Maine politicians announced Tuesday that the state has been awarded $10 million in taxpayer funding to subsidize the installation of heat pumps in mobile and manufactured homes throughout the state.
Gov. Janet Mills (D) was joined at a press conference Tuesday by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D), Director of the Governor’s Energy Office Dan Burgess, and Efficiency Maine Executive Director Michael Stoddard. Also in attendance at the press conference was homeowner Marianna Casagranda who participated in a heat pump pilot program last year.
This grant comes as part of a $336 million initiative from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) — sourced from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — that paid for “17 projects across 20 states and 30 Tribal Nations and communities,” according to press release from the governor’s office.
Through this funding, Maine will install approximately 675 heat pumps in manufactured and mobile homes owned by low-income residents living in towns with populations less than 10,000.
There are more than 62,000 manufactured and mobile homes located in Maine, representing approximately 8 percent of the state’s total housing stock.
The heat pumps that will be offered to these homeowners are specially designed to fit the existing duct work of mobile and manufactured homes, thereby easing the retrofitting process.
A portion of this federal funding will also be used to help train installers at Maine’s community colleges on how to install these special purpose heat pumps.
While funds from the program will cover much of the estimated $15,000 price tag associated with installing a heat pump of this sort, participating homeowners will be required to pay either $2,000 up front or a total of $2,500 over the course of 50 months.
Contractors and installers will be paid directly and in-full by the state, and homeowners will send the government their contribution to the project.
Mills explained Tuesday that the installation of one of these heat pumps can be expected to replace the use of 600 gallons of oil or kerosene, or more than 900 gallons of propane, each year. She further suggested that the use of a heat pump would reduce the CO2 emissions produced by a given household by roughly 6,000 pounds annually.
The heat pumps, however, will still have to rely on electricity in Maine, a state with the some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Because much of Maine’s electricity still comes from natural gas, the heat pumps will still be generating CO2 in order to function.
“Transitioning to heat pumps is cutting costs, and it’s making [people] more comfortable in their homes. It’s also cutting our carbon emissions and creating good paying jobs — clean energy jobs,” Mills said at Tuesday’s press conference. “And Maine has the fastest growing clean energy economy in the country.”
“With this new support from the Biden Administration — and with the additional federal support that we anticipate for Maine’s Home Energy Rebate Program — I am confident that we can achieve our clean energy goals and make a meaningful difference in the lives of Maine people, saving them costs out of pocket, and saving them on heat efficiency and cooling in the summer,” Mills concluded.
Rep. Pingree expressed her pride in the state for “taking a leadership role and doing the right thing in making sure people can have affordable heating and cooling in their housing.”
She also placed great emphasis on the importance she ascribes to addressing climate change, citing the recent storms that have swept through Maine as evidence of its impact on the state.
“Climate change is around us all the time. It is not something we can talk about in the future,” Pingree said. “The weather is changing faster than we had ever been able to anticipate, and it’s just scary when you see the level of damage that has been done.”
Casagranda — the Freeport homeowner who took part in a heat pump pilot program last year — described her personal experience using the system, relaying its effectiveness in both heating and cooling her home under extreme temperatures.
“It’s been easy. It’s been efficient. It’s been fabulous,” she concluded lightheartedly.
Last to speak was Executive Director Stoddard of Efficiency Maine who provided some more specific details about the nature of the new program, as well as the state’s efforts leading up to this point with respect to increasing heat pump usage.
Stoddard also suggested in his remarks that this program will make it easier for other mobile and manufactured homeowners to access these specialized heat pumps in the future.
“The point is not only to make the lives better for those 675 homeowners. The point is to demonstrate that this will work for all 62,000 homes in the state,” Stoddard said. “We’re going to be setting the example here, setting the standard. We’re going to be getting better at installing them faster and at lower cost. We’re going to get volume discounts as we start doing this kind of project at scale.”
“We’re trying to transform the marketplace,” Stoddard concluded. “We’re trying to transform how Mainers heat their homes and businesses so that we can have a more robust and secure economy, so that we don’t have to import fuels from around the world, and so that we can help our climate get through another day.”
Click Here to Read the Full Press Release from Gov. Mills’ Office
Expanding heat pump usage has been a focus of the Mills Administration since 2019 when the governor signed legislation formally establishing a statewide goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps by 2025.
