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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
In Richmond, California, Zenaida Gomez is ready to say goodbye to the gas stove in the apartment she has rented for over a decade. She has a hunch that the pollution it emits is exacerbating her 10-year-old son’s asthma attacks, and she has heard from public health experts and doctors who’ve said it probably is.
“I’ve learned that not only do we have contaminated air when we are outside in Richmond, but there’s contamination and toxins within our homes,” Gomez said in a recent phone call.
She started attending City Council meetings and organizing with her neighbors as a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, because, she said, “I wanted something different. I wanted something better.”
But ACCE Action’s goal isn’t simply to get rid of gas stoves. In a city where about one in four people — nearly double the national average — suffer from asthma due in large part to pollution from heavy industry, the group wants to shut off or “prune” the lines that send natural gas into homes in some neighborhoods. The phenomenon is called “neighborhood-scale decarbonization,” and it’s just getting off the ground in California.
Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility in the area, is on board with the idea. It has expressed a willingness to spend a portion of the money it would otherwise use to maintain gas lines to help electrify the homes in the neighborhood that will no longer use the gas.
David Sharples, county director at ACCE Action, says the group is looking at different neighborhoods that PG&E has identified as likely candidates. Once the group chooses an area, it plans to run a pilot project with the goal of electrifying all the appliances and adding solar panels and batteries for up to 80 homes.
“We’re looking at the Coronado, Iron Triangle, and Santa Fe neighborhoods, which are working-class, Black and brown neighborhoods where ACCE has been organizing for years,” Sharples said. “They all have old gas lines that need to be replaced, so it represents an opportunity to electrify.”
To understand the appeal of neighborhood-scale decarbonization, which is also sometimes called “zonal decarbonization,” it helps to be able to envision the vast network of gas pipelines that exist under most cities in the Western U.S. That network holds a potentially explosive gas, and it requires constant, expensive upkeep.
California has pledged to install 6 million heat pumps by 2030 as part of its larger effort to reach net-zero by 2045. And while a rule will begin going into effect in the Bay Area in 2027 requiring that broken water heaters and furnaces be replaced by electric appliances, a similar rule was just rejected in Southern California.
Experts say a large-scale effort just makes more sense than a piecemeal approach in many parts of the state. And as dramatic as it might sound to transition a whole block or neighborhood off gas at once, the approach may also cost less overall and make it easier to employ people fairly.
Neighborhood-scale decarbonization has also been popular with lawmakers. Last fall, the California Legislature voted to adopt SB 1221, a bill that will enable up to 30 neighborhood-scale projects of this type over the next five years.
The catch is that most residents in the neighborhoods must agree to the change. While the state’s obligation to serve currently requires 100% approval, SB 1221 will lower the threshold to 67% as the pilot projects start rolling out. Several groups have begun the work of educating communities about the benefits of the switch.
In Albany, a city of about 20,000 people north of Berkeley, Michelle Plouse, the city’s community development analyst, has spent the last few years working with PG&E to pilot one of the first neighborhood-scale projects in the state. Using the gas line mapping tool developed by the utility, Plouse and other city staff worked with the Albany City Council to identify 12 potential blocks. This spring, they narrowed it down to three.
The goal, Plouse said, is to find blocks that are easier to electrify while also focusing on lower-income parts of the city, where residents are less likely to be able to afford to electrify.
“What will happen if we don’t decommission the gas line is that the cost of maintaining it will continue to increase over time, and the user base will drop as people electrify,” said Plouse. “The folks who don’t have the money to electrify will be stuck on gas that will get more expensive every year.”
The City of Albany received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project, and they’ve used the funds to support an outreach plan that involves a block party, a focus group, and a team that goes door-to-door in hopes of talking to everyone on the three blocks. “It’s going to be a lot of listening and a lot of connecting with different people,” said Plouse.
Rachel Wittman, a senior strategic analyst at PG&E, said the utility provided a letter of commitment in support of Albany’s DOE grant, but it won’t be providing financial support for the project.
Although the California Public Utilities Commission is soliciting interest from communities that want to take part in the SB 1221 pilot program, a spokesperson for the commission said it won’t have a list of potential sites until the second half of 2026, at the soonest.
The Albany project will begin before then, so it won’t likely be considered one of the 30 pilots, and Plouse said they’re hoping to get 100% of the residents to sign on. “What’s most likely is that we continue serving as a kind of first test run that can provide information for those pilots,” she said. If that doesn’t work, they may decide to wait until they only need 67% resident approval.
“Albany’s learnings from their efforts in community outreach and advocacy during this project will provide valuable insights that can inform zonal electrification outreach strategy,” said Wittman. “This applies not just for SB 1221 and PG&E, but for any utility or community.” She said over three dozen cities, counties, and other energy providers have reached out to the utility with interest in zonal decarbonization.
ACCE Action and others in Richmond hope its neighborhood-scale project — dubbed Clean Energy and Healthy Homes — will be included in the list of pilot projects, and it appears to have a good chance at making the list. If they’re able to decommission a gas line there, Sharples estimates that it could cost as much as $15 million to upgrade and electrify homes spanning a few different neighborhoods and provide them with solar power. He hopes PG&E will cover around 10% of that cost.
The Richmond City Council approved the effort in early 2024, but the remaining funding is still in question. Chevron, whose local refinery has been a major polluter for more than a century, entered into a settlement with the city for $550 million over the next 10 years to avoid paying a per-barrel tax on the oil it produces. ACCE Action wants to see a portion of that money spent on the neighborhood-scale project. The group has been hosting community events and engaging community members like Gomez.
Tim Frank, a representative of the Building and Construction Trades Council in the county, wants to see the project move forward because it could also create a model for so-called high-road work in the home-electrification space. Currently, unionized workers tend to do larger electrification projects, while one-off residential projects are done by smaller companies not affiliated with unions. While some pay their workers well, many hire temporary laborers and keep wages low.
