‘Insulate the crap out of everything’: 5 key decisions for home electrification

Vanessa Bertelli is out to make heat pumps and induction stoves as cool and sexy as the latest, trendiest pair of jeans or trainers. 

With jeans or shoes, “you see an ad for it, you can go try it on at a shop, and then you purchase it. It’s simply not the same for a heat pump,” she said.

Bridging the cool and sexy gap “is really important because that is what will make consumers think about these sorts of white box stuff in a different way,” essentially like any other home appliances, Bertelli said.

“We’re not there yet, and that is a disservice to consumers,” she said.

I first met Bertelli about four years ago, when she had just finished electrifying her own home – a 1928 brick beauty in Northwest D.C. – and held a small open house for the local green building community. 

She has since become a passionate and persuasive advocate for home electrification, launching a local nonprofit, Electrify DC, and an annual Healthy Homes Fair, where area residents can check out and see hands-on demonstrations of electric appliances. 

This year’s event on May 10 will also feature an experts lounge where attendees can book 20-minute consultations to talk about their specific electrification questions, and a makers’ corner where kids can design their own electrified homes using wooden toy homes from IKEA.

Home electrification is all about decisions, Bertelli told me during a recent online interview. Residential energy use accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions in the D.C metro region, she said, drawing on figures from the city’s Department of Energy and Environment. 

Those emissions come “from decisions that every one of us makes and is empowered to make,” she said. “It’s not like [a law] Congress needs to approve. … We are the final decision makers on the purchase of these appliances.

“By choosing well … like five choices in the course of our lifetime, we can massively reduce that quarter of emissions,” she said. The critical five are insulation, space and water heating, cooking, clothes drying and rooftop solar.

“Make as much energy as you can. If you have a battery, all the better,” Bertelli said. “Insulate the crap out of everything, and then get those fossil fuel-burning appliances out of your home.”

Model programs under the radar

The Healthy Homes Fair comes at a pivotal moment, as federal energy efficiency efforts, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, are reported to be on the chopping block. 

The program, which has broad support from the business sector, has set efficiency standards for a range of home appliances and other electronic devices (such as the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 this post was typed on). A 2023 federal report noted that the program had saved 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity and $500 billion in energy costs since its founding in 1992.

The potential demise of Energy Star would be yet another measure of the utter hypocrisy of Trump’s pledge to cut consumer energy bills in half and underlines, yet again, the potential impact of personal decisions and events like Healthy Homes. 

But there’s another side of this story that is equally important and relevant at the present moment. The nation’s capital has long been a proving ground for innovative clean energy programs that fly under the radar, regardless of who’s in the White House.

City government is keenly aware of the economic and social divide between D.C.’s well-off neighborhoods with luxury apartments and million-dollar homes and its low-income, mostly African American communities. Clean energy programs are one way to chip away at equity and environmental justice issues in the city.

The DC Sustainable Energy Utility was launched in 2011 with the sole mission of helping local residents and businesses cut their gas and electric bills through efficiency and clean energy initiatives. 

DCSEU now provides free electrification upgrades for low-income households and substantial rebates for others. Just one example, residents replacing a gas furnace with a heat pump rated Energy Star Most Efficient are eligible for a $6,000 rebate. 

Bertelli was able to offset some of the costs of her home electrification with D.C. rebates and other incentives. A recent ad campaign about the electrification options now available has upped participation, according to DCSEU. 

Solar For All, D.C.’s groundbreaking low-income solar program, was established in 2016 with a mandate to increase solar generation in the city and cut electric bills in low- and moderate-income households by 50%. Working with local installers and nonprofits, the program has developed community solar models that provide a range of benefits to low- and moderate-income residents.

Beyond lower utility bills, SFA projects have channeled savings into improved security and expanded childcare facilities at public housing communities. Another benefit: participating in SFA can offset any increase in electricity use resulting from home electrification.

The D.C. program served as a model for the federal Solar For All program, aimed at funding low-income solar programs across the country with $7 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze Solar for All in February, but had to unfreeze the funds in March, on federal court orders.

D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment recently announced its SFA program would be expanding with a $62.45 million grant from EPA, more than doubling the number of households served over the next five years and adding 33 to 43 megawatts of solar capacity in the city.

A new front line

In the interests of full disclosure, I have written about multiple SFA projects over the years. I am a big fan of D.C.’s clean energy programs, while also recognizing their limitations. 

Chief among these are the smart but very complex financing strategies the city has used to underwrite some of its programs, based on payments from utilities and some of the highest SREC prices in the nation. (Wonk alert: unavoidable industry jargon ahead.)

Solar renewable energy certificates – SRECs – are the saleable renewable energy attributes of the electricity a solar project generates. One megawatt-hour of clean power equals one SREC.

In D.C., one SREC may be worth $400 or more, compared to well under $100 elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic, due to a combination of the city’s high clean energy goal (100% by 2032) and relatively low supply of solar. At 68 square miles, D.C. just doesn’t have much room for large projects.

SREC sales have helped solar installers in D.C. grow their business and develop SFA projects that deliver substantial savings for customers. For D.C. homeowners with rooftop solar, selling their SRECs can either subsidize or offset the cost of electrification, Bertelli says. 

But the model is hard to replicate in areas without high SRECs, so other federal or state funding streams could be essential – an increasingly difficult challenge as states tighten budgets and the Trump administration continues its campaign against energy efficiency standards and state clean energy programs.

A clearly unconstitutional executive order issued April 8 calls on Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify and potentially declare illegal any state or local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change’ or involving ‘environmental, social, and governance’ initiatives, ‘environmental justice,’ carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.”

Trump is here attempting to paint such initiatives as “state overreach” and a direct threat to American energy production, in other words, fossil fuels. To start, the Justice Department has filed lawsuits against New York, Vermont, Hawaii and Michigan. The first two have passed laws allowing them to sue fossil fuel companies for climate-related damages; the last two are considering them. 

Whether Trump will eventually go after states or cities, like D.C., with ambitious clean energy goals remains an open question. 

But with advocates like Bertelli, home electrification could become a new front line in the clean energy transition – cool, sexy and providing Americans with better technologies, energy savings and healthier homes. Heat pumps have been outselling gas furnaces across the U.S. since 2021, and the internet is awash with videos of top chefs singing the praises of induction stovetops.

See you at the fair. 

The Healthy Homes Fair will take place 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, May 10, at the Pryzbyla Student Center at Catholic University. Check out the website here for a full schedule of presentations and the expo. 

The Brookland-CUA Metro stop is a short walk from the campus, and the Brookland Farmers Market, on the Artwalk next to Metro, will be in full swing from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.