⚡️Electrify Everything: What Does The Pace of Progress Look Like?

Quinn: [00:00:00] Sure, we've got to electrify everything, including 1 billion machines by 2050. But where are we now and how do we get there? That's today's big question, and my guest is Cora Wyent from Rewiring America. Cora is the Director of Research at Rewiring America, where she's conducting research and analysis to enable rapid electrification of everything in the economy.

Sure why not. Prior to joining Rewiring America, Cora completed her PhD in physics at Caltech, where she studied new materials for ultra thin solar cells and performed techno economic analysis of new photovoltaic and carbon capture technologies. Before that, she received her bachelor's degree in physics from the beautiful UNC Chapel Hill.

So if you're new here, you should know this is another in our continuing series on electrifying every building in America and car and all that shit, [00:01:00] including your home, whether you own it or whether you rent. We've partnered with the best in the business in Rewiring America to understand where we need to all go on the whole, what we can do, and how you in particular can get started on your own journey.

And of course, to unlock an easier path for everyone else. Welcome to Important, Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is dcience for people like you who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human like Cora, who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone.

Along the way, we'll discover tips, strategies, and stories you can use to get involved to electrify your home and become a better steward of the future for yourself and your family, your city, your company, and our world.

Cora, welcome to the show.You've been putting up for me for 10 minutes now, but welcome to the actual show. [00:02:00]

Cora Wyent: Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

Quinn: Well, you'll say that now. Let's see how it goes. Let's see how quick you close that laptop. Thank you for joining us from the illustrious Rewiring America, some of our favorite friends on the planet as we talked about a little bit offline, and I will have time machine mentioned in the preview.

We've done a whole series sort of together, both in written form, some audio addressing how we electrify all of our homes and buildings because it is a big piece of the puzzle and obviously a preface for people. A lot of this content is necessarily and practically aimed towards home owners and building owners, because as a renter there's just certain things you can't do or you're not, you don't want to do, or you can't pay for.

We are increasingly trying to focus on that stuff as well. So maybe we can dig into that a little bit. But a lot of the big structural stuff, a lot of these big appliances and stuff are really sort of homeowner focused. So we've definitely had some feedback from folks going, but I rent, what can I do?

And so we're working on that. [00:03:00] But this stuff is important because as we'll talk about it, is just an enormous chunk of what we've got to do. Replacing every car, et cetera, et cetera. That's what we're talking about. You've got a brand new report out this week. Very exciting. I'm so glad you all wrote it and I didn't have to.

It's just such a delight to read something else that someone else wrote. It's so funny. My wife is a, this wonderfully hardworking and successful screenwriter and her favorite thing in the world is to like help someone else with their work. Because she's like, it's not me, it's not on me, it's not my shoulders.

This is fantastic.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, it's pretty great. I come from a background in academia, so it's pretty great writing reports now where I write something up and then all of a sudden we pass it over to our comms team and I get this beautifully designed thing back where in grad school, I'm used to just like typing away to paper, throw some plots in, send it to the publisher.

But yeah, this is amazing. Like get this absolutely gorgeous thing made out of something that I just wrote one day. It's awesome.

Quinn: It's incredible. I still think it's like [00:04:00] magic. I have this buddy who's done some design stuff for us over the years and a few weeks ago. One of the things we've been covering quite a bit is like AI ethics.

Obviously things are moving pretty quickly there, but it's really important to me and it's really important objectively to stop and ask like, What data are people collecting? What sort of privacy are they using? Is it encrypted at all? Are they sharing it? All these different things. Like nine o'clock one night I was like, you know what, here's the 10 commandments of like what you need to ask of each one of these little tools and companies before you just start plugging in your emails or your zooms or anything like that.

Pictures of your kids. And I just sent it to him, I said, can you make this look like respectable? As opposed to just my bullet points, wake up the next morning, this beautiful little like poster. I'm like, this is so great. I never could have done that. It's amazing. It's so much better.

Anyone else would've just like clicked off of it if they just saw my chicken scratch. I appreciate that. Anyways, well, I don't want to discount all of the work you've obviously done, and I want you to prop yourself up a little bit here because the [00:05:00] one question we always ask everybody before we get going and it is a little ridiculous.

It's a little tongue in cheek, but I do get pretty good answers is, Cora, why are you vital to the survival of the species? And again, I would love for you to be honest here.

Cora Wyent: Wow. Ooh, that's a tough one. Why are you vital to the survival of the species? Well, I think my background's in science. I love like knowing the nitty gritty and technical about anything.

Whether that's like, okay, what are the steps you need to do to install heat pump in your home? Or what are the actual accounts of machines that we need to replace? So, I really love the technical side, but I also really love talking about it and trying to communicate these things to just like a general audience.

So I think being able to take like the science and the technical pieces that we need, and then being able to like communicate that effectively to a general audience is maybe [00:06:00] something that's more uncommon and something that I'm super happy to be able to do in podcasts like this. And you can tell me how well I've done it at the end so I can improve in the future.

Quinn: You're doing great. We're done here. This is fantastic. No, that's really interesting. I mean, that's usually, like we were just saying, two different jobs or at least two different skill sets. Sometimes it's one job and someone doesn't have the Venn diagram of at least most of both of those skill sets.

So I guess to preface a little bit, so when did you discover that you were super into like spreadsheets full of heat pumps? And then when did you realize you were really excited to evangelize those to people who were forced to listen to you?

Cora Wyent: Ooh, so. I've been interested in climate for a really long time, like since middle school and high school.

I was like making PowerPoints to my school about why they should put solar on their roof back in the, I don't know, early 2000 tens or so. So I think [00:07:00] both components have always been there for me, but I took a roundabout path to get to where I am now. I initially thought I wanted to do like hard science in the lab coming up with a new technology that we need to solve the climate crisis. So I actually studied physics in college and then went and got my PhD in physics. I was making microscopically small solar cells that had very low efficiencies. So we definitely need people working on those things.

I think that's great. I'm a huge fan of basic science research, but it totally, it just wasn't for me, it was too isolated. I really wanted to be closer to the actual solutions rather than working on a technology that may or may not have an impact decades down the line. After grad school, I sort of made the transition out of the lab to spreadsheets full of heat pumps, like you said, which I love.

