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As a historic 10-day heat wave threatened brownouts across California last summer, a small San Diego County school district did its part to help: It captured excess power from its electric school buses and sent it back to the state’s overwhelmed grid.
The eight school buses provided enough power for 452 homes each day of the heat wave, and the buses were recharged only during off hours when the grid was not strained.
California energy officials have high hopes that this new power source, called bidirectional charging, will boost California’s power supply as it ramps up its ambitious agenda of electrifying its cars, trucks and buses while switching to 100% clean energy.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called two-way charging technology a “game changer,” saying “this is the future” during a speech last September, about a week after the heat wave ended.
This year, a bill already approved by the state Senate in a 29-9 vote would require all new electric cars sold in California to be equipped with bidirectional technology by 2030. In the Assembly, two committees approved the bill earlier this month and it is now under consideration by a third.
This two-way charging has big potential — but also faces big obstacles. By 2035, California expects to have 12.5 million electric cars on the road, but it’s an open question how much California can rely on them to feed the grid. Automakers say the technology would add thousands of dollars to the cost of an electric car, and California’s utilities are still sorting out how to pay ratepayers for selling them the kilowatt hours.
The ability to use electric cars, trucks and buses to feed energy back into the grid would be especially helpful during peak times for energy use, such as heatwaves. But relying on vehicles as a year-round power source may not be practical — at least not yet.
“It’s a great idea conceptually…but we haven’t had the time to flesh out the details of what needs to happen for California to be able to power itself on electric vehicles,” said Orville Thomas, state policy director for CALSTART, a sustainable energy nonprofit.
“It should be on the menu of options that California has. Is it going to be the number one option? Definitely not.”
So far, its use has been limited in California. Pacific Gas and Electric has a pilot program — the first in the nation — that lets up to 1,000 residential customers with bidirectional chargers sell power back to the utility. Some school districts also are experimenting with it.
Only about half a dozen electric car models currently are equipped with bidirectional capabilities, including the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Nissan Leaf and Ford F-150 Lightning. Tesla announced recently that all its models will have it by 2025.
Electric vehicles convert one type of energy, alternating current electricity, into another, direct current, which is stored in a battery. Bidirectional charging means that an electric vehicle can convert the energy it has stored in its battery and send it to other sources, such as home appliances or back to the grid.
Willett M. Kempton, a University of Delaware professor who has studied bidirectional charging for more than two decades, said the vast majority of the time a vehicle is parked and not using electricity.
“Five percent of the time you’re using the car and you want to have enough energy — electricity or gasoline — to get to where you’re going and back. But most of the time, it’s just sitting there and some other use could be made of it,” he said.
Kempton said these vehicles, properly managed, could be sources of reserve energy, supplanting backup sources that burn fossil fuels.
Gregory Poilasne, co-founder and CEO of Nuvve Holding Corp., which sells electric fleet charging services, said a big challenge is that cars are unreliable energy assets. “At any time, somebody might come in and unplug the car,” he said. But he added, as the technology becomes more reliable and affordable, bidirectional cars and fleets should increase.
In Denmark, bidirectional charging earns electric vehicle fleet owners who sell power to the grid $3,000 per vehicle a year, Poilasne said, adding that this reduces the average total cost of electric car ownership by about 40%.
But citing the high cost, automakers oppose the Senate bill that would mandate the chargers for all new cars sold in California by 2030. It would increase the average cost of an electric car by $3,700, according to an opposition letter written by Curt Augustine of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford and other major auto companies.
About $3,000 of that cost would be adding battery capacity to meet warranty requirements, while other costs are for hardware and software.
“This technology is a competitive matter between vehicle manufacturers and should remain that way,” Augustine wrote. “Not all customers will see an advantage of bidirectional charging, and therefore, should not have to pay more for a technology that they will not use.”
Thomas of CALSTART agreed, saying it should be optional.
“There might be a situation where there are people that want to do it and will pay a little extra for a car that is bidirectional, but there will also be people that just want to use a vehicle for driving,” he said. “Do we raise the price of electric vehicles for everybody?”
But Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat from Oakland who authored SB 233, said she wants to ensure that automakers don’t reserve the technology for only their higher-end models. She said since the relatively affordable Nissan Leaf has it, it can be widely available.
Skinner said all consumers would benefit from the technology by selling energy to the grid or using the energy in emergencies. But she said another important reason is that it could end reliance on diesel generators during power emergencies like during wildfires.
“If you have an EV you don’t need that diesel generator,” Skinner said. “Why would we want to encourage diesel generators? They’re extremely polluting.”
Jeffrey Lu, an air pollution specialist with the California Energy Commission’s vehicle-grid integration unit, said the state is working with owners to identify the best times to charge — called smart charging — to protect the grid. Bidirectional charging takes the concept a step further, he said.
The Energy Commission is not yet ready to say how reliant California will be on bidirectional charging to provide sufficient power and meet the state’s 2045 mandate for carbon-free electricity.
“We’re fairly early in this process. California is very committed to load flexibility broadly, but where that load flexibility specifically comes from, how many megawatts or gigawatts are coming from any particular kind of resource? We’re working on that,” he said.
California’s utilities are running pilot projects and studying how bidirectional charging might work and how electric car owners could be compensated for selling energy to the grid.
The California Public Utilities Commission has studied the issue for more than a decade, said spokesperson Terrie D. Prosper, including funding pilot projects and establishing two working groups.
Last year many utilities signed a “Vehicle to Everything” memorandum of understanding with car manufacturers, state agencies, the federal government and others seeking to accelerate all aspects of bidirectional charging.
Southern California Edison, which serves about 5 million businesses and residences, wants to go beyond using bidirectional charging as just an emergency backup.
Chanel Parson, Edison’s director of electrification, said the utility is working on a rate program that would allow customers to sell their power back to the grid every day of the year.
“By selling it back to the grid when our rates are more expensive, then that actually helps reduce customers’ energy bills. And it could be so economically attractive that they’re actually making money,” she said.
Pacific Gas and Electric, which serves 5.5 million electric customers in Northern California, said it is aggressively looking to build what it calls a robust vehicle-to-grid-integration. It has partnerships with BMW of North America, Ford Motor Company and General Motors exploring bidirectional charging.
The utility last year launched the nation’s first bidirectional charging pilot available to residential customers, offering up to 1,000 customers $2,500 for enrolling and up to an additional $2,175, depending on their participation.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power also is conducting a pilot project using a small fleet of its Nissan Leafs. The utility hopes the technology will eventually provide power during peak load times.
“Five years is definitely within reach,” said José María Paz, the utility’s project manager for vehicle-to-grid integration. “Technology is advancing quite fast.”
The electric school buses at the Cajon Valley Union School District in San Diego County are among a number of school district pilot projects in California. Experts see school buses as a good option for two-way charging because they have set routes and are often parked during peak load times between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Nationally, Nuvve has about 350 school buses connected to its platform.
At the Cajon Valley district, eight electric buses sent 767 kilowatt hours of power back to the grid during the heat wave between Aug. 17 and Sept. 9, according to Nuvve.
Working with Nuvve, the buses power up when energy is less expensive, said Tysen Brodwolf, the district’s transportation director. Brodwolf said there are still several quirks, including the chargers not communicating properly with the grid or someone improperly plugging in a bus.
“But we’re getting there every day,” Brodwolf said. “We’re working through all those bumps and obviously, when you take on a pilot project, you have to take that into consideration that things aren’t necessarily going to go smoothly.”
New Hampshire — long an outlier among New England states on climate action — is on its way to creating a new climate plan for the first time in 14 years.
The state budget adopted last week includes a $3 million federal grant from a program intended to support the development of climate action plans across the country.
