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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

I find all this fear mongering about heatpumps in the US currently to be a little odd, because they've been popular in some cold countries in Europe for some time. If there was going to be a problem, there would already have been a problem.

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The companies making money from older heating methods are doing the fear mongering. That's not particularly odd.

Apparently part of the problem in the US is unreliable electricity supply. In Europe you can reasonably count on the electricity supply not having an outage of more than a few hours (and even that's rare). According the HN comments on past submissions on this topic, it seems that's not the case in the US.

The US doesn't have an unreliable electricity supply. The overwhelming majority of electric outages have a duration fewer than 4 hours, and most of those have a duration fewer than 2 hours.

There are problems in our more rural areas where the population density is low and damaged equipment may only affect very few customers. They're the lowest on the priority to get restored. In extreme cases it may be several days before your power will be restored. That's an outage event you can expect to occur once every decade.

But if you live in an urban area, urban being 5,000 or more people living in a town, then you have very reliable electricity.

Pushes on the part of utilities for heat pumps in the past were made with systems that honestly sucked. People remember how much they sucked.

Does Europe have cold countries? According to some quick Googling, the average winter temperature in Norway is still warmer than in Iowa (a not-particularly-cold state).

(FWIW I think heat pumps are interesting, I drive an electric car, etc--I'm not speaking from some reflexively anti-electrification ideological position)

Northern Scandinavia gets pretty cold. Various parts of Europe also have exceptional extremely cold weather; the average isn't _really_ what you want to think about when it comes to heating systems (well, it matters, in that it's relevant to the cost structure, but you really want your system to be able to deal with the reasonable edge-case weather).

Yeah, it's a crude metric for sure, but we have to make sure we're making a good comparison before claiming "If there was going to be a problem, there would already have been a problem." Notably, some Googling indicates that heat pumps aren't effective below -13F which can be the high temperature in Iowa (never mind colder states) for week on end. Are heat pumps common in parts of Scandinavia that get this cold (or colder)?

From what I can see Des Moines[1] and Oslo[2] are fairly comparable, and here in Oslo it's quite common to have air to air heat pumps.

Mind you, Oslo is quite south in Norway, it's much colder further north.

[1]: https://www.weather.gov/wrh/climate?wfo=dmx (annual)

[2]: https://seklima.met.no/months/max(air_temperature P1M),mean(air_temperature P1M),min(air_temperature P1M)/recurring_period/SN18700/nb/2003-01-01T00:00:00+01:00;2023-01-31T23:59:59+01:00

Oslo seems to have mean winter temps about ~10 degrees warmer (~23 degrees in DSM on average vs ~32 degrees in Oslo). It's a little hard to compare those tools (at least I didn't find a good way to get precise mean data on the Oslo side). And I suspect that Norway is one of the coldest countries in Europe while Iowa is not a particularly code state in the US.

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