It's the perfect place for me. It's a great mix of, doing the technical research and then getting to talk about it too.

Quinn: I love that. I've been so lucky to talk to, oh God, I don't know what it is, [00:08:00] 160, 170 people were like this, we're 10 minutes in, and I'm just going like, why is this person talking to me?

Like, I don't understand. You're clearly using like 4% of your brain for this conversation and running calculations with the rest of it. I have this friend we were in Los Angeles for a long time. He is a scientist and worked for a little while with the Jet Propulsion Lab. And I remember our, you know, our kids were smearing dirt on each other in a yard one day and we were just sitting there talking and I was getting to know him and I said, so, you know, what do you do?

And you could see, he was like, well, here we go. But he's like very earnest and honest and he was like, well, I make skin for robots in space. And I just remember thinking like what am I here for? Like, what is even happening? Like, who are these people?

It's insane to me. Like where do you even start? What do you make skin out of yeah. It's crazy. No idea.

Cora Wyent: It's crazy. Yeah. I actually, I'm [00:09:00] in Los Angeles too, and I went to Caltech for grad school, which is right down the road from JPL. So I've been there. Seen the Mars Rover. It's pretty cool.

Quinn: It's so cool. He let me in and like saw the, you know, the duplicate rover they used for everything. I was like, I shouldn't be allowed near this. Like, what do we even doing here? This is crazy. Yeah, it's awesome. I didn't even ask him like how much it cost.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Like, not allowed to touch it. Thank you for your answer. I really appreciate that and for putting up with me. Why don't you give us the 30 second, here's this report and why we did it, and then we'll start going through this baby.

Cora Wyent: One thing that we've talked about in the past at Rewiring America is that we know that we need to electrify everything in the economy to solve the climate crisis.

And I know that we've talked about that together in the past, and I think one of the stats that we've used before is that we need to replace 1 billion machines across the country, which is a crap ton of machines if you think about it. Like a billion is a lot. So, what [00:10:00] we wanted to do in this report is really break that down into, okay, we know we need to get to this point by 2050.

We know where we need to be in a few decades, but what do we actually need to do in the next year or two years or three years, and how can we really set some near term targets that will put us on track to reaching our goals? I think short term targets can be really helpful for local policymakers and local communities who are trying to figure out sort of like how to get themselves on track for these longer targets.

So that was the goal of this report. And what we did is we basically said, okay, if you look at the trajectory that cool new technologies have taken in the past, if you look at something like a color TV or a refrigerator or a cell phone, they follow these sort of S-shaped adoption curves. Where you start out with some early adopters and then it really takes off and the market accelerates on its own.

And we know that electric technologies are just better than the [00:11:00] incumbent fossil fuel technologies. Like people love driving EVs, they love cooking with induction stoves. So we expect them to follow these same S-curve trajectories of adoption across the economy. So that's what we did. We basically modeled S-curves for five different electric technologies and then looked at what does that mean for our near term climate goals and how many machines we need to install in the next year, two years, three years.

Quinn: I love that. I'm a liberal arts major who like flashcards not so great. I love spreadsheets. Not a hundred percent sure how they work. It's great. But I really loved, there's a book out there by this wonderful economist named Mariana Mazzacato. She wrote, and I'm going to grossly oversimplify this and just definitely not do it justice, but my takeaway from it is it's essentially it's mission-based economies and she's got a couple books and she lectures all the time.

She's very smart human. My takeaway from the book to oversimplify it was [00:12:00] essentially, it is so helpful, if not essential a lot of the time to have a very transparent, clear, measurable goal, an outcome, and then to reverse engineer your teams, your decisions, your milestones, your processes, your contractors, your paint colors against that.

And if it's not there, then it's got to get out of here. And the best example, and again, it's ridiculous, is always like put a man on the moon. And bring him home. It's pretty clear, right? Like what you're aiming to do here. Does it contribute to that? No. Does it take away from it? Get it out of here and you can really not to say there aren't a lot of inefficiencies in the process, but it really helps everybody be on the same page.

That I think that has been what is such a big part, if a manipulated part of net zero and things like that is this idea where it's like, okay, but what does zero mean? No one has agreed. What does net mean? [00:13:00] That's a whole shit storm. Because all of a sudden you have airlines day two, after someone invents the idea of net zero and they're like, we're net zero.

We're buying all these carbon offsets that aren't real, you know? All these different things. So what is that? Whereas someone says, no new emissions. You go, okay, I know what that is. Great. What is involved? Can we electrify them? What is required? Where are they? Who's responsible? And when you say, we got to replace the billion machines, cool.

That's a lot. What are they, where are they? Can we, do we need to invent new shit, do we not? And questions like, do we need to train people to do that? Because they don't just replace themselves. So that's why I have always found the work that you all do, so clear and impactful. Cause it's going like, here's the thing, now here's all the different policies and pieces we got to get to along the way.

So anyways, that's like a thank you, I guess.

Cora Wyent: Awesome. Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's all about having a clear sense of where we need to go. And I think that's what's so compelling to me about electrifying everything is like, we have the [00:14:00] technology, we need to do this. We know exactly what the end state looks like.

It's every home having a heat pump and a heat pump water heater. Et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, you're totally right. I really like that.

Quinn: Because it does require nuance if we're going to get there, you know, it's I don't know if he was the first person to jump on it. But you know, my friend Dave Roberts, Dr. Vox, or whatever he calls himself now. Dr. Volts now he's Volts. Yep. You know, his thing has always been electrify everything, which is great. And you could, sure, you could say that's a measurable outcome, but what is it? What is everything and what are they and how do we get there?

And having milestones like these that you all talked about in the report we'll get into and where we are on these s-curves, how we jumpstart them is really helpful because the way the incentives and rebates and money we've set up along the way is pretty varied. And there's going to be 50 different states doing 50 different versions of these things.

But having and saying like, here's where we are, however you're going to get there, [00:15:00] I hope that this kind of thing is going to be very helpful to people.

