This winter, rising home heating costs are an acute pain point:

• 50-80% of U.S. residential fuel consumption occurs in winter.
• Natural gas, which heats nearly half of U.S. homes, nearly doubled in price this year and is now merely up by half.
• Households in the Northeast and Upper Midwest that use propane for heat could spend upwards of 94 percent more on their energy bills than they did a year ago.

The federal cavalry is too late to help this winter, but if Congress can pass Build Back Better before the holidays, they’ll provide a new year’s gift to Americans who are suffering through the worst heating bills in a decade. We need to end this volatility once and for all -- and with it, a heap of carbon emissions. Gone, the fossil furnace in the basement. In its place, geothermal and air source heat pumps, plus other products that can lower home heating costs for millions of households.

Build Back Better (the House passed version) is powerful:

• Households would get 30% off a new geothermal heat pump, and 30% off a home battery. They could get up to another $14,000 in rebates to electrify home heating by installing an all-electric air-source or geothermal heat pump.
• Coupled with 30% off home solar and a new $1200 incentive for energy efficiency, we’re talking about a major potential shift in home climatenomics.

The impact in leading states will be super-sized, while laggards miss out: 

States that already have ambitious electrification goals and incentives will win big, like New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. States like Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota, which passed new legislation this year to incentivize fuel switching, will follow fast. Then there will be states that still need to be pried open, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where fuel switching incentives are forbidden. C’mon guys!

A pack of startups are ready to pounce: 

• Dandelion makes it explicit: “Upgrade to geothermal and never buy heating oil, propane, or natural gas again.”
• Sealed is marketing energy efficiency as an aspirational quality-of-life tune-up.
• BlocPower is installing heat pumps and efficiency in low and middle income buildings.
• Stash and Stow are rolling combined battery/heat pump products out of the lab.
• Gradient’s sleek window modules provide heating & AC via heat pumps and next-gen refrigerants.
• Radiator Labs has a hybrid electrification approach for buildings that will be the hardest to fully electrify.

In summary, we’re about to do some serious judo on the way millions of households stay warm. None of this will happen overnight. We’re not going to mothball billions of dollars in existing gas infrastructure tomorrow. We’ll also need companies to balance escalating winter peak demand so we don’t repeat a Texas-like debacle. But the electric winter is coming; our climate demands it.