New Hampshire, along with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine, will share $450 million in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) drawn from a pool of $5 billion authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the so-called “Green New Deal” — which altogether provided $396 billion in funding to address various causes and effects of climate change.
In 2023, New Hampshire received a federal grant of $3 million to develop and prepare a Priority Climate Action Plan, which was completed in March. Meanwhile, the state joined with its neighbors in seeking $500 million earmarked for providing incentives to apply heat pump technology to single-family and multifamily residential buildings. Adam Crepeau, assistant commissioner of the Department of Environmental Services (DES), said the agency expects to be awarded grants of between $40 and $45 million.
Crepeau stressed that the program does not mandate the transition to heat pump technology but instead offers financial incentives to reduce the upfront costs of purchasing and installing the qualifying technology while assisting manufacturers and distributors to expand the market for heat pump systems. He said that the technology for heating both space and water apart from displacing systems fired by fossil fuels, would also lower monthly and seasonal utility bills.
In New Hampshire, the transportation sector represents the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHS) emissions — 45.9% — residential, commercial and public buildings account for 20.5%, the second largest share. The Priority Climate Action Plan projects that, under a “business as usual” scenario, GHG emissions would fall by 12% between 2025 and 2050. On the other hand, DES’s model forecasts that, with the transition to heat pump technology, together with aggressive weatherization measures and enhanced energy efficiencies in buildings, CO2 emissions would drop by 25% by 2050.