Cora Wyent: Yeah. I really hope so too. And I think it hopefully helps to create additional policies along the way too, that have these really clear goals in mind so that a local city like Chicago can look and say, okay, what does our pace of progress look like for our county?

We need to install, we've done the numbers for Cook County, Chicago, for example, and it's about 12,000 heat pumps over the next year. They can look at that and say, okay, how can we design a policy or an incentive program to get that many heat pumps into homes?

Quinn: And it matters because it also means that someone in the office has to stand up and go, how many did we install last year? And does someone know that answer? And if not, how do we track it and how we're going to track it going forward? Like it just unlocks so much. One of the most measurable things in the report and we can just focus on heat pumps for now, I guess, because they really carry so much of the emissions weight here.

The biggest takeaway for me from the report is [00:16:00] if we want to get there by 2050, by 2035, it's got to be heat pumps. That's it. How did you get to that point? When did, like, how did the math work and when did you realize okay that's the cutoff.

Cora Wyent: Basically the report relies on sort of a stock turnover model, which looks at like, what's the typical lifetime of one of these appliances.

And if you replace them when they die, how does that basically translate from sales in a given year to like what's actually in households in a given year? So we know that we want a hundred percent of households to have heat pumps by 2050. Typical appliance lifetimes are around 15 years, like furnaces and boilers and things like that.

So working backwards, we just subtracted 15 years and we're like, okay. If we're selling the last gas furnace in 2034, that means that furnace will be replaced before our 2050 target. So that set us at that a hundred percent sales by 2035 mark. Does that, did that make sense?

Quinn: No, it totally does.

And it also [00:17:00] tracks with things like and again, I don't want to, don't want to pivot here, but the same with cars. You know, there's a report recently it says like, we're holding onto our cars for longer. So it's not just hey, selling new EVs. It's going like, every time someone buys a new gas car, you're starting this clock.

Unless we incentivize them for some way to, to make that happen sooner. Right. Yeah. So, okay. Where are we?

Cora Wyent: That's a great question, and it's because of what you said about people aren't really tracking how many of these we're installing in every city and every state. It's hard to know.

But the best guess that we have is that about 16% of homes in the US have heat pumps right now in this report, we've set the sales proportion to be about the same as the current percent in household. So we can assume that it's about 16% sales. I think it actually might be slightly higher than that, but that was a modeling simplicity that we took.

We need to ramp up pretty quickly to get from where we are now to a hundred percent sales by 2035. And that's where that S-curve really kicks in. And if you look [00:18:00] at the S-curves historically of other technologies, this decade long ramp is actually not that crazy. Like think about how quickly smartphones got adopted across the country.

That was definitely sort of a decade long, fast ramp. So I think that's sort of where we are right now is we're at the very bottom of this S curve. We're currently seeing a linear growth rate in heat pumps. We need to really accelerate that to get onto that S curve and I think one good piece of news is that if you look at the data last year there were more sales of heat pumps than there were gas furnaces in the US, which is great news.

So I think we're starting to see signs that heat pumps are overtaking these traditional fossil fuel appliances, but we need to accelerate that and make that go faster.

Quinn: What are sort of the milestones you have built in between here? Projected hopeful fingers crossed milestones between here and [00:19:00] 2035 basically. Like where do we, where sort of, if you had to pick two or three or four chunks, like dates, like what would those look like?

Cora Wyent: Yeah, so we really focused in this report, on setting milestones for like this year and the next three years. So for heat pumps, for example, I'm looking over at my numbers here.

We need to install 240,000 new heat pumps in the next year. That we wouldn't have otherwise installed with that linear growth trend of the market.

Quinn: Okay. So on top of what would've been linear growth.

Cora Wyent: Exactly. Yeah. So that's sort of the next year target. And then we also have set these sort of three year targets.

So in over three years, we need to install about 5 million new heat pumps.

Quinn: It seems like. I don't want to say like we have a good chance of doing that, but again, if folks read or listened to some of the earlier work, it's a confusing moment because the money we had, obviously the IRA bill was signed and then [00:20:00] it became, now we got to sort out how this is all going to work and what qualifies and what doesn't, and then each state is going to have their stuff and a lot of the states still don't have anything.

You can't go and get a lot of these incentives or rebates or whatever it might be yet in some ways. And sometimes they're on top of the federal stuff and sometimes there's local stuff. So the point is it seems like we need to start to accelerate, but maybe we don't have the tools to you do it yet, which might be a good thing.

Cora Wyent: In this modeling, we didn't take into account current policy. So I do think that these incentives from the IRA will get us a long way towards reaching some of these near term targets. And then I think on top of that, we need state governments and local governments to do even more. Like Efficiency Maine has a fantastic heat pump program. Maine is installing more heat pumps than anywhere else in the world right now, which is pretty wild. Just goes to show that heat pumps really do work in cold climates. So I think our hope with this report is that having these near term goals can allow sort of a city or a [00:21:00] state to say, okay, here's where we need to be. Do we have enough incentives in place to help people get there, or do we need more incentives?

Quinn: And it seems like in the report, you folks really mentioned in a few places, like you said, Cook County, but you are trying to really bridge that gap with states and localities and say, here's where you are.

Like this isn't just some sort of more vague national measuring stick, like let's get really particular about it, right?

Cora Wyent: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the report was mostly focused on the national scale, but we're planning on releasing state by state data soon. And then we're also, whenever we talk to a local city who wants help with like electrification policy, we're also bringing sort of a set of numbers that's specifically tailored to them, which has been really cool to see people react to that and be like, oh, okay.

We can do this. This is manageable. This is on the order of thousands of machines, not like millions in the next year.

Quinn: 1 billion machines. Yeah.

Cora Wyent: Yeah. So I think that was like, that was one of the coolest parts about actually doing the analysis [00:22:00] for me was seeing what the final numbers for this year and the next three years ended up being and being like, oh wait, like this is actually reasonable.

It's achievable. It's like certainly ambitious, but it's also achievable.

Quinn: That's always nice. I mean, the metaphor I use with my children and the first time I used it they were horrified, was, you know, it's, how do we eat an elephant? It's one bite at a time. And they were like, what the hell's wrong with you man? What?

