Making heat pumps smarter to cut more carbon, with Harvest Thermal
Heat pumps paired with thermal storage can cut carbon emissions by up to 90%, says Jane Melia. She joins WattCarbon to share how a smart thermal storage system can help heat pumps work even harder.
Heat pumps are great, but can we make them work even harder? Jane Melia, CEO and co-founder of heat pump company Harvest Thermal, thinks so. She joins WattCarbon to discuss how their innovative thermal storage tech draws, stores, and deploys the cleanest watt-hours at the right times, helping Californian homes cut carbon emissions by up to 90%.
This article is part of WattCarbon’s Every Watt-Hour Tells a Story series, spotlighting how WattCarbon partners are deploying distributed clean energy to achieve climate impact, here and now.
The big idea
They say heat pumps are the heroes of building decarbonization, but there's a catch: we need heat most during peak hours—mornings and evenings—when energy is priciest and dirtiest.
Harvest Thermal’s big idea? Pairing a hyper-efficient heat pump with a smart thermal storage system – combining heating and hot water in one all-electric super-efficient system. By timing heat production to when grid electricity is clean and cheap, the storage tank becomes a high-impact energy asset, maximizing decarbonization potential at an accessible cost.
Unlike a gas furnace, Harvest knows what time it is. Most people use hot water and heat in the morning and at night. Harvest’s heat pump takes energy off the grid in the middle of the day, when there’s a lot of cheap, clean solar power. It stores that energy in a hot water tank, which combined with its smart pod, creates its Smart Thermal Battery™.
The smart thermal battery stores heat in a water tank (like storing energy in an AA battery, but with water instead of electrochemicals). Machine learning algorithms ensure homes stay 100% comfortable.
Up to 90% emissions reductions
Harvest’s approach is more than just electrification; it’s about using the cleanest electrons available. Home heating and hot water drive two-thirds of residential energy use and create 10% of global emissions. Harvest’s Smart Thermal Battery reduces those emissions by up to 90% compared to gas furnaces and 40% compared to heat pumps without thermal batteries attached.
Plus, with load flexibility, Harvest’s tech supports a cleaner, more resilient grid, allowing more households to electrify without strain. This load flexibility enables the heat pump system to draw energy when it's cheapest and cleanest, and deploy it in the home when it's needed. Since California’s grid is now 54% renewable (IEA 2023), users get the cleanest watt-hours, when they need them. This opens the door to cost-effective home electrification, on a massive scale.
As Harvest’s CEO and co-founder Jane Melia puts it, “people buying Harvest watt-hours really are getting the cleanest, most cost-effective electrons.”
Realtime customer energy use ensures accurate real-time and regional accounting of avoided carbon emissions, for every system, and is ready to install anywhere in North America.
A scalable solution
Heat pumps rely on the cleanliness of the energy of the grid they’re plugged into. In the past, the solution has come under criticism for not being able to totally ensure that no fossil fuels are burned, while keeping costs low for homeowners.
Melia says Harvest’s solution solves for this, and is scalable. “This is how heat pumps scale. By combining them with cheap, affordable thermal storage we can add heat pumps in every home without a negative grid impact,” she explains.
Decarbonization investment opportunities
For decarbonizers, investing in Harvest Thermal electrification Energy Attribute Certificates (EACs) presents an opportunity to scale and accelerate decarbonization outside of your own operations in California and across the U.S. with smart thermal heat pumps where the emissions reduction and decarbonization impact is high.
Investing in Harvest EACs enables corporates to fund distributed clean energy projects today to meet your climate goals, such as activity-aligned Scope 3 matching, emissionality, or community impact.
Harvesting for future generations
“Decarbonizing buildings has been an overlooked challenge, but by partnering with Harvest and WattCarbon, companies can support cleaner, smarter, and more grid-friendly heat pumps at scale, and take the whack-a-mole out of night-time electricity usage,” says Melia.
“Electrification is an essential part of every decarbonizer’s toolkit, but Harvest’s smart thermal HVACs innovation just made heat pumps even smarter and even cleaner. We’re delighted to welcome Harvest Thermal to the OpenEAC Exchange to accelerate and scale a new era of smarter heat pumps through EACs,” says McGee Young, CEO and founder of WattCarbon.
Get involved
Want to support decarbonization? Explore Harvest’s Storefront on the WattCarbon OpenEAC Exchange for electrification investment opportunities today.