“We’re definitely very excited about this — we think it’s a great opportunity for the state,” said Chris Skoglund, director of energy transition at the nonprofit Clean Energy New Hampshire.
Among residents there is a widespread sense of pride in New Hampshire’s tendency to follow its own path and buck conventional wisdom, an attitude that extends firmly into energy and climate policies, advocates have said. The state is not necessarily against climate action, but is determined to make its own policies, its own way, rather than just repeating the choices of other states, said Meredith Hatfield, associate director for policy and government relations for the Nature Conservancy in New Hampshire.
Today, while the other New England states all have, to various degrees, ambitious state-mandated climate goals and updated climate plans, New Hampshire has no binding targets for lowering emissions or reducing fossil fuel use.
“There’s a sentiment among some people in New Hampshire that we aren’t going to follow the traditional recipe — we like to figure things out on our own,” Hatfield said. “We are making progress, but it’s just not fast enough.”
In 2009, the state developed a broad-based climate action plan that incorporated the work of dozens of stakeholders across diverse fields. Though that document had some influence on legislation in subsequent years, it was never codified into law or updated after its initial release.
The federal Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August 2022, created an opportunity for New Hampshire to dive back into climate planning.
The law includes $5 billion for the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program. Of this total, $250 million has been designated to help states, local governments, tribes, and territories develop or update plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Another $4.6 billion will then be available to help implement these plans.
When applications for the first phase of the program opened in late February, the state’s Department of Environmental Services jumped at the chance and applied. At the end of June, the state adopted a two-year, $15.2 billion budget that included this grant money in the department funding, an essential step in pushing the climate plan project forward.
The state is now in final discussions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about minor revisions to how much of the grant money will be spent on what elements of the planning process, said Michael Fitzgerald, assistant director of the state environmental services department. Though early plans are still tentative, the money will likely pay for new positions to manage the process, as well as a broad outreach strategy intended to gather feedback from a range of stakeholders, Fitzgerald said.
“We’re planning on doing focused work in disadvantaged areas,” he said. “There are requirements that there be consideration of ensuring benefits go to environmental justice areas.”
Grants are likely to be awarded in July and August, according to information from the EPA. States and territories that receive the grants will have until March 1, 2024, to deliver their completed plans. The EPA anticipates announcing the final details for the implementation grants in September 2023, with applications likely being due the following April.
Four states — Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and South Dakota — declined to apply for the planning grant money. The remaining 46, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, all submitted applications.
Advocates are optimistic that the new plan, when completed, could gain more traction than its predecessor.
There was a lot to like about the 2009 plan, Skoglund said. By convening so many people with such a wide range of expertise, he said, the plan was able to build widespread knowledge of, and support for, climate action.
And advocates said it did have some impact on state climate and energy policy. New Hampshire’s energy efficiency goals and energy performance targets for new buildings were influenced by the plan, Skoglund said. The plan also bolstered the state’s continued participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and helped spark an investigation into grid modernization in the state.
Implementation, however, never gained momentum and there were no efforts made to keep the plan up-to-date.
“There was no follow-up to keep that conversation going at high levels,” Skoglund said. “But we didn’t continue that, so we are now a decade behind.”
This time around, advocates would like to see the state replicate the strengths of the 2009 process, particularly the inclusion of a wide range of voices, while making more impact on policy changes. They expect — and hope for — the ultimate plan to have a strong focus on the economic development, cost savings, and job creation that a shift to clean energy can offer, backed up by rigorous analysis.
“People are aware of what is happening and they are concerned about it,” Hatfield said. “We need to do a better job of connecting the solutions with what people are worried about.”
Though the national conversation about climate action has become more polarized in recent years, New Hampshire’s unique character might make the state a place where a broad consensus can be reached, advocates said. The deep national divide between the parties isn’t as evident in pragmatic New Hampshire, where opportunities to save money could carry more weight than the chance to score partisan points, said Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire.
“There still is a surprising amount of bipartisanship,” he said. “I think money-saving clean energy technologies can be popular here on a bipartisan basis.”
A coast-to-coast electric vehicle road relay recently stopped in Cleveland and highlighted the need for equity in the transition to electric vehicles.
Drive Electric Northeast Ohio welcomed the Route Zero Road Trip for its June 11 stop at the new headquarters of the Cleveland Foundation.
The foundation chose the location to promote equitable growth in the Midtown and Hough neighborhoods, a historically redlined area where a majority of residents are Black and median household incomes are less than half of Ohio’s statewide median.
The Route Zero Road Trip is an electric vehicle tour from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., that began last month. Drive Electric Northeast Ohio worked with the Cleveland Foundation to host the stop at the foundation’s new headquarters, which features a solar-powered carport, to draw attention to the neighborhoods and the importance of making sure that people at all income levels can take advantage of the shift toward electrification.
“We believe everyone should be able to access EVs and to have a clean energy charging infrastructure providing benefits beyond just a clean, quiet, fun ride,” said Michael Benson, vice president of Drive Electric Northeast Ohio. He’s also a co-owner of Command Consulting, a Wadsworth firm that advises on electrification, microgrids and shared services.
Beyond being electric car enthusiasts, Drive Electric Northeast Ohio focuses more broadly on electrification, Benson said, particularly the “chicken-egg problem of EVs and EV charging.” Ideally, he said, batteries could store electricity from solar arrays, which then could charge electric vehicles.
Both solar energy and the development of electric car charging in the area appealed to Keith Benford, who attended the Route Zero Road Trip event and said he lives in the Midtown-Hough neighborhood.
“It’s the new technology. They’re going with all-electric cars. And we can kind of capitalize on that by having charging stations in our area, and having the solar arrays.” Benford said. “We’ve got a lot of building that’s going to happen around here in our neighborhood. And that would be a perfect opportunity when the buildings come up to have solar.”
People in the Hough neighborhood have already shown interest in developing clean energy. The Hough Block Club has been working for several years to develop a community-based solar array in the area.
“Everyone in that group is committed to the project, but the timeline is getting stretched out a little bit longer,” said Jonathan Welle, executive director of Cleveland Owns, which has provided technical assistance to the Hough Block Club. While there’s no definite date for completion, the Hough Block Club had an environmental assessment completed earlier this year, Welle added.
Neither Cleveland Owns nor the Hough Block Club organized the electric car event on June 11. Yet Welle agreed that Hough and other disadvantaged neighborhoods should be at the table as electrification, the move to electric vehicles, and other parts of the clean energy transition continue.
The neighborhood “has been a center of disinvestment and capital strike for decades, due to racism and systemic injustice,” Welle said. So, he added, residents there can help create a new system to avoid those problems.
The City of Cleveland’s Office of Sustainability & Climate Justice also is working to get more electric vehicle charging capacity in the city’s neighborhoods. A charging station opened last fall at the Frederick Douglass Recreation Center in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood. The Cleveland Foundation’s chargers are currently available only to staff and visitors.
Several others are in the works, said Elizabeth Lehman, who is the built environment project manager at the city’s Office of Sustainability & Climate Justice. Two stations with a total of four ports will be at the Canal Basin parking lot near the Cuyahoga River. A station with two ports will go in at Cleveland Hopkins Airport’s red lot. And charging stations for the West Side Market and the downtown Willard Garage are part of a recently approved project by the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, whose list of planned charging sites also includes dozens more locations throughout its five-county planning area, including several Cleveland Public Library branches.
Additionally, the city of Cleveland requested bids earlier this year for installing electric chargers throughout the city. “We hope to have a vendor selected soon,” Lehman said. “This project will also help us to determine the total number of stations that we hope to have available citywide over the next couple of years.”