Cora Wyent: Why are we eating elephants?

Quinn: They were just like, what? Which is understandable because they're very young, like, people eat elephants. I was like, don't go there. Don't go there. Yeah. Anyways, the point is we can't do it at one time. Yeah. It seems like, and correct me if this is the wrong data word, but amortizing it overall of our cities and our localities and our states is really where does become something again, you have the outcome is a subset of this greater 1 billion machines and number of heat pumps, but it becomes something much more attainable. And if they are collecting data in any way, even if it's [00:23:00] just been furnaces to this point, because obviously it's a longstanding thing, there is something to measure against to establish and it does seem like this is the first time we're trying to really start to establish, and I'm thinking of like early Covid data and what a hard time we had with fax machines and all that kind of stuff. And how that there was no requirement to send anything anywhere. Trying to set a baseline because it's easy to say we need to do this and this is how many the are.

And like you said, you were pretty conservative about the 16%, but without these baselines or people starting to build them for the first time, we don't know where we have to go.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're seeing this report as like step one in this process, which is what are our targets? And then step two is like, how do we track progress against those targets?

And that's a much harder problem because there's not great data out there on how quickly people are installing heat pumps. So what we're hoping to do over the next, you know, months to a year is really like establish some data partnerships with some of these people who are administrating the incentives so we [00:24:00] can start to say, okay, here's our S curve, here's where we are year over year, and let's start tracking our progress.

Quinn: So I have a million questions. I want to get to sort of lowest common denominator, or I guess most common obstacles slash levers to be pulled for each sort of, let's say city. Because that's just going to be the most manageable and the most likely place where a listener can probably have some sort of impact.

But before we get that, let's talk for a minute about sort of outreach. So you build this report and you start to do this modeling. And obviously you guys have been around for a while and so you've obviously got a number of relationships, but what is the next step after producing this report and relationships like ours?

Is it outreach? Are cities coming to you? Like how do we start to build more of that so cities can find these tools and states can find your tools so that they can find out, okay, well what do we have to do to get there? [00:25:00]

Cora Wyent: Yep. So we're working on building a more interactive version of this report that will allow sort of a state to go in and click around and see what their own targets are.

And then we also have a lot of great coalitions. We've got like a coalition of local government leaders. We've got a coalition in Congress, we've got like a CEO's coalition, so we're definitely pushing this out through all of those channels and getting people who are coming to us saying like, Hey, can you send me the California data?

Or hey, can you send me the Massachusetts data? So it's been ad hoc right now, like people reaching out to us, us reaching out to other people. But we're hoping to develop tools that will allow anyone across the country to go in and actually find, you know, without us having this sort of data exchange back and forth.

A sort of simple to use tool on our website too.

Quinn: A little more self-serve as you would. So what that brings up, and again, I know this is one of the obstacles slash opportunities as we always try to paint them here, [00:26:00] however, big or small is the data that's going to be reported. The firsthand data is going to come from installers.

We're short a lot of electricians in this country. And current installers are obviously, have been at least legacy wise, incentivized in a thousand different ways to install furnaces. And part of that is understandable because as we've discussed in this in our series, most people again your warranty for your furnace is 10 years usually.

Something like that. Most people push it a little farther than that if they possibly can, which is understandable. Replacing these things in the heat of summer or the dead of winter is switching it to a heat pump is actually a fair bit of work. And so when you need to, and you go, my children are going to freeze to death tonight, it's not usually the optimal time to have somebody come in and give an assessment and all the work needed to be done, much less like insulating your house and all these different home audit reports. You're going I just need to do this. But then [00:27:00] it comes back to that. Great. Now you're starting another 10, 11, 12 year clock. Right? So how do we start to use this data going both ways now to further incentivize these installers to start doing more heat pumps or to train new ones entirely?

Cora Wyent: I think the installer piece is huge. I think there's a, as you mentioned, a massive shortage of electricians right now, and that's only going to get worse as people do start to electrify. So I think there's a lot we need to do to build the electrification workforce. So, you know, supporting local training programs through unions and at community colleges is a big one.

And then I think, you know, I've got someone on my team who's working on this workforce stuff in a lot of depth, and one thing that she and I have both started to get excited about recently is like a direct install program. Because one of the challenges right now with electrification is that the residential sector isn't [00:28:00] typically unionized.

It's the commercial sector that's unionized. So that means that job quality can be potentially not as good in the residential sector. That also means that you might have not as strong of training pipelines because the unions are really where a lot of training happens. So one thing that we've gotten excited about recently is state governments or local governments doing a direct install program where they say, Hey, we're actually just going to install 20,000 heat pumps in low income homes across the state.

And that allows you to aggregate a big chunk of projects together and make that unionized labor and get people in there with like really good wages with certain diversity standards too. So that's one sort of small policy nugget that we've gotten really excited about. Rebates can be hard to access for lower income households, so how can we like really just say, hey, we're just going to install a heat pump for you in your home.

Quinn: Well, and it also, I love a good [00:29:00] multi-solve. Which heat pumps inherently do. But in a world where, again we've barely electrified anything, we're already short so many electricians, there's always this question of how do I get experience, by getting experience? It's this chicken and egg thing. But if city or a state says, yeah, we're putting in 20,000 heat pumps, right?

Or if someone works with Donnel Baird you know, during Bloc Power and just says like, we're signing a deal for our city. A lot of people are going to get experience installing heat pumps that might not otherwise have done that, which should theoretically jumpstart that local S-curve itself, at least on the experience side.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what we're hoping too is that once people see how much demand there's going to be for this type of work that will sort of allow people to say like, okay, I can safely get into this career and know that there will be work for me for decades to come. So to go back to your original question, which I think I tangented away from I think this [00:30:00] pace of progress report will hopefully help local installers or people who are interested in potentially getting into the trades to say, Hey, like if we're actually going to do this and meet our climate goals, there's going to be a lot more work for me to do. And you know, this is like a predictable source of work that's going to be there for decades to come.

Quinn: Sure. Okay. So let's, we try to tackle things and sometimes we don't get to both on a specific topic or show or whatever it might be, but try to tackle things in the sense of, here's what I can do for me and here's what I can do to unlock the system better for more folks, whether they're well-to-do or not.

