Commit to a replacement plan

How can the average household afford clean-energy upgrades? For most situations the key strategy is to plan for clean infrastructure when the old vehicles or units require replacement—which for both vehicles and energy appliances happens on average every 15-20 years.

  • Your next vehicle should be electric.

  • Your next furnace should be a heat pump.

  • Your next water heater should be an electric heat pump water heater.

  • Your next stove should be an electric or induction cooktop.

  • You should plan to put solar panels on your roof if you have good solar resource.

Yes, that requires 20 years or more to phase out all the polluting infrastructure, but replacing it faster than the replacement rate implies taking usable infrastructure out of service. Sometimes governments offer cash-for-clunker programs that get old vehicles out of service, whether to stimulate the market or accelerate change, but that gets expensive.

Replacement Plan

  • Vehicle goes electric

  • Furnace goes to heat pump

  • Water heater goes electric (if owned)

  • Add solar or battery?

The purpose of a simple plan is to be prepared for when your furnace dies or you need a new vehicle. We’re all busy, and the simple decision is to just replace the failed equipment with the same. But if you’re prepared with a plan to upgrade, you can lock in lower operating costs and superior performance instead of locking in expensive fuel and another 15 years of pollution. Besides lower operating costs, the co-benefits of electrification include much lower toxic emissions, fewer trips for auto maintenance, more options for energy resilience, keeping energy spending local, and more.

What if I’m a renter? You can still affect your main energy usages. Your vehicle fuel is probably your main energy cost, and your replacement plan should commit to a much more efficient vehicle, ideally a new or used battery electric vehicle. That may require lobbying your landlord to add a 230-volt EV charger, but overnight charging with a 110-volt extension cord is sufficient for a 50-mile daily charge.

For more efficient space heating, recent heat pump options include portable, window-mounted units that are ~3X as energy efficient for heating and cooling a room or two, and plug into a wall socket.

Even small solar power generation is possible in dense housing. “Balcony solar” refers to solar panels small enough for a balcony that just plug into the wall. (At this time, a user needs to be aware of some safety issues and Oregon has no laws about how these are to be integrated into the grid.)

In more depth: Electrify by Saul Griffith (2022) lays out the numbers and planning for quickly decarbonizing the US. Meanwhile, the technologies used for generating, storing, and using clean energy all follow classic manufacturing learning rates. The costs to manufacture solar panels, batteries, or electric vehicle drive trains drop about 20% for every doubling of cumulative production. And that is driving exponential adoptions globally, along with bringing power to the people instead of being held hostage by oil or gas companies, utilities, or petrostates.