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An energy-efficient home needs energy-efficient lightbulbs and air conditioners and refrigerators and other gadgets to fill it up. But it all starts with the structure itself. That’s why we recommend you take a good, hard look at your walls, ceiling, floors, windows, doors, roof, and electrical wiring as a first step towards decarbonizing your home life. (Embarking on a renovation? Heatmap has a guide for that.)
When you add air sealing and insulation, get energy efficient windows, or a cool roof that reflects heat back into the environment, you’re either preventing heat from entering or escaping. This stabilizes your indoor air temperature, thereby reducing your heating and cooling loads, which account for 55% of a household’s total energy use, on average. Making these improvements is not only good for the environment, it’s also a boon to your quality of life. Plus, it allows you to get the most bang out of one of Heatmap’s other favorite decarbonization upgrades: replacing your furnace with an electric heat pump, which operates most efficiently in a well-insulated home.
And lest we forget the electrification upgrades, they’re certainly a different beast than the aforementioned ways to seal up your house. But adding new electrical circuits is a prerequisite to installing energy-efficient appliances such as electric stoves, dryers, heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, or EV chargers. And depending how much space is on your electric panel, you might need to upgrade that too.
None of the investments mentioned here (often referred to as weatherization upgrades) will directly decarbonize your space. Insulating your attic won’t free you from fossil fuels, and installing new wiring doesn’t actually electrify anything in and of itself, although they will lower your energy-related emissions. But what these renovations do do is prime you to consume less energy at home just keeping yourself comfortable.
“The weather that you can expect to see where you live is changing over time and changing in a pretty unpredictable manner,” Michael Gartman, a manager at RMI on their carbon-free buildings team, told me. “The benefit of weatherization, unlike some of the other decarbonization measures that you might be thinking about, is it really just shelters you from whatever that change means over time.”
None of this sounds very thrilling, I know. These types of upgrades certainly won’t lead to the same oohs and ahhs that you’d get for buying a shiny new electric vehicle or induction stove. “You often can't see weatherization after it's been completed, and even if you can, I don't think many people are going to be taking guests into their basement and pointing at their floor joists and saying, look at all that insulation,” Gartman told me.
Probably not, but once folks spend some time inside your house, the benefits will become apparent in cooler summer days and cozier winter nights — and lower energy bills. “Even if it’s not sexy, that's something that you're going to feel every year that you're in your home,” Gartman said.
These upgrades that you’re considering — and the attendant reductions in energy use — will have impacts that ripple out beyond your home’s walls and onto the grid at large. After all, residential energy consumption makes up 21% of total energy use in the U.S., and 15% of total emissions.
“Weatherization can reduce peak demand on the grid, which reduces the likelihood of the grid going down in the coldest winter nights or hottest summer days,” Gartman told me. This makes the grid greener, too, as utilities often meet demand spikes by calling on fossil fuel sources such as gas plants, which can ramp up and down quickly. A smoother demand curve can thereby increase the share of renewables in the mix. And in the case that the grid does fail and the power goes out, a fully weatherized home is a safer home, protecting you and your family from the elements for as long as possible.
Depending on what weatherization measures you go with, as well as your specific circumstances, your savings could eventually surpass your upfront costs. The upgrade that’s most likely to pay for itself is air sealing and insulation, which can lead to energy bills that are 10% to 20% smaller, leading to net savings in just a few years. The Green Building Alliance says cool roofs — which are not suited to every environment — can also pay for themselves in as little as six years. And while complete window replacements are a particularly pricey upgrade, if you opt for storm windows that are installed on top of an existing window, you could see payback as soon as three years time post-installation.
No matter what you choose to do, the absolute best time to do it is when prices are low — and when it comes to energy efficiency upgrades, the discounts have arrived. “A lot of energy performance improvements to houses right now are on sale, and they're going to be on sale until the end of the decade,” Eric Werling, former national director of the Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Homes program, told me. He’s referencing the $1,200 federal tax credit for weatherization, which is available now, and the home efficiency and electrification rebates that will be rolling out this year and next.
But even with this years-long sale, we know that the upfront costs can be tough to shoulder. So don’t feel pressure to drop thousands in the name of decarbonization right now. If you stay in your spot long enough, you’ll eventually need to undertake at least a few home improvement projects. “Anytime anybody does a renovation project or fixes a problem in the house,” Werling told me, “I implore them to think about, is there an opportunity for me to make improvements to the house that will pay for themselves in utility cost savings, but also improve the health and safety and comfort of the house that we live in?”
You’ll find the answer is often yes, and we encourage you to let your friends, family, and neighbors know about it. Because while we trust that you, as a reader, care deeply about the climate, you don’t actually need to give a hoot to benefit from energy efficiency upgrades. As Werling put it, “It's just not about energy, and it's just not about the climate. It's about your home.”
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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.