If all goes well, after just a week or so of focused, frenzied work, the show arrives at the grand finale: the capping of the gas line.
Liu has staged this performance more than 25 times since 2023 as the implementation contractor for Electric Advantage, an incentive program in New York offered by the gas and electric utility Con Edison. The program covers 100% of the cost of replacing a building owner’s gas-powered appliances with electric versions, plus installing insulation and air sealing. Although it sounds too good to be true, there’s no catch — except that you have to be lucky enough to own a building that’s eligible for the program and agree to cut your gas connection.
ConEd, as it’s known, delivers natural gas to just over a million customers in the Bronx, Manhattan, Northern Queens, and Westchester County, and qualifies buildings for the program by first identifying sections of pipeline on the peripheries of its network that are due for replacement. Then it runs a cost-benefit analysis. If it would be cheaper to electrify all of the buildings served by a given stretch of gas main than to dig up the street and replace the pipe, the company starts going out to the homeowners and businesses along the line to gauge their interest. If the owners agree to go electric, that’s when Liu steps in.
There’s no established name for what Liu does. “It’s not a home improvement business, it’s not an energy efficiency business, it’s not an HVAC business,” she told me. “It’s about putting together a tight live production.” An apt title would be “electrification contractor” — one of the few, if not the only one of her kind operating in the New York area.
Anyone who has tried to electrify even just one appliance in their home has probably wished they could hire someone like Liu. Between finding an available and trustworthy contractor, navigating quotes and equipment choices, and managing ballooning costs, the process is often frustrating and confusing. It’s a major time commitment, not to mention a big capital investment — not a winning formula for mass adoption.
Liu doesn’t offer her services to just any homeowner, though. She only takes on jobs that come through contracts with utilities and government agencies like the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA. Having ConEd’s backing is actually one of the major benefits Liu brings to the work. It means she’s held to stringent standards of performance. Her business actually fronts the full cost of every Electric Advantage project, putting up tens of thousands of dollars for parts and labor, and only gets paid back by the utility after she demonstrates she’s met every requirement. Engineers check her design choices on the front end and the installations on the back end. A missing anti-tip bracket on a stove once almost cost her an entire $100,000 job, she told me.
Liu is the first to admit that all of this is a huge headache and a tough business model. She also fundamentally believes in this being utility-backed work. When a homeowner pursues a project on their own, the oversight is only as strong as their own ability to vet contractors and manage the job — which, with limited time, information, and leverage in the market, is likely not nearly as strong as Liu’s.
“My conviction is, for the middle class to thrive, we need to have a lot of things that are expensive to do and complex to do to become utilities,” Liu said. “That’s my hypothesis since I was 22.”
In the climate world, a lot of advocates and experts also believe that a utility-run program like Electric Advantage is the key to unlocking an all-electric future, although for slightly different reasons. When random individual homeowners decide to electrify, a shrinking number of remaining gas customers have to pay to maintain the entire pipeline system. If utilities instead strategically prune the gas system while helping customers go electric, the theory goes, it can reduce costs for remaining gas customers while also creating sustained demand for heat pump retrofits. This would help build the workforce necessary to perform them and create economies of scale.
The problem is, ConEd has 4,400 miles of gas mains. In just over two years of running Electric Advantage, the utility has retired about half of one mile. If the program, or similar ones at other New York utilities, were ever to scale from converting about a dozen buildings a year to taking on the whole state, it would need a lot more Julie Lius. ConEd has a small network of contractors who take on projects with more limited scopes, but Liu is the only one doing whole-home decarbonization.
“It’s high capex deployment of complex work in the field, and you have to have people who go into people’s homes and not piss them off,” said Liu. “That’s a very unique business.”
Liu is not exactly a known figure in the world of building electrification. She’s not on social media or otherwise broadcasting her accomplishments or policy views. You won’t find her headlining clean energy panels or on the boards of nonprofits. But Liu has been quietly leading building electrification in the New York area for nearly a decade. Her early belief in heat pumps and determination to bring them to the New York market helped lay the foundation for future programs in the state.
Long before all of this, Liu was a Taiwanese immigrant growing up in Hacienda Heights, Los Angeles. Her family moved to California from Taipei in 1983, just before she entered seventh grade. Liu told me she “did all the good, dutiful-daughter things.” Her family owned a small furniture manufacturing business, and she went to college at Carnegie Mellon for business and industrial design with the intention of helping her dad produce “more inspiring furniture than colonial reproductions.”
