The One Thing That’s Holding Back the Heat Pump

If billionaires actually cared about saving the planet, they’d pool their vast wealth and buy everyone a heat pump. Instead of burning planet-warming fossil fuels, these appliances extract warmth from even freezing outdoor air and transfer it into a building, thanks to neat tricks of physics. In the summer, they reverse to act like an air-conditioning unit. One recent study found that if everyone in the United States got a heat pump, it’d slash emissions in the building sector by 36 to 64 percent, and cut overall national emissions by 5 to 9 percent. (Because they’re fully electric, heat pumps run on a grid increasingly loaded with renewable energy.)

Not that billionaires would ever have the altruism or desire to buy us all heat pumps—megayachts aren’t going to buy themselves, after all. But if they did, there’d be one critical hurdle they’d run into—the one thing that’s holding heat pumps back from their full potential more generally: There aren’t enough trained workers yet to install them.

“No one talks about supply chain constraints anymore. What is now the bottleneck is actually the installer,” says Philipp Krinner, CEO and cofounder of Arch, a platform that helps HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) companies manage customers. “In the winter and in the summer—in the peak seasons—when most people actually want to install a system, it’s actually still a contractor-constrained market.”

The result is classic “greenflation,” a temporary rise in the costs associated with decarbonization due to market constraints, says climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School in New York. “Yes, there is a shortage of qualified contractors,” he says. But it’s a good problem to have, he argues, and “one where there’s an obvious solution” on the road to decarbonizing our civilization. It’ll be costly to train more workers in the green economy, but that’ll end up paying huge dividends.

“Electricians get talked about a lot, and used as sort of an avatar for all of the jobs that are going to be needed to install heat pumps and decarbonize the economy,” says Alexandria Herr, senior research associate at Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes