Pumping up building decarbonisation: the role of policy awareness in heat pump adoption among Canadian homeowners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heat pumps are a key technology for decarbonising residential buildings, yet their current market share in Canada remains very low at approximately 5%. To promote heat pump adoption, governments in Canada have introduced supportive policies such as purchase subsidies, and it is often assumed that increasing consumer awareness of such policies increases heat pump adoption. Using a survey of Canadian homeowners who do not own heat pumps (n=3,138), this study assesses: (1) levels of willingness to adopt air source and ground source heat pumps across Canada; (2) the effect of information provision on willingness to adopt heat pumps, (3) levels of heat pump policy awareness across Canada; (4) whether perceived technical characteristics of heat pumps can be categorized as functional or symbolic, and as private or societal, and (5) the role of policy awareness and other drivers in explaining willingness to adopt heat pumps. The study finds that a third of Canadian homeowners are willing to adopt heat pumps. These homeowners are found predominantly within the Atlantic region and show higher levels of adoption willingness for air source rather than ground source heat pumps. Awareness of existing heat pump supportive policy is low, with only 5% of respondents able to name any policies from memory. Awareness tends to be higher in British Columbia, and for heat pump subsidies and carbon taxes. Policy awareness without cues is a predictor of willingness to adopt air source heat pumps only. When provided with a list of policies to aid reporting, policy awareness is not associated with heat pump adoption. Other significant predictors include perceptions of heat pumps’ functionality and their environmental benefits, having a technology-oriented lifestyle, being a younger homeowner, and the financial and inconvenience costs during installation. Based on findings, insights into targeted policy designs to accelerate residential building decarbonisation are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".