The city’s bidding documents note that preference will be given to contractors who plan to work in communities that are marginalized, underserved and overburdened by pollution, based on the federal government’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. The tool shows most areas in the city are disadvantaged and would qualify under the criteria.
Preference will also go to contractors who can propose a no-cost or low-cost rate structure for low-to-moderate income consumers, specifically for those who use charging stations within the city’s business districts, the bidding materials said.
A March addendum to the bidding materials also noted the city’s intent to support the winning bidder in pursuing federal funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation’s website currently shows July 28 as the deadline for some of those grants.
The following commentary was written by Deana Dennis, senior manager for Midwest state policy at Ceres. See our commentary guidelines for more information.
Michigan has been a manufacturing powerhouse for the Midwest and the U.S. for generations, so it’s no surprise to see it riding the massive wave of investment into clean energy manufacturing that is sweeping the nation. Since last fall, the state has seen major corporations announce more than $8 billion worth of projects and thousands of jobs to build batteries, electric vehicles, and other clean transportation solutions that honor Michigan’s history as an industrial base while seizing this opportunity to super-charge the state’s economic future.
Similar projects are popping up across the country, thanks in large part to the federal incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. Passed last year, the nation’s largest-ever climate law is designed to cut carbon pollution while establishing the U.S. as the global leader in clean energy manufacturing, supply chains, and deployment. Already, states from all regions and governed by both parties are welcoming the huge influx of clean energy and advanced manufacturing projects.
But the activity is especially resonant in Michigan — and not only because the scale of investment is so enormous. It also represents a quick return on the state’s efforts to establish itself as a clean energy leader. It was just last year that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer unveiled the MI Healthy Climate Plan, the state’s first-ever roadmap toward tackling the climate crisis by achieving a net zero economy by 2050.
While the Healthy Climate Plan is already sending a strong signal to industry, it has not yet been implemented. The plan features many important goals, such as preventing the worst impacts of climate change and addressing environmental injustices, such as air and water pollution, that unfairly harm marginalized communities. But at its unveiling, officials also emphasized that it was an economic plan. By positioning Michigan as a climate leader, they argued, the state stood to capture economic development and create legions of good jobs as companies seek out forward-looking business environments forged by strong clean energy policies.
That proved prescient: today, Michigan is a clear beneficiary of the clean energy boom in the U.S., and the state has both the federal Inflation Reduction Act and the promise of the MI Healthy Climate Plan to thank for it.
The powerful mix of public policy and private investment shows why leading companies and investors have been strong champions for ambitious federal and state climate policy. Thousands of companies across the U.S. — including more than two dozen S&P 100 companies — supported the climate measures in the Inflation Reduction Act. And the MI Healthy Climate Plan was celebrated by 15 major companies operating in Michigan, including General Motors, Ford, and Siemens. Business leaders recognize that clean energy investment comes with the promise of jobs, lower utility costs, energy security, and a more sustainable and less risky economic future.
It’s exciting to think we’re only beginning to see these many economic benefits surface in Michigan. But as other states move to pass climate and clean energy policies to prove they are open for business, Michigan policymakers can and should bolster this momentum by taking action to implement the Healthy Climate Plan.
Michigan lawmakers seem to recognize the unprecedented opportunity before them. They recently introduced the MI Clean Energy Future Plan, an ambitious suite of clean energy legislation that supports the Healthy Climate Plan. It’s highlighted by a new target of 100% clean electricity by 2035 — a policy that is both bold and feasible, and essential to meeting the state’s climate goals and fully capitalizing on this moment.
With the right policies in place, analysts believe Michigan can attract $26 billion in clean energy investment while dramatically improving public health in the coming years. It’s no wonder why. History has shown that this is a state with the industrial workforce and know-how to be a key engine of innovation not just for the U.S., but across the world. Let’s pass a 100% clean electricity standard this session to take full advantage of the opportunities of the clean energy economy and make Michigan the place where companies choose to build it.
No, City Councilor Andreas Addison was never trying to ban cars in Richmond.
All along, his gambit to scrap parking space requirements for developers was about curtailing sprawl. It’s expected to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases in an evolving capital city that prizes walking, bicycling and ready access to public transit.
Addison is jubilant that the council has joined cities such as Seattle, Buffalo, Raleigh and Hartford by voting in late April to repeal decades-old zoning rules that forced new residential and commercial buildings to have a certain number of dedicated, off-street parking spots.
Instead, that number will be set by property owners and developers.
“It has been a journey,” Addison said about the conversations he initiated two years ago with anybody who would listen. “Usually the first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, you’re getting rid of parking.’”
That attitude matured as he explained his ordinance’s environmental benefits and how eradicating parking minimums could free up space for affordable and additional housing.
“I was surprised at how smooth and easy it was,” he said about the unanimous votes, first by the city Planning Commission and then by the council. “Even opponents who had spoken out against it, when they saw the writing on the wall, they said, ‘Fine.’”
Surveying the big parking picture, he envisions the new measure will “reinvent paved space” by introducing the concept of shared parking in off-street lots. Before, those spaces could only be used for the particular purpose laid out in the zoning code.
In conjunction, he is urging the city to streamline smartphone parking applications and windshield parking permits. The latter would better allow residents of popular neighborhoods to regularly access street parking near their homes.
For years, Addison, a gym owner who is an active walker, bicyclist and ride-sharer, was puzzled by the abundance of parking lots in the city empty during certain times. He realized most of them were designated for one specific use, which constrained access.
A city analysis of 50 large residential, commercial and mixed-use developments constructed over a recent five-year period confirmed his suspicions that regulations were contributing to a single-use parking glut. The study revealed that developers had built 12,600-plus spaces — more than double the 4,800 spaces required by rules.
“When that data was presented, I realized we don’t have a parking problem,” Addison said. “We have a lack-of-access-to-parking problem.”
Clean transportation specialists at the Washington, D.C.-based American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy have kudos for Richmond and other cities thinking holistically about shrinking their carbon footprints.
“Land-use decisions are often forgotten in conversations about climate change,” said Shruti Vaidyanathan, the organization’s transportation program director. “We need to get people to think beyond electrification.
“Yes, electric vehicles will be a significant part of how we reduce emissions in the transportation sector, but we need to consider more than that.”
Auto-centric development since World War II has turned huge chunks of land into parking lots that could be dedicated instead to more compact communities where people can go car-free, she said.
“Places like Richmond are where electrification and other opportunities come together with creative people-focused transportation policy,” she said. “That’s when vehicle miles traveled, a big component of emissions, go down significantly.”
While vehicle miles traveled tapered off appreciably across the country during COVID-19, preliminary numbers indicate they are creeping back to pre-pandemic levels — which showed little sign of ebbing.
In Richmond, for instance, those annual figures stood at 1.97 billion miles in 2019, according to state Department of Transportation figures. That’s up from 1.79 billion miles in 2009.
Stewart Schwartz, president of the Richmond Partnership for Smarter Growth, said eliminating mandatory parking minimums would advance the goals of the city’s climate action plan, RVAGreen 2050.
Briefly, that plan calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. The baseline year is 2008.
The ordinance “is an essential tool to foster a city that is more affordable and dynamic while also minimizing car traffic, carbon emissions, and noise,” he wrote in a letter to the city Planning Commission. “At the same time, it must be combined with other initiatives.”
For instance, Schwartz urged the city to focus on safer walking conditions while also expanding public transit and adding lanes, sharing, parking and electric bikes to Richmond’s bicycling infrastructure.
The Greater Richmond Transit Company is heeding that plea. GRTC continues to offer fare-free buses, a policy instituted in March 2020 with the onset of the pandemic.
