Socioeconomic and Housing Influences on Electric Heat Pump Adoption in the U.S

Rohan Best and Reinhard Madlener
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Rohan Best: rohan.best@mq.edu.au

No No. 11/2025, FCN Working Papers from E.ON Energy Research Center, Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior (FCN)

Abstract: We assess influences on electric heat pump adoption with household data from the American Housing Survey covering 2017-2023, with implications for sustainable and affordable energy transitions. Substitutability for heating is important, motivating our comparative and multinomial logit analysis. A key attribute of our analysis is including prior energy contexts at the household level, such as the prior main heating type and whether the household previously used natural gas for any purpose. We find that existing housing contexts are crucial, with lower likelihood of electric heat pump adoption for households with warm air furnaces as their prior primary heat source, those using natural gas for any purpose, apartments, and old dwellings. Economic influences are less obvious for electric heat pumps compared to some other technologies. However, we conduct interaction analysis to show that income likely has an influence on electric heat pump adoption. Policymakers should therefore still consider equity across economic distributions. The more complicated context of heat pump adoption, with existing substitutes already being widely used, implies that policies need to be flexible to support households when they are ready to make heating investments.

Keywords: air conditioning; energy efficiency; heat pump; solar; substitute; warm air furnace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 D12 O33 Q41 Q48 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2025-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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