The announcement is basically: A US company (Lenox) has a prototype heat pump that matches performance of Mitsubishi and LG heat pumps.
The DOE is running a competition to get US companies to improve performance of their heat pumps.
But there exist sooo many prototyping breaktroughs.
Those who follow press releases for many years know that just a tiny fraction can transfer this in real world products that actually work
(so many more challenges to overcome compared to prototype situations!! I don’t even know where to begin… every ground is different, average person doing the manual work is not as skilled and has less support engineers, the guys setting/defining the dimensions of various recipients/pumps/conduits are often undeskilled and the efficiency often lacks tremendously for that reason…)
And I suspect the magic here is also an air tight new construction home with a layout designed around this, not leaky everything with an old water heater tucked under the stairs, a 30 year old furnace, and R19 insulated walls.
The "up to" part means it's the absolutely largest home you can possibly imagine
I have realized an approximately $500 yearly savings by replacing an older electric tank water heater with a hybrid electric (heat pump) water heater so I can believe that claim.
Tell me you’ve made an incremental improvement and I’ll believe you, tell me you’ve made a breakthrough and either you’re lying or something will prevent it from being realized before commercial availability. This is what decades of press releases and articles that might as well be press releases have taught me.