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The need to prioritize the installation of heat pumps in California’s low-income households is clear.

California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment devoted a separate report on the challenges for low-income residents in the San Joaquin Valley and the resulting health implications. Affordable air conditioning is likely at the top of the list of health needs for the vulnerable in the San Joaquin Valley, where weather regularly exceeds over 100 Fahrenheit in the summer and fall.

“Some residents living in these homes are disabled, need regular medical attention, and are unable to work,” a program implementer noted in a pilot report update on San Joaquin Valley, reporting on the conditions that program recipients had endured prior to the heat pump installations. “Ethically, these customers need HVAC systems to live comfortably and cannot be overlooked.”

Yet ensuring that these same communities benefit from rebate programs to encourage heat pump installations is more complex.

It turns out that for low-income residents, participation in a rebate program can require thousands of dollars of additional out-of-pocket costs, relative to richer households, because the homes tend to be older, the electricity is more likely to need upgrades, and there are often additional modifications or infrastructure improvements required — such as replacing water damaged flooring or walls from leaks — to provide the power. These costs, for additional wiring and other critical work, are typically either only partially or not covered by most rebate programs.

TECH Clean California, a statewide initiative to accelerate the adoption of clean space and water heating technology and put California on a path to carbon-free homes by 2045, has identified these additional costs as a key barrier to introducing heat pumps into lower-income homes.

“If you are a lower-income or harder-to-reach person, you’re probably not going to participate in a program that requires you to do a $20,000 HVAC replacement that you can’t afford,” said Sandy Laube, an energy efficiency policy researcher at Energy Solutions, the program administrator of TECH Clean California.

To address this roadblock, TECH Clean California provided funding for an already existing program, the San Joaquin Valley Disadvantaged Community Pilot Project. The pilot is part of California’s broader effort to assess the economic feasibility of helping these residents reduce their energy costs by replacing certain appliances with electric ones. The findings will be used to determine how best to meet the State’s broader goals for addressing climate change and reducing the disproportionate climate burden these communities bear.

TECH Clean California, which has committed 40 percent of its incentive funding to income-qualified customers, has learned that working with other partners in equity work helps leverage that commitment even further.

For this effort, TECH Clean California experimented with encouraging greater participation from interested households, many of which were budget-constrained.

The San Joaquin Valley Disadvantaged Community Pilot program had funded the installation of heat pump systems into roughly 279 qualifying low-income homes in the San Joaquin Valley, but due to restrictions in how funding can be used, there is a $5,000 minor home repair remediation cost maximum. This put some of the needed repairs out of reach for would-be program participants.

TECH Clean California was able to provide enough additional incentive funding to expand the San Joaquin Valley Pilot, so that it could reach more residents. In fact, TECH Clean California successfully helped fund remediation work in 89 additional homes. “We saw that many of these lower-income households were not going to be able to participate and get the broader benefits of renewable power in their home,” Laube said. “We wanted to be equitable in how we are spending the incentive money, which has meant finding ways to include groups that would normally not participate.”

This additional TECH Clean California funding covered home repair expenses, trenching, and other infrastructure costs, bridging the gap between what the utility was able to fund through its program and what the end customers needed to install the new electrification equipment. As a result, eligible customers had no additional out-of-pocket expenses.

“The additional TECH Clean California funding ended up being very important,” said Jose Landeros, the Director of Energy Programs for Proteus. “If it had not been for those additional funds for the remediation, many of these customers would not have participated.”

The needed work which TECH Clean California funded were a subset of homes that PG&E’s Building Electrification program had identified as needing heat pump water heaters. For these homes in San Joaquin Valley, the preparatory work for installation in a 2022 pilot project revealed a broad range of preliminary repair issues that first needed to be addressed.

Many of these homes needed to relocate the new heat pump systems water heater to the exterior of the home, requiring the installation of a metal enclosure for protection from weather or other damage.

Several residences in the San Joaquin Valley also required panel upgrades to support the added load of the new electrical equipment.