Last year, Mills announced that Maine had met this goal two years ahead of schedule. In response, she set forth a new goal of installing an additional 175,000 heat pumps by 2027.
Shortly thereafter, the United States Climate Alliance — of which Mills is a co-chair — expressed a commitment to increasing heat pump usage nationwide four-fold by 2030.
According to Yale Climate Connections — a project of Yale Center for Environmental Communication at Yale University — most heat pumps are able to run at full capacity at temperatures as low as -5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Although the systems will still produce heat at lower temperatures, heat pumps may “not necessarily keep it as warm as you may typically like.” In these cases, the group recommends turning to “backup heat sources,” noting that “supplementary heat is important for heat pumps in cold climates.”
The Mills Administration’s advocacy for increased heat pump installation comes amidst a broader push in Maine for an increased focus on environmentalism and on achieving the state’s climate-related goals.
Earlier this month, Maine received $4.4 million from the federal government — also sourced from 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — to improve the “resilience” of the state’s electrical grid, as well as to “support Maine’s climate and clean energy goals.”
A number of other federal grants have been awarded to Maine agencies in recent months for climate-related projects, including $1 million from the federal DOE to install of solar panels and electric vehicle (EV) chargers at the new Acadia National Park maintenance complex.
In January of this year, the Maine Department of Transportation (MDOT) received $15 million from the federal government to install 20 Level 2 EV chargers and 34 DC Fast chargers across a total of 132 locations statewide.
[RELATED: Maine Receives $15 Million from Biden Admin to Install EV Chargers Across the State]
Another initiative being pursued in order to help further the state’s climate-related objectives is the controversial EV mandate actively under consideration by the Maine Board of Environmental Protection (BEP).
Referred to officially as the Advanced Clean Cars II Program, this agency rule would would all-but phase out the sale of new internal combustion vehicles in the state by 2032.
[RELATED: Electric Vehicle Mandate Slated for March Hearing as Mills Touts EV Charger Investments]
In the current form, this mandate would require that 51 percent of new car sales in Maine be comprised of EVs by model year 2028 and 82 percent by model year 2032.
The BEP is scheduled to undertake further rulemaking on the proposal at their meeting in the Augusta Civic Center on March 20.
Another ten million boondoggle. Where did the 10 mil come from? Oh yeah, printing press funny money. Since they don’t work too well in cold climates, you will freeze and be happy about it just like you will eat bugs instead of meat and be happy about it. These people are off their rockers nuts.
This women is out of control. WE LIVE IN MAINE you want to freeze us an rely on high cost electricity? Janet your hurting every American in Maine and giving everything to ILLEGAL IMEGRANTS.. So glad this is your last term.
No problem Mills — just shovel some more coal into the power plants to power these babies up.
Dumbass
Sure, Ladies, and I use that term loosely, Maine is well suited to electric heat. We are one of the coldest states in the US of A, with just about the highest electricity bills. Please note that in this whole, overly long article, there is not one comparison of the cost to heat a trailer with electricity, #2 oil, or propane/natural gas. The Ladies never mention comparitive costs because doing such would destroy their socialist argument for their democrat plan to buy votes by giving away money to a likely democrat voting segment of our population.
What all these political hacks fail to tell you is that heat pumps don’t work when the temperature gets down to 24 degrees and more over it takes electricity from fossil fuel powered generating statiosn to produce the electricity to run the inefficient heat pump. There is nothing more dangerous than a stupid politician with power and we Mainer’s have an abundance of them.
I recently moved into a fairly new but small one-bedroom apartment with two heat pumps. I can tell you first hand they do NOT work well in cold weather state such as Maine. It’s a struggle to keep the temperature around 70. Even though the units are serviced twice a year, I also vacuum the filters regularly but that doesn’t stop the accumulation of dust or my allergies from kicking in and having sneezing fits way more then normal.
I only have one question: If heat pumps, wind turbines, solar panels, EVs, etc. are so wonderful, why do they have to be subsidized? I also have only one answer: They’re a money maker for politicians and their business cronies in the climate change scam.
Heat pumps tend to have reduced efficiency and performance in cold weather. They can also have a higher installation cost and a shorter lifespan than furnaces. A heat pump is also noisier and may need to defrost regularly to function in sub-freezing temperatures. A a heat pump costs between $4,200 to $7,630.