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To do it right, you’re going to need a building science pro.
When Zara Bode, a musician from Brooklyn, New York, first walked into the old seven-bedroom Victorian in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, it just felt right. Her husband, also a traveling musician, had grown up nearby. “You walk in this house and you’re like, oh, there’s a good vibe,” she told me. Since the 1890s, when it was built, it had been a community health center and a food co-op, before being lovingly restored by the older woman who sold it to Bode and her husband in January of 2020. Bode hoped to make it their forever home, a place for friends and family to gather.
Within a month of moving in, she and her husband both lost their incomes in the pandemic. Then they made a brutal discovery: the house was ruinously expensive to heat.
They spent all their time huddled in the kitchen with their two young children in front of the wood burning cookstove and kept the thermostat at 65. Even so, they were running through a full tank of oil every nine days. Each delivery cost more than $1,000, adding up to twice their mortgage every month. They had to ask for government emergency assistance.
Bode started asking around to other families, who told her about a state-funded program that gives out 0% weatherization loans with deferred repayment to low-income families. She got quotes from two different reputable companies, each of which proposed using polyurethane spray foam insulation in the large basement. The buzz in the community was that spray foam is a miracle product — so incredibly insulating that it would cut their heating oil needs down by two-thirds or or more. But Bode was protective of the old Victorian. “I knew it was lucky for us to get this house in the first place. We don’t have the money to make mistakes,” she says.
Without any outside expert to turn to, desperate for relief, and grateful for Vermont’s robust social safety net, she went for it.
She would come to regret it.
To hit its climate goals, the U.S. is going to have to upgrade its old housing stock. Residential energy use accounts for about 20% of U.S. carbon emissions, and the lion’s share of that energy is used to heat and cool homes. At the same time, low-income families are struggling more than ever to shoulder the financial burden of doing that. In 2023, the number of American families needing assistance jumped by 1.3 million to over 6 million.
The Inflation Reduction Act is aiming to tackle these twin crises, with a tax credit covering 30% of the cost of insulation and air-sealing materials, up to $1,200 annually per household. So far only New York has an active IRA-funded home rebate program, but more states have applied to start handing out funds to homeowners over the next year, which should also help shield Americans from the health effects of extreme temperatures.
The problem is, insulating an old home is a delicate and complex process. Improper installation can lead to mold, dry rot in your home’s framing and roof, and poor indoor air quality that can make you sick.
“It’s potentially a huge problem,” Francis Offerman, a.k.a. Bud, an industrial hygienist who does indoor air quality testing for homeowners (and lawyers) who suspect a house or apartment is making its inhabitants ill, told me. “Especially if your mindset is, we’re going to just spray foam the home, and that’s it.”
Bode reached out to me last year after she read my viral story for VT Digger, which raised the alarm about the risks of spray foam insulation in particular. (Though experts say any insulation done badly can cause problems.) She and her family had vacated their Victorian for a few days in early 2021 while the basement was spray foam insulated. When they moved back in, Bode was struck by the bad paint smell. That eventually went away, and oil deliveries dropped from every nine days to every three weeks.
But then she realized the basement, which used to be bone dry, was now damp all the time. She bought two industrial dehumidifiers that run constantly, and still the smell of mildew wafts up through the floorboards. Bode has allergies to mold and mildew and worries the bad air quality could affect her kids, who also have allergies and asthma. She’s had to move all her furniture and art out of the basement lest it get damaged.
When she saw my article, she felt a mix of emotions. On the one hand, after having her concerns dismissed by the insulation company, she finally felt validated. “That was the first time that I had heard about air exchangers and other things I can’t afford,” Bode told me about reading my article. But she wondered, “Did I ruin a house that’s been standing strong for 140 years?”
The kind of person that could have advised Bode on how to safely insulate her historic home would be someone trained in building science — that is, someone educated in the physics of buildings, who can identify moisture issues and air leaks, recommend appropriate materials and HVAC solutions, and give you a step-by-step plan for implementing them so your home stays healthy and whole.
Unfortunately, many insulation companies, architects, and contractors have either never heard of or are actively hostile to these concepts, which they see as expensive, unnecessary, overly complicated, and (in the case of many spray foam contractors) an impediment to making the sale.
“In the grand scheme of things, building science is a relatively new field,” Eric Werling, who recently retired after 30 years of directing the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program to run his own consulting business, told me. “People have studied structural engineering for thousands of years. But air-tightening buildings is a relatively new phenomenon.”
Up until the 1970s, people in the U.S. didn’t think much about insulation. Then the energy crisis struck, and oil shortages caused prices to skyrocket. President Jimmy Carter told Americans to put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat. Letting all that expensive energy flow outside suddenly seemed like a waste of money.
The Department of Energy launched its Weatherization Assistance Program in 1976 for low-income families and created efficiency standards for commercial buildings that relied on the new, synthetic materials that had emerged after WWII. The problem was, as homes and commercial buildings were sealed, a lot of people got sick. The most high profile cases were cancer from chronic radon exposure or quiet but shocking deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning. But there also emerged the autoimmune-adjacent condition called Sick Building Syndrome, a constellation of symptoms related to breathing in VOCs from furniture, carpeting, pesticides, and cleaning products circulating inside a tight building.
