Gov. Charlie Baker told the Boston Globe's Sabrina Shankman on Tuesday that he is looking into whether an efficient electric heat pump makes sense for his Swampscott home. Image courtesy of State House News Service

To get to the required 50 percent reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the Baker administration says about a third of Massachusetts homes will have to be heated and cooled with electric heat pumps, and Gov. Charlie Baker is looking into whether it makes sense for his Swampscott home to be among them.

“I’m actually going to have somebody come take a look at my house and see what they think,” Baker said Tuesday morning, adding that his communications staff would be upset with him for sharing the detail. “But I think there’s like a mythology out there that heat pumps won’t work in single-family freestanding homes in a cold climate like this one. Well, I would like to put that to the test. And I think given the advancement in the technology there, it’s probably no longer true.”

The governor’s answer came during a discussion with Boston Globe climate reporter Sabrina Shankman about the steps required to spark a widespread shift away from fossil fuel home heating and gas-powered cars towards efficient heat pumps for residential heating and cooling and zero-emission vehicles.

Baker’s administration last week detailed a bit more of what will be required to achieve the statewide 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels by the end of this decade. Specifically for the residential heating sector, the administration’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan proposes targeting reductions of 27 percent by 2025 and 44 percent by 2030.

“For the residential and commercial buildings, we want to achieve a third of homes have tighter building envelopes and are heated and cooled by electric heat pumps,” Undersecretary of Energy and Climate Solutions Judy Chang said last week during a public hearing on the administration’s proposals for the 2025 and 2030 Clean Energy and Climate Plans.

While the switch to heat pumps is being looked to as a key cog in the state’s energy transition, most Massachusetts homeowners are not as interested as Baker in seeing if the technology might be a good fit for their own homes.

A new MassINC Polling Group survey found that 48 percent of homeowners never plan to install electric heat pumps or have no plans to do so.

Thirteen percent said they have already installed an electric heat pump, five percent said they plan to have one installed in the next year, another five percent said it would happen in the next two years, six percent said they planned to install a heat pump in three to four years, and another six percent said it would be five or more years before they install a heat pump.

Another key piece of the state’s climate and energy policy is connecting large-scale offshore wind generation to the grid. Massachusetts already has about 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind under contract with the procurement of another 1,600 MW close to being finalized. But Baker said Tuesday that the Maine ballot referendum that has, for now, sunk the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission project has him worried about whether the promise of offshore wind will be realized.

“If you really want to electrify a lot of stuff that’s currently not electrified, you have to be willing to acknowledge that that’s going to require some pretty significant investments in what I call sort of the guts of making that happen, and a big part of that is transmission,” the governor said. “It makes me very worried. To tell you the truth, the Maine thing – which is still in play, OK, it’s in the courts – but that makes me very nervous about whether or not we’re actually going to get all the offshore wind that we talk about, because that’s hundreds and hundreds of transmission hookups that, all the way up and down the East Coast, we’re going to need to actually deliver on that.”