In this episode, I chat with Ari Matusiak, co-founder and head of Rewiring America, which recently received a $2 billion grant from the feds to take home electrification mainstream. We dig into the practical challenges — getting local contractors on board, simplifying rebate access — and the enormous opportunities.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Greetings everyone, this is Volts for November 1, 2024, "How is electrification going?" I'm your host, David Roberts. Earlier this month, I attended the annual conference put on by Mountain Towns 2030, which brings together leaders from small western towns and ski hills to discuss how they can collaborate to advance their shared climate goals.
It was a blast! More so than most conferences, it was clear that everyone involved is driven by a deep and sincere love of place, of home. And with that love of place — along with all the limitations and restrictions that come with being a small place in a large landscape — comes a certain pragmatism and creativity that are, in our hyper-ideological times, incredibly refreshing.
The culmination of the conference was a conversation between me and Ari Matusiak, the co-founder and head of Rewiring America. We discussed the progress of electrification so far, how IRA is working, and what his organization plans to do with the $2 billion — yes, billion with a B — grant it received from the feds.
So much exciting stuff on the horizon. Enjoy.
Host
We now have the keynote presentation, and I saw one of these speakers this morning and it blew me away. I told him it was like getting a fire hose of information directly to the face. And in a positive way. It turned out I liked it; it was nice. But you guys are about to experience the raddest talk, I'm going to say it, of the whole conference. I don't know, we'll see. Give it up big for David Roberts and Ari Matusiak.
David Roberts
I feel overhyped now. I feel like I need to do something to lower expectations. So, we're here to talk about home electrification and its various ramifications. And I was telling Ari earlier: So, I've been, I guess, a member of the Church of Electrification for several years now, evangelist to the point of annoying friends and family. So, I often assume that everybody surely gets it by now. But you know, I've been reliably informed that not everyone thinks about this stuff as much as I do. So, I thought a good place to start was kind of the origin story of Rewiring America.
So, you know, I guess this is how I'd frame it. For the first part of my career, for the first, I've been at this for 20 years, something for the first long part of my career, part of the problem with climate change was the solutions were big and far away. Big, far away, policy. Distant, about power plants, about the federal government. And then when individuals wanted to contribute, they heard, "Turn off your lights, buy a hemp tote bag," which everybody rightly recognized as absurd and futile in the face of, you know, which left, I think, individuals very frustrated. But I feel like a lot of what's happened since then, especially in the last 10 years, especially in the last five years, is that middle area has filled in.
So, there are ways now for individuals to tap into meaningful changes, for individuals to do something that is larger than tote bags. And so, this is all by way of framing sort of Saul Griffith, co-founder of Rewiring America — the smartest guy you've ever met, largest beard, probably you've ever seen — he had kind of this original insight that gave birth to Rewiring America about electrification and the demand side. So, maybe just start there. Like, why do we care about electrification?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, well, it's wonderful being here with you and doing this together in our living room without anybody else here. So, when you take a poll in the United States of people who are concerned about climate, you typically get a number that looks like 60% to 70% of Americans are concerned about their climate future and where we're heading. If you then ask those people what they should do, the number one thing people say is not actually a hemp tote bag. The number one thing people say is that they should recycle.
David Roberts
Oh, God, worse.
Ari Matusiak
And the number two thing that people say is that they should stop eating meat.
David Roberts
Ugh, I guess.
Ari Matusiak
But here's the insight that Saul really unlocked. And it started with a grant that he received from the Department of Energy in 2016, where he took what is a Department of Energy diagram, called a Sankey diagram, that maps all of the sources of energy in the U.S. economy and ties it to their uses. The uses are things like transportation, industrial, commercial, residential. And instead, he said, "Well, we're going to map it down to 0.1% granularity." Because Saul has a very big —
David Roberts
Magnificent spaghetti. The spaghetti diagram should be framed.
Ari Matusiak
And he turned it into a shower curtain at one point and thought it was going to be a big seller. It wasn't. It wasn't. But in that mapping, what the core discovery was, was that 42% of energy-related emissions in the US are tied to about five kitchen table decisions that we all basically make. What kind of cars we drive, how we heat the air and water in our homes, how we cook our food, how we dry our clothes, and how we power those things. 42% of energy-related emissions in the US economy is quite a lot.
