What if - there was a Nerdwallet for Home Electrification?

This should be easy....

About this newsletter:

Climate change isn’t a technology problem, it’s a finance and user experience problem.  Eighty percent of the technology that we need to solve climate change exists today. But what doesn't exist are the ways to finance it, the public policy to make it happen and the delightful user experiences that would make the transition easy. 

My newsletter will explore what we need to create to make the transition easy for consumers.  We will dive deep into real companies, those that don’t yet exist (but need to) and how we might train and retrain thousands of workers for the green economy.  And airplanes, just because they're cool. This is Issue #1 on Climate plus things I’ve been reading at the bottom.

Residential Electrification

One of the biggest challenges in climate change is cleaning up the tiny fossil fuel machines like hot water heaters and furnaces that pollute daily and account for roughly 20% of US carbon emissions. Saul Griffith, in his fantastic book “Electrify”, estimates that we need to replace 1 billion machines in 150 million homes (just in the US) to electrify everything.  

I own at least 6 of those machines. My journey to electrify a 1400-square-foot cabin highlighted for me just how much we need to build to make such a transition possible.  It would take serious effort to design a worse customer experience.  If everyone has to go through a similar journey, replacing 3 of those machines will be hard, much less 1 billion.  

The whole experience made me think about all the things that need to exist (but don’t) to make home electrification easy and affordable.   So this is my dream experience, organized around the questions my not-so-hypothetical user might ask: 

Where do I start?  I wish there were a Nerdwallet or Pointsguy for home electrification.  The site would have stories of electrification, checklists,  comparisons of various systems, and calculators that could go as deep as the user’s interest and expertise might support.  It would be structured to go as deep as the user's interest. So if I just wanted a broad overview, three articles would suffice. But if I wanted to go deep into how to seal or insulate the house, I could dig in.

What’s my impact on climate change now?  This calculator would connect to my local gas utility (or do a rough analysis based on my annual spending) and calculate how many tons of greenhouse gases I’m spewing into the atmosphere. It can also provide comparisons against houses similar in size that are fully electrified. As a side note, Joro already provides a carbon footprint based on credit card spending, so this can be done. Once committed to the path, the next question is:

How much power do I need to electrify my current home?  Even more importantly, how much power do I need to electrify the home I want to create? The second question would incorporate any changes I might want to make during the process.  For example, for my little cabin, I want to replace a propane furnace, propane dryer, and propane stove plus add a car charger and a 220v hot tub. I couldn’t find any easy spreadsheet online, so I modified a form used for permitting requirements.  It would be easy to turn this would be easy to turn into a calculator and build out some assumptions for basic appliances. Then the site could guide me down into some of the details such as:

How much HVAC do I need? I’m sure there are sophisticated calculators available for the HVAC industry, but the two tradespeople I contacted certainly didn’t use them. This seems like a fairly straightforward calculation.  The user might enter the square footage of the home (or even the room dimensions), number of exterior windows and doors, types of insulation, location for weather assumptions, number of HVAC zones needed (bedrooms should have their own mini-split head, right?).  If you want to get fancy, perhaps you could create CAD drawings of your home using your phone (https://canvas.io?)  and share them for analysis.  Once the system has got some general information about HVAC requirements, it could propose several different systems and do some comparisons.  Finally, it could print out these recommendations so the customer could approach an installer with a list of options. With all the electrical needs to find, the system could explore how these needs could be met:

How might the electrical needs be met by solar plus storage?  Now that the system understands the electrical loads needed, it could estimate the amount of solar and storage needed to support the loads in the most efficient way possible while exploring different constraints. One constraint might be cost efficiency (trying to reduce consumption when electricity is the most expensive) or another might be (for my little cabin) trying to maintain power when the grid goes down.  Parts of this already exist on Google’s Sunroof, but it could be tuned for more precise information. 

What would such a system cost?   Finally, with the proposed system and constraints understood, the system could make some estimates of how it could be financed.  Estimates could include loans, rebates (like how Main Street operates), Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing, and, eventually, selling carbon credits based on the averted emissions.  We can estimate both the emissions and the life expectancy of the furnace and any other appliances that are replaced. A third party can attest that the replacement occurred (additionality). The amount of electricity used by any replacement system (and the carbon intensity of such electricity) can be tracked so all of this creates a delta between what WOULD have been released and what WILL be released.  Which could be then packaged into a credit to be sold on the market.  This could be used to reduce the installation cost or provide other incentives to make the installation happen.  

With all this information to persuade my not-so-hypothetical user, I would naturally hit “Buy Now” and the system could connect me to local contractors.  

What do you think?  We should be done by Tuesday.

What I’ve been reading:

The Climate Economy is About to Explode by Robinson Mayer

Robinson Mayer writes about 1) how we are underestimating the catalytic effects of the Inflation Reduction Act.  2) the US is poised to be the “world’s leading energy provider” with solar and wind under $5 a megawatt hour 3) the IRA would not be dismantled by the GOP because it would hurt their own voters the most and 4) that the bill shifts the entire conversation around climate from risk to opportunity.  He predicts the sector will go through a “techification” as entrepreneurs around the world flock to the biggest money-making opportunity of all time.  I agree completely.

The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change by David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells writes a clear-eyed analysis of where we are and the future that’s coming. It’s still bleak, but seeing the author of “An Uninhabitable Earth” write “But in just the past few years, the future has begun to look somewhat different, thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.” is testament to the speed with which this transition is happening.  

We need more water than rain can provide: refilling rivers with desalination by Casey Handmer

Casey, the founder of Terraform Industries, believes that “water should be unconditionally abundant. In the face of extended droughts, aspiring for greater usage efficiency is not, by itself, a sufficiently robust solution.”  It’s one of a few articles I’m beginning to see what explores what a new era of abundance might look like.  What could we do if we actually had plenty of electricity for desalination? What other crazy ideas become doable?