New York City bans natural gas in new buildings
Another way to interpret these changes is to expect housing to become more expensive as heat pumps are more expensive than using (existing) gas infrastructure.<p>Random anecdote: in New Jersey installing a Mitsubishi hyper-heat heat-pump in a 8 room house (4 bedroom + 2 bathroom + living room + kitchen) is much more expensive than running hot water baseboard in all rooms. And with most heat pumps you can usually only zone 4-6 heads per compressor, so you'd need two compressors. A single compressor is probably pulling 50 amps alone, so you'd need 100 amps available usually for your breakers. For reference, a normal house usually 100 amps dedicated for the entire house, not just HVAC. Drastic upgrades in electric infrastructure will be required.<p>Heat pumps heat more efficiently than gas, but I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some sort of rolling blackout and thousands of people freezing to death because we went all-in on electric. Will these buildings also have generators to combat this potential problem?<p>Ideally we could just use existing gas lines and another, man-made produced gas through the same lines that's carbon neutral or negative.<p>I'm excited to see the development of heat pumps, though. I'm not a huge fan of the forced-air heat pumps. I hope something like a radiator-heat-pump can be made soon.