Electrifying all the homes on one block allows for the efficiency and stability associated with larger projects while benefiting individual families. It’s also more cost-efficient because it allows for bulk purchases of supplies.
It’s a worthwhile experiment, Frank said. “We’re engaged, partly because we see the huge promise of this strategy and we want to help prove out the model and scale it up,” he added.
For Gomez, who has been talking to her neighbors about the possibility that all their homes could be upgraded and electrified at once, the biggest barrier is convincing them that it’s not a scam. Richmond’s low-income communities have seen their share of companies that go door-to-door trying to extract money from people who are stretched thin and working multiple jobs. Some clean energy providers have turned out to be imposters.
“It’s something they’ve never heard of before. So, people ask: Is this a real thing? Can it actually happen?” And she tells them that yes, if the plan goes as a growing number of people hope it will, it just might.
This story was produced with support from the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism.
A first-of-its-kind pilot to electrify homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard is set to finish construction in the coming weeks — and it could offer a blueprint for decarbonizing low- and moderate-income households in Massachusetts and beyond.
The Cape and Vineyard Electrification Offering is designed to be a turnkey program that makes it financially feasible and logistically approachable for households of all income levels to adopt solar panels, heat pumps, and batteries, and to realize the amplified benefits of using the resources together. These technologies slash emissions, reduce utility bills, and increase a home’s resilience during power outages, but are often only adopted by wealthier households due to their upfront cost.
“We are going to be advancing this as a model that should be emulated by other states across the country that are trying to achieve decarbonization goals,” said Todd Olinsky-Paul, senior project director for the Clean Energy Group, a nonprofit that produced a new report about the program.
In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. Work should be completed on the final participating home this month.
“This is the first and only instance where solar and battery storage are being presented in combination with electrification and traditional efficiency,” Olinsky-Paul said. “Instead of having several siloed programs, it’s all being presented to the customer in a package, which makes everything work together better.”
It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region, where households making less than one-third of the area median income spent an average of 27% of their income on energy as of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. (The updated figure is unavailable because the federal tool that provided this data is no longer live.)
The initiative is a project of the Cape Light Compact, a unique regional organization that negotiates electric supply prices and administers energy-efficiency programming for the 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. The compact first proposed the pilot in 2018, but regulators rejected the idea. The organization submitted a revised version in 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the state finally gave the program the green light.
An energy-efficiency contractor partners with each program participant to assess their home, then coordinates the necessary work, including any preparations that need to be completed before solar panels, heat pumps, or batteries can be put in. The batteries installed through the program are enrolled in ConnectedSolutions, a state program that pays battery owners who send power to the grid when needed. Because the pilot footed the bill for the batteries, these payments will go to the Cape Light Compact, rather than residents, to help defray the cost of the program.
Bringing the program to life was not always a smooth process. The original proposal called for 100 homes to participate in the pilot, but the final number fell well short of that target. Some homeowners who originally expressed interest were put off by the requirement to remove all fossil-fuel systems from their homes, particularly if they had recently invested in new gas or propane heating, said Stephen McCloskey, an analyst with the Cape Light Compact and the program manager for the pilot.
In some cases, homeowners balked at up-front costs. Moderate-income households that did not live in deed-restricted affordable housing had to pay 20% of the cost for heat pumps and any cost over $15,000 for solar panels. If a roof was too shady for solar, homeowners were responsible for removing trees and branches.
“At the end of the day, each customer and their decision-making process is different,” McCloskey said.
The original plan called for installing batteries in 25 participants’ homes, but unexpected limitations lowered that number, McCloskey said. Houses without basements, for example, couldn’t receive batteries. In some cases, the combined capacity of solar panels and a battery would have exceeded the local utility’s threshold for connecting a system to the grid.
The compact also had not fully accounted for the array of barriers that needed to be addressed before weatherization could be done. Some homes had mold or needed electrical upgrades. Others required roof work before solar panels could be installed.
These challenges are not dealbreakers but lessons learned for utilities or organizations that attempt to emulate the program in the future, McCloskey said. And Olinsky-Paul sees great potential for similar plans to be pursued nationwide. Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted 100% clean energy targets, he said, and distributed-energy programs like the Cape and Vineyard’s can make those goals more achievable by reducing the cost and strain electrification can create for the grid.
“If you’re going to do decarbonization, you have to do electrification,” Olinsky-Paul said. “And so there is going to be a huge need for some way of doing this without inadvertently causing massive new fossil-fuel use” to generate more power.
The Cape Light Compact intends to release a full report on the deployment of the pilot in August, but feedback so far has been very positive from participants who appreciate the turnkey approach to comprehensive electrification, McCloskey said.
“There are definitely things that whoever is facilitating that program would need to look at, to game plan for,” he said. “But this is a great model.”
Five years ago, San Francisco–based startup Span debuted a smartphone-controllable electrical panel that allows homeowners to manage their solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, HVAC systems, and other major household appliances in real time. It was a high-end product for a high-end market.
But as more households purchase EVs, heat pumps, induction stoves, and other power-hungry devices, the demand for cheaper ways to control their electricity use is growing — not just from homeowners trying to avoid expensive electrical upgrades but utilities struggling to keep up with rising power demand, too.
Enter the Span Edge, unveiled at the Distributech utility trade show in Dallas this week. The device packs the startup’s core technology into a package that can be installed in about 15 minutes and plugged into an adapter that connects to a utility electric meter.
Span’s other products are targeted at homeowners; electrical contractors; and solar, battery, and EV charging installers. But the Span Edge, which requires a utility worker to install, is “expanding way beyond a homeowner or installer-led adoption of the product, to becoming part of the utility infrastructure,” said CEO Arch Rao.
