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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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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.