How much dearer can a heat pump be than a gas furnace plus AC before gas wins on 30-year cost?

What it found

Instead of inventing equipment prices, reports the break-even premium at which a heat pump and a gas furnace + AC tie on 30-year net present cost, each with its own cost-optimal envelope, at EIA state prices. In Miami, Houston and Atlanta the heat pump may cost at most $84, $132 and $735 more; in Chicago, Minneapolis and Duluth it would have to cost $5,399 to $6,698 less, across 1–6% discount rates. The southern result flips with gas 25% cheaper. Constant COP flatters the heat pump in the cold; no equipment sizing or incentives. Stylised.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

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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.