Mainers are scoring big with new heat pump installations. The state's move to the electric appliances has been so successful that even a disinformation campaign by dirty energy-based heating companies has failed.
The latest good news shows residents can save 60% on their annual energy bills, the Bangor Daily News reported. It cited the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which studies different homes, appliances, fuels, and billing structures.
"Homeowners who have flat-rate billing, where charges are the same regardless of the time of day or amount of energy used, can save 52 percent by replacing a propane furnace with a heat pump to pay an average of $2,168 annually instead of $4,486, the study found," according to the Daily News.
Those who replace fuel oil furnaces can save 40%. This is possible because heat pumps are so efficient, moving heat from one location to another instead of creating it.
Utilities Central Maine Power and Versant Power further boost these savings via heat pump rate discounts. These were measured at 60% savings for former propane users, 53% for fuel oil exes, and 11% for those who converted from natural gas.
The study revealed that improving insulation is another way to keep money in your wallet.
Maine — and New England in general — has one of the most aggressive clean energy programs in the country, with a goal to cut planet-warming gas pollution 45% by 2030. To that end, residents installed 100,000 heat pumps from 2019 to 2023, meeting a deadline two years early. So Gov. Janet Mills bumped up the objective to 175,000 by 2027.
Mainers can get up to $9,000 in rebates for installing a heat pump as well as a $2,000 tax credit and $600 to upgrade an electrical panel from the federal government, per the Daily News.
"Despite being a cold state, Maine is a leader in heat pump deployment and for a good reason, because they generate bill savings," Matt Malinowski, the study's co-author, told the newspaper.
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