That makes it one of a growing number of tools for utilities to manage the solar, batteries, EVs, controllable appliances, and other distributed energy resources that they must increasingly plan around.
If utilities manage these resources reactively, they could drive up the cost and complexity of managing the grid. But if utilities can get better information about when and how these devices use power — and if some customers are willing to adjust them sometimes to reduce grid stress — they could actually save ratepayers a lot of money.
That’s what Span’s new technology aims to allow. The company’s “dynamic service rating” control scheme can throttle or shift power use between household electrical loads, based on a homeowner’s preset or real-time priorities. That helps ensure total draw on the utility grid stays below a home’s top electrical service capacity, which typically ranges between 100 and 200 amps.
Households that want to exceed the limit of their electrical panel are often forced to upgrade to a larger one. Depending on where you live, that can cost from $3,000 to $10,000 and add days to weeks of extra time to a project, like installing an EV charger. If a utility determines a home’s new maximum power draw will trigger grid upgrades, the project could be even more expensive and take much longer to complete. In the worst case, that could kill households’ plans to do everything from switching to an EV to electrifying their heating and cooking.
It’s also expensive for utilities. “Where consumers are adding heat pumps and EV chargers, the existing solution has always been, ‘Let’s build more infrastructure — more poles and wires — to meet the maximum load,’” Rao said.
Installing a device like the Span Edge could well be a more cost-effective alternative, not just for the customers who get one but for customers as a whole. Utility rates are largely determined by dividing the amount of money earned from electricity sales by the amount of money utilities have to collect from customers to cover their costs. A big and rising portion of U.S. utility costs is tied up in upgrading and maintaining their power grids, including to meet rising demand for power from EVs and heat pumps. As a result, ratepayers in many parts of the country are seeing higher bills.
If devices like the Span Edge can cut those grid costs while allowing people to buy more electricity for EVs and heating, rates for everyone will drop over time, Rao said. While some utilities may balk at replacing profitable grid-upgrade investments with new technology, others that want customers to electrify to meet carbon-reduction mandates or to increase electricity sales may be eager to implement it, he argued.
Span’s smart electrical panel was among the first attempts to give the old-fashioned electrical panel a 21st-century makeover.
But similar products that also embed circuit-level controls are now available from major manufacturers, including Schneider Electric and Eaton; startups such as Lumin and Koben; and solar and battery vendors like FranklinWH, Lunar Energy, and Savant.
Utilities have been experimenting with such technologies for a while. Some plug directly into utilities’ existing electric meters, including the Span Edge, ConnectDER’s smart meter collar devices, or the Tesla backup switch.
Others are embedded elsewhere in a home’s electrical system, like the controls product startup Lunar Energy is developing using Eaton’s smart circuit breakers. Those digital, wirelessly connected breakers are “modular, interoperable, and retrofittable,” Paul Ryan, the company’s general manager of connected solutions and EV charging, told Canary Media in October. That’s helpful “as you add heat pumps and electric vehicle charging,” he said — and could be useful for utilities, a group of customers Eaton has worked with for many years.
The trick for all of these technologies is to combine the convenience and simplicity consumers demand with utility safety and reliability requirements, said Scott Hinson, chief technology officer of Austin, Texas–based nonprofit research organization Pecan Street.
In a 2021 report, Pecan Street estimated that about 48 million U.S. single-family homes with service below 200 amps might need to upgrade their electrical panels to support electric heating, cooking, and EV charging.
But not all of the technologies that allow customers and utilities to sidestep upgrades necessarily meet the needs of both parties, he said.
Take the smart-home platforms on offer from Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and other tech vendors, which can control light bulbs, thermostats, ovens, refrigerators, and a growing roster of other devices. These systems rely on WiFi and broadband connections, and that’s not good enough to let households skip upgrading their electrical panels, Rao pointed out. The latest certifications for power control systems require fail-safes that work even when the internet is down, something Span’s products do by sensing overloads and shutting down circuits.
On the other hand, rudimentary on-off control switches are far from ideal, Hinson said.
“A lot of these devices don’t like to be controlled” by having their power cut off externally in such a rough-and-ready manner, he added. For example, abrupt power cutoffs trigger the “charging cord theft alert” feature in EVs like the Chevy Volt, which starts the car alarm until the owner shuts it off — not a pleasant experience for the EV owner or neighbors.
More importantly, Hinson said, a good system needs to control “large loads so they’re aware of each other,” he said. Homeowners want to control which appliances get shut off when the need arises, whether it’s their EV charger, clothes dryer, oven, or heating and cooling, he said. But to do that, “the car has to know what the electric oven is doing, which has to know what the heater is doing.”
Span’s devices have two ways to do this, Rao said. Because they contain the connection points for power to flow through circuit breakers to a home’s electrical wiring, the devices can directly measure how much power household loads are using — and cut them off completely in an emergency.
At the same time, Span uses WiFi or other technologies to communicate with “smart” heat pumps, water heaters, EV chargers, and other devices, he said. That allows households to control the power that devices get on a more granular scale as well as collect information beyond how much power they’re using, such as when an appliance is scheduled to turn back on or, for EVs, how quickly they need to be recharged to give the driver the juice they need to get to where they’re going next.
What’s important is that a system can provide both options, Rao contended. “If you only did on-off control, the customer experience is bad,” he said. “If you only did WiFi, you’re not safe enough for the grid.”
Having both visibility into and control over home electricity flows creates the groundwork for a more flexible approach to enlisting homes in utility virtual power plants, or VPPs. In simple terms, VPPs are aggregations of homes and businesses that agree to turn down power use or inject power onto the grid as utilities need, helping reduce reliance on large centralized power plants.
