consumption and/or past weather. This can be problematic in a number of ways.
For example, in a warmer winter, electric or gas, you'll use less energy for heat because you don't have to. Besides this, there is the human choice element. How many people any more are able to work from home at least some of the time? A lot and that decision is very individual.
People staying home will use more energy because rather than letting the thermostat go down while you're away, they'll keep it up (this is, I'm nearly sure, why this man's consumption over 12/26 - 1/5 is so much higher than 1/5 and beyond without an appreciable difference in temperatures).
So, if you try to estimate future consumption and try to use things like average temperatures or etc., your numbers will be quite speculative. Look again at screenshot 5: consumption for this one man (and my guess is for many) is not tied to temperature very strongly.
One way around this problem is to average over many people and over many years. Individuals (years and people) can vary widely, but if you collect enough of them, the individual variation smears out (you hope) and the averages tend to settle to reasonably predictive values. I.e. you can't predict an individual, but you can predict probabilities.
That would be a valid approach, but we don't have it yet. We have the years of weather data. We do not have the years and crowds of people data with heat pumps.
When you see estimates that heat pumps save money, that they'll save energy, that things will just click into place seamlessly, I hope the example above has convinced you to be skeptical of the findings. At the very least, you should be asking and checking the estimating method because it's inevitably going to be based on an assumption some fallible human made at some point. That may not make it wrong, it may not make it worthless, but it does make it something you should check.
Heat pumps do work when it's very cold. They also will come with consequences and problems just like any other technology. We need to remember to have both of these on the table when we talk.
Heat Pump #2: The first time I’ve seen electrical consumption data on a heat pump for very cold temps, and the implications for our electric grid.
I want to return to the topic of the earlier post (the one labeled "Somewhere between 'heat pumps will not work when it's cold' and 'heat pumps can replace natural gas furnaces and boilers with absolutely no consequences or change to our standard of living'") for a salient point that sticks out.
I copied over the relevant screenshots from the earlier post to this one for convenience. Attached you'll see screenshots 1 and 4 from the earlier post. They are an outline of this gentleman's electrical consumption vs. day and a graph I made of his electrical consumption vs. the daily low temperature respectively.
Look again at the consumption for the two day cold snap (12/22 to 12/23) in screenshot 1. Those days show up in the upper left of the graph (screenshot 4). Both screenshots show that these data points are quite a departure from the rest. As a matter of fact, those two days show a consumption that is about roughly twice (193%) the average when the overnight lows go below zero. And the lower it goes, the higher the consumption gets: there's a jump between close to zero and, say, -8.
This is not a problem for one person. You're not going to pay for gas, so the increased electrical consumption can be weighed against no natural gas bill. Your heat pump won't leave you shivering.
This is, however, a problem for the grid. Imagine what would happen to the electrical grid feeding Denver if on the 6 nights a year electrical demand for even half the houses doubled (see the link below--perhaps not the best known source, but all I wanted was a rough number of nights below zero in Denver every year). If you want a peek, consider what happens on hot days in the Front Range when lots of people want to run their AC.
Right now Xcel is starting to use demand management in order to help counter the self-imposed (due to Xcel's need to meet Progressive policy goals) lack of capacity during summer. If heat pumps start popping up all over and we've not prepared for situations like these, will they shut off power on cold nights? Can we expect brownouts in winter too?
Without a huge jump in capacity in this state, effectively doubling the consumption overnight for any substantial portion of the population will be a big problem. This will be an even bigger issue if the cold temperatures are not just a low overnight, the peak demand would persist (possibly for the entirety of a couple days) if temperatures stayed low as they did on that cold snap.
This is not a new issue. If you've read my op eds on heat pumps or read this page long enough, you'll recognize it. The thing that makes this one novel and worth a special post is the scale of the numbers. As we start to get more and more familiar with heat pumps and as we see actual numbers on their performance, I hope that things like this will start to be part of the conversation.
That would require, however, a media and politicians who are more interested in being honest and forthright than in being activists. I, therefore, won't hold my breath.
https://www.weather5280.com/2022/12/19/arctic-blast-dangerous-cold-remains-on-track-for-denver-colorado-by-thursday