“Going fare-free has been a great tool for expanding our pool of ridership beyond our pre-pandemic numbers,” GRTC spokesperson Henry Bendon said. “Plus, we can offer more reliable and efficient bus service because customers don’t have to stop at the front of the bus to pay.”
One of the biggest boosters to ridership is the Pulse, a high-capacity, high-frequency rapid transit bus line that serves a busy 7.6-mile corridor along Broad and Main streets. It began operating five years ago as a congestion-reducing measure.
“We are in the process of expanding that type of service,” Bendon said. “You don’t sit in traffic. The reality is, people rely on this bus system. We continue to improve service and we’re really proud of that.”
Statewide, transportation of all methods accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019, the sector accounted for 52.5% of those emissions, according to calculations from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Much of that is because annual vehicle miles traveled in Virginia alone continue to rise — from 81 billion miles in 2009 to 85.4 billion miles in 2019 — according to the Federal Highway Administration.
City Councilor Katherine Jordan told her constituents that she supported the idea of stamping out parking minimums because cars are the No.1 source of greenhouse gas emissions in Richmond.
“Clearly, eliminating parking minimums will not ‘fix’ the climate crisis or our housing crisis, but I do believe this change will have a positive, cumulative impact on both,” she wrote in a memo.
Jordan, who served as a member of the Green City Commission before being elected, said “the walkable, historic, mixed-use and neighborhoods we love, like the Fan, Jackson Ward, and Carver could not be built today, in part because of onerous parking requirements for residential development.”
She also noted that the cost of building parking — between $10,000 to $40,000 per space — is a burden for neighborhood businesses and also saddles residents with higher rents and mortgages. That money would be better spent on filling the housing gap, she added.
Her sentiments have been echoed by city planners and others in Mayor Levar Stoney’s administration.
Collectively, they have emphasized that the ordinance eliminating parking minimums aligns with Richmond 300: A Guide for Growth, which was adopted in 2020. The master plan outlines specifics for a vision of sustainability, innovation and equity the city wants to achieve by 2037, its tricentennial year.
Both Jordan and Addison serve on the council’s Land Use, Housing and Transportation Committee.
Addison is hopeful Richmond’s decision to scale back on parking lots can be a model for other Virginia cities intent on reshaping how people move around.
That antiquated requirement meant a missed opportunity for growth, he said. “Changing it forces Richmond to be strategic about its future.”
Vermont Gas Systems is offering to install electric heat pumps in their customers’ homes, the latest example of how state policy is nudging the utility to adapt its business model.
In order to comply with the state’s climate mandates, the utility is building a broader portfolio of thermal systems that will help both the business and its customers make the transition to a decarbonized future, said Richard Donnelly, the company’s director of energy innovation.
“We offer natural gas, energy-efficient products, weatherization, renewable natural gas, heat pump water heaters, and now heat pumps,” he said.
Expanding its offerings also puts the company in a good position to comply with the state’s new Clean Heat Standard, which became law last week after the legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Phil Scott. Once implemented in 2025, the law will require fuel dealers to reduce the amount of fossil fuel they sell over time, or earn “clean heat credits” by doing things that offset building emissions, such as weatherization services and installing heat pumps.
Under the new heat pump program launched this month, the state’s only natural gas utility will use its in-house service technicians to install centrally ducted, cold-climate heat pumps in qualifying homes. The highly efficient systems use electricity, rather than fossil fuels, to heat and cool homes.
Customers will be able to either buy or lease the systems at rates that factor in the heat pump rebates available through the state’s utilities in partnership with Efficiency Vermont.
“We’ll process that rebate up front for a purchase, and bake it into our lease prices as well,” Donnelly said.
Each system will use the home’s existing ductwork, and be integrated with the homeowner’s gas furnace, which will serve as a backup heating source during extremely cold weather. A smart thermostat will automatically switch back and forth between the heating sources according to the customer’s settings.
“We are offering our customers an opportunity to diversify their heating system, adding in the benefits of resiliency,” Donnelly said. “This is also an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint.”
In order to qualify, homes must already have ductwork that delivers heat through vents. They must also have a fairly efficient furnace.
An estimated 14,000 of the utility’s 55,000 customers could be eligible. Most homes in the company’s service area have hydronic heating systems with radiators or baseboard radiators; Donnelly said the company will begin offering heat pump solutions for those customers in the future.
The new program comes just over a year after Vermont Gas announced it would begin installing electric heat pump water heaters for its customers. The company is also looking for a site to test its first fossil fuel-free networked geothermal project, another possible business to branch into as the state moves away from fossil fuels.
“As a distribution utility, energy efficiency utility, and integrated energy services provider, Vermont Gas is uniquely positioned to help its customers take advantage of the latest and most cost-effective technology,” said Dylan Giambatista, the company’s public affairs director.
Vermont’s climate mandates call for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2025, 40% from 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% by 2050.
“We are going to need a lot of different partners” to meet those goals, said Johanna Miller, energy and climate program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. “To the degree that our utilities like Vermont Gas will lean into and help their customers cut costs and cut carbon, I think that that is important.”
Gas heating customers switching to electric heat pumps won’t necessarily save money, at least for now. While the heat pumps are more efficient, gas is currently the cheaper source for heating, Donnelly said.
But the company is developing an online calculator that will allow customers to see how setting the system to swap over to the furnace at 20 degrees versus, say, 25 degrees will compare in terms of carbon reduction and heating costs. They will also be able to measure the carbon and cost impact of adding in renewable natural gas.
“A lot of our customers are motivated by carbon reduction, but they don’t know how much a heat pump would help in terms of their overall consumption,” Donnelly said. “We’re taking that role to educate.”
Giambatista said he installed a heat pump in his 1945 house last fall. He set the smart thermometer to swap over to his gas furnace when temperatures dropped to 25 degrees. Over the winter his gas usage dropped by about 60% compared to previous years, he said.
To date, about 45,000 ducted and ductless heat pumps have been installed in Vermont under the state’s rebate program, according to Phil Bickel, HVAC and refrigeration program manager at Efficiency Vermont.
They are primarily in homes that heat with fuel oil, the majority of homes in the state.
“We’ve seen the cost of all fossil fuels go up and down over the years,” Bickel said. “The main thing about making the switch to heat pumps is it provides a little bit more of a stable cost. They are three times more efficient than oil or propane, and they also provide the low carbon benefit, as well as the cooling benefit.”
Efficiency Vermont does recommend that homeowners maintain a backup source for heat. The heat pumps work well down to about -15 degrees, “but in Vermont, there are those times when we are going to have a long cold snap,” Bickel said.
A small but growing number of Minnesota electricians are finding steady work installing residential electric vehicle chargers.
Minnesota has around 35,000 electric vehicles on the road today, but that number is expected to rapidly grow in the coming years as more models become available. The state is using federal funds to help build out a public charging network along major highways, but even so, research suggests most drivers are likely to mostly charge at home.
Some will simply have to plug into an existing outlet in their garage, but many will need electrical upgrades, especially those with older homes or those who want to take advantage of faster charging times. Participating in certain utility programs may also require the installation of new equipment.
That’s creating an opportunity for electricians like Adam Wortman of St. Paul, who installed an electric vehicle charger at the home of a clean energy advocate four years ago and has since retooled his business to focus almost solely on similar projects.
“It’s where I see the demand,” Wortman said, “and from a business standpoint, it’s nice to have a specialty,”
It’s unclear exactly how many electricians have decided on a similar path, but anecdotally it’s more than a few. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 292 has trained and certified more than 400 electricians over the past two years to install commercial electric vehicle chargers along state and federal highways, but residential installations are more commonly non-union contractors.
