Full Title: To Decarbonize Households, America Needs Incentives for Electric Appliances
Author(s): Trevor Higgins, Ari Matusiak, Bianca Majumder, Sam Calisch, Debbie Lai
Publisher(s): Center for American Progress, Rewiring America
Publication Date: June 3, 2021
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Residential building electrification must be a major pillar of any federal infrastructure strategy and is an essential step on the path to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. For U.S. households, electrification of heat and cooking appliances is centered around the adoption of just four appliances: heat pump space heaters, heat pump water heaters, induction cooktops/ranges, and upgraded breaker boxes. Because these machines last 10 to 20 years or more before needing replacement, completing the transition by midcentury requires the mass mobilization of U.S. markets and manufacturing today. In order to fully electrify these appliances—and all 121 million American households—before 2050, the United States must replace more than 80 million of these appliances across more than 50 million households over the next decade, setting the electrified appliance replacement rate on a path to 100 percent of installations by some time in the 2030s.
In this report, the Center for American Progress and Rewiring America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the electrification of the economy, propose new consumer rebates for the purchase and installation of the four aforementioned machines. Together, these rebates would deliver an average incentive of $4,200 to participating households and an average of $6,000 to participating low-to-moderate-income (LMI) households. These rebates are calibrated to make sure the upgrade to electric appliances is no more expensive than a fossil fuel replacement, even before counting the subsequent energy bill savings a household will realize from the transition.