Let's look at this from the perspective first of if somehow people have listened to me drone on about this for however many episodes and how much I've written about it, they haven't quite bitten the bullet yet. Cause again, they're heat pumps in like or their furnace is in year six or it's fairly new.

Or maybe they're closer to it. Are there any updated takeaways or actions that Rewiring [00:31:00] America supports for people to get going? And I guess where are we sort of on the state by state rollout for these rebates and incentives?

Cora Wyent: Yeah, so for your first question, we're actually hopefully rolling out some really great tools in the next month or two to help people figure out what's the first step to take to electrify.

So one of those is going to be like a consumer facing website. It's got step-by-step checklists for every single electrification project, and then a lot of great content for more specific details about any of them. I've been working a lot on those with some awesome members of our team, so we're super excited about that.

And so I definitely direct people to check out our website, check out the consumer facing website, and then we're also rolling out a personal electrification planning tool which will allow anyone to go and enter in their address and get like a really personalized step-by-step plan that also has how we think their energy bills might change by electrifying.

Because that's huge, like you want to make sure that you're going to save money or you know, if that's not your [00:32:00] main motivation, you want to see how much you can reduce your carbon emissions. We have a fantastic data science team that's put a ton of work into this tool into trying to get really accurate estimates of how much it's going to cost and how much people can save.

So for that like personal next step, I'd say definitely check out our consumer site and our personal electrification planner. And then I think, you know, for starting the journey, I would recommend this is something that I'm doing in my own home. My wife and I bought a house in October for the first time.

We don't have a ton of money to spend on electrification right now, so I think we're trying to take it piece by piece. And one thing that I'd encourage people to do is just to like start getting quotes for things because it's going to be so much easier if you're like, okay, hey, my water heater's going to die in two years.

I don't know who I want to do that project. I don't know how much it's going to cost. But if you just call three plumbers, get some quotes for installing a heat pump water heater, then you've [00:33:00] already reduced that barrier so that you know, okay, when it does die or when it's closer to dying, here's who I'm going to call and here's how much I can expect to pay.

So I would just encourage people to just like start calling people, start getting quotes, even if it's a project that you're going to do a couple years down the line. And that I think has the added benefit too, of showing these installers that there's demand for these projects. So that's something it's on my to-do list for like next week is getting heat pump and heat pump water heater quotes.

So that's one thing. And if I can offer one more suggestion, it would be to do the electrical work and the wiring first. So if you're switching from a fossil fuel to electric appliance, often you'll end up needing an electrician to come and run a new circuit because there are higher power demands for electric appliances.

So if you're switching from a gas stove to an induction stove, you'll probably need a new 240 volt circuit and outlet. So one [00:34:00] recommendation is to get your home electrification ready by just running all those circuits all at once. And that's something we did here. We needed to install an EV charger, so we went in and our dryers in the garage too.

We have a gas dryer right now. Which is like fairly uncommon. Only less than 20% of people in the country have gas dryers. So yeah, we went in and basically installed an outlet for our future electric dryer at the same time as we did our car circuit. Call an electrician, get a quote for doing all the pre-wiring, and we've got, I know that can be a kind of intimidating task because you don't even know what circuits you need. So we've got a great guide that's coming up onto our website in like a week or so check that out and check out what you need to do to pre-wire and get some quotes.

Quinn: I love that. And you know, you're building not just a to-do list, but you know, a bit of a budget.

Even if that might change over time and your state and your locality roll out certain things and rebates or your tax bracket changes, whatever it might be, you're getting a [00:35:00] general idea because otherwise it's very difficult to conceptualize sort of again, like the cost, but also the order evaporations, like you were saying.

Like get the brain of it done first, but also like again, who is the most experienced and reputable person to do this work. And I have been there where you call an electrician or a plumber, whatever it might be, and you're saying like, oh, I'm just trying to get a quote. And they're going to be like, well, look, if you're not going to do the work, like we're not going to come out.

Or you don't tell them until afterwards that you're just getting quote. They may be annoyed. That's fine. That's where we are like, you know? It's just like build it for yourself because you said like at least they will report back that there is some incentivized demand coming on these things.

Even if you, like you said, you're like, well, I'm three years away. Great. It's something every phone call counts here, you know? Every time someone comes out, every time an installer has to come out and look and go, how do I electrify this home? Every bit of that is experience for them as well. So that their job gets easier and more efficient.

Cora Wyent: For sure. Yeah. And that's, it is a good point about being [00:36:00] sensitive about people's time and not, don't call and get a quote if you're like, never planning on doing this I would say, but if it's like, okay, I know I need to do this in the next year or so, so like, let me get some quotes, let me get an installer lined up.

You're going to give them the business. It'll be in a couple months. Maybe not right away, but I think that's okay.

Quinn: But like you said, there are things you can do and you probably should do, and it's efficient for both you and them to do, like you said, if you have an electrician coming out to literally like fix an outlet.

Also have them run a 240, like basically wherever they can. If you are going to switch to induction and I mean there might be 120 versions eventually, but like put that there. Look at your water heater thing. Just walk around with them at least. And if not, if you can go further and actually have them do some work to set up these things, it's better because calling them a week later and saying, can you come back out?

They're going to say, see you in three to six months. Especially for something that is not in demand overnight, you know, something that's not required.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, it's great. It's so important to do that electrical work all at once. [00:37:00] Especially if like we're in this situation where we have our panel in a stucco wall and they had to like make a hole in the stucco to run some wires.

So like you don't want to do that twice. You really want to do that once.

Quinn: No, just do it. No one wants to deal with all a hole in the wall multiple times. That reminds me when I recorded with Leah Stokes, oh God, I don't remember how long ago. And I think she just finished her home electrification journey.

Like she was like, look at my kitchen. And it's just like holes and stuff everywhere because it's, you know, it is the brains of the operation. It's the nervous system of your house. And you do have to take it apart a little bit, especially if it's old or there's been additions and renovations and some of them are up to code and some of them are not.