Most of the virtual power plants that exist today are organized around individual devices — smart thermostats that can reduce electricity demand from air conditioning, for example, or solar-battery systems that can send power back to the grid. Each of these technologies has its limitations, and utilities’ reliance on them is often constrained by a lack of precise data on how much power the grid is using or can offer at any particular time.
A system that tracks the energy use of multiple appliances and devices in a home could bring far more precision to these VPPs, Rao said. “That’s very different than the demand-response world, where you call a thermostat and say ‘I hope it responds to me.’”
Utilities certainly have a growing interest in using these kinds of devices. On Monday, Pacific Gas & Electric announced a new VPP pilot program that seeks to enlist customers willing to allow the utility to control their “residential distributed energy resources to reduce local grid constraints.”
PG&E is looking for up to 1,500 electric residential customers with battery energy storage systems and up to 400 customers with smart electric panels. Its partners include leading U.S. residential solar and battery installer Sunrun, which has done VPP pilots with the utility in the past, and Span, which will use its technology to allow homes to respond to utility signals.
Span has already tested this capability in a pilot project enlisting customers who’ve installed the company’s smart panels in Northern California, Rao said. The results so far are promising, although only a handful of households are taking part.
Getting utilities to deploy Span Edge devices could expand the scale of those kinds of programs, he said. Of course, households will have to agree that letting some of their electricity use get turned off or dialed down during hours of peak grid stress is worth avoiding the cost and wait times of upgrading their electrical service to get the EV charger or heat pump they want.
Span hasn’t revealed the cost of the Span Edge, which Rao said will soon be deployed in pilot projects with as-yet unnamed utilities. The company has a partnership with major smart-meter vendor Landis+Gyr, which is offering the Span Edge to its utility customers.
The question for utilities, regulators, and other stakeholders is whether the long-term payoff in avoided infrastructure upgrades is worth the cost of the technologies that must be deployed to make that possible. Those calculations will inform decisions such as whether customers getting the technologies should pay a portion of the price tag and how much profit utilities should be allowed to earn on the costs they bear in installing the tech.
PG&E’s chief grid architect, Christopher Moris, said the Span Edge device “is a potential solution which may be able to, at a reduced cost, enable customers to connect their EV and transition off of gas.” One of the utility’s biggest near-term challenges is helping customers install EV chargers, he noted. PG&E has more than 600,000 EVs in its service territory, almost certainly more than any other U.S. utility.
The company also faces customer and political backlash to its recent rate hikes, a problem driven by its need to carry out more and costlier power grid upgrades. While devices like the Span Edge could help address that problem, “we realize how new such a concept is for our customers,” Moris said.
“I’m very bullish on this new solution — but we don’t know what we don’t know,” he said. PG&E “will need to go through a customer discovery process to really understand their challenges more first, before definitely landing on the Span solution and, if so, what the end-to-end solution looks like.”
A clarification was made on March 26, 2025: An earlier version of this article implied that Lunar Energy and Eaton are co-developing a home energy controls product, and that Eaton is testing its AbleEdge circuit breakers for use by utilities. In fact, Lunar Energy is integrating Eaton’s AbleEdge smart breakers into Lunar Energy’s home energy controls platform, and while Eaton has worked with utilities in the past, it has yet to test its AbleEdge devices with utilities.
This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
New York state is one step closer to banning fossil fuels in new buildings.
On Friday, the State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council voted to recommend major updates to the state’s building code, which is updated every five years and sets minimum standards for construction statewide. The draft updates include rules requiring most new buildings to be all-electric starting in 2026, as mandated by a law passed two years ago.
The vote came after the code council went missing in action for more than two months, leaving some advocates nervous that the state might be wavering on the gas ban. With the rules now entering the final stage of the approval process, New York remains on track to be the first state to enact such a ban.
The new draft code also tightens a slew of other standards in a bid to make buildings more energy efficient and save residents money over the long term. But it leaves out several key provisions recommended in the state’s climate plan — possibly running afoul of a 2022 law.
Specifically, the draft energy code leaves out requirements that new homes include on-site energy storage and be wired such that owners can easily add electric vehicle chargers (when the property includes parking space) and solar panels. The state’s 2022 climate plan listed these three provisions as “key strategies” to achieve New York’s legally binding emissions targets. On-site energy storage also makes homes more resilient when disasters strike, the plan noted, providing backup power in the event of a blackout.
A separate 2022 law required the state to take those recommendations into account when updating its building code.
“Updating the infrastructure for those things is a key part of what this transition is,” said Michael Hernandez, New York policy director at the pro-electrification group Rewiring America.
The Department of State, which oversees New York’s code development process, did not respond to a request for comment.
Buildings are New York’s largest source of emissions, according to the state’s accounting, amounting to nearly one-third of all climate pollution. New York’s buildings burn more fossil fuels for heat and hot water than any other state’s, according to the clean-energy group RMI. That contributes not only to global warming but also to local air pollution, with deadly consequences: A 2021 study by Harvard researchers found that pollution from New York’s buildings causes nearly 2,000 premature deaths a year.
Cutting that pollution will require major upgrades to the state’s aging housing stock — an enormous challenge. But climate hawks stress that the first and easiest step is to stop digging the hole deeper, by making new buildings as climate-friendly as possible. Making them all-electric is a key part of that. But other, subtler changes can also play an important role.
The fossil-fuel industry, for its part, is taking those changes seriously. Gas trade groups led a major fight to keep provisions such as the EV-ready requirement out of the national building code that provides a model for states including New York. After nearly five years of wrangling, the International Code Council — actually a national nonprofit — that oversees the process voted not to include the provisions as requirements, siding with the gas groups over the advice of its own experts.
Among the parties who stood up for the stricter energy code: a New York state code official, who joined advocates like Hernandez one year ago in urging the International Code Council to keep the requirements in. Yet the state is now following the national group’s lead and relegating the solar, electric vehicle, and battery standards to the appendices of its draft code. That means they can still serve as templates for localities that want to adopt the tougher standards, but they’re not required.