“The Department of Energy… screwed it up a lot at the very beginning,” Joe Lstiburek, a longtime building science consultant, told me. But the DOE started training its weatherization crews, establishing standards for proper insulation, and providing additional funding for safety measures, including mechanical ventilation. “America became a world leader at figuring out how not to rot houses and how not to kill people,” Lstiburek said.
Today, indoor air quality in the workplace has dramatically improved. Aspects of building science have been codified in residential homes as well, with some states requiring that new builds with a tight air seal include mechanical ventilation. But nobody I talked to could point to similar requirements for an existing home that has been retrofitted with insulation. And when I asked Lstiburek if low-income renters and homeowners have access to building science information and advice, he said, “No, they do not.”
According to Werling, there are still probably fewer than a thousand building science experts, and many are eyeing retirement. “Their teachings have impacted thousands –– probably hundreds of thousands –– of people in the construction industry.” He points to New York and Wisconsin as two states that have had robust contractor training programs for the longest. But he admits that’s still a small percentage of the millions of people involved in construction in the U.S.
“There are just too many companies with people who don’t know enough about the issues regarding moisture doing whatever they want and leaving the homeowner with the bill,” Chris West, a Vermont-based certified consultant and trainer for Passive House, a design standard for ultra-low-energy-consumption homes, told me. “Often these companies have some kind of caveat in their contract that makes the owner responsible for any future issues.”
To make things worse, our homes are more delicate today. New building construction has largely switched from rot- and mold-resistant materials such as hardwood and plaster to cheaper manufactured mold-prone materials like plywood and drywall.
“Green” or “eco” home programs that advise homeowners focus solely on energy efficiency, and tightened energy codes are requiring ever more robust insulation without taking into account existing moisture problems (such as a wet basement or unventilated bathroom), which are not rare. NIOSH estimates about half of all homes have some sort of moisture or mold issue. Residential contractors, architects, and developers, meanwhile, are largely free to ignore building science concepts and go about their business doing things the way they’ve always been done. And there doesn’t seem to be a good plan in place to upskill contractors for this next weatherization push or protect consumers from shoddy workmanship.
“There isn’t an educational track that’s indoor air quality in universities or colleges,” Offerman told me. “I’m 71 now. I’m gonna retire eventually, and where are the replacements?”
I’ve talked to several homeowners who have been burned by bad insulation jobs, and every one expressed dismay that contractors aren’t required to at least share the potential risks or downsides of getting your home weatherized. For example, homeowners may have to install mechanical ventilation at an extra cost of a few thousand dollars, and spray foam, as opposed to traditional batting insulation, is permanent and all but impossible to remediate or take out.
This information is largely hidden from consumers, even savvy ones like me. I was pitched spray foam by an energy auditor for my own old farmhouse, and I had to go out and interview a half dozen experts for an article and pay $1,000 to West to drive two hours down to audit our house (again) and come up with an alternative plan I was comfortable with.
Werling doesn’t want homeowners to be scared away from weatherizing their homes. “In the vast majority of cases, homeowners are better off when they insulate and air-seal their homes,” he said, “but it’s important to be aware that the house is a complicated system of parts. Hire the right contractor to help avoid potentially costly problems down the road.” He points to the Home Improvement Expert section of the Building America Solution Center from the U.S. Department of Energy, which has detailed checklists you can go over with your contractor to ensure the work is done properly. West suggests homeowners find a certified consultant at Passive House Institute US.
The building science experts I spoke to suggested things like an educational program for consumers so they know to ask about ventilation, third party inspections before and after weatherization projects with the results entered into the public record, pre-sale energy audits, and mandatory building science training for contractors and their crews. Offerman said weatherization programs should hold installers accountable for insulating and ventilating according to the latest building science standards as a condition of receiving funds.
The question is how many homeowners like Zara will have their homes and health damaged before the situation is addressed. “It’s not that we don’t know that this is happening,” Listiburek says. “It’s that it’s not painful enough yet.”
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It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”
Current conditions: A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days • Algeria is roasting in temperatures of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Department of Energy notified workers in multiple offices Friday that they were likely to be fired or reassigned to another part of the agency, E&E News reported Tuesday. Staffers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs received notices stating that the offices would “be undergoing a major reorganization and your position may be reassigned to another organization, transferred to another function or abolished.” Still, the notice said “no determination has been made concerning your specific position” just yet.
At least five offices received “general reduction in force notices,” as opposed to official notification of a reduction in force, according to a Latitude Media report. These included the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of State and Community Energy Plans, and the Office of Fossil Energy. Nearly 200 Energy Department employees received direct layoff notices.
