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Buildings are one of the few places where individuals have direct control over greenhouse gas emissions. You can’t instantly reduce a farmer’s beef production by eating less meat or personally shut down a natural gas power plant. But if you’re a homeowner, it’s up to you whether or not you’re burning fossil fuels every time you heat your home, use hot water, dry your clothes, or cook food. Together, these activities account for about 7% of annual U.S. fossil fuel-related carbon emissions.
That may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. When you buy a new heating system or a new clothes dryer, you’re investing in a machine you’re going to use for 15 to 20 years or more. You can decide to lock in a system that burns fossil fuels and is guaranteed to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere throughout that time — or you can invest in one that can drive down emissions as the electric grid becomes cleaner. (If you want some advice for which new appliances to go with, we have some guides for that.)
“There’s an inflection point that we’re facing right now,” Sara Baldwin, the senior electrification director at the think tank Energy Innovation, told me. “If we lock in another two decades of fossil fuel infrastructure in our homes, we’ve got way more work down the line.”
That’s not to say these are easy changes to make. Perhaps it’s not even totally fair to say “it’s up to you,” because for some homeowners, the cost of making some of these changes will be out of reach. Electric appliances are often more expensive to install than their fossil fuel counterparts. And in some cases, as in places where natural gas is much cheaper than electricity, the switch might also increase your energy bills, even though the appliances themselves are more efficient.
If you have the means, though, the benefits can be significant. Replacing your furnace with an electric heat pump — which can both heat and cool your home — could have two-for-one benefits for those without central air, especially as summers get hotter. Many homeowners also praise the quieter, more even temperature control that heat pumps provide. Electrify any of your appliances and you’ll also be helping to reduce local outdoor air pollution; switch to an electric cooktop and you’ll reduce indoor air pollution for you and your family, as well.
Another way to think about electrification is as a chance to leave your mark on the world. Political scientist Leah Stokes, who serves as policy counsel to the electrification advocacy group Rewiring America in addition to teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me she likes to think of the appliances in our homes as “the infrastructure that we are in charge of.” You can lobby your representatives to build bike lanes, but the decision is mostly out of your hands. You’re the only one that can decide to change out your furnace or your water heater, however. “These are huge opportunities for us to make legacy impacts on carbon pollution,” Stokes said. And unlike behavioral changes such as eating vegetarian, you only have to do it once. “If you sell that house, if you die, it's a piece of infrastructure that continues on.”
Making these changes won’t necessarily result in immediate emission reductions. It depends on where you live and where your power comes from. If a lot of your electricity comes from coal, for example, a natural gas furnace might emit less carbon than even the most efficient heat pump. But that’s just how the math works out today. Researchers who have modeled out the emissions impacts over the average lifetime of the equipment — about 16 years — have found that as the grid continues along its trajectory of getting cleaner, heat pumps will emit less carbon overall in every state.
Not every home electrification project will get you the same carbon bang for your buck. Space heating is by far the most energy-intensive thing we do in our homes, so from an emissions standpoint, replacing your boiler or furnace is the most effective change you can make. Clothes dryers and stoves use so little energy, comparatively, that swapping them out looks almost inconsequential for the climate, at least on paper.
But the reason electrifying your home can be such a high leverage action is not just because of the absolute emission reductions you can achieve. It can also accelerate structural changes. If you’re currently a natural gas customer, going fully electric means you’ll be able to disconnect from the local distribution system and stop paying into the pool of funds used to maintain it. That can increase rates for the remaining customers, which is far from ideal. But it also makes the economics of electrification more attractive.
“It's very important that we can't leave low income people behind,” said Stokes. “But the more folks who get off of gas, even a small number, it can really start to force the question of, should we start thinking about if we should be investing hundreds of millions of dollars into aging gas infrastructure? Or should we use that money to subsidize electrification for low income folks?”
So, where to begin? Space heating is the biggest opportunity, but it’s also the most expensive and complicated project. There’s no reason you have to start there, especially if your existing heater has a lot of life left in it. “Don't start with the hardest thing,” said Baldwin. “If it feels daunting, start with the easiest thing, or start with something that feels within reach.”
Larry Waters, an HVAC contractor I interviewed for our heat pump guide, recommends making a “gas inventory” — a list of all of your gas appliances and how old they are. Replace whichever appliance is nearest to the end of its useful life first, but plan ahead for future projects. Figure out if you’ll need to budget in an electrical upgrade, or if you can combine any of the work to save money.
The following guides will help you navigate each of these projects, with recommendations from experts who are on the ground, helping homeowners through this every day.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”