And it really redounds ultimately to a very small handful of decisions, which means that the number one through five things that you can do sum up to your share of 42% of energy-related emissions. That's a huge amount. And so the conversation historically in climate has oriented itself kind of in two ways. One way has been basically separating the individual from the solution, as you were saying. And so it becomes a story of, "Well, we're all going to have to adapt to our future," or someone is going to come along and invent a technology that's going to save us all from ourselves.
But you're kind of not in the story. And the other way that it sort of gets organized is that it's all about these big decisions on the supply side, basically.
David Roberts
Right, right.
Ari Matusiak
And what the key insight here was, that if you flip it around to the demand side and start talking about all of these machines, it ends up being a billion machines across 129 million households that need to be electrified over the next couple of decades, but they really only need to happen one decision at a time. And that's the core of the idea.
David Roberts
Yeah, so Saul's whole thing is we can hit our climate targets if every replacement of every one of those billion machines is an electric alternative from now on, which is rather ambitious. So, one of the sort of happy historical accidents in all this, I feel like, was, you know, Saul and you are developing this idea, talking it through just as Joe Biden wins, just as there's a special election in Georgia which gives Democrats a narrow majority. So then, Democrats start thinking, "What are we going to do on climate? We need to do something on climate."
And then, sort of, Saul and the whole electrification thing find their way into the halls of power somehow. I mean, the way Saul puts it is — the IRA, Inflation Reduction Act, it's a dumb name — the IRA is the first climate legislation he's aware of that was written by engineers rather than lawyers, is the way he puts it. So, talk about a little bit how the IRA was shaped by this insight and what is the result in the IRA?
Ari Matusiak
Well, the Inflation Reduction Act was shaped by lots of people, for honestly, decades in the sense of laying the groundwork to take advantage of that moment. And it really is this incredibly historic and sort of underappreciated, I think, even to this day, how big a deal that thing was. It also died several times in the process.
David Roberts
Yes, I remember quite well.
Ari Matusiak
Yes, I cried precisely three times during the process. Twice when it was dead, and once when it passed.
David Roberts
Yeah, I remember my wife saying like "The world is ending? I thought the world ended already." And I was like, "No, it ended again."
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, it ended again. Yeah, Merry Christmas. That was one of the times. So, I think the thing that I would just say about the Inflation Reduction Act is it has a lot of different levers and incentives that are designed to shift the market. But what's really going on in the end is that it's creating incentives for people to take action. And I kind of think about it as what the Inflation Reduction Act did in large measure was it created an electric bank account for every household in this country. Now, people need to know that they have it and they need to know how to access it.
And what's incredible about that piece of legislation is that it really is all oriented toward a set of opt-ins. So, when the Congressional Budget Office sort of priced the bill in terms of how much it would spend, it came in somewhere around $300 billion.
David Roberts
$369 billion.
Ari Matusiak
Yes, $369 billion. But the story about the $369 billion is that it was based on a set of projections about how many people would use the things. And so, later, Goldman Sachs came around and they said, "You know what, it's actually more like $1.1 trillion." And we looked at it and we said, "Actually, if you think about the replacement cycle of all of these machines and the incentives that are in the Inflation Reduction Act, there are $567 billion that could be spent over the decade to support households in those kitchen table decisions." That's an enormous amount of money to go directly to households and communities to help do that massive shift away from fossil fuels and reducing the emissions in the process.
David Roberts
For people who aren't familiar, just run through all the things that are incentivized.
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, well, we have a terrific calculator at rewiringamerica.org that you can go find to learn what you're eligible for. But effectively, it breaks down into a few parts. One, the Inflation Reduction Act does a magnificent job of using the tax code. And so, there are tax credits for things like rooftop solar and batteries, for heat pumps, for heat pump space heating and water heating, for geothermal systems, for electrical panels and wiring and insulation, for induction cooktops, and for EVs.
But not for electric bikes. Let me just put that up.
No, we actually —
David Roberts
Big disappointment.
Ari Matusiak
Yes, we actually fought for the electric bikes, so we didn't get them in. But there are tax credits that are available for all of those. And then there are also rebates that are put out through the states for people who are income-qualified to get an additional subsidy to help make the math work for them. The whole premise of the Inflation Reduction Act is basically to push down the upfront cost to unlock the savings on the other side for families. Because the story of the transition to electrification is that households become winners on multiple levels.