“What I’ve seen is that with more electric cars and with more of the demand for electric car chargers, a lot of these smaller shops seem to be picking up work,” said Andy Snope, business representative and legislative and political director for IBEW Local 292. “They are getting a niche and a reputation.”
The market for electricians installing vehicle chargers is bifurcated into commercial and residential projects. He and others estimated that dozens of electrical firms install chargers, but just a handful focus primarily on chargers. Firms attract jobs through word-of-mouth advertising and references from vehicle manufacturers or utilities such as Xcel Energy.
“It seems like kind of an underworld niche for electrical contractors who are usually smaller but are getting a lot of this work, which is great for a small business,” he said.
Paul Hanson, energy service sales representative for Connexus Energy, said the cooperative recommends that customers getting vehicle chargers reach out to Wortman and a handful of other contractors who specialize in installations and have had good reviews over the years. Hanson said he’s started hearing from solar and heating and cooling companies that want to get on the utility’s list of preferred charging installers.
“Everyone is trying to get their hand into the electric vehicle market,” Hanson said, adding that Connexus saw a 90% increase from 2021 to 2022 in members enrolled in its off-peak vehicle charging program.
Electricians working on vehicle chargers generally gain their first experience working with Tesla, which had the first electric vehicles on the market. Many electricians bought Teslas early and discovered other buyers were struggling with firms that knew anything about chargers.
Bryan Hayes, founder and owner of Bakken Electric LLC, bought a Tesla in 2012 and moved from providing general residential electrical services to installing vehicle chargers. Though Hayes had been an electrician for two decades, he wanted a change.
“My reason for doing it was more ideological,” he said. “I wanted to do something that leaves a legacy of making the world a little better place than I found it.”
Hayes built a staff of six electricians who have installed over 4,000 chargers in the Twin Cities region, ranging from garages to apartment buildings to downtown Minneapolis ramps. His projects come from recommendations from electric vehicle manufacturers and word-of-mouth advertising.
One area of growth has been installing chargers in multifamily buildings. Hayes created a separate company, U.S. Charging, to partner with Tesla to install its commercial chargers in multifamily buildings. “Condominiums and apartments [and] hotels are now a big focus of my business,” he said.
St. Paul-based Sherman Electric owner Jim Sherman has installed thousands of vehicle chargers and collaborated with Xcel Energy on its Accelerate at Home charging program several years ago. Installations represent 40% of his business, with working at restaurants a second specialty.
“I think the market is getting more specialized and more niche than ever,” Sherman said. “I know contractors that only work on hospitals, and I know contractors that only do apartment buildings.”
Part of the specialization comes from building codes that have become stricter and more demanding. Sherman and his staff of four assistants developed expertise and an understanding of building codes by concentrating on vehicle charging and a handful of other industry sectors, primarily restaurants.
The charging sector is new enough that inspectors often call Sherman with questions and situations they encounter. Homeowners who suffered poor installations pay him to correct the mistakes.
The biggest challenge lately has not been codes or charger technology but instead educating newer EV customers. The early electric vehicle buyers had few questions because they had done their homework and understood the technology.
“My average phone call now is about 20 minutes to sell a customer because I have to educate them about how [the charger] works, how the cars work, how the cars charge, how the power works — everything,” Sherman said. “The early adopters, the Tesla people, knew their stuff. Now it’s getting to be a wider, broader range of people driving electric vehicles.”
In the Twin Cities, home and multifamily building owners typically pay $2,000 to $3,000 to install a Level 2 charger, which provides from 20 to 50 miles per charging hour. Level 1 charging, in contrast, requires a common outlet and no electric system upgrade but charges vehicles at just two to five miles per hour.
Wortman said Level 2 chargers can require homeowners with attached garages to add another circuit to their electric panels. He installs a separate meter for detached garages and usually upgrades the building to a 240-volt system. Then, typically, he has the homeowner pay Xcel or their utility to drop a line from its transmission grid to power detached garages.
While there’s no average day for Wortman, he usually has two to three installations lined up. Many times, he and other electricians will pick up small jobs like changing out or adding plugs or other repairs in addition to installing chargers.
Clients say electricians are hard to schedule for smaller jobs and are happy to pay them to do extra work, he said. He and other electricians also consult with clients on federal tax and utility rebates they can use to reduce their costs.
Multifamily apartments and condos present different obstacles. Electricians sometimes must connect chargers to the electric systems of clients living several floors above the garage. Or they work on managed charging that moves electricity around to different cars, a common solution to serve the growing number of EV drivers living in apartments and condominiums.
Hayes has directed much of his business to working with multifamily clients and Wortman and other electricians see it as the next frontier.
This article was originally published by Maine Monitor.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the tax relief for heat pumps and other home energy saving projects that is available under the Inflation Reduction Act. One aspect of the IRA incentives is a rebate for heat pumps and other home electrification projects that is still being finalized by the state. The story also misstated a rebate available for small scale home sealing and other do-it-yourself projects. That rebate has expired.
Venus Nappi strolled through a community center in South Portland in early April, chatting with vendors at Maine’s annual Green Home + Energy Show about electric heat pumps, solar power, and the discounts that aim to make these and other technologies affordable. A worker in an oversized plush heat pump costume waved a gloved hand nearby.
Nappi heats her Gorham home with oil, as do 60% of Mainers — more than any other state, as The Maine Monitor reported in the first part of this series. She finds oil to be dirty, inconvenient and expensive. Her oil costs this winter, she said, were “crazy, absolutely right up through the roof.”
Nappi joined a record-breaking crowd at this expo because she’s ready to switch to heat pumps, which can provide heating or cooling at two or three times the efficiency of electric baseboards and with 60% lower carbon emissions than oil, according to Efficiency Maine.
“It’s good to have incentive to try to go somewhere else rather than just the oil,” Nappi said. “Even gas, propane, is actually a little expensive right now, too. The heat pumps are kind of in the middle.”
Government rebates of up to $2,400, with new tax breaks coming soon, help with up-front heat pump installation costs that can range above $10,000. These incentives have helped put Maine more than 80% of the way to its 2019 goal — now a centerpiece of the state climate plan — of installing 100,000 new heat pumps in homes by 2025, and many more in the years after that.
“This is a real highlight of our climate action,” said state Climate Council chair Hannah Pingree. The state aims to have 130,000 homes using one or two heat pumps by 2030 and 115,000 more using “whole-home” heat pump systems, meaning the devices are their primary heating source.
But Maine lags much further behind on a related goal of getting 15,000 heat pumps into low-income homes by 2025, using rebates from MaineHousing. At the end of last year, it had provided just over 5,000 heat pumps to the lowest-income homes.
These homes face particular barriers to maximizing the benefits from this switch — from poor weatherization, to navigating a daunting web of incentives, to fine-tuning a blend of heat sources that can withstand power outages and actually save money instead of driving up bills.
As fossil fuel costs remain high, the pressure is on for advocates and service providers to expand access to heat pumps and other strategies for reducing oil use, especially for people most often left out of the push for climate solutions.
In Maine and beyond, it’s clear that heat pumps are having a major moment — heralded in national headlines as a crucial climate solution that successfully weathered a historic cold snap.
But the technology is not new. It’s long been used in refrigerators and air conditioners.
“The problem was, when you design a heat pump to primarily provide cooling … it is not optimized for making heat,” said Efficiency Maine executive director Michael Stoddard. “So everyone concluded these things are no good in the winter. And then around (the) 2010, ’11, ’12 timeframe, the manufacturers started introducing a new generation of heat pumps that were specially designed to perform in cold climates. … It was like a switch had been flipped.”
Maine has offered rebates for heat pumps ever since this cold climate technology emerged. Even former Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who frequently opposed renewable energy and questioned climate science, installed them in the governor’s mansion and told The Portland Press Herald in 2014 that they’d been “phenomenal” at replacing oil during a cold snap.