Then her education at Carnegie Mellon took her in a different direction. The programs were built around “productivity, process orientation, efficiency, build it cheaper, faster — it’s all about, can you get things done?” She developed an appreciation for utilities, in a broad sense — for how much of the economy was built around “serving more and more people at scale, and serving them better things.”
When she graduated in the mid-1990s, Liu broke the news to her parents that she wanted to get into telecommunications — the hot field at the time. She initially thought she wanted to work at the Federal Communications Commission, but some early mentors warned her that she wasn’t suited for government work and connected her with a job at DirectTV. “You’re too eager to get things done, you’ll be banging your head against the wall,” she recalled being told at the time. “Go to the private sector.”
She went on to spend the next 15-odd years working in satellite television in New York, with a brief interlude starting a software-as-a-service company with an ex-boyfriend that was a little too ahead of its time, according to Liu. She was successful in the industry, but she wasn’t very happy, she told me. She felt like she was “growing couch potatoes.”
By 2014, after a few zigs and zags — business school, a stint at an online real estate startup in Luxembourg — Liu found herself back in New York, unemployed, and spending a lot of her time trying to fix up the rat-infested Brooklyn brownstone she owned. The building had an oil-burning heating system that was draining her bank account. She wanted to install minisplit heat pumps, which were everywhere back in Taiwan, but at the time nobody was really doing that in New York.
In early 2016, still unemployed and living off savings and tenant rent, Liu reached out to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, to ask about incentives for minisplits, and got connected to a consulting firm called the Levy Partnership that was putting together a proposal for the agency’s first-ever heat pump pilot project. The company told her that brownstones were too difficult and expensive, though, and that it was planning to propose doing the pilot in just a couple of mobile homes on Long Island.
Liu was peeved. Statistically that wouldn’t have even constituted a demonstration, she told me. “That’s not even an alpha in the world of where I came from, satellite communications.” She made a bet with the firm. It was a Thursday. If she could get a bunch of her neighbors to sign letters of interest in the pilot by Monday, she told the company, then “you’re gonna copy and paste that trailer park proposal and say there’s gonna be one for brownstones.”
Needless to say, she got the letters. But Liu didn’t just get the Levy Partnership to expand its proposal or to include her brownstone in the pilot. She convinced it to hire her to help implement the projects. She had looked up the census data on home heating and saw that about half the boilers in the New York City area used expensive heating oil. “I was like, there’s the money,” she told me. She saw that people could lower their bills by switching to heat pumps, while also getting access to better cooling in the summertime. “The business opportunity was just like when I got into satellite, right? It was a transition,” she said.
A week after she and the firm co-submitted their proposal to NYSERDA, Liu incorporated her new company under the name Centsible House. (Her business now goes by the name Carta Electric Homes.) NYSERDA awarded the team the funding a few months later, and by March 2017 they were executing agreements with homeowners to participate. The pilot ran for two years and installed heat pumps in 20 homes throughout Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Long Island, including Liu’s brownstone. Learnings from those projects informed the development of New York’s statewide Clean Heat program, a partnership between utilities and the state that launched in 2020, offering rebates for heat pumps. Liu was “patient zero,” she told me.
After that, NYSERDA as well as ConEd and another local utility, National Grid, hired Liu for other demonstration projects and heat pump programs. She racked up more than a dozen trainings and certifications from the Building Performance Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency, and various equipment manufacturers, developing expertise in building envelopes, heat pumps, refrigerant systems, and health and safety.
In this piecemeal way, Liu created the job of the electrification contractor from the ground up. By the time ConEd was preparing to launch the Electric Advantage program, Liu had the only contracting business in the area that was essentially purpose-built to take it on.
On a recent Thursday morning in Croton, New York, a suburb of New York City, the show was behind schedule. Liu and I pulled up to a two-family house at the top of a hill to oversee what was supposed to be the “grand finale” day of an Electric Advantage-funded retrofit.
In this case, workers had already put in a new electrical panel, minisplit heat pumps, and a heat pump clothes dryer. Now, electricians would rewire the kitchens with 220-volt outlets for new induction stoves, while a father and son duo of plumbers would put heat pump water heaters in the basement, and a weatherization team would spray insulation around the perimeter of the basement roof and attic floor.
While still sitting in the driveway, Liu called PC Richard, the appliance store, to check on the stove delivery, but the sales rep on the other end was confused — she didn’t have anything scheduled. Liu kept her cool and worked it out, setting a new delivery date for the following day. She turned to me, with sympathy, to let me know this meant I wouldn’t get the denouement she had promised — the cutting and capping of the gas line. She made sure the plumbers could come back on Friday to finish the job.