Fossil-fuel interests and some Republican lawmakers have argued that including such mandates would only drive up the cost of new homes at a time when housing is already deeply unaffordable. But climate advocates point out that it’s far cheaper to install electrical infrastructure up front than add it in later on — as much as six times cheaper in the case of an EV charger, for example.
That’s in keeping with many of the green rules that New York did include in its new draft code. Chris Corcoran, a code expert at the state energy authority NYSERDA, told the code council on Friday that adopting the full suite of proposed energy rules will add about $2 per square foot to the up-front cost of new homes but save residents more than three times that over 30 years.
It’s not entirely clear who in New York has pushed to leave the storage, solar, and EV provisions out. Only eight groups disclosed that they lobbied on the building and energy codes last year, and it’s not obvious that any of them had a specific interest in opposing those rules.
Officials speaking at Friday’s meeting did not explain why they left out the requirements. One lawyer who helped draft the updated energy rules, Ben Kosinski, left the Department of State just this month to work as chief counsel for the Senate Republicans, for whom he also worked before joining the code office, according to his LinkedIn profile. The GOP caucus has voted almost unanimously against the laws driving the pro-electrification updates to the code. (Kosinski did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
Although the council voted unanimously on Friday to advance the all-electric rules, not all members supported the move. William Tuyn, a builders’ representative from the Buffalo area, noted that the state adds roughly 40,000 homes a year — a tiny fraction of the roughly 7 million that already exist.
“We don’t even make a dent in the issue of climate change by focusing there,” he said in the final minutes of the meeting. “The Legislature did what they did. That ship has sailed … [but] we really need to concentrate on renewables or improving the grid if we’re really going to be able to do something and we’re not just going to simply crash the economy of the state of New York.”
Several lawmakers urged the council on Friday to include the full suite of climate provisions in the final rules.
“These provisions are not trivial add-ons. They are the backbone of a truly effective energy code,” said Neil Jimenez, legislative director for Assemblymember Yudelka Tapia. “Their exclusion weakens the very foundation upon the policies we’ve fought so hard to put into place here in Albany.”
A fast-growing startup is giving Texas homeowners cheap access to unusually large batteries for backup power — and paying for it by maneuvering those same batteries in the state’s ERCOT energy markets.
Base Power launched last May and already has installed more than 1,000 home batteries, around 30 megawatt-hours, in North Austin and the Fort Worth area, CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media recently. The company plans to expand that footprint to 250 megawatt-hours this year, he added.
To make good on that promise, the 80-person startup rolled out service to the Houston area last week. That move had been planned for this summer, but customers in the storm-prone metropolis were calling and emailing to sign up, and a cold snap was bearing down on Texas, testing the grid’s ability to keep pace with winter energy needs.
“We saw what happened in Winter Storm Uri, four years ago, and we want to put a solution in the hands of Texans for situations like that,” Dell said, referring to the widespread grid outages that contributed to hundreds of deaths. “As another cold front sweeps through Texas this week, we felt like pulling up the Houston launch as quickly as possible was the right thing to do.”
If a homeowner in Texas wants backup power, they could buy solar and a battery. But most battery products aren’t large enough to meet the needs of the typical American home — that’s why you see three Tesla Powerwalls lined up in some garages. At that point, the out-of-pocket cost reaches tens of thousands of dollars, unless the buyer grapples with the current state of interest rates and takes out a loan.
Base Power pitches the benefits of whole-home backup power without the massive up-front expenditure. The company designed its own battery for the express purpose of backup power, so each unit packs 25 kilowatt-hours of storage instead of the usual 10 or 15. It can instantly discharge 11.4 kilowatts of power. Some people get two of these side by side for a truly hefty home energy arsenal.
But the customers don’t buy this product: They pay a $495 installation fee and an ongoing monthly fee of $16. They also choose Base Power as their electricity retailer — Texas allows customers to pick who they buy from — and pay 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for their general household consumption.
If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, nor is there nearly free backup power. Base Power (and, by extension, its venture backers) fronts this rather hefty bill, on the premise that it can make money not just from customer subscriptions but by bidding the decentralized battery fleet into the ERCOT energy markets. That also lets Base Power charge a lower rate for household electricity than it otherwise would need to.
“We’re a battery developer; we’re an asset owner,” Dell explained. “For us and for the customer, a bigger battery is better.”
In that sense, this company is the newest in a lineage of startups seeking to unlock the multi-layered benefits of distributed energy devices, which both help a local customer and, when harnessed with effective software and amenable market rules, make the overall grid more clean and efficient.
Many startups have gone bankrupt chasing this rosy vision. Base Power aims to avoid their fate by adopting a very old technique in the utility sector: vertical integration.
In order to make its customer-friendly product into a viable business, Dell and company have taken control of every step of their value chain, rather than outsourcing or partnering.
The company designed its own battery hardware, giving it far more capacity than the market-leading home battery systems. Base Power wrote its own software to govern the batteries and operate them as a decentralized fleet bidding into the wholesale markets. And the startup does its own sales, installations, and long-term maintenance.
The corporate strategy, Dell explained, is to create “compounding cost advantage through vertical integration.” If Base Power bought, say, Tesla Powerwalls and resold them to customers, it would have to give Tesla a margin. If it paid outside firms to knock on doors and pitch batteries, those commercial evangelists would also take their cut. Contracting out for installation further dilutes the profits, and so on.
“Because we do all these things, we can take cost out of every part of the system and then pass those savings down to the customer in the form of low prices,” Dell said. “As our returns go up and our cost of capital goes down, our intention is to build the largest and most capital-efficient portfolio of batteries in the country.”
