Home Electrification 101
A high level primer for understanding why home electrification is important, where your personal emissions come from today, and what your future carbon-free home will look like.
If you’re interested in electrifying your life but feel overwhelmed, you are in the right place. I’m right there with you. I’m a new, first-time homeowner in Concord, MA and also am on this path too — and have found myself wondering why this all feels so hard. This post, Home Electrification 101, is a summary of what I’ve learned so far. Specifically, it’s a high level primer for understanding why home electrification is so important, where these emissions come from today, and what your future carbon-free home can look like. I’m hoping this and future articles on this blog can help us all get past the challenges of reaching zero emissions living. If you haven’t already, I’d also recommend checking out Volted’s first post.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Electrifying our homes and cars is an essential part of addressing the climate crisis. Electrifying everything also offers meaningful benefits to you and your family. We don’t have any time to waste to make this transition.
The critical path to zero out emissions is to replace every fossil-fuel burning appliance and machine we own with all electric alternatives when they reach their end of life. In addition, ensuring these electric items are ultimately powered with 100% renewable energy sources.
A majority of our personal emissions come from getting around (45%), plugging in (27%), and staying warm (25%). Other sources include drying clothes, cooking food, and landscaping.
There are market-ready carbon free alternatives for each of these sources of emissions that offer a mix of benefits to you like cost savings, health benefits, and superior product experiences. There are also challenges to be aware of, most notably high upfront costs.
The next step is to take inventory of what’s already in your home to figure out your personal path to electrification. We will cover this in the next Volted post. Make sure to subscribe to get new posts sent right to your inbox.
Why electrify your home?
Let’s start by grounding ourselves in the “why” behind why electrifying everything in our homes is so important. In short, there are two main reasons:
It is necessary to preserve a livable planet
It will materially improve the quality of your family’s life
Electrifying our homes is necessary to preserve a livable planet
First, let’s briefly review the important role of home electrification in addressing the climate crisis. While recent progress toward decarbonizing our economy is encouraging, effects of climate change are already “far-reaching and worsening” due to continued global use of planet-warming fossil fuels. The science is clear that failure to rapidly cut our emissions at sufficient scale will result in increasingly catastrophic consequences both at home and around the world — with outsized impact on the most vulnerable.
Data from leading climate scientists show that staying below 1.5°C of warming, the original Paris Agreement goal, would require cutting emissions by 10% every year and halving them each decade. Keep in mind that even 1.5°C of warming will result in large-scale drought, famine, poverty, more extreme weather, and ecosystem loss1. Many scientists already believe 1.5°C is out of reach and it is only realistic to keep warming under 2°C, which represents significantly more risk. Simply put, we have to start severely cutting emissions now. There’s simply no time to waste.
Our homes have a major role to play in this effort, and perhaps more than you think. An estimated 42% of all U.S. energy-related emissions are from the machines we have in our homes and driving our cars. That’s quite a chunk! Even if we replace 100% of our power grid with clean energy, we will still fall far short of our climate targets if we’re still collectively:
Getting around in our 277 million gas powered cars and trucks
Heating our homes with 70 million fossil-fuel furnaces
Heating our water with 60 million fossil-fuel water heaters
Cooking our food with 50 million gas stoves, ovens and cooktops
Drying our clothes with 20 million gas dryers2
In total, it is estimated that we need to install or replace 1 billion machines to electrify our homes in the United States. Let that number sink in. Saul Griffith, author of the book Electrify, refers to this as our personal infrastructure: the machines we use to live our daily lives that make up our carbon footprint. It will take all of us working quickly to replace these fossil-fuel burning machines with electric alternatives to clean up residential emissions in time.
Importantly, this must be coupled with ensuring the electricity we get when plugging in ultimately comes from 100% renewable sources of energy like solar, wind, and nuclear. As home dwellers, we have a duty to do our part in zeroing emissions on the “demand side” of our energy system just as industry is rapidly transitioning the “supply side” of energy to zero emission sources. Both sides of the energy system must work together and in parallel to make this change with the level of urgency required.
What’s more, this is actually where we have arguably the most agency in shaping the world we want our children and grandchildren to inherit. If you’re anything like me, you’ve gone through your fair share of feelings of climate hopelessness and despair. This is our chance to use our choices as consumers and home dwellers to make what is a necessary and material contribution to staving off the worst of global warming.
Electrifying will improve the quality of your family’s life
Let’s not forget arguably the most critical question here: what’s in it for me? The good news is that electrifying everything in your home offers real, tangible benefits to you and your family:
Lower costs. Electrified alternatives can offer reduced operating and maintenance costs as well as increased energy efficiency, making it cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives over time. In addition, many government-sponsored financial incentives already exist to further subsidize going electric
Example: Charging an electric vehicle is approximately 3.5x less expensive per mile when compared to paying for gas ($0.04 per mile vs. $0.14 per mile)
Better products. Electrified alternatives can actually offer improved product experiences compared to their outdated gas counterparts, like new features and increased convenience.
