Building electrification can help meet our climate goals while also improving outdoor air quality to create better health outcomes for communities across the country. Upgrading America’s existing household appliances to efficient electric machines comes with a host of positive outcomes. Electrification will improve outdoor air quality — leading to fewer premature deaths and reduced societal costs — all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 400 million metric tons, cutting energy bills by $60 billion every year, and creating more than one million jobs.
In this report, we model the health benefits of electrifying America’s households through upgrading space heating, water heating, and clothes drying using heat pump technology. Collectively, these systems currently output more than half a million tons of fine particulate matter outdoors each year, through burning fossil fuels at home and electricity consumption from existing, inefficient electric appliances. We use building energy modeling, open-source data on air pollutants, and air quality modeling to quantify the potential for population health benefits of electrifying America’s households.