Heat pumps provide warmth in cold weather the same way they keep warmth out of a fridge — by using electricity and refrigerants to capture, condense and pump that heat from somewhere cold to somewhere warmer. Simply put, they squeeze the heat out of the cold air, then distribute it into the home.
The current generation of heat pumps will keep warming your home even if it’s around negative 13 degrees out.
Heat pumps are less efficient in these colder temperatures, requiring more electricity to make the same heat. With outdoor temperatures in the 40s and 50s, today’s typical cold-climate heat pumps can be roughly 300 or 400% efficient — tripling or quadrupling your energy input.
As temperatures drop into the teens, heat pumps are often about 200% efficient. And in the single digits or low negatives, heat pumps can be closer to the 100% efficiency of an electric baseboard heater. Costs at this level are closer to that of oil heat, which usually has about an 87% efficiency rating.
This means heat pumps often generate the most savings and are most efficient when temperatures are above freezing, or when used to provide air conditioning in the summer — something Mainers will want increasingly as climate change creates new extreme heat risks.
“During the shoulder seasons, you can definitely use a heat pump. When it’s wicked cold out, then you’d probably turn on your backup fuel. That’s not the official line of Efficiency Maine Trust, but a physical and engineering reality,” said energy attorney Dave Littell, a former top Maine environment and utilities regulator whose clients now include Versant Power — which, along with Central Maine Power, now offers seasonal discounts for heat pump users.
This is a relatively common approach among installers, such as ReVision Energy, a New England solar company that also sells heat pumps. They don’t recommend heat pumps as the only heating source for most customers, especially those who live farther north, unless the home can have multiple units, excellent insulation, and potentially a generator or battery in case of a power outage — a costly package overall.
“(Heat pumps) do still put out heat (in sub-zero weather), but less, obviously, and they have a lot more cold to combat in those conditions,” said Dan Weeks, ReVision’s vice president for business development. “Generally … we do recommend having a backup heating source.”
These blends of heating sources are nothing new in Maine — many families combine, say, a wood stove with secondary heat sources that rely on propane, oil or electricity. Experts say heat pumps are a powerful addition in many cases, adding flexibility and convenience.
Heat pumps will add to your electric bills but also reduce another expense that’s eating up a lot of household budgets — heating oil. Instead of spending hundreds to fill your tank just as winter starts to wane (a full 275-gallon tank would run more than $1,000 right now), you might be able to switch entirely to your heat pump in early spring. Vendors say a heat pump will be much more cost-effective than fossil fuels for the vast majority of Maine’s heating season.
One study from Minnesota — which has lower electric rates and more access to gas, but has made a similar push for heat pumps — found the greatest savings from using a heat pump for 87% of the heating season, switching to a propane furnace only below 15 degrees.
Electricity costs also change less frequently than fossil fuel prices. And the advent of large-scale renewable energy projects, like offshore wind, aims to help smooth over rate hikes that are now driven by the regional electric grid’s dependence on natural gas, said Littell of Versant Power. (While Maine has little gas distribution for home heat, New England power plants use a lot of it to make the electricity that’s primarily imported to Maine on transmission lines.)
This will also mean the electricity that fuels your heat pump will be even lower-emissions than it is now. The emissions comparison between heat pumps and oil is based on the current New England electric grid’s carbon footprint, which is set to continue shrinking.
Paige Atkinson, an Island Institute Fellow working on energy resilience in Eastport, pitches heat pumps as a good addition to a home fuel mix. But she said all these cost comparisons can cause anxiety for people unsure about switching. Oil costs, though rising and prone to fluctuations, can be a “devil you know” versus heat pumps, she said.
“Transitioning to an entirely new source of heat creates a lot of ‘what-ifs,’ ” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about how to best use that system — will it meet my needs?”
The best way to guarantee savings from a heat pump is likely to work closely with your contractor about where to install it, and when and how to run each part of your home’s fuel mix.
“Our job is to educate (customers) on proper design, proper sizing, best practices for installation,” said Royal River Heat Pumps owner Scott Libby at the South Portland expo. “I always tell people to use the heat pump as much as possible. … If you are starting to get chilly, that might just be for a couple hours in the morning when the temperature outside is coldest, so maybe use your fossil fuels just to give the system a boost in the morning, for even an hour.”
The condition of your house is another big factor in the heat pump’s performance.
“Weatherization is a great tool. It is not necessary to make a heat pump work … but the heat pump will work better if the house is well weatherized,” said Stoddard with Efficiency Maine. “When you have those super, super cold days, it won’t have to work as much.”
The need, ideally, for updated insulation and air sealing as prerequisites for heat pumps may help explain the slower progress on getting them into low-income homes. (We’ll address heat pumps as a potential benefit for renters later in this series.)
“I think a lot of the homes especially that (qualify for rebates from) MaineHousing … require a lot of upgrades, just sort of basic home improvements, to get to the next step,” said Hannah Pingree of the state Climate Council.
Bob Moody lives in the kind of house Pingree is talking about in Castle Hill, a tiny town just outside Presque Isle. The ramshackle clapboard split-level totals four stories, set into a wooded hillside. Moody grew up down the road, and his family built this place in the 1980s using much older scrap materials from the former Loring Air Force Base in Caribou.
On a snowy day in March, Moody was visited by a small team from Aroostook County Action Program, or ACAP. It included his next-door neighbor, ACAP energy and housing program manager Melissa Runshe. She and her colleagues were there for an energy audit, a precursor to weatherization projects — all paid with public funds through MaineHousing.
“Weatherization is at the very top. If your heat isn’t flying out of your house, it’s going to save you money,” Runshe said. “We have a lot more winter here (in Aroostook County) than in the rest of Maine, so it’s really important to make sure that the houses are energy-efficient — so that they’re not burning as much oil, so that they’re not spending as much money on oil.”
ACAP officials said they don’t push any technology over another when meeting new clients, but instead describe the options and benefits — savings, comfort, a smaller carbon footprint. This all typically happens after someone has called for heating aid or an emergency fuel delivery — or, in Moody’s case, an emergency fix for their heating equipment.
Moody’s health forced him to retire early, and he now lives alone on a low fixed income. He’s gotten energy assistance and upgrades from other state and county programs before, but first called ACAP late last year when his main heat source, a kerosene furnace, suddenly died. ACAP got him a new, more efficient oil furnace, then signed him up for a weatherization audit.
“If it hadn’t been for assistance, I would have been really in trouble,” Moody said as he filled out paperwork at his kitchen table. A sticker on the wall proclaimed Murphy’s Law — anything that can go wrong, will. “Murphy has been settling in very heavily on me,” he laughed.
Moody’s ACAP audit included a blower door test, which depressurizes the house to expose air leaks. They showed up on a thermal imager as cold seeping in through window seams, power outlets, hairline cracks in the walls, and most of all, an uninsulated exterior-facing wooden door that was down the hall from Moody’s new furnace, sucking heat from the rest of the house.
“He has, roughly, a (total of a) one-by-two-foot-square hole that’s wide open in the house,” said energy auditor BJ Estey. “It’s basically like the equivalent of having a window open year-round.”
The inspection showed weatherization could save Moody $1,230 a year on oil. New windows and doors would help even more — but the weatherization program doesn’t offer those, and there’s a 900-person waiting list for ACAP’s program that does. Instead, the staff told Moody to try a federal option for home repair grants and loans, and promised to help him with the forms.
For people who don’t receive MaineHousing-funded upgrades, Efficiency Maine offers healthy rebates for air sealing and insulation performed by contractors. Last winter it also added a small new rebate for do-it-yourself home weatherization, such as plastic wrap for windows, pipe wraps and caulk, which has since expired.
