I have a few family members with heat pumps (I’m in Canada) and they work well. They do need to be supplemented for the coldest days, but they have an electric heater integrated into the system for that. Last month was particularly cold (every day was below freezing) and resulted in some very high power bills, but still worked out to be less costly than oil or even wood.
In terms of EVs not working well in the cold… yeah and neither do Diesel engines. Need to plug in a block heater if you want your diesel engine to start on a cold morning. Seems a really easy fix to have something similar for an EV, and since you’re plugging it in anyway, it shouldn’t be a big problem.
EVs are kinda a no-brainer in terms of energy usage. Way cheaper than gas or diesel, only problem is there’s a significant upfront cost at the moment. Once some lithium mines come online and we get some economies of scale going on making the batteries that upfront cost drops too. Other than the battery, an EV is way simpler than an ICE vehicle, and all studies have shown they will last significantly longer than an ICE vehicle. Electric motors aren’t all that complicated, the batteries are getting to be mature tech now, so there’s less that can go wrong with them than with complicated ICE powered vehicle.
I have a few family members with heat pumps (I’m in Canada) and they work well. They do need to be supplemented for the coldest days, but they have an electric heater integrated into the system for that. Last month was particularly cold (every day was below freezing) and resulted in some very high power bills, but still worked out to be less costly than oil or even wood.
In terms of EVs not working well in the cold… yeah and neither do Diesel engines. Need to plug in a block heater if you want your diesel engine to start on a cold morning. Seems a really easy fix to have something similar for an EV, and since you’re plugging it in anyway, it shouldn’t be a big problem.
EVs are kinda a no-brainer in terms of energy usage. Way cheaper than gas or diesel, only problem is there’s a significant upfront cost at the moment. Once some lithium mines come online and we get some economies of scale going on making the batteries that upfront cost drops too. Other than the battery, an EV is way simpler than an ICE vehicle, and all studies have shown they will last significantly longer than an ICE vehicle. Electric motors aren’t all that complicated, the batteries are getting to be mature tech now, so there’s less that can go wrong with them than with complicated ICE powered vehicle.