The announcement is basically: A US company (Lenox) has a prototype heat pump that matches performance of Mitsubishi and LG heat pumps.
The DOE is running a competition to get US companies to improve performance of their heat pumps.
But there exist sooo many prototyping breaktroughs.
Those who follow press releases for many years know that just a tiny fraction can transfer this in real world products that actually work
(so many more challenges to overcome compared to prototype situations!! I don’t even know where to begin… every ground is different, average person doing the manual work is not as skilled and has less support engineers, the guys setting/defining the dimensions of various recipients/pumps/conduits are often undeskilled and the efficiency often lacks tremendously for that reason…)