Heat Pumps

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Jaron. [00:00:25] Speaker C: And I'm your other co host, Lonnie. [00:00:27] Speaker B: And today we're talking about one of the quiet heroes of the clean energy transition, heat pumps. [00:00:34] Speaker C: And if you're not too familiar with heat pumps, they're just a device that can heat your home in the winter and cool it in the summer using electricity. Think of it like a super efficient two way air conditioner. [00:00:47] Speaker B: Exactly. Which makes them great not only for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also for giving people access to cooling where they didn't have it before. Which we talk more about during our interview with Jordan Bonomo from the New York City Housing Authority, or nycha. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Lonnie, can you share WEAC's mission? [00:01:07] Speaker C: Absolutely. WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices. Is. [00:01:20] Speaker B: Thank you, Lonnie. So as we were saying before, heat pumps work just like a regular air conditioner. It pulls heat from inside your home and moves outside. And in the winter time, it does a reverse. It pulls heat from outside, you know, from the outside air and brings it into your house. And, and yes, even when it's super cold out, there's still heat in the air. There's still energy that heat pumps are able to pull in. And heat pumps are surprisingly good at finding and bringing it in and still heating your home in the wintertime. [00:01:52] Speaker C: And that's because they don't create heat, they move it. And moving heat is way more efficient than burning something to make heat like gas or oil or other fossil fuels. For example, traditional gas furnace might be around 80 to 90% efficient. A heat pump, on the other hand, wait for it can be 300 to 400% efficient because it's transferring energy, not generating it. [00:02:19] Speaker B: That's mind blown. Didn't even know that was possible. Well, with all that said, why, why does any of this matter? Why are we here talking about heat bumps? What's going on? [00:02:29] Speaker C: Great question. So buildings are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution here in New York, mainly from burning gas and oil for heat and hot water. If we replace those systems with electric heat pumps and power them with renewable energy from wind or solar, we can cut those emissions drastically. [00:02:47] Speaker B: Plus you're getting two systems in one, heating and cooling, and that's a big Deal. Because with more frequent heat waves from climate change, having cooling is a big benefit. Heat pumps have also come a long way in terms of technology. Older models really struggled in cold climates, but newer ones less like cold climate heat pumps. You may hear them referred to as they can handle winters in places including upstate New York and even Minnesota. So they can get down there. You know, Minnesota, it gets pretty cold. [00:03:15] Speaker C: It gets freezing cold in Minnesota. So it's good to know that these heat pumps can work in those places as well. And it's also worth mentioning that they can save money in the long run because they're so efficient. And with rebates and incentives out there, installing heat pumps can make financial sense as well. Those cost savings and rebates have been motivating a lot of homeowners to make the switch. But, you know, this is New York City. Most of us don't have a single family home that we own, and we can make all these changes. So. So what about people who are renting? [00:03:48] Speaker B: That's a great question, Lonnie. And that's actually one of the main topics that we discussed during our interview with Jordan. Here in New York City, NYCHA has been piloting a few different types of heat pumps in their building. There's different types out there, including a portable heat pump that can sit in a window like a regular AC unit, except without blocking your window as much, which is even better. And they've gotten really good feedback from residents, and they've had some promising results from those pilots. [00:04:13] Speaker C: And that's good news for renters because they will likely see more and more of these kinds of heat pumps popping up throughout the city thanks to Local Law 154, which requires all new construction to be fully electric. [00:04:24] Speaker B: Well, that's exciting. Let's not give too much away. Why don't we go ahead and jump into our interview with Jordan and hear more? [00:04:30] Speaker C: Let's go. [00:04:37] Speaker A: All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, Jordan. We're super excited to talk to you about pretty hot topic heat pumps today. But before we get into that, do you mind just giving us a brief introduction of yourself and tell us a little bit about your role? [00:04:51] Speaker D: Sure. Good to be here. Thanks so much for having me. So my name is Jordan Bonimo, and. And I'm a senior program manager in the energy and sustainability department at NYCHA that's housed in the asset and capital management division. So we work on capital projects at NYCHA. So we're home to about 500,000 New Yorkers here in the city. It's about one in every 17 New Yorkers lives at NYCHA. 