Like, look, at some point you have to start doing at least the detective work to understand how your house is wired, you know? Was something shoved onto some other circuit at some point and the electrician's like, yikes. You know? You do have to do that stuff because if we're being honest and it's important to do so you're going to actually add to your electrical load over time here.

By adding, when you add an EV charger, when you add a heat pump, all these things, it's going to become more efficient. It's [00:38:00] probably going to save you money in the long term, but you are going to add your load, so you might even have to upgrade your panel. Like you want to find that out before someone's shipping you an induction stove.

Cora Wyent: Totally. Yeah. And I will say that on the panel upgrade side, there's a lot of really great people doing work on how you can electrify without a panel upgrade and I highly recommend people check out the Watt Diet Calculator online. So if you have a hundred amp panel, you may be able to avoid a panel upgrade just with some careful planning.

And I'm a huge advocate for this because no one wants to pay for a panel upgrade if you can avoid it.

Quinn: It's so much more than you think it's going to be.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then like, you know, you've got to wait for your utility to come out and drop a new service line. So I definitely recommend that people, there are some ways that you can electrify on a smaller amp panel really without sacrificing anything, which is amazing.

I think one major area where people can sort of save some room on their panel when they electrify is in that EV [00:39:00] charger. Like I've heard of people. Installing 80 amp EV chargers, which gives you like 600 miles of charge overnight. But no EVs have a big enough battery to take 600 miles of charge. Yeah, so definitely like install the smallest charger that you need to save room on your panel if you can.

Like typically a 16 or 24 amp EV charger will be plenty of charge for any household, that's like a hundred or 200 miles of charge at night.

Quinn: Yeah. I'm all for future proofing, but it's like, be smart. I mean, again, it is like, it's a finite resource, like try to be smart about it because it's just going to cost you and there's money in the IRA and I don't remember how much there is for panels and for like, like general wiring and things like that.

But again, like that's why doing this investigative work or whatever you want to call it, and building this budget really does matter. So you understand what you're really working with here and the, and again, the order of operations to do it. Talk to me about systemically, let's say our listeners, obviously if [00:40:00] someone is we've got plenty of legislators and aids that listen, but also they might be someone who frequents city council meetings for one reason or another.

Or they just may be a citizen who's going to do this for the first time and they're like, this has to get easier. How do I unlock this for myself and more folks? What is your first sort of order evaporations for them. What do we have for them?

Cora Wyent: Let's make sure we come back to renters after that.

Cause I remember you saying at the start.

Quinn: A hundred percent. Yep. I will get in write-ins from all of them because I have ignored them again, please.

Cora Wyent: Awesome. Cool. Sounds good. So I think for systemic, for sort of policy change, one thing that you can do is support these local ordinances that are requiring new construction to be all electric, you know? There's no reason that we need to be building homes that are connected to the gas grid right now. And every one of those we can avoid, in my opinion, is a great thing. And gas bans are, you know, they're political, but it's mostly about people being like, don't come and rip the gas stove out of my [00:41:00] current home, as opposed to looking at new construction and saying like, okay, like does it really make sense to be expanding the gas network to this new home right now?

Not really. It's going to lock people into like a fuel that's likely to become more and more expensive in the future.

Quinn: But also, if I can very briefly interrupt to be clear, like people should be on the forefront of this because it might seem sort of negligible to be talking about new housing when we have to retrofit all these existing ones.

We also need to build about 4 million new homes in this country and up zone everything. So it's actually a really important step. Talk about future proofing.

Cora Wyent: And then I think the other piece that's really important is we need to make sure that low income and communities of color aren't left behind in this transition.

And these are often expensive upgrades to make to your home. A low income household likely isn't going to be able to go out and replace their gas furnace or their air conditioner with a heat pump right away. So I think advocating for local policy that really addresses that sort of equity [00:42:00] issue and that gets these electric technologies into low income households is huge.

So, one of those direct install programs I talked about earlier, or incentives targeted to low income households. I think that's a huge thing for folks to advocate for because going back to the report, typically when you have these S-curves, the people who are really the early adopters are like the wealthier and whiter households.

What we really want to do with electrification is flip that on its head and have the early adopters be the people who can benefit most from the energy bill savings and the indoor air quality improvements and all of the many other benefits of electrification. So I think definitely getting at, if there's any bill in your state or local government that's about sort of these low income retrofits, go to a public comment period and express your support for it.

Ask what their plan is for retrofitting low income households if they haven't already got one. I think that's a big piece of it too.

Quinn: I want to talk about that briefly [00:43:00] offline, because there's. Something I want to get into with you guys in a positive way about this sort of thing tools for folks there.

What about the most obnoxious thing in the world? HOAs. Anything that you have found that's transferable from one to another that might be helpful to get past these ridiculous groups of people?

Cora Wyent: Ooh, that's something that we've had like on our to-do list for a while to figure out what works, and we haven't done enough work on it yet, but I think if you're a member of an HOA, getting on that board and then coming prepared with all of the benefits that electrification could bring to everyone in your community.

So talk to us, get some numbers. Use our planning tools and get some sense of like, what can everyone save on their electricity bills or on their utility bills by doing this, particularly if you're in a home that heats with like electric resistance or fuel oil or propane. You could save a ton of money by switching to electric appliances.

So I think [00:44:00] really getting the numbers and like coming prepared to that HOA meeting with like some facts and data about like, here's why this will be better for all of us. And hopefully we'll be developing some tools for people to make those arguments more in the future. But yeah, definitely a tough one and annoying.

Quinn: I love my neighbors. Someone knocked on my door recently and was like, Hey, are you interested in joining the board? And my initial response was like, Absolutely not. And I was like, should I join? And then try to dissolve it from the inside. Like how can I take this thing apart and she was, anyways.

Yeah. Oh God.

Cora Wyent: So what'd you do? Did you join or?

Quinn: I didn't, but now it's all I can think about is like, how do I show up and then just like piece by piece, dismantle the thing and just everything looks like Barcelona. Perfect. That's really helpful. So it sounds like, again, this report is really helpful.

