Massachusetts has awarded $53 million — and announced plans for additional funding — to allow affordable housing operators to execute energy efficiency retrofits that are expected to reduce carbon emissions, cut energy bills, and create healthier, more comfortable homes for residents. 

The state in late July announced the second round of awards in the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program, allocating $26.1 million to five organizations to improve insulation, tighten building envelopes, and switch to heat pump heating and cooling systems. These grants come seven months after an initial round of $27.4 million was awarded to seven affordable housing operators statewide. 

“This has been a really critical funding stream for moving forward critical energy projects at some of our family public housing sites,” said Joel Wool, deputy administrator for sustainability and capital transformation at the Boston Housing Authority, which received grants in both rounds.

Along with the most recent round of awards, the state also announced it would invest another $40 million into the program in anticipation of giving out another set of grants in the fall.

The program was designed to address two major policy goals: decarbonization and addressing the state’s affordable housing crisis. 

Massachusetts has set the ambitious goal of going carbon-neutral by 2050. Buildings — which contribute 35% of the state’s carbon emissions — are a particularly important sector to target for decarbonization. This means finding ways to retrofit the state’s existing housing stock, much of which is drafty, heated by fossil fuels, and decades — or even centuries — old. 

At the same time, Massachusetts is experiencing an acute housing crisis. State officials estimate at least 200,000 new homes are needed to accommodate demand by 2030. Finding an affordable home is even more challenging for lower-income residents faced with soaring rents and home prices — and often, high energy bills. 

“We have such a housing crisis in Massachusetts that we want to do anything we can to create more housing, but also to make the housing we have now a better place to live,” said state Energy Department Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony. “These are investments in our infrastructure.”

Nonprofit Worcester Common Ground received an $820,000 grant in the latest round that it will use to complete deep energy retrofits on four buildings that were last updated some 30 years ago. The money will allow the renovations to include air sealing, more energy-efficient windows, and extra insulation. The grant will also allow the buildings to go fully electric, including with air source heat pumps that will provide lower-cost, more comfortable heating and cooling.

“Even though it’s a higher upfront cost, the hope is that maybe it reduces expenses going forward,” said Timothy Gilbert, project manager for Worcester Common Ground. “It might sound a little cheesy but we really do care about the well-being of the folks who live in our houses.”

In most cases, the grant money is being combined with other funding to allow more complete — and even downright ambitious — upgrades. In Worcester, other funding sources will pay for rooftop solar panels that will make the newly energy-efficient buildings even more cost-effective and environmentally friendly. The Boston Housing Authority is using its latest $5.8 million award as part of a larger project that aims to completely decarbonize the Franklin Fields housing development in the Dorchester neighborhood by combining energy efficiency upgrades and Boston’s first networked geothermal system. 

In the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, the Madison Park Development Corporation is receiving $13.5 million from the Affordable Housing Decarbonization Grant Program to do work at its 331-unit Orchard Gardens development. But it is also seeking out other sources to meet the $20 million expected cost of the planned sustainability upgrades.

“It’s a big property and the heart of one of Boston’s oldest, most diverse, most underserved neighborhoods,” said Oren Richkin, senior project manager for the organization. “This grant money is pivotal for this project.”

Supporters of the program are expecting it to strengthen the state’s ability to respond to climate change in the future as well. Switching affordable housing units from fossil fuel heating to heat pump heating and cooling will allow residents to stay comfortable and safe in their own homes during increasingly hot summers, Wool said. 

The funding could also help nudge the ideas of deep energy retrofits and electrification more into the mainstream, Mahony said. 

“We are essentially socializing these programs — the more we do it, the more people will get used to the ideas,” she said. 

As the recipients of the first round of grants begin their projects, the state is starting to learn how to operate the program more effectively. The state has already, for example, started providing some technical assistance to organizations interested in applying for future rounds of funding. Continued conversations with building owners and nonprofits will be essential to creating an even stronger program moving forward, Mahony said.

“We’re setting ourselves up for success in the future,” she said.

Massachusetts awards $53 million to help affordable housing operators cut emissions and make homes healthier 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.

Communities in southern Maine are collaborating on a pilot program that aims to help residents overcome cost and logistical barriers to accessing climate-friendly home energy upgrades.