Catastrophic floods brought on by the remnants of a typhoon devastated the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday. Five months ago, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant intended to protect the community against exactly this kind of extreme flooding, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to stabilize the riverbank on which Kipnuk is built. But in May, the agency yanked back the Biden-era grant, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “no longer consistent” with the government’s priorities. In a post on X, Zeldin said the award was part of "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants,” suggesting the funding was part of an ideological push for diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than a practical infrastructure boost to an Indigenous community facing serious challenges.
Zealan Hoover, a Biden-era senior adviser at the EPA, accused Zeldin of using “inflammatory rhetoric” that misrepresented the efforts in places like Kipnuk. “For decades, E.P.A. has been a partner to local communities,” Hoover said. “For the first time under this administration, E.P.A. has taken an aggressively adversarial posture toward the very people and communities that it is intended to protect.”
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Late last Thursday, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman observed that the status of the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7, the nation’s largest solar project, had changed on the Bureau of Land Management’s website to “canceled.” The news sent shockwaves nationwide and drew blowback even from Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox, as I reported in this newsletter. Now, however, the bureau’s parent agency is denying that it made the call to cancel the project. “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive. “Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
That means the project could still move forward with a piecemeal approach to permitting rather than one overarching approval, which aligns with what one of the developers involved told Jael last week. A representative for NextEra said that it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and that the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.” Still, the move represents a devastating setback for the solar installation, which may never fully materialize.
Ethane exports are rising as export capacity soars.EIA
U.S. exports of ethane, a key petrochemical feedstock extracted from raw natural gas during processing, are on track for “significant growth” through 2026, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Overseas sales are projected to grow 14% this year compared to the previous year, and another 16% next year. Ethane is mostly used as a feedstock for ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, resins, and synthetic rubber. China has been the fastest growing source of demand for American ethane in recent years, rising to the largest single destination with 47% of exports last year.
Spain’s electricity-grid operator shrugged off concerns of another major blackout after detecting two sharp voltage variations in recent weeks. Red Electrica, which operates Spain’s grid, said that what The Wall Street Journal described as “recent voltage swings” didn’t threaten to knock out the grid because they stayed within acceptable limits. But the operator warned that variations could jeopardize the electricity supply if the grid didn’t overhaul its approach to managing a system that increasingly relies on intermittent, inverter-based generating sources such as solar panels. Red, which is 20% owned by the Spanish government, acknowledged that the high penetration of renewables was responsible for the recent fluctuations. Among the changes needed to improve the grid: real-time monitoring, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted in April “is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered.”
It’s not just Spain facing blackouts. New York City will have a power deficiency equivalent to the energy needed to power between 410,000 and 650,000 homes next summer — and that number could double by 2050, the state’s grid operator warned this week in its latest five-year report. “The grid is at a significant inflection point,” Zach Smith, senior vice president of system and resource planning for NYISO, said in a statement to Gothamist. “Depending on future demand growth and generator retirements, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next 10 years.”
Sodium-ion batteries are all the rage, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported yesterday about the commercial breakthrough by the startup Alsym. But a major challenge facing sodium-ion batteries compared to lithium-ion rivals is the stability of the cathode material in air and water, which can degrade the battery’s performance and lifespan. A new study by researchers at Tokyo University of Science found that one ingredient can solve the problem: Calcium. By discovering the protective effects of calcium doping in the batteries, “this study could pave the way for the widespread adoption” of sodium-ion batteries.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own.
NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring political archetype.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What were lessons that you took away from the writing of the book, or from the reporting of the book, that changed how you thought about climate or the environment in some way that maybe wasn’t the case when you were working on these issues full time?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I would say that while I was working on climate issues, I was actually, myself, really changing a lot in terms of my thoughts on how politics worked and did not work. I think I came into my period of my life as a climate activist really believing in the power of direct action, and protest, and, you know, if you get enough people in the streets and you get enough politicians on your side, you eventually can change the laws. And I think that there is some truth to that view.
But I think being in DC for four years, being really involved in this movement, conversation — however you want to put that — around the Green New Deal, around eventually a Biden administration and how that would be shaped around how they might go about actually taking on climate change for the first time in U.S. history in a significant way, really transformed my understanding of how change happens. I got a greater appreciation, for example, for the importance of persuading people to your view, particularly elites in decision-making positions. And I also started to understand a little bit more of the true gamesmanship of politics — that there is a bit of tricks and trickery, and all kinds of other things that are going on in our political system that are really fundamental to how it all works.
And I bring that last piece up because while I was writing the book, I was also thinking really purposefully about my own people’s narrative traditions, and how they get at transformations and how they happen in the world. And it just so happens that probably the most significant oral historical tradition of my own people is a story called a coyote story, which is about a trickster figure who makes change in the world through cunning and subterfuge and tricks, and also who gets tricked himself a fair amount.
And I think that in that worldview, I actually found a lot of resonance with my own observations on how political change happened when I was in Washington, D.C., and so that insight did really deeply shape the book.
Mentioned:
We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave NoiseCat
How Deb Haaland Became the First Native American Cabinet Secretary
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.