175,000 apartments in 2,200 buildings citywide. That's kind of split between traditional Section 9 or Section 8, packed, rad projects. So we're very large. We're like a small city within the city of New York. And so, you know, everything that we do, it's kind of like managing a little city here. And we have quite a bit of scale. [00:05:39] Speaker C: Thanks for that. We can dive right in. Before we get into kind of the nuance of what's going on in nycha, if we could just get a little bit of higher level understanding that, you know, heat pumps have been around for a while. It's not like they're brand new, but I feel like a lot of people who listen to this podcast or work in this space, particularly in the US it seems like it's kind of new to everyone. It's just everyone's kind of now, just now kind of talking about it here in the U.S. but again, they've gotten a lot of attention recently. Can you talk a little bit about that and like, what's driving the conversation around heat pumps? [00:06:09] Speaker D: Sure. Well, heat pump technology is certainly not new. It's been around for decades. In fact, every air conditioner you see is really a heat pump. All your window acs that we see are ubiquitous in the city. Those are heat pumps. They only work in one direction. So when we talk about heat pumps, we're really talking about bidirectional, so they'll both heat and cool a space. But I think one of the reasons that they're getting so much attention now, of course, one, there's a growing focus on climate change, the need to reduce our CO. CO2 emissions, carbon emissions from everything from our transportation, our industrial sectors, but especially here in New York, our building sector, which accounts for the majority of our carbon emissions. So the way to do that really is by converting to electric. Because I think there's a larger understanding now as we're focused on climate change, that in order to reduce those CO2 emissions, we're going to have to electrify processes that previously were relying on burning fossil fuels. So for buildings in particular, this is usually like a boiler or a furnace that's burning gas and converting it to heat for space heating or to heat your hot water. That's the majority of our fossil fuel used in buildings. And, you know, the idea is to convert those systems to electric and then you get rid of the fossil fuel equipment and then you can generate that electricity. Through renewable sources like solar, wind. And then, you know, by doing that, eventually your building emissions will just go down, which is kind of like the logic behind, you know, Local Law 97 here in New York City, which is kind of our. Our North Star, as we do a lot of our decarbonization efforts at nycha. So, you know, I think with. With. With kind of this new understanding and drive towards electrification, it's brought a focus on heat pumps because, you know, they're really the best technology out there right now for electrifying these building processes. And most people, when they think of electric heat, think of an electric baseboard base heater. And those, you know, those have been around forever. Everybody's pretty familiar with them, but they're quite limited. One, they have a very limited efficiency. They're 99% efficient, so they're more efficient than your boiler, but that's it. They're never getting any more efficient than that. You know, they also, you know, have. Have been known in the. To have some. They're prone to issues like overheating. You know, there have been fires associated with them because they get, you know, hot. And if they. If they touch something that is combustible, you can have problems. But with heat pumps, you're not limited to inefficiency, to 99%. Heat pumps can be over 100% efficient. So when they're. When they're operating, depending on what the conditions are operating under, they can be 200, 300, 400% efficient from a heat pump. And that makes a big difference, especially when we're talking about things like the cost of electricity relative to gas. Right. The cost of electricity is much higher than gas here in New York City especially. So if you can use that electricity more efficiently, you begin to get parity with gas equipment. And so that's why everybody's, like, rushing to heat pumps as opposed to, like, electric space heaters and things like that. And finally, a lot of the attention on heat pumps is kind of driven by the innovation that's happening there. So there's a lot of new products coming to market right now that are more efficient, can work in colder temperatures, come in different configurations, and they're constantly improving. So that's just driving attention, which then drives more innovation. It's kind of nice, virtuous cycle that we have here. [00:10:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate you touching on the cost piece, you know, thinking about. Because heat pumps are so efficient, and with the cost of electricity, especially in the Northeast, being what it is, if you have a really efficient system, it can really Help manage those. The cost piece of it, which I think for a lot of people that is top of mind. You think about your energy bill. If you're going to swap out your heating system and you're going to go with the heat pump, you get the benefit of those cost savings or at least cost parity. But then also I know another potential benefit, especially you know, thinking about New York is for people who had heating but did not have cooling before. You know, you get that extra benefit of potentially having cooling as well, which, which can be a huge benefit come