> This reduces electric infrastructure demand, which is why it's subsidized. Presumably, this saves money

Short term gain, long term pain. The story of our entire electrical infrastructure the past couple generations. Why invest in capital infrastructure like generation or transmission capacity when you can simply reduce peak demand via stuff like this.

Eventually you run out of cheap tricks and need to actually build things. We are roughly at that inflection point now - brought forward maybe half a decade or so by datacenter demand.

We had it really damn good the past 30-40 years due to investments in all area of the grid our grandparents and great grandparents paid for. Then we decided it was cheaper to let a lot of that stuff age out and deteriorate vs. replacing it via efficiency gains and de-industrialization. We reap what we sow. It was obvious electrical demand was going to increase at some point, and we have run out of the cheap parlor tricks of the past couple decades while we let everything else decay around us.

It's been incredibly frustrating to watch since I was a teenager 30 years ago and figured out why electric companies would pay someone to use less power against the obvious incentives. It's so they didn't have to do their jobs - just sit on capital equipment others paid for and collect rent.

> Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint).

This seems a lot but for utilities which still have coal plants it seems accurate if the reduced demand allows them to close the coal plant down.

A typical car emits 4.6 tonnes CO2 per year. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Heat pump saves around 3,760 kWh per year. https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_water_heaters/...

Coal emits 1.02 tonne CO2/MWh = 3.8 tonnes CO2 per year savings from the heat pump. Natural gas emits 0.44 tonne CO2/MWh = 1.65 tonne CO2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296

That's a pretty substantial saving which will kick in when the next administration reverses Trump's absurd orders to keep existing coal plants open.