It's the first real attempt, again, knowing we don't have all the data, but we're trying to do that you know, concurrently with all these different pieces and puzzles to try to say like, here's where we [00:45:00] need to go. Here's the real clenching moment at 2035. You know, no more after that. Here's where we think we are now, how it's been going.

Here's the pieces of the puzzle that are coming and you've got all kinds of calculators and tools that exist and are rolling out on that front to help people understand, okay, how do I do it for myself, but also try to accelerate this thing on a puzzle that is, you know, on a piece of the puzzle that is much more something they can conceptualize and put their hands on.

Because, you know, when people sign up for our email it's really wonderful. You get this little welcome email. There's just one question to answer. We actually just changed it, but it's traditionally been, Hey, can you reply to this and just tell me why are you here? And it's really wonderful cause I get investors and university presidents and second grade teachers and elderly folks and all these different people talking about like, why are they here?

Because it says on the front of the website, like, science for people who give a shit like you are very here for a reason. And it's really inspiring and wonderful, but it's compelling [00:46:00] to be able to go to people and turn it around and say, you can't. I know you're like, how do I keep the jet stream from slowing down?

You can't. Because climate change really is like, it is the heat on your back now. I mean, Jesus like the middle of the country right now. Holy shit. You know? It's the water that is becoming, you know, more difficult to come by. It is the toxic air. It's all these things. You can actually do things about those and the more we can take this 1 billion machines and dial it down to here are the practical steps you can take for yourself and your city.

What I want to get into again is sort of the most transferable basic policy things that people can take to as many different city councils and state meetings and public utility commissions, whatever it might be, water utilities for wastewater, that sort of thing that we can just start to see more compounding progress on.

Because that's really how we're going to jumpstart this S curve.

Cora Wyent: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's looking at where states that have been [00:47:00] successful so far, like Maine with Efficiency Maine, and even California, and saying, okay, how can we learn from this and then replicate this all across the country?

Quinn: Yeah.

And there's going to be an incredible amount of nuance, and that's going to be very frustrating. But there are things that do apply in a lot of different places, and among those is you're going to have a more comfortable home. You're go probably going to have lower bills over time. You know it's going to be safer.

There's not going to be pipelines that just randomly explode or methane leaks that, you know, make everything worse. Like everybody wins. It's just, it's going to take some real work. This is one of the things on our list, like, it's very, it's like I really like doing the dishes because it's a one, most people don't like to do it, so they're not going to bother me to do something else while I volunteer to do it.

But also it's a thing and then I watch it go down. Does that make sense? At the end of the day, I close my laptop. I'm like, what have I done today? Who can even know this is. Like doing the dishes. Like the thing we have to do is very tangible here, but it's going to take a lot of work. And [00:48:00] so the more tools, I'm so appreciative of everything you guys do from the data side to the tool side to help people really conceptualize that and put their hands on it.

Renters, where are we? I mean, again the preface is like the tools are very limited. There's some things you can do. You can get your little induction thing from Amazon or whatever it might be. The rest of it's a little complicated, but, so go, let's do it.

Cora Wyent: The main things right now are like, get the appliances that you do have control over.

We've just had this conversation on our Slack about how there's a $300 AC slash heat pump that you can actually buy at Costco right now, which is pretty incredible.

Quinn: Fucking Costco.

Cora Wyent: Fucking Costco. It's amazing, it's like a typical portable AC, but if you read the fine print on the box, I think it's fine print at least, don't quote me on that.

It says like also has a heat pump mode. So great. If you need a portable AC to survive the summer wherever you are. If you don't already have AC as a renter, check out this heat pump too and see if you can use it some in the winter to display some of your winter heating too. And then the [00:49:00] portable induction stoves are great.

I have one right now for us. It was like more of a get my wife on board with induction cooking, but she got it for me for Christmas and now we love it. And like she's a better saleswoman then me on this induction stove.

Quinn: That’s you need to do right. How do you set them on their journey?

That's amazing.

Cora Wyent: Exactly. Yeah. I like, I can't really keep my cool when I'm talking about electrification because I get too excited about it. So she is like really good at like talking to our friends about induction and EVs and everything. Cause she's just like yeah, she's way better at it than me.

It's so much fun to see. So yeah, we've got a great induction hot plate that's gotten us both on board with induction cooking and definitely recommend that for renters. And then, we're also going to be developing some tools on how to talk to your landlord about electrification. And eventually the idea would be to like, how do you actually organize the tenants in your building and be like, hey, this is a thing that we want to talk to your landlord.

So those are some of our [00:50:00] renter things that are coming up.

Quinn: It really is a version of control, what you can control and try to be pretty honest with yourself and your situation about that. Like, is this a place you're in just for the next eight months until you find another neighborhood or another place?

Are you going to be in it long term? If so, here are the appliances you can definitely control. Here's the ones you definitely cannot. And then in the middle, once you've gone down that journey is the, let's talk to the landlord about the ones we can't. And how do we frame that as. Lower bills, less shit's going to break.

All those things, you know, where everybody sort of wins, which not to group them all together but can be a difficult conversation with landlords. You know, getting them to replace anything much less something they don't need to is a tough one for sure. The renting thing, it's going to be inherently a little more limited, but I'm glad we're trying to proactively consider that group more, because it does matter and it is a lot of folks, this is where it comes more on the systemic side, which I love the organizing [00:51:00] front because so many of the low income folks are on the front and even their rent is out of their control.

And they're the ones that are going to suffer the most from gas stoves and windows that don't open and things like that. It really does matter. Awesome. Okay, last questions then we're going to get you out of here. Sound good?

Cora Wyent: Yep. Sounds great.

Quinn: I just want to say I'm really proud of myself that I haven't, my niece's name is your name and I'm really proud that I haven't called you Cora Bora, because I spent the whole weekend with her and I was like, don't do it, don't do it. She's an adult, don't do it. So I just want to put that out there.

Cora Wyent: I wouldn't been offended. It would've been totally fine.

Quinn: Well, that's very nice of you. But I was like, yes, I got here. This is really great.

It's kind like when I talked to an actual senator and I'm like, you cannot drop f bombs in this conversation. But like, come on, you can make it an hour.