“It costs more money to electrify low-income households,” said Rachel Etherington, an energy transition strategist with the Ortiz Group, who worked with the San Joaquin Valley community in facilitating heat pump installations. “You only know how bad it is when you’re on the ground. “There’s no pavement for example. You can’t put machinery on dirt. You must revert to manual trenching, so that’s a significant labor cost. And every single home needed an electrical panel upgrade. It gives you an understanding of why it’s such an interesting project, like the pioneer of low-income implementation.” However, these kinds of upgrades will have further benefits for customers down the road, providing the basis for further electrification.

“A 200-amp panel gives low-income customers a better availability of power for the future, meaning that if they do have to get an electric car, they now have the capacity to be able to put an EV charger on their house,” said Lyal Ray, a quality production manager for Synergy Energy who was actively involved in many of the installations for San Joaquin Valley. “They have the capacity to put battery storage that is provided for low-income housing.”

It’s these kinds of hidden costs that are proving to be a barrier for lower-income families to access the benefits that electrification technology such as heat pump water heater HVACs can provide. 

“Without TECH Clean California funds, 89 of these households would not have been able to participate, elderly residents who require electricity all day, residents on dialysis machines,” Etherington said. “They required a significant amount of infrastructure upgrades. But at the end of the day, these are people’s homes, and those TECH Clean California funds created a huge quality of life improvement for those households.”

Written by Emily Pickrell. For more information about this and other projects, please visit TECH Clean California’s Annual Report at techcleanca.com. The report highlights learnings and accomplishments through the initiative’s statewide focus and collaboration. The guiding principle of TECH Clean California puts the state on a pathway to six million heat pumps by 2030 and carbon-free homes by 2045.

Commentary: Encouraging heat pump technology for San Joaquin Valley residents is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This article is a paid promotion and the Energy News Network is not responsible for its contents.

Home electrification has many benefits: it is cleaner, more efficient, and reduces environmental degradation.

It also means that existing infrastructure for managing power coming into homes may need to be rethought. When customers want to switch from gas to electric appliances or add an electric vehicle charger to their home for example, many customers are faced with having to upgrade their electric service. This is an expensive project, and many customers may decide not to electrify. Fortunately, some emerging technologies in the California market are designed to intentionally balance a home’s power usage, and allow homeowners to avoid expensive panel upgrades, making electrification a workable option in situations when electrical upgrade costs or local infrastructure shortfalls would otherwise put a stop to the project.

These devices are known as “intelligent power management technologies” or IPMTs. They give customers options to juggle the use of different appliances and their power requirements to avoid capacity constraints and reduce installation costs when looking to fully electrify their homes.

They also have a much broader importance: helping the utilities manage and reduce the impact of millions of additional heat pumps, electric vehicles (EVs), and other smart appliances that California expects to add to the grid. The additional expected load is not insignificant. For example, California plans to have more than 12 million EVs on the road by 2035.

“These (IPMT) technologies are a real opportunity for utilities in California,” said Nick Neverisky, manager of Consumer Insights at VEIC and one of the authors of a CalNEXT report on alternative technologies that can mitigate the need for an expensive panel upgrade. For utilities, the technologies could make it easier for customers to participate in energy efficiency and demand response programs. It will be welcome help, said Neverisky, noting that “as California moves to rapidly electrify, the state will run into capacity constraints on a grid level, on a neighborhood level, and on a household level.”

With funding from CalNEXT — California’s emerging technology initiative — the VEIC team, with support of the Ortiz Group, recently published a report, “Market Study of Household Electric Infrastructure Upgrade Alternatives for Electrification”. This report looks at four alternative technologies and how each could be used to reduce the overall grid demand, both on a customer and a utility level.

“These technologies can help manage that capacity issue on a larger scale,” Neverisky said, noting that reducing the power demand helps utilities avoid the need for additional distribution infrastructure.

The study included smart technologies in the following four categories: outlet splitters, smart circuit breakers and relays, circuit control units, and smart electric panels.