Groups like ACAP also offer free heat pumps for low-income residents using MaineHousing funds. The rebates feed the state’s goal, where progress has been slow.
Moody has one kind of heat pump in his home but it’s not the type that provides hot air — it’s a heat pump-based hot water heater, which he got for free through a rebate from Efficiency Maine. He loves the savings and convenience it’s provided.
But he doesn’t think an air-source heat pump — the kind that can replace an oil furnace — will work for his home, which has many small rooms split up across levels. (Installers often recommend at least one heat pump per floor.) He’s also worried about how a heat pump would affect his electric bills. He knows he couldn’t afford electric baseboard heat, so he’s concerned about the very cold conditions where a heat pump’s efficiency drops down to around that level.
“Sometimes in the middle of the winter, you get so cold that you just might as well have an electric (baseboard) heater,” he said. “And there ain’t no way that I can afford an electric heater — not even one month.”
Down the road in Castle Hill, Melissa Runshe’s newer-construction house came with three heat pumps, a boiler that can use wood pellets or oil, and a propane fireplace. “I think (heat pumps) are wonderful,” for heating when temperatures are above about 20 and for summer cooling, she said. “They definitely offset the cost of my oil.”
While not every house is heat pump-ready, it may be even more important to get folks like Moody connected with this energy safety net in the first place. This will continue to decrease his oil dependence, offering escalating upgrades as his home changes and funding sources shift.
“In the social services world, there’s this idea of ‘no wrong doors,’ and we need to adopt that for home energy as well,” said Maine Conservation Voters policy director Kathleen Meil, the co-chair of state Climate Council’s buildings group. “There’s no distilling and simplifying how people live in their homes. You experience your house and your home’s heating situation not as a data point, but as your daily life.”
For people like Meil, there are multiple goals working in tandem — help Mainers reduce their reliance on planet-warming fuels like heating oil, while helping them lower household energy costs, and live with more comfort and convenience. This is what climate advocates mean when they say the crisis is “intersectional” — it’s interwoven with health, race, poverty and more.
Juggling these issues can mean making more incremental progress toward emissions goals — but that’s far better than nothing in scientific terms, said Ivan Fernandez, a professor in the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.
“Everything we do, every increment we do, counts,” Fernandez said. “I think we need to do this transition in a relatively quick way, recognizing that it will be imperfect, and spending a good part of our focus on realistic, data-driven, science-driven tracking of where we are at, so we’re not telling ourselves fables that aren’t substantiated by the science.”
Officials say Maine used this kind of science in building detailed goals for things like heat pump adoption, adding them up toward a path to the two biggest targets that are inked in state statute — reducing emissions 45% over 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
“Ultimately the atmosphere will determine how successful we are. It’s already telling us that we have not been very successful in many ways,” said Fernandez. “But … I think we’re embracing the reality of that a lot better.”
Setting these goals carefully and pushing hard to meet them does not guarantee equity — and there are still holes in the state’s approach, according to people working on spreading the benefits of the energy transition to those who might not be able to access it without help.
The Community Resilience Partnership, or CRP, is the state’s signature grant program for town-level climate action. Each project starts with a local survey to determine residents’ priorities out of a 72-item list that includes everything from flood protection to energy efficiency.
State officials say the CRP was designed primarily to build up towns’ capacity to respond to climate change. But advocates say they’ve had to work around a crucial gap in the program: It won’t buy equipment directly for individuals, which is often what people say they want the most.
“There are communities who really do have the need to fund heat pumps beyond what Efficiency Maine is providing,” said Sharon Klein, an energy consultant and University of Maine professor who works with Maine tribes on their CRP projects. “Because there’s still that last piece of it where money still needs to be put up, and some people don’t have that money.”
For people whose income is not quite low enough to qualify for a totally free heat pump through MaineHousing, Efficiency Maine’s rebates will cover $2,000 for a first unit and $400 for a second. People at any income level can get $400 to $1,200 for one or two units. This might cover some or all of the cost of a typical single heat pump — but total installation costs can range from around $4,000 to above $10,000, depending on the complexity of the system.
Starting this tax year, the Inflation Reduction Act will offer new tax credits of 30% for heat pumps, up to $2,000 per year. The IRA will also provide additional rebates to cover heat pumps and other home electrification projects, but the details of those rebates are still being finalized. The IRA allows states to, in theory, offer as much as 100% of project costs up to $8,000 for low-income families, or 50% of costs for moderate-income families — but state officials are still deciding how exactly this limited pot of money will be used and who will be eligible. The rebates will not be universal or unlimited, said Stoddard with Efficiency Maine, but should benefit several thousand homes.
Dan Weeks of ReVision Energy said increasing availability of low- or no-interest loans is another priority for those who want to see more people switch from oil to efficient electric heat. The IRA will help Maine expand its Green Bank in the next year or so to “start offering financing to particularly low-income folks and folks with poor credit,” Weeks said.
But tax credits and cheap loans are still deferred ways of helping people lower their oil costs and cover those remaining heat pump costs. Downeast CRP coordinator Tanya Rucosky, who works on community resilience for Washington County’s Sunrise County Economic Council, said many families simply can’t afford to make the switch.
“Folks need just a little bit of seed money,” she said. Without more support, “it locks out the people that potentially need it the most.”
Atkinson, the Island Institute Fellow, said Eastport found a creative way to offer direct funding within the constraints of its CRP grant. People who participate in the city’s peer-to-peer energy coaching program, Weatherize Eastport, can get another $2,000 toward heat pump installation.
“They’re agreeing to become almost ambassadors for this program. One of the steps to do that is to volunteer some time,” Atkinson said. “The city is compensating these residents for their time involved in this partnership, rather than saying, we will just give you funds for X, Y and Z.”
Solutions like this are key to ensuring these tools for moving off oil can grow equitably, said Rucosky — helping more people to join the transition and spread the gospel of its benefits.
“Especially for Mainers — they’re so salty and smart. They’re like, ‘What’s the catch?’ So I don’t think there’s any getting around the labor of it,” Rucosky said. “The more people have successful experiences doing this, the more I don’t have to be the one saying it …and it can be like, Bob down the road. And so it builds — but it takes a long time to build that, where everybody knows this is how you get this done. That’s going to be years in the making.”
New electric vehicle rebates are expected to become available in Massachusetts in early summer, some nine months after lawmakers passed a bill calling for the incentives’ immediate implementation.
The state has said funding and logistical obstacles have delayed the launch of the new provisions, which will add higher incentives for low-income car buyers, create a rebate for the purchase of used electric vehicles, and establish a system for providing rebates at the point of sale, lowering the upfront cost of the vehicle.
Advocates have been understanding of the complications with rolling out these provisions but are eager for the new components to take effect.
“I am sympathetic, but if we want to hit not our climate goals — our climate requirements — we really need these coming online as soon as possible,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director at climate nonprofit the Acadia Center.
Massachusetts has ambitious goals for reducing its transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. The state’s clean energy and climate plan sets a goal of slashing vehicle emissions by 86% from 1990 levels by 2050. One of the major strategies for getting there is increased adoption of electric vehicles: The plan calls for all new vehicles sold in the state to be electric by 2035. The state has also set a target of having 900,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2030.
To those ends, the state’s electric vehicle incentives have long been considered among the best in the country. The Massachusetts Offers Rebates for Electric Vehicles program, or MOR-EV, was launched in 2014, providing rebates of $2,500 on eligible purchases or leases. For a time the rebates dropped to $1,500 due to funding issues, before returning to their original level in 2020.