Minimizing cost and reliance on outside parties makes fundamental sense, and yet fledgling startups typically shy away from taking on so much for fear of biting off more than they can chew.
“It’s really hard,” Dell admitted. However, “because it’s so hard, there’s not a lot of people who can do it.”
It’s a business strategy that calls to mind the ancient bristlecone pines that occupy a remote, arid mountaintop between the eastern Sierras and California’s border with Nevada. The trees suffer extremes of heat and cold and thirst and wind, but when they persist, they carve out a niche where few competitors can survive. The oldest bristlecones predate the pyramids of Giza.
The do-it-all approach also distinguishes Base Power from others that are similarly trying to get more batteries into people’s homes.
German company sonnen has been working on this challenge for over a decade and operates a vast network of home batteries in Germany that make money in power markets there. In the U.S., the company partners with solar companies and sometimes with real estate developers to sell its batteries. Sonnen launched a no-money-down battery offering in Texas with a company called Solrite, which had put equipment in more than 1,000 homes as of January, a similar volume to what Base Power has installed.
Neither sonnen nor Solrite are retail electricity providers in Texas, though, so they need to pair up with companies that buy and sell power and can monetize the batteries’ ability to arbitrage. The Solrite deal requires people to sign up for 25 years and buy out any remaining value if they want to quit before the quarter-century mark. Base Power, in contrast, asks customers to commit to a three-year retail contract, and the cancellation fee is $500, to cover removing the battery system.
Other climatetech-savvy retailers offer special deals for people who buy their own batteries. Great Britain’s Octopus Energy has entered the ERCOT market and offers modest monthly credits per kilowatt-hour of storage capacity if residents let the company manage their home batteries. Octopus uses its software to shift consumption to times with abundant renewable generation, thereby lowering the cost of serving those households.
Startup David Energy offers retail plans in which the company optimizes customers’ battery usage to minimize their overall electricity bill. Tesla itself opened a Texas electricity retailer subsidiary that pays customers a fixed credit of $400 per year for each Powerwall pack that they allow to discharge to the grid, up to three Powerwalls.
Those providers still need customers to front the money or take out a loan to install their own batteries, which constrains how quickly battery adoption can grow. On the other hand, that model means those companies can focus on honing their energy software and trading strategy and don’t have to spend millions of dollars to install and own batteries that might one day pay for themselves.
Base Power pays for its buildout with a mix of equity, debt, and tax credits, Dell noted. Investors funded an $8 million seed raise led by Thrive Capital and a $60 million Series A led by Valor Equity Partners. As for making money, Base Power uses the batteries to arbitrage energy in the ERCOT market from the renewables-filled times of plenty to the valuable hours of scarce supply. The company is currently undergoing qualification to bid ancillary services, a more complex suite of market offerings that maintain the quality and reliability of the grid.
As temperatures dipped well below freezing last month in Asheville, North Carolina, the heat pumps at Sophie Mullinax’s house hummed along, keeping up just fine.
The fact she was warm inside without a gas furnace while the outdoor temperature read 9 degrees Fahrenheit reaffirmed a core belief: “Electrification is better in almost every way you slice it.”
Mullinax is chief operating officer for Solar CrowdSource, a platform that connects groups of customers with solar panels and electric appliances. Since last spring, the company has been preparing for North Carolina’s first-ever statewide incentives for switching out gas stoves and heaters for high-efficiency electric versions.
The Energy Saver North Carolina program, launched in mid-January, includes more than $208 million dollars in federally funded rebates to help low- and moderate-income homeowners make energy-saving improvements, including converting to electric appliances.
“The electric counterpart to every single fossil-fuel technology out there does the same job better,” Mullinax said, and “has a lower impact on the climate, is healthier, and often saves money.”
Solar CrowdSource, which has partnered with the city of Asheville and Buncombe County to help meet the community’s climate goals through electrification, expects the rebate program to make its task easier.
Still, questions remain about the federally funded inducements, including — perhaps most urgently — whether they can survive President Donald Trump’s unilateral assault on clean energy.
The state’s new incentive program stems from the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 federal climate law that unleashed nearly $400 billion in federal spending on clean energy and efficiency — and which is now embattled by a flurry of Trump edicts.
While much of the climate law directs incentives to large, utility-scale wind and solar projects, the $8.8 billion home rebate program is designed to curb planet-warming emissions house-by-house, where there is vast potential for improving efficiency and shifting to electric appliances.
Studies estimate that roughly 35% of home energy use is wasted — lost to inefficient heating and cooling systems and appliances, air leaks around windows and doors, and poorly insulated walls. That’s especially true in states like North Carolina, where building energy conservation codes are woefully outdated.
While homes in North Carolina rely less on fossil-fuel appliances than in other parts of the country, they still contribute to climate change. About a third are heated with fuels other than electricity, per the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the Energy Information Administration, some 15% use gas for cooking. In all, state officials estimate that households that burn gas, propane, and other fuels account for 5% of the state’s net greenhouse gas pollution.
Both energy waste and the rising cost of fossil fuels — whether burned directly in the home or in Duke Energy power plants — contribute to the state’s energy burden. Some 1.4 million North Carolinians pay a disproportionately high fraction of their income on energy bills, according to the state’s latest Clean Energy Plan.
But though the state has long deployed federal weatherization assistance to its lowest-income households, there’s little precedent here for a widespread nudge to electrification, either through carrots or sticks.
Unlike dozens of municipalities around the country, no local government in North Carolina has moved to limit residential hookups for gas; most legal analysts say they lack the power to do so. In 2023, the state legislature made doubly sure of that with a law banning local bans on new gas appliances or connections.