summertime when it gets hot. [00:10:59] Speaker D: Right. And it's in one. It's in one piece of equipment. Like the same piece of equipment gives you the heating and the cooling, which you know. Who wants to have two pieces of equipment, especially in New York when space is at a premium. [00:11:10] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. Which, which leads us to our next question, which is about what's going on at nycha. I know that y'all have been doing some great work with actually getting heat pumps installed at NYCHA residence. So can you tell us a little bit about what's going on with that? I believe it's a part of a pilot, so just. Yeah. What's, what's going on? What's, what does that project look like? [00:11:29] Speaker D: Yeah. So NYCH has been looking at heat pump technology for a couple of years now, since at least 20, 19, 18. And we are looking at it as a potential future heating option for our buildings to replace our old steam boilers. Just to give a little bit of background for those who are not familiar with NYCHA heating systems. But typically our buildings are heated right now by large steam boilers, usually campus style boilers. So we'll have like one central boiler plant that feeds, you know, multiple buildings, 5, 10, 20 buildings from one boiler plant. And it uses like all a network of underground steam pipes, miles of piping, underground up risers, up in the buildings to get to the radiators in people's apartments. So we're looking at retiring these legacy systems which are 70, 80 years old often. And we think that heat pumps are the most promising technology because it not only allows us to address several issues that steam heat have posed to residents, but it also allows us to meet our carbon reduction goals. So it's great with the steam heat. For example, residents have absolutely no control over the temperature in their apartment. So this results in either typically apartments being way overheated and you'll see residents just opening windows in February or way underheated and then that becomes a well known news story. So we are by converting to heat pumps or other technologies. What it, what it does actually is it puts the thermostat really in the resident's apartment and it gives them the control of the temperature so they can kind of set to whatever they like. So, so we're really liking that aspect of this. We've piloted a few types of heat pumps. We've done like split systems. That's where you have an outdoor unit connected by refrigerant piping to an indoor unit. And you see these kind of all over the city. They'll be like a unit either mounted on an exterior wall outside somewhere or often on the roof. And then it's connected to usually a fan coil that's on, on a wall somewhere inside. And then there's like a remote, you know, those things that, so that's a split system. And we, we did a pilot with that building, Ford Independence in the Bronx around 2020 in a couple of apartments. And then we also have been looking at package systems which essentially take the outdoor unit and the indoor unit and put it into one package. Sort of like a PTAC or a window ac. You could think of it like that as well. It just makes installation a lot easier. We've also looked at heat pumps for heating our water. So we have a couple of projects where we're replacing water heaters with heat pump water heaters and making hot water that way. So we're really, you know, I think it's, it's still early, it's early in the game here for heat pumps. There's, like I said, a lot of technologies coming to market all the time. And I just been testing various types of those heat pump technologies and seeing what works and what the most practical solutions for our buildings are. [00:15:05] Speaker C: Well, I actually didn't know that there were that many different components to what's going on here in the different types that were being used and also kind of for hot water systems as well. Normally when people think of NYCHA or NYCHA campuses, there are different types of building, different ages, different ages, different states of disrepair. We often talk about that here and we act in kind of like the conditions of the actual physical units and buildings themselves. So what, what makes NYCHA a good place to even install heat pumps? [00:15:36] Speaker D: That's a good question. Well, we have a couple of advantages going for us that have made piloting at NYCHA particularly helpful or easier. 1 actually our buildings are not as varied as some folks think. I believe like 90% of our buildings by floor area are of this similar post war campus Vintage NYCHA style and very familiar with like the tower in the Park NYCHA campuses. So that actually comprises the majority of our portfolio. And those buildings are for the most part pretty similar to each other, you know, and then, and then from once you get outside of that, we have scattered sites and other buildings that NYCHA has acquired through the years. Different reasons, we even have some brownstones. So there's some variation on the ends. But for the most part our building stock is pretty homogenous which, which actually makes planning scoping a little easier for us. Another thing that NYCHA has going for it is master metered. So our residents, our buildings have one single electric meter in the basement. And electricity, electric costs are part of the residents monthly rent. So residents do not pay separately