The climate law passed in 2022 called for expanding these incentives in several ways. The base rebate was increased to $3,500 and the price cap for eligible vehicles was raised to $55,000, changes that have already been implemented. Other changes have been more difficult to put into effect.
Though the law authorizing the program was passed in August 2022, the legislature didn’t provide any additional funding until November.
“The administration was a bit handcuffed in that they couldn’t set up a program they weren’t sure they’d have the money for,” Murray said.
At the same time, implementing the new provisions required enough updates to the program software that the state had to put out a call for proposals from vendors to handle the changes. In March, the state chose to continue working with the existing vendor, the Center for Sustainable Energy, and the final program design is now underway with the first components rolling out this summer, according to information from the state Department of Energy Resources.
“I am hoping for a July 1 roll-out of all the new features the program requires to satisfy legislative intent,” said state Sen. Michael Barrett, a champion of the 2022 climate bill.
A new rebate will provide an additional $1,500 to low-income residents who buy or lease a qualifying vehicle, though the state is still determining details including what income levels will be eligible and how income will be verified. A used vehicle rebate and an enhanced rebate for consumers trading in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine are also expected this summer, though, again, details have not yet been released.
While advocates have generally expressed understanding for the lengthy implementation process, this lingering uncertainty has also frustrated some.
“That lack of specificity makes it really hard to help people figure out what car to buy when,” said Anna Vanderspek, electric vehicle program manager for the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “Overall, we wish they would have moved faster and been clearer about which changes would occur when.”
A major uncertainty that remains is whether the new provisions will be effective retroactively, considering the delays in implementation. Barrett is a strong proponent of retroactive rebates.
“We passed a new law last year with an immediate effective date,” he said. “I think consumers had a right to rely on the statute we wrote.”
Vanderspek, however, does not like the idea of retroactivity. Anyone who bought an electric vehicle since last August clearly did not need the state-sponsored financial incentive to do so, she noted. It makes more sense to use the finite pot of rebate money to help nudge new consumers toward clean vehicles, rather than paying out for cars already on the road, she said.
Whatever form the new provisions take, a variety of factors beyond the state’s control will also affect how quickly electric vehicle adoption accelerates. Supply chain shortages have been making it more difficult for eager buyers to acquire electric vehicles. A generous $7,500 federal incentive in the Inflation Reduction Act sparked optimism, but the Treasury Department announced last week that just 14 models are eligible for that tax credit.
Still, Murray is confident that the combination of public sentiment, state incentives, and federal tax credits will soon make a measurable difference.
“We’re definitely going to see it really start to tick up,” he said.
The following commentary was written by research and modeling manager Rachel Goldstein and modeling analyst Daniel O’Brien of Energy Innovation Policy & Technology LLC. See our commentary guidelines for more information.
California’s new clean-vehicle policy will transform the world’s second largest car market, drive a nationwide electric vehicle (EV) revolution, save consumers money, and clean the air. New Energy Innovation Policy & Technology LLC research shows if the 16 “Section 177” states follow California’s plan to phase out fossil-fueled car sales by 2035, EVs could compose more than 80 percent of all new car sales across the United States in 2050.
This accelerated EV transition could extend this policy’s benefits far beyond California, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, preventing thousands of pollution-induced deaths, saving drivers hundreds of dollars every year, and cutting the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing an entire year’s worth of today’s car emissions.
Section 177 of the U.S. Clean Air Act allows California Air Resources Board (CARB) to enact more stringent emissions standards than those set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In August 2022, CARB approved the new Advanced Clean Cars II rule (ACC II) requiring all new cars sold in the state be zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) by 2035. California sells more cars and trucks than any other state, driving major implications for nationwide car sales and transportation emissions.
The Clean Air Act also allows other states to “piggyback” off California’s standards, helping cut emissions from vehicles inside their borders — 16 states have opted to follow earlier cleaner car standards. These Section 177 states and California make up 38 percent of the U.S. auto market, meaning ACC II adoption could transform how Americans drive. While some states automatically adopt new CARB rules, others, like Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York require proactively adoption via legislation, executive order, or regulatory action.
Energy Innovation modeled the impacts of the new ZEV rule using its free, open-source Energy Policy Simulator model. The results showed that if all 17 states adopt ACC II, annual U.S. transportation emissions could fall 53 percent by 2050 versus today’s levels, equivalent to avoiding the emissions of 13 coal plants operating for the next 30 years.
CARB’s decision followed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which extended and expanded the federal EV tax credit up to $7,500. The IRA eliminated a restriction that only automakers that have sold less than 200,000 EVs can qualify for the credit and created a separate $4,000 tax credit for used EVs.
These incentives will drive consumer demand in the near term, while spurring domestic battery and EV manufacturing. But overcoming long-term adoption challenges requires ZEV standards. Following the tax credit expiration in 2032, annual EV sales could fall to pre-IRA, business-as-usual levels without ACC II adoption.
Drivers of fuel-burning cars are handcuffed to volatile gas prices. Gas prices fluctuated as much as 25 percent since 2022, largely due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. OPEC and Russia recently announced plans to cut 1.6 million barrels of oil production per day by the end of 2023, aiming to push prices even higher.
EVs are already cheaper to finance and own than gas-powered vehicles the day they are driven off the lot in most states, even if they have a higher sticker price. EVs need less maintenance and charge on the electricity grid, which has greater price stability and lower prices than the oil market. Previous Energy Innovation modeling found EV owners average $6,000 in savings over the vehicle’s lifetime thanks to lower fuel and maintenance costs.
If all 177 States adopt ACC II, U.S. households could save an average of $238 annually, with savings concentrated in states that adopt the standard and offer robust EV incentives. For example, households in in New Jersey, which boasts one of the country’s highest EV tax incentives, could save $682 every year when the state implements ACC II.
ACC II adoption in all 17 states could also create more than 300,000 jobs nationwide through new EV supply chain and domestic manufacturing facilities investments.
National economic changes due to ACC II as compared with an IRA baseline
Shifting away from fuel-burning vehicles will also cut toxic nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter emissions which harm human health. Air quality improvements from ACC II could prevent as many as 160,000 asthma attacks and 5,000 deaths nationwide by 2050.
Improved public health will feed back into the economy. In New York, adopting the ACC II rules could prevent up to 55,000 health-induced lost workdays. These benefits will be particularly prevalent in communities of color, which experience pollution-related health impacts at significantly higher rates than the national average.
With model ZEV standards ready to adopt, state policymakers can floor it toward an electrified transportation future, delivering considerable benefits for their residents. But complementary policies are critical to ensure rapid EV adoption. Each state can further support EV market growth by developing charging infrastructure, offering state incentives for EVs, and hosting supply chain manufacturing facilities.
EV adoption is still contingent upon the buildout of a widespread, equitable charging network that ensures access to quick charging. Coordination between state and local governments, utilities, and the private sector can help build out charging infrastructure across all neighborhoods and help overcome a major obstacle to EV purchases in rural areas.
State policymakers should pair IRA tax credits with state incentives to make EVs even more price competitive. Means-based rebates and tax credits, like those in California’s Clean Cars 4 All program, should be funded to support EV access for low- and middle-income communities. Policymakers can also support the growth of their EV markets and bring more jobs home by incentivizing EV supply-chain manufacturing to their states. These facilities can bring new jobs and sources of tax revenue to their communities.
Vehicle markets are rapidly moving towards EV adoption, and states with supporting policies will be best positioned to take advantage of the benefits. ACC II will accelerate that transition, driving down carbon emissions and other tailpipe pollution while saving customers money. State lawmakers should move swiftly to adopt the ACC II rules — any delay forgoes jobs, savings, and cleaner air for their residents.
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