Cora Wyent: Unless you’re Leah Stokes, in which case you can.

Quinn: Hundred percent, hundred percent. She'll do it before I do. Alright. Cora when was the first time in your life when you realized you had the power of [00:52:00] change or the power to do something meaningful, however you define that, whenever it might have been. Some people, it's like when they were a kid on student council or they saved a butterfly or student movement.

Like what is it for you?

Cora Wyent: Oh, that's a great question. Wow. I think it might have been in, I was like an activist about like a series of somewhat silly things when I was younger. And one of them was my dad's, he's a chemical engineer, he works in biotech and I think I must have been in like elementary school and I learned that they tested their drugs on animals, which like, at this point, like, yeah, that's something that we generally need to do, but I think I wrote him a letter of when I was like an elementary school student about like animal testing and why it was a bad thing.

So I think that was when I first was like, Hey, here's something that I see that I disagree with at the time, so I'm going to do something about it.

Quinn: I love that. That's awesome. That's really great. [00:53:00] I always love I could probably reframe the question as like, when were you radicalized, because that's generally what I get from folks.

But it's helpful. That's great. Okay, next one. Who is someone in your life that has positively impacted your work in the past six months? Very specific.

Cora Wyent: Oh man. So many people.

Quinn: Well, now you have to pick your favorite and then we're going to tell everybody who it was.

Cora Wyent: Okay. Work life or personal life or both.

Quinn: In your life. I'm not choosing for you. This is your question, Cora.

Cora Wyent: Oh, there's so many people. It's very hard to choose. But I think…

Quinn: We'll make sure we include that part that you're not picking among your children here.

Cora Wyent: I'm not sure if this is quite the right answer to this, but I'm managing people for the first time, which is a new adventure. And I feel really fortunate to have like multiple people at Rewiring America to like guide me along the way. So I'm going to cheat and pick two people, but Eric and Steve are two of my mentors who have been sort of helping me with that transition.

Quinn: There you go. That's so great. And [00:54:00] that's a real one. Managing people for the first time is a lot. Yeah, it's a whole different thing. It can be totally great and or a nightmare and it can alternate. And it's just like, it's not just, you don't just get to do spreadsheets and like really low efficiency solar panels. It's people. And that's complicated.

Cora Wyent: Sometimes I get too buried in my code and I'm like, oh my God. I have to be mindful that like, I'm not just doing this for myself anymore. I've got these other people.

Quinn: Right, like Jerry's been crying in the bathroom for an hour. Like, you got to go. It's your job now. Last one, in all of your free time what is a book you have read this year? In the past year? Really whenever, that has either opened your mind to some new topic or idea you hadn't considered before or has actually changed your thinking in some way. We got a whole list up on Bookshop and people love this stuff.

Cora Wyent: Oh, that's great. The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee. I listened to a podcast by her and then read the book. It's the sort of subtitle is what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. [00:55:00] And that just completely changed the way I think about like politics and race in this country. And I really liked it because like for a political book it's very solutions oriented too.

Like how can we actually get beyond this? And yeah, that book was fantastic. Highly recommend it.

Quinn: That's fantastic. See easy that was. So great. Thank you so much. This is probably much more annoying than you bargained for. You're wonderful.

Cora Wyent: No, this was great.

Quinn: Well, I appreciate it. It is, you know, whatever the make or break thing is that we're covering or talking about or thinking about. The question is always, and it's like why you guys exist, as well as people just going, what can I do? And it always sounds a little ridiculous coming out of my mouth, but I do always try to express to folks when I'm having a conversation, not the people who ask the question, but I really get that question in a lot of different ways.

I get, what can I do? Which is pretty specific about what is the [00:56:00] thing. But there's also, what can I do? Which when someone says, we got to replace a billion machine. That's really, it's easy to feel pretty diminutive, like an impotent. Covid, same thing. What can you do? Stay at home. That's hard to stomach actually.

And it's important to me to try to keep becoming more, not just efficient at helping people answer that question, but really specific in answering that question to continue to compound the trust they have in us to do that. Which is when I ask you to mash your finger against the button to donate or volunteer or buy something, all we've got is the trust of people who have trusted that we've done the homework for them.

So they don't have to do a lot. Unless they want to, but also as impactful, which is why I always try to frame things as here's what you can do for you to help your situation or to add your piece to this, but also unlock it for everyone else because I really hate the gate keeping in all of this. It drives me totally crazy and it doesn't need to be that way because these things are often paired together [00:57:00] or should be.

And you guys do such a great job of illustrating that. So anyways, thank you.

Cora Wyent: Awesome. Yeah, I love the way that you framed that. I think both pieces of what can I do and what can I do to improve this for everyone else are both incredibly important.

Quinn: Yeah. And some days you just want to like shop for an EV charger, which is great, but there's also like little policy things that you probably don't know exist where your city's like trying to figure out how to put more EV chargers around, or even better congestion pricing or just adding three more trolleys to the train.

Like whatever it is. It's also pretty easy to do that, but that's the one that's harder because there's not like a Wire Cutter for public policy, you know? Right. You guys are about as close as it gets for that.

Cora Wyent: I love that idea. Wire Cutter for public policy.

Quinn: I know. That's literally the thing I want to talk to you guys about.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I hope your day is more productive than it's been with us. You're just such a gem for joining me. Thank you so much.

Cora Wyent: No, this is great. Thanks so much, Quinn. This is awesome.

Quinn: That's it. The show is hosted by [00:58:00] me, Quinn Emmett. It is produced by Willow Beck up in Canada. It is edited by Anthony Luciani, and the music is by Tim Blaine. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified of new podcast conversations @ importantnotimportant.com. We've got a store there as well, t-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, all kinds of stuff.

You can find me on Twitter if it's still standing at Quinn Emmett. I'm also on LinkedIn or really anywhere else, even though I don't really have them on my phone anymore because it's dangerous. You can send feedback or questions or guest suggestions, really whatever to me on Twitter or at questions@importantnotimportant.com.

And if you're interested in sponsoring the show, we got a pretty high bar, but you can go to the website to look for more information there. That's it. Thanks for listening and watching, and thanks for giving a shit.