Meanwhile, a decades-old state rule barring ratepayer-funded utility promotions that could influence fuel choice has prevented Duke from offering much in the way of carrots. While shareholders could pay for rebates, they have little motive to do so: Duke acquired Piedmont Natural Gas, the state’s predominant gas utility, in 2016.
For years, Duke has offered incentives, carefully calibrated not to run afoul of state rules, for builders to construct more efficient homes. The latest iteration of those ratepayer-backed inducements is under $2,000 per home. By contrast, the new statewide rebates for upgrading to electric appliances cap out at $14,000 apiece.
“This is the largest and the first program in the state that is truly incentivizing fuel switching,” said Ethan Blumenthal, regulatory counsel at the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association.
A second program within Energy Saver North Carolina offers rebates of up to $16,000 to homeowners who add insulation, plug air leaks, and make other improvements, so long as an audit shows the measures will reduce energy use by at least 20%.
In both cases, North Carolina officials are aiming the incentives at low- and moderate-income households. Those earning less than 80% of the area’s median income — about $70,000, depending on the county — get projects for free, and those earning up to 150% of the median get a 50% rebate.
“That was a choice. The federal government did not require it to be a specifically low- to moderate-income program,” said Claire Williamson, energy policy advocate at the North Carolina Justice Center. Yet, she added, the administrations of former Gov. Roy Cooper and current Gov. Josh Stein have “made sure that these funds are going to people who need them the most.”
Like Solar CrowdSource, the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters has awaited the new rebates for months. Meech Carter, clean energy campaigns director at the group, has been handing out flyers, holding information sessions with legislators and community leaders, and setting up an online clearinghouse for homeowners to explore available incentives.
“Every time I present on the website and what resources are out there, I get so many questions on the rebate program,” Carter said, “especially for replacing gas appliances, propane heaters, and transitioning folks to cleaner sources and more energy-efficient sources.”
Costs and climate concerns are factors, she said, but so is health. Just like fossil-fuel–burning power plants and cars, gas stoves and furnaces emit soot and smog-forming particles. A growing body of evidence shows that these pollutants get trapped indoors and far exceed levels deemed safe.
Now that the rebate program has launched, Carter has dozens of people statewide to call back and assist, including 25 in Edgecombe County’s Princeville, the oldest town in the country chartered by Black Americans.
Edgecombe is among the state’s most impoverished counties, making it a prime candidate for the new rebates. “Considering North Carolina’s energy landscape,” Carter said, “we are very optimistic about this program.”
Yet even champions for the program acknowledge they have questions about its deployment. Despite the immense need, it’s hard enough to expend weatherization assistance money due to distrust in government programs, a dearth of qualified contractors, and other hurdles. Those funds, intended for the state’s lowest-income households, total roughly $38 million per year at the moment, after a big infusion from Congress, according to state officials. The new rebates, if evenly distributed over five years, would more than double that with another $41.6 million annually.
“This is larger than the weatherization assistance program,” said Williamson. “There are many contractors out there, but I think there is going to be a big lift to get people trained.”
Announcing the program last month, Gov. Stein stressed that new contractors and other workers would follow.
“[The Department of Environmental Quality] estimates that the program will support over 2,000 jobs across our state,” Stein said at the launch event. “I’m also eager to see the workforce development opportunities that will come.”
Asked how historically disadvantaged communities could benefit from such opportunities, department spokesperson Sascha Medina said over email, “We have planned this program to launch and ramp up for continuous improvement. We will be focusing our marketing to contractors in high energy burden and storm impacted areas first and will expand from there.”
Still, the counties most devastated by Hurricane Helene, like Buncombe, aren’t first on the program’s outreach list. The department’s analysis of statewide energy burdens led it to choose Halifax County in the eastern part of the state along with Cleveland County, in the foothills.
“The hurricane affected areas add a layer of complexity to the program because the rebate programs cannot duplicate money that has been awarded to households through other recovery funding sources,” Medina said. “As we roll out the program, we will continue to work with our partners in the affected areas and receive guidance from the U.S. Department of Energy.”
That guidance from a Trump-led Department of Energy could imperil the success of the rebates more than any other factor. While the president rescinded his widely panned memo halting virtually all federal government spending, his first-week orders targeting Biden-era clean-energy spending appear to remain in force.
The fact that the federal government signed contracts with the state in accordance with a law passed by Congress should shield North Carolina’s Energy Saver rebate program from harm, Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Reid Wilson said at the launch.
“This is finalized. This is done,” Wilson said.
CLEAN ENERGY: Food and beverage production facilities across the U.S. begin to deploy low-carbon heating technologies as an alternative to gas-powered systems, though high costs remain a barrier. (Canary Media)
POLITICS:
GRID:
COAL ASH: A coalition of U.S. power companies sends a letter to Trump’s EPA nominee asking for“immediate action” to roll back federal regulation of toxic coal ash and rescind recent enforcement actions. (Canary Media)
EMISSIONS:
EFFICIENCY: Twenty-four states lack energy efficiency standards meant to curb energy use, which advocates say come with economic as well as climate advantages, according to a new industry report. (Grist)
WIND: President Trump’s actions against wind energy development might actually benefit Texas’ wind industry because the vast majority of its projects are located on private and not federal land, says the director of a university energy institute. (Texas Standard)
COMMENTARY: A California columnist urges policymakers to continue to invest in risky clean energy innovation even as the “expensive, bird-killing eyesore” known as Ivanpah solar plant nears its retirement. (Los Angeles Times)
UTILITIES: S&P downgrades the credit rating of three Connecticut utilities, with executives blaming state regulators for rejecting rate increases as costs increase. (CT Insider)
ALSO: New Jersey lawmakers advance a bill that would require utilities to alert customers mid-month if their energy usage is unusually high. (New Jersey Monitor)
CLIMATE:
OVERSIGHT: New Hampshire’s consumer advocate is backing legislation to clarify the authorities of the state’s Public Utilities Commission and its recently created Department of Energy. (New Hampshire Bulletin)
WIND: A labor leader says Maine should reach out to other states to help support a deepwater port for offshore wind construction, after multiple attempts to secure federal funds have failed. (Maine Public)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: New Jersey has surpassed 200,000 electric vehicle registrations, but an advocate says a lack of charging stations and shifting tax credits make it unlikely the state will hit its goal of 330,000 by next year. (NJ.com)
SOLAR:
COMMENTARY:
This article was originally posted by South Dakota Searchlight.