The planning for this project began many months before, with a knock on the door from a man named Mark Brescia, who manages Electric Advantage for ConEd. Brescia does all the initial outreach, making house calls, phone calls, and sending emails, trying to sell homeowners on the idea. Part of the challenge is that in most cases, unless 100% of the buildings served by a given gas main agree to participate, the company can’t move forward because it won’t be able to retire the pipe. The majority of successful Electric Advantage projects to date have replaced gas mains that were serving a single building.
The company doesn’t sell the program to customers by talking about climate change or emissions. Instead, Brescia explains that the money that would have been spent digging up a gas pipeline could instead be used to buy them brand new appliances. “Customers are excited about the opportunity to make their everyday living more comfortable,” Brescia told me when I asked what the biggest selling point tended to be. They also “no longer worry about having to spend money to replace equipment when it fails.” If the building owner is interested, the next step is for them to schedule a visit from Liu, who does a site evaluation and budgets the job.
Survey data collected by ConEd shows that the most common reason customers decline to participate is a preference for gas cooking. The second is fear of higher electric bills. ConEd makes no guarantees to customers that their overall bills will go down if they participate, but by pairing the new appliances with air sealing and insulation, it tries to ensure the homes will run as efficiently as possible. Liu does her best to provide customer education, walking them through how to operate their heat pumps correctly — running the devices consistently, rather than turning them up and down or on and off, which uses more energy. Customers can also opt in to a special ConEd electricity rate that can save heat pump customers money if they run their systems this way.
“Many customers are still learning about the superior performance and convenience these technologies offer,” Brescia said. But there are also other bottlenecks to expanding the Electric Advantage program. Under New York law, if customers want to keep their gas service, ConEd must oblige them. So unless and until legislators change this “duty to serve,” the program will be hamstrung by customers who turn it down.
The program also currently only targets replacement leak-prone “radial” mains — pipes that connect to the wider gas distribution system on just one end — as these can be removed without affecting system safety or reliability. The path to expanding it beyond these is uncertain because, as currently structured, that would start to put an untenable burden on customers.
Whether the money goes to a new gas main or a home electrification project, it comes from ConEd’s gas ratepayers through their bills. Whenever ConEd identifies a new batch of mains that meet the program’s specifications, it must submit a benefit-cost analysis to state regulators for approval to pursue the projects before it can begin reaching out to homeowners. In the most recent batch submitted to regulators, for example, replacing the 26 mains identified would have cost nearly $8 million, while the estimated cost of electrifying the buildings served was around $6 million, plus another $1 million in electric system upgrades. The latter is obviously a better deal for customers, even if, as an incentive, ConEd earns back part of the difference as a bonus — also paid for by customers.
Since gas customers pay for the program, it doesn’t totally solve the problem of a shrinking number of customers covering these major investments, even if they are spending less than they otherwise would. And once the most cost-effective projects get taken care of, the expense of electrification will be harder to justify.
Growing the program also depends on having more contractors like Liu to implement it, Brescia told me. Liu has a proven track record of coordinating multiple trades, upholding standards, and educating customers. “Delivering an exceptional customer experience is essential to building trust and driving widespread adoption of electric appliances,” he said.
Throughout the day that I spent with her, Liu vacillated over the question of whether she should or even could expand her business. Working alone enables her to keep costs down, she told me. “I cannot afford to hire additional people,” she said, “because every extra bit of cash flow I end up generating as a profit gets fed to more jobs” — that is, more electrification projects. She also doesn’t want to take on a bunch of high interest debt in order to front more capital to take on more projects.
At other points, she talked about scaling as both important and inevitable. She believes in whole-home electrification — both as a climate solution and as a way to change people’s lives for the better — and wants to see other entrepreneurs like her, especially women, be able to pursue this as a career. She already gets more job leads than she’s able to pursue. She’s starting to think about other fundraising options, such as finding private investors.
Liu also recently started working with a Columbia University masters student to develop software that would help manage and automate all of the “mind-numbing, insane amounts of reporting, submissions, and invoicing” she has to do. Although she already does all of the administrative work digitally, the process has only gotten more arduous as the various programs and companies she works with frequently change what and how she has to report back, whether due to shifting policies or just a round of McKinsey-ification. This is part of what prevents her from being able to take on more work, since all the bureaucratic overhead makes it harder for her to fully close a job and get paid.
Although it’s still very early in the process, her hope is that this kind of software solution could also make it easier for others to get into the field.
“I actually really think this is a very suitable career for every eight-year-old little girl who wants a Barbie’s dream house,” she told me. “If every woman can run a $10 million electrification business, it’d be great. I think we’ll get a lot more done.”
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