Example: Electric lawn mowers are now more powerful than gas, and are virtually noiseless. Gas mowers which operate at 95 decibels which creates noise pollution for you and your neighbors
Improved health. Going electric also means avoiding introducing harmful pollutants into the air your family breathes as well as other health benefits.
Example: Children living in homes with gas stoves are 42% more likely to have asthma due to release of nitrogen dioxide into the air
Importantly, this is not to say that there are no drawbacks of going electric. Perhaps the largest of which is the high up-front costs required to reach a zero carbon home. Even with new government subsidies factored in, an analysis from Rewiring America shows a well-resourced family of four spending $107,980 in up-front costs to electrify. That’s pretty steep! To be fair, this did include rooftop solar, 2 new EVs, home storage, and additional upgrades. Other paired back scenarios showed a price tag of a fraction of the price. Regardless, this process is still costlier for the average consumer than it should be. In addition, some electric alternatives still come with minor notable annoyances — for instance, mowing my lawn with my Ego Mower takes longer because I have to wait for the battery to recharge when it runs out halfway through the job.
Being honest and up-front about these tradeoffs is essential because we all are balancing our concern for maintaining a livable planet — a collective goal — with our very real individual needs and constraints. We all have limited budgets, are disinterested in sacrificing our current standard of living, and may live with others who are less climate conscious than we are. Electrifying our homes to limit warming must offer clear and compelling benefits to us as individuals that supersede the drawbacks. A win-win is a non-negotiable. Any misalignment will slow our transition and create further risk to the planet. In this blog, I will honestly call out these drawbacks and explore the best ways to get around them.
Where do my personal emissions come from?
If we are going to reach zero-emissions living and together replace those 1 billion fossil-fuel burning machines, the first step is understanding the sources of emissions from your home. I’m a big fan of Bill Gates’ book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Specifically, he’s able to simplify the colossal issue of tackling the climate crisis by identifying the 5 major categories of emissions from human activities (e.g. growing things, making things), and then structures the book around what we need to do to zero-out emissions from each category. I will follow a similar approach for Volted.
While Gates did this for all societal emissions, we can adapt the framework to categorize the sources of personal emissions. There are 6 main categories to consider when it comes to where your direct emissions come from3:
Getting around. We’re talking about motor vehicles, namely the car(s) you and your family drives.
Plugging in. Sourcing the electricity from your local utility used to power things plugged into outlets. This is a catch-all for everything that already uses electricity in your home: washing machines, refrigerators, lights, etc.
Staying warm. Heating the air and water inside your home are where the direct emissions come from, but A/C is an important factor here, too.
Washing clothes. Specifically, tumble dryers. While most tumble dryers are electric, roughly ~12% are gas powered and generate direct emissions4
Cooking. Heating up your food to cook before eating it.
Landscaping. Cutting the grass, clearing leaves, blowing snow off the driveway.
For each category, the traditional means of powering these activities rely on some kind of machine that burns planet-warming fossil fuels. For instance, most furnaces use natural gas to heat a home. Unless you’ve already bought an EV, your car is likely an internal-combustion engine vehicle that burns gasoline. Your local power grid likely still includes some degree of fossil fuels as part of its energy mix to deliver electricity to your home.
To make this as straightforward as possible, let’s map each category to the most common machines and appliances that the average American uses:
To be sure, the specifics of where emissions in your home come from can vary greatly based on the installed machines in your home, where you live, and previous electrification investments you’ve made. For instance, you may already own an EV. Relatedly, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my hometown of Concord, MA already claims 85% of purchased energy was renewable as of 2021 — whereas where you live may still be heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Understanding true climate impact
Before diving head-first into EVs and heat pumps, it’s important to first level-set on which parts of our personal infrastructure have the most (and conversely, the least) impact on your carbon footprint. Given that each “swap” to an electric alternative will require cost and investment, we should be clear-eyed on where the biggest gains are when it comes to reaching zero emissions. Relatedly, relative emissions info can help guide us in prioritizing our home electrification journey.
Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find this data easily accessible so I created my own analysis of where the average U.S. homeowner’s direct emissions come from5:
Visualizing this data gives us an even clearer picture of the sources of our emissions:
In short, nearly half of our household emissions come from their cars (an average U.S. household has 1.88 cars). This is by far the biggest contributor to the carbon footprint of our personal infrastructure — over 1.6x more than the second-most category. I was quite surprised to learn just how dominant gas-powered cars are in the overall mix of household emissions relative to other items. Home electricity use takes second place and makes up just over a quarter of our carbon footprints. This felt reasonable to me given how many things in our homes already run on electricity — our refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, lights, etc. Heating our space and our water is a major contributor as well, together amounting to roughly another quarter of our homes’ emissions.