to Con Ed or anything like that. And this actually makes it a little bit easier for us to electrify because we don't have to deal with one of the biggest issue challenges of electrification like everybody else does, which is you're now switching the payment structure for heat onto the residents. And so that's like one of the biggest challenges that a lot of my colleagues outside of NYCHA in the housing industry have faced is well, how do we take this, this thing that we've generally accepted that the landlord will pay for. And now because of electrification, we kind of have to move it onto the residence utility bill. So that's been a challenge there. We don't have to deal with that. So it kind of makes it a lot easier to pilot it at nycha. And finally, as a NYPA customer, our electric rates are much lower because we are NYPA customer than private buildings. So we can get a little bit closer to break even with gas equipment and heating. So that's helped us a little bit. And you know, I think that NYCHA also is staffed with a lot of folks who believe in or have the desire to improve the quality of our housing stock and really want to push the envelope with what we provide to our residents. So that has also been a huge help in getting NYCHA to pilot some of these newer technologies. And what I think beyond the kind of the cutting edge of some of. [00:18:41] Speaker A: This stuff, I appreciate you circling back to the pilot project because this all kind of fits under the umbrella of that and thinking about how as this equipment is getting tested and what you said, the way that electricity is managed for NYCHA buildings. Yeah. How are you all kind of defining success in deciding whether or not to move forward with some of the different developments? [00:19:03] Speaker D: Let me first talk about some of the pilots that we've done because it's been a very iterative process, right? We do a pilot, we learn from it, we figure out what was the success, what was a failure, and then we try and go on to the next pilot and replicate the successes and obviously try and avoid the failures. So we started this electrification work in around 2018, 19, in a partnership with the mayor's office of Sustainability. And we had a grant from NYSERDA to pilot a split system up in the Bronx at Ford Independence. And we did about seven apartments there on the top floor. We had some equipment donated to us from the manufacturer, which was great. And these were occupied apartments, so the residents were there. And the day after we signed the agreement with the contractor to do the installation, Covid hit and so shut down everything. And we were able to do the work eventually. We started a couple months late, but we eventually were able to start the work. But, you know, we had to manage, you know, within that space. Everybody was wearing masks and we had the resident had to be in one room and the workers in the other room. And it was a bit chaotic. But we learned a lot from that project. And the big takeaways were one, it was a pretty big inconvenience to the residents. The apartment work lasted about five to seven days per apartment, and some somewhere longer. It depended on the conditions in the apartment. There were a lot of built ins, these residents. A lot of residents at NYCHA have lived there for 30, 40 years. Some of the residents I've met, residents who were the first residents in the building, they're as old as the building in there. So, you know, they've accumulated a bunch, they've done renovations within their apartments, you know, and you have to work around that. So. So that was a challenge. And then when you're in an apartment for that long, you know, the resident also has to be home to let you in. So it's kind of a pretty big burden to them. And these are folks who might not get too much vacation time. It's a challenge for them to be home. They might have medical. A lot of them have medical appointments that they have to, you know, work around and schedule around. So it's difficult. And so. So there's the constructability, getting access and that kind of stuff. And then there was also just the cost, because all of that adds up a lot of cost. You have, you know, the design engineer, hazmat abatement and testing, the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and they're all going in and out. And there's a Lot of scheduling and coordination. That's, that's what that. So basically our main takeaway from this was it's going to be impossible for us to scale this to 177,000 apartments because we did seven apartments. It took something like six months. Not including the design. The design took its own, you know, six months. It was quickly apparent that we were going to have to look for a different approach. And so we did an evaluation of that project. The residents were very happy with the technology. At the end of the day, they loved having the cooling, they loved having the apartment temperature control. The units were very consistent in the heat that they were providing. Everybody got the same heat or cooling. There weren't any distribution issues that we see with our steam systems or anything like that. But you know, it wasn't without its problems. It was the constructability issue. But also after a year or so, one of the units had a refrigerant leak that we had to go back and fix. So you know, when you have these long runs of refrigerant piping, there's a lot of elbows