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How fast must gas prices rise against electricity before a heat pump ties a gas furnace on 30-year cost?

research/house-escalate

How fast must gas prices rise against electricity before a heat pump ties a gas furnace on 30-year cost? At equal installed cost the heat pump already wins in Miami, Houston and Atlanta unless gas gets cheaper; in Chicago, Minneapolis and Duluth gas must rise 4.6%, 3.7% and 3.7% a year in real terms for 30 years. Stylised.

8 tests

What it found

Separates each house package’s yearly bill into gas and electricity and lets each grow at its own real rate, then reruns the break-even premium of house-hvacnpc, which held prices flat. With electricity flat, a heat pump of equal installed cost already ties in Miami, Houston and Atlanta unless gas gets cheaper (−2.9%, −0.3%, −1.1% a year), while in Chicago, Minneapolis and Duluth gas must rise 4.6%, 3.7% and 3.7% a year in real terms for 30 years; a $4,000 premium raises that to 5.2–6.3%. Constant 2.5 COP, constant growth rates, no forecast. Stylised.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/house-escalate: premium_by_growth
house-escalate/experiments/premium_by_growth.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.