On the flipside, for all the recent conversation and attention on induction cookstoves and electric lawn mowers, I was also surprised to learn that gas ranges and landscaping tools only represent a tiny fraction of emissions (~1% each). Of course, electrified alternatives for these items offer benefits beyond zero emission usage, namely the health benefit of avoiding inhalation of harmful pollutants from fossil fuel burning versions. We will cover these benefits in the next section.
What your future zero-carbon home looks like
With an understanding of the types of fossil-fuel burning machines that need to be replaced, we can now focus on what zero carbon alternatives to replace them with. At a high level, here is what zero-carbon living looks like for a single-family home:
Before going further, in our first post we described Volted as a pragmatist’s guide to home electrification focused on comfortable carbon-free living. As such, the replacements that will be suggested here and in future posts will be based on a base principle of “same or better” experience. That is, we’re not going to tell you to replace your dryer with a clothesline — this is an inferior experience and runs counter to our objective to electrify a way that is net positive to our quality of life. It will also slow progress towards decarbonization because the average consumer simply won’t switch.
With this in mind, we can build on our table above and identify the ideal replacement machines for our traditional fossil-fuel personal infrastructure, the personal benefits you get from switching, as well as current challenges to be mindful of (Click the image to zoom-in for readability):
The table can be thought of as a high level roadmap for electrifying your life. Importantly, in addition to swapping these fossil-fuel machines with an electrified one, we must also ultimately ensure electricity to power these replacements comes from clean renewable sources like wind and solar. This is helped in part by purchasing renewable electricity from your local utility or community solar project, and/or installing rooftop solar at your home to generate your own clean energy. We can use our north star categories of personal infrastructure as a grounding framework not just for this post, but continue returning back to it as we dive deeper into specific topics to remind us of how it fits into the bigger picture.
As they say, Rome was not built in a day. It is unrealistic that anyone will undergo this transition all at once. It would be too expensive and likely upend your life in a way akin to a major home renovation. Rather, the idea is that when your legacy fossil fuel machines retire, you replace them with the recommended zero emissions alternatives above, every time. This is what Griffith refers to as 100% adoption rate in his book. The only recommendation above which doesn’t quite fit that model perfectly is purchasing renewable energy from your utility – which can likely be done immediately and for roughly the same cost as your current cost for electricity (renters can do this as well).
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, I’m with you. This is a lot to think about, represents a significant amount of money, and each one of these categories (e.g. EVs) require its own deeper understanding. Fear not! Don’t sweat the details yet. In future posts I will deep-dive into each category (e.g. an in-depth look at electrified home heating) to explore the main things you need to know, who you need to work with, and the pros/cons to consider with the different purchasing options you may have. Remember, this is a 101 — like your first day of a new semester-long class. At this point, just understanding home electrification at the highest level is what we’re after.
Next up: taking inventory of your home
We now have a shared understanding of the reasons for rapid electrification, where home emissions come from, and the zero emissions machines that need to be swapped in when the fossil fuel burners retire. The next step is taking inventory of what is already in your home today — what is already electrified and what is not. This is an important prerequisite to charting your course to full electrification and getting some of the machines and appliances described above in place. We’ll also explore how to think about prioritizing the phases of your electrification journey based on cost, personal benefits, and emissions contribution.
I’m hoping that this was a helpful orientation to demystifying what it means to electrify your home and why it’s so important. I’d love to hear your feedback and questions in the comments. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post! To make sure you get it, please subscribe below:
I want to give a big shoutout to Saul Griffith and the folks at Rewiring America. A combination of information from his book Electrify and content from Rewiring America was a major help in writing this post. Love what they are doing and thanks for creating such useful, approachable content for home electrification!
IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, Chapter 3. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
From Homes to Cars, It’s Now Time to Electrify Everything by Saul Griffith. https://e360.yale.edu/features/from-homes-to-cars-its-now-time-to-electrify-everything
These categories are all direct sources of emissions but of course our homes all have many indirect sources of emissions, too. For instance, the production of the food we eat is a major source of global emissions (19%) but isn’t captured here. For the purpose of this blog, we will intentionally leave out indirect sources of emissions that are harder for a home dweller to control directly and focus on those sources that can be taken to zero emissions via home electrification decisions. In addition, this is not necessarily an exhaustive list of emissions sources for everyone — for instance, you may have a pool that is currently heated using natural gas. This list of categories is aimed at the average home dweller and the most common machines and appliances that burn fossil fuels.
Electrify Everything in Your Home from Rewiring AMerica. https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-home-guide
Many of these sources emit other pollutants into the air like nitrogen oxide, and carbon monoxide, but for the sake of simplicity we will focus on planet warming emissions, measured as pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. We consider other air pollutants when discussing the health benefits of replacing these machines with zero carbon alternatives below.