and joints and if the contractor, you know, didn't braze a joint properly or didn't tighten something, you'll get a leak and eventually the unit will stop working. And you know, the refrigerant itself is a highly potent greenhouse gas, like many times, thousand times worse than CO2. So you know, one refrigerant probably offset the entire projects carbon savings unfortunately. But you know, these are things that we were learning as we were going through the pilot and what that, you know, what we came to at the end of that was that we needed a different technology. We wanted to look away from these bespoke field fabricated systems to something that could be more like pre assembled, prepackaged, smaller, more unitary and something more like an appliance. So we kind of moved more towards package systems from that and started piloting that different tech. So that was kind of our first foray into electrification. And then from that spoke with the manufacturer and said, you know, here's what we liked, here's what we didn't like. This was the manufacturer's Repsar and at the time he had just gotten a new packaged unit that was marketed as the same efficiency as like a split system, but all in one unit. It all went indoors and you just drilled two holes through the wall so you could just mount it onto your wall with two holes through the wall and it would do heating and cooling from it. So we were like, that sounds great, you know, send us one. We Installed it in the supers office at that building where we did the, where we did. The pilot gave the super some, you know, instructions on how to use it. And you know, it was installed in like an hour as opposed to seven days. And you know, it blew out heat and it blew out cold. It wasn't perfect. There was a lot of air penetration, air infiltration through it, which we didn't particularly like. But at the end of the day it was a pretty good working facsimile of what we wanted, which was a quicker installation, like similar performance. And so that kind of sparked some other pilots. [00:25:29] Speaker A: It's interesting to hear. I appreciate you kind of walking us through the different phases because like you said, you kind of learn as you go. You know, you don't get it right the first time, but those lessons that you learned from the first pilot are still valuable and help carry through on the other one. [00:25:41] Speaker D: So I mean, from, from that, you know, what we did once we had this other unit which was just being brought in from, I think it was Italian, it was an Italian company and really they had no market or foothold. They were trying to get a foothold in mistakes. And we were interested, we were not interested in drilling a bunch of holes through our walls though either because that comes with a lot of challenges, constructability issues there. And also you degrade the performance of your, of your thermal envelope by punching a lot of holes through the walls where they weren't before. So what we actually did with that unit was rather than stick it, rather than punch the holes through the wall, we, we put it in a window. So we, we did it a couple times. First we built like this sheet metal box that connected the unit to the bottom of a window, a window sash. So the window sash opened like 4 or 5 inches. We stuck this giant metal box in there and then the unit sat below the window and that's where we had all the air infiltration. But it, I mean it blew hot air out. But we had a really tough time air sealing it. It also looked really clunky. And then what we did was we got rid of the metal box and we just stuck the unit directly into the window. Kind of put it on this like piece of wood paneling in the window. And that worked a lot better. We, we didn't have the air sealing issues, but we lost like half of the window light. So we weren't really thrilled with that. So what we did was from there we said, well, we didn't know about this product. You know, a month ago it's likely that there's a lot of products out there being sold in other markets that we, we just don't know about. Right? They're just not being offered here because like heat pumps were relatively new thing at the time anyway. People were just kind of getting into them. So what we did was we issued an rfei, which is a request for expression of interest. And we said, you know, we were basically asking the market, do you have any products that we don't know about that do xyz? So we said, we're looking for something that, you know, we can plug into a standard 120 volt outlet with no electrical upgrades needed that can provide heating at an outdoor temperature of whatever the design temperature in the city was like 17, 15 degrees. Provide heating at that low temperature and cooling and doesn't cost more than like $3,000 or something like that. We were also interested if that doesn't exist, what, you know, what would it take to make it. Is it possible to make it? And so we did get a bunch of responses. You know, the folks that gave us the original packaging that responded, we also didn't want it to drill holes at the wall. We wanted it to go through like a window. That was a key part of it. So, so all these requirements, we got a couple of responses. Some folks were like, you can't build that at all. Like there aren't compressors small enough for the size that you want. And others were like, yeah, we can do it. We just need, you know, an order of X magnitude