Five towns and two regional nonprofits received a three-year, $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program in late 2023. The budget for the program is now being finalized for launch this summer or fall.

The grant will fund AmeriCorps members to provide one-on-one energy coaching for residents. These “navigators” will help identify the best cost- and emissions-cutting retrofits for each home, and will help residents apply for a range of accompanying tax credits, rebates and other incentives. The grant also includes about $500,000 to directly offset residents’ remaining costs.

“The pilot program, as we envision it, will remove the up-front capital barrier and help homeowners navigate the process with confidence,” said Kendra Amaral, the town manager in Kittery, one of the towns participating in the grant. “We expect to see a significant increase in the number of households able to make energy-reducing and cost-saving improvements to their homes through this program.”

Kittery joins the towns of Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, Wells and Ogunquit in working with Southern Maine Planning and Development Commission on the project, along with York County Community Action Corporation. SMPDC will host the AmeriCorps navigators, while the county action agency will set up a new Southern Maine Energy Fund to help pay for projects and will provide energy services staffers to oversee actual retrofits and installations.

“We’ve heard from all of our communities that home weatherization and heat pumps are really important, but they didn’t feel like they could do it themselves,” said SMPDC sustainability coordinator Karina Graeter. “(This program) provides the opportunity for these smaller communities that don’t have their own sustainability staff or their own capacity to undertake big outreach and education efforts … to try and address the energy issues that have been shown to be really important to the community.”

Cost and information barriers

Maine relies more on home heating oil than any other state, and residential emissions are the state’s top contributor to climate change after transportation. In recent years, Maine has been nationally lauded for successful efforts to incentivize efficient electric heat pumps as a replacement for oil. State heat pump and weatherization rebates can total thousands of dollars per project, especially for lower-income people, and federal tax credits can offer thousands more.

But even hefty incentives may not cover everything, and energy bill savings from these upgrades can take months or years to materialize — meaning many people still can’t afford remaining project costs, said Amaral and Graeter.

During Kittery’s climate action planning process, the town discovered that many residents weren’t taking advantage of state energy rebates, Amaral said. And costs were not the only problem; Amaral said residents also cited “the confusing and often rigid process required to qualify” for incentives as another reason they chose not to pursue home efficiency or electrification work.

“There are so many great incentives out there, but they’re always sort of changing depending on what funding is available, you know, who’s running the program,” said Graeter. “Helping people navigate that requires a certain amount of skill and knowledge.”

The program’s navigators will be trained to help residents make the most of these complex offerings, she said.

The grant proposal envisions connecting with interested residents through whatever way they reach out to a participating group, whether it’s via the county agency or a town. Residents of any income would be paired with a navigator, who would answer their questions, assess their needs and provide technical assistance on designing a project with the greatest energy savings impact.

For low- and moderate-income families, the program would also provide instant rebates to offset upfront project costs. The county agency’s energy technicians would do the actual installation work on the project and follow up on other assistance options, including tax credits as needed.

Filling gaps at a regional scale

In the next six months of setting up the program, Graeter said her cohort plans to seek inspiration from other regional groups — like the county agency partnering on the grant, or WindowDressers, which builds heat-saving window inserts for low-income people — to design a community engagement approach that will reach the most people.

“The idea is to have a ‘no wrong path’ sort of option for people; meeting people where they’re at in terms of their energy needs, and figuring out what assistance they need most,” she said.

The participating towns have been working toward this program for years, since initially collaborating to fund Graeter’s position at SMPDC, Graeter said. This regional approach lets them learn from each other and build on shared progress rather than duplicating effort, she said.

Amaral noted that the pilot nature of the program also aims to help officials evaluate impact and potentially scale up similar efforts elsewhere in the state.

Graeter stressed that the grant doesn’t seek to replace federal energy tax credits or existing state programs offered by Efficiency Maine, the quasi-governmental agency that oversees Maine’s energy incentives.

“Our focus is really to increase access to those programs, and then provide some additional financial support to help bridge the gap between current incentives and the true cost of these upgrades, which is always shifting and changing,” she said.

Correction: Kendra Amaral is the town manager in Kittery, Maine. An earlier version of this story misspelled her name.

Maine towns band together to offer ‘energy navigators,’ extra funding for home energy 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.