Massive data centers used for cloud computing and artificial intelligence are consuming enormous amounts of energy, and developers are eyeing South Dakota as a potential location, regulators say.
These “hyperscale data centers,” or “hyperscalers,” are designed to handle immense computing demands and are often operated by tech giants. The centers are characterized by their large size — often tens of thousands of square feet — and thousands of computer servers that require significant energy to operate.
Nick Phillips with Applied Digital in Texas, a developer of the centers, highlighted South Dakota’s appeal: a cold climate that cuts down on cooling a room full of hot servers, and abundant wind energy that’s considered one of the most cost-effective renewable energy sources, which can help keep operating costs down.
State regulators are not aware of any hyperscale data centers currently operating in South Dakota.
“There isn’t a requirement to report hyperscale data centers to the commission, so we don’t have a formal method to track that information,” said Leah Mohr with the Public Utilities Commission.
Commissioner Kristie Fiegen noted that the state’s largest proposed data center is a 50-megawatt facility in Leola.
“We don’t know what’s coming,” she said. “But the utilities are getting calls every week from people trying to see if they have the megawatts available.”
The commission recently hosted a meeting in Pierre with representatives from regional utilities, regional power grid associations and data centers. The goal was to understand the emerging demands and facilitate an information exchange.
Bob Sahr, a former public utilities commissioner and current CEO of East River Electric Cooperative in Madison, emphasized the scale of energy needed.
“We’re talking loads that eclipse some of the largest cities in South Dakota,” he said.
A single data center campus can require anywhere from 300 to 500 megawatts of electricity to operate. One megawatt can power hundreds of homes. By one estimate, there are over 1,000 hyperscalers worldwide, with the U.S. hosting just over half of them.
Ryan Long, president of Xcel Energy, headquartered in Minneapolis, illustrated the extreme nature of the demand.
“We now have, I would say, north of seven gigawatts of requests across the Xcel Energy footprint for data centers to locate in one of our eight states,” he said. “And I’ll be very frank that there’s no way that we’re going to be able to serve all of that in a reasonable amount of time.”
Protecting existing customers from potential costs or energy shortages is another shared concern. Utility representatives emphasized the need for coal and natural gas to maintain a reliable “base load” when renewable sources like wind and solar are unavailable. Arick Sears of Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy underscored the point, noting that costs for each data center should depend on how much energy it consumes.
“We need to ensure that large-scale energy users are paying their fair share,” he said.
Utilities also flagged the risk of “stranded costs,” referring to a data center ceasing operations, leaving a utility with added infrastructure to meet a demand that no longer exists. They said financial safeguards will need to be written into power agreements with hyperscalers.
Speed of deployment is another pressing issue. Representatives from Montana-Dakota Utilities, headquartered in North Dakota, and NorthWestern Energy, headquartered in Sioux Falls, noted that some facilities expect to be operational within months of making a deal, straining infrastructure, planning and resources.
Grid managers Brian Tulloh of Indiana-based Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Lanny Nickell of Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool echoed those concerns. They warned that data center growth is outpacing the grid’s ability to meet demand and cautioned against decommissioning coal power plants too quickly. Setting aside how much it would cost to produce the required energy, Tulloh estimated that MISO needs $30 billion in electric transmission infrastructure to support the demand from hyperscalers.
“The grid wasn’t designed for that,” Public Utilities Commissioner Chris Nelson told South Dakota Searchlight after the meeting.
Nelson was glad to hear the data centers will include backup generators, similar to hospitals, for power outages or when homes need prioritization. He said some even aim to have huge batteries to power the plant until the generators get going. They would consume massive amounts of diesel and natural gas until the outage is over.
Nelson said all of this makes modern nuclear energy facilities more attractive. He said few alternative “base load” options remain, and the public has little appetite for ramping up coal power.
NorthWestern Energy is exploring the possibility of constructing a small nuclear power plant in South Dakota, with an estimated cost of $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion for a 320-megawatt facility. The plant would be the first in the state since a test facility near Sioux Falls in the 1960s.
The company is conducting a study, partially funded by the Department of Energy. Details about the study and potential plant sites remain confidential.
Additionally, South Dakota’s Legislature has shown interest in nuclear energy, passing a resolution for further study on the topic that led to the publication of an issue memorandum by the Legislative Research Council.
WORKFORCE: Kentucky communities where developers are building large battery factories that are expected to create thousands of jobs are experiencing housing shortages, with a legislative study finding the state is 206,207 housing units short of what it needs. (Lexington Herald-Leader)
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR:
WIND:
CLIMATE: New research finds soaring insurance premiums fueled by climate change increase the probability of homeowners falling behind on their mortgages. (Floodlight)
GRID:
POLITICS:
NUCLEAR: A new report suggests Texas lawmakers rework the nuclear permitting process and establish a state fund to incentivize construction of new plants, similar to what the state established recently for gas-fired power plants. (Utility Dive)
HYDROELECTRIC: The Tennessee Valley Authority signs a deal with two companies to receive power from a 377 MW portfolio of four hydroelectric dams in Tennessee and North Carolina. (news release)
COMMENTARY: With the incoming Trump administration unlikely to address climate change, it’s up to the private sector to handle the job instead, writes the head of a conservative climate group. (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
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