and you know, two years or something like that. And so one company that did respond to it was called True, and I think now they're called Gradient and they sent us, you know, kind of picture of a, of a unit that they were, it was a pilot, sorry, a startup out of California and they were working on a. Essentially like a much more efficient air conditioning system that could be installed through a window, sort of like an upside down shaped U. So it didn't, it was like a saddle shape. So it didn't take up much window space. It provided cooling and some heating. I think it worked down to like 40 degrees or something like that outside and plugged into an outlet, like a standard outlet. And once we saw that, we thought, okay, it's not a great leap of technology to go from this to a cold climate version of this that would provide heat in our climate here in New York City. So that is when we issued an RFP for. We got more specific with our product requirements and we issued an RFP with our partners at NYPA NYSERDA for window heat pump. And we got two responses from that. Oh, sorry, two. We awarded two manufacturers from that. We got about five responses. And then those two manufacturers within a year provided us prototypes of their units. And then within 18 months we were installing them at a development in Queens to pilot them and test them. And they've been installed now for about two years. So yeah, that's been our big pilot the last two years. Really? [00:31:06] Speaker C: Wow, that's a journey. I actually did not know that all of this went into the pilot in kind of getting heat pumped that, you know, almost as if you guys helped push forward kind of technology and the advancement of heat pumps just simply by wanting to do this pilot and kind of the dedication to getting heat pumps installed at nightshad. I just, I'm kind of amazed at this that happened because of this pilot. [00:31:36] Speaker A: Just one quick follow up question I had just out of curiosity. You said the pilot with those window systems has been going for about two years. How has it been going? Has it been successful or would you consider it successful? What's gone? Well, what's, what have you learned? [00:31:51] Speaker D: Yeah, so I mean there's a lot of measures of success in this. But you know, at a high level, the units provide, have had no trouble providing heat even at the coldest temperatures that we've had in the last two years. So that's not been an issue. They also provide cooling. So everybody's been, the residents have been really happy with having cooling where they didn't previously have cooling before. The energy reduction has been better than we anticipated. So when we looked at the energy use of these and compared it to what our typical steam boilers, what the energy production or energy uses of those, there's been big savings. Even in terms of costs to operate the units relative to the boiler, there's been savings. So we've been really happy at the, at a high level there. Yeah, you know, the, the residents I think so far have been happy with the results. The units are very quiet. So that was a concern at first. You know, window air conditioners are, you know, not silent, but these are very, very quiet, mostly because the compressor sits outside and you've got the window in between. So the only thing that's operating inside is a little fan. So you don't really hear it much. And now we've gone through the, the demonstration phase and the manufacturers then were issued like a punch list of all the items that we wanted corrected and all the feedback from the residents, you know, they, what they can do they made the changes. And then we received sort of like the final units which are now being tested to confirm that, you know, all of the punch list items have been addressed. And then as a next phase, we're going to actually scale that pilot up from we were doing it in four apartment lines in two buildings. We're going to do a full building now. So that's our goal this year, is to scale it up to a full building and then hopefully from there we'll go to a full campus site. So there's 20 buildings at that campus. We're hoping that the full 20 buildings will be electrified. [00:34:13] Speaker A: That's super exciting. I feel like that we got to see the whole journey and to know that it's kind of going to continue to scale up and be tested. I think that's just kind of how these kinds of things work. You have to start small and, and kind of especially like you mentioned before, with such a big entity like not just its own mini city within New York City and really kind of slowly building up these things slowly and testing them at larger and larger scale. So I'm excited to see what comes out of that next phase of the, of the testing. [00:34:46] Speaker C: Thanks for listening. Don't forget to check out our next episode in our Right Direction miniseries where we talk to folks from CUNY about wind energy in New York and what it means for workforce development. The episode is going to drop May 26th. [00:34:57] Speaker B: If you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and [email protected] check out react on Facebook at weact4ej. [00:35:12] Speaker C: That's W E A C T F O R E J Instagram, Blue sky and YouTube at weact for EJ that's W E A C T number 4 EJ. And check out our website, weact.org for more information about environmental justice. [00:35:28] Speaker B: Until next time, Bye.