The outlet splitter is the most basic technology. It is a circuit-sharing switch that splits an outlet between two loads, while preventing them from both drawing power at the same time. It’s designed to control power draw when two major electric devices are in the same room and can share a circuit, such as an EV charger and a clothes dryer both located in a garage.

A big advantage of the outlet splitter is that it does not require professional installation or configuration to meet code requirements. It’s a solution that could be easily utilized by a homeowner or resident. Its low cost and portability make it a good option for rental units.

A circuit control unit is another more comprehensive smart technology option. This is a stand-alone load management device that prevents a device from operating depending on available power on a circuit.

“Let’s say your electrical panel doesn’t have enough space to put in another circuit for the electric car charger,” said Alex Pine, an energy consultant with VEIC and a co-author of the report. “The electrician installs one of these circuit control devices on an existing circuit, for example an electric stove. This allows the stove and electric car charger to share the same existing circuit. When you get home, you plug in the car and the car starts charging. When you start cooking, the car charger shuts off, then resumes as soon as you are done.”

It’s best suited for a low-priority system and a high-priority system, or for two systems (such as heating and air conditioning) that will not run at the same time.

“They’re inexpensive, and they’re very easy to install for a hardwired device,” Pine said. “These circuit control units can be used in an application where the homeowner or resident is looking to add one new electric load and need a simple solution.”

A potential future option currently under development is a smart circuit breaker. A smart circuit breaker provides the same overcurrent protection as a conventional circuit breaker and installs in a conventional circuit breaker panel. Smart circuit breakers, however, can also collect electrical system usage data and control the circuit they are installed on. Smart circuit breakers are currently on the market but at the time of the report did not offer intelligent power management.

When they are on the market, these features could open the door to power management that is scalable, allowing a customer to juggle power between individual circuits in their circuit breaker panel. This is especially important for houses where a range of additional electrical equipment is being added.

A smart panel is the broadest solution. A smart panel fully replaces a traditional electric panel and is fully integrated into the functionality of the home. It typically allows for control, monitoring, and management of all circuits within the house, with features such as energy consumption monitoring and remote access capabilities. It allows customers to better understand how and when they use electricity, which may encourage them to reduce energy consumption overall and/or shift energy consumption to off-peak hours for customers on time-of-use rates. As a smart panel manages all circuits in a building, there is more flexibility in managing circuits including smaller capacity ones.

One big challenge for all these technologies is getting the word out — to customers who would benefit by being able to afford the upfront cost of electrification, to utilities that could benefit from customers managing their increased electricity demand right at the source, and to contractors and electricians, who are key in facilitating their adoption in homes.

“Demonstrating how IPMTs can help homeowners achieve their energy goals, whether electrification or savings, is necessary to gaining customer support for these technologies,” the authors wrote in the report.

Customer buy-in, the authors emphasize, will greatly help California meet its ambitious carbon reduction goals.

“We’ve got older homes that don’t have as much capacity, with residents who do not have the income to afford to retrofit service upgrades,” Neverisky said. “If we want to continue to decarbonize, and do so equitably, these smart technologies are going to be part of the solution.”

As utility customers consider switching out old appliances to cleaner electricity in their homes or adding EV chargers to their garages, these technologies offer a bridge to overcome the first-cost barrier and help facilitate success. Utility incentives could entice customers and give them the confidence boost they need to make the decision to go electric and be a part of the solution to decarbonize California.

To learn more about this project, read the report on the CalNEXT website, or email info@calnext.com to continue the discussion.

Written by Emily Pickrell, this article was submitted by CalNEXT. CalNEXT is a statewide initiative to identify, test, and grow electric technologies and delivery methods to support California’s decarbonized future. CalNEXT is funded by the ratepayers of California investor-owned utilities and provides a means for studying emerging technologies and energy-efficiency innovations that have the potential to save energy via utility programs and/or market support. 

Commentary: Smart panel technology may replace need for pricey upgrades is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This article is a paid promotion and the Energy News Network is not responsible for its contents.

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