On Monday, Jack Policar, a climate tech founder and friend of Halcyon, posted a plea on LinkedIn. Seeking clear and transparent data on heat pump installation prices, he searched Google, and received its “AI overview” quoting average installation costs of $4,200 to $7,600.

Yes, this is an overview — but for Jack, or anyone seeking accurate and actionable information to guide their capital planning at any scale — it is not satisfactory.  Our own Sam Steyer replied to Jack saying “I would estimate that is less than 50% of reality, based on the quotes that I have seen,” and other replies to Jack say something similar.

There’s an old analysis joke that the plural of anecdote is data, and there is some truth to it. Aggregate enough individually sourced data points, and you have a data set, after all.  But, at Halcyon we thought we could do better than an anecdote.

Halcyon now has more than 700,000 documents in its catalog, including from authoritative sources such as state and regional regulators, utility and service commissions, and federal government rulemakers. We used our AI-assisted search software to ask Jack’s question to this set of data sources. Here’s our question (specified as a residential ducted heat pump system in the US), and here’s the response: 

Halcyon’s response is more precise, with state-level details.  It also provides citations, with one reference to energy services provider EnergySage and another to a filing that is part of a California Public Utilities Commission proceeding from 2022. (That second CPUC source is worth digging into.) 

And, Halcyon now supports a new way to access information contained within authoritative documents: figure search.  We queried this CPUC document for relevant figures (which is our term to describe images, charts, tables, graphs, and other non-text material) data about heat pump prices and received two useful figures in return. 

The first is a large-sample plot (n=622) of heat pump conversion costs in Massachusetts, graphed as total cost to the homeowner and square feet of conditioned space. This image contains the average total cost to convert a house to a heat pump system ($20,428) as well as an average cost-per-square-foot of conditioned space ($13.60). 

Another image, from that same document, is a table of heat pump installation costs for individual conversions in Ohio, grouped by ZIP code, house square footage, the year the house was built, and the date of installation. Prices vary, but the average cost from 2014-2019 for this sample of installations is $27,349. This table also includes additional, valuable data, such as the second installation (“Ryan A.”) which unusually had zero duct work or insulation and air tightness costs.

The other responses to Jack’s LinkedIn post are instructive as well. One home energy efficiency expert says that “AI is hallucinating here” in suggesting prices between $4,200 and $7,600. An employee of a clean energy product online comparison marketplace says much of the source information for the “AI overview” is published by sources that lead with artificially low numbers in order to get customers interested. Another early-stage climate advisor adds that price transparency in home improvements such as heat pumps is poor and that different AI models give distinctly different answers. 

At Halcyon, we’re happy to demystify this one brief inquiry into one corner of one part of decarbonization. It is more than an academic exercise, though. Accurate, transparent, documented information drives better investment decisions at any scale. An authoritative corpus of vetted sources, which can be queried for both text and images, provides that information quickly, and with rapid iteration too. 

Heat pumps provide hot air (and cool air, to be fair). But that does not mean that search engine information about heat pump pricing should be hot air too. Authoritativeness, sourcing, and documentation matter, and Halcyon’s work embraces and embodies those attributes for energy transition inquiries.

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