Yes, it's good for the climate, but in the end, most people don't make climate-based decisions when they're sitting around their kitchen table. They're trying to make their budgets balance every month. They're thinking about the comfort in their home, they're thinking about the health of their kids. And so, the whole premise of the Inflation Reduction Act is to push the upfront cost down so that what you access on the other side, you ultimately unlock the savings that come with that.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's a very familiar story across clean energy, which is those high upfront costs and then the greater savings over time. So you shave that high upfront cost, then you harvest the savings. I'm sort of curious, just as a kind of geek, about the IRA. If there are, other than electric bikes, are there big pieces that got stripped out or lost that still haunt you? Is there any? Or do you feel like it covered the household electrification waterfront?
Ari Matusiak
"Make me cry a fourth time? I think there were opportunities in the Inflation Reduction Act to do things around tax credits, in particular for heat pumps and heat pump water heaters, to make them sort of bigger and also, candidly, to make them more widely available."
David Roberts
They were originally direct pay, which just means you don't have to wait and do it on your tax form. You just get it at the point of sale.
Ari Matusiak
Right.
David Roberts
So, they all used to be like that.
Ari Matusiak
So, there were opportunities, I think, to enhance that and hopefully, we can keep working on that. And then, I think with the rebates, the rebate programs that are up and going out to the states, they're robust. They're about $9 billion worth of rebates that are flowing out to the states, but they're also going to get used very quickly. And I think there's an opportunity for us to come in behind and support those policies on an ongoing basis.
David Roberts
Yeah, so this thing, which is a pretty big grand experiment, was passed two years ago. Have we hit the two-year anniversary? This is about two years old. So, what's your grade on implementation? We've had two years to see. How is it working? Are people taking advantage of the rebates and credits? Are they going out? Do people get it? What are the friction points that you see so far in implementation?
Ari Matusiak
Well, one of the things that happened as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act is a commitment to reporting on progress. So, the IRS is printing the receipts of who's using the tax credits, and the 2023 report is basically out. And it's a stellar grade, a solid A of performance in terms of people actually accessing and using these credits. And you're starting to see it in the macro data, too. So, heat pumps are outselling fossil fuel furnaces now for the second year in a row. And there's a relationship to these incentives that are in the market.
The rebates are just starting to come online. So, sometimes people say, "Oh, that's been too slow to get out into the world." A handful of states have their programs online. Another handful will have them online before the end of the year.
David Roberts
So, the rebates, the money for rebates, goes to states and sort of states design their programs, like, historically programs like that. Sometimes you see red states sort of not moving with alacrity, you might say. Are we seeing that kind of thing or...?
Ari Matusiak
No, and, you know, I'll give you an example. Actually, the state of Florida had made a decision that they were not going to accept the rebate dollars. And then they decided that they were going to accept the rebate dollars. And it makes sense, right? Because why should Floridians pay for somebody else to get the benefit of the rebates when they should be coming to them? And actually, the red, blue, and purple states, all of them are working really hard with the Department of Energy to get their programs up and running. And the reason why I think this program is smart in a lot of ways is because it allows the states, the statute says, "This is the framework for the rebates and how they get applied to all these various technologies."
But the states get to focus on the things that are most important and are going to have the biggest benefit to the people that live there. And so, I actually think what's happening is it's creating capacity in states to think about how they can use these kinds of dollars to stand up programs that will hopefully be supported over the long run, but that are creating market momentum locally as well.
David Roberts
So, just from an individual perspective, walk us through. Like, I go buy a heat pump and then later when I'm filing my taxes, I just put it on there and then it's added to my rebate check? Or, like, how do you access these things?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, so it depends on what we're talking about. The rebates for people who are eligible for them: they're point of sale. So it's sort of money off the top, right? The tax credits are filed. It depends on which tax credit we're talking about. If you're getting rooftop solar or battery storage or an EV, it's basically off the top. If you're getting something like a heat pump and you're using a tax credit, then you're going to file that and get the credit later. But the totality of this is that — and this is one of the reasons why we created the calculator, actually — is that it's very hard for someone to figure out what they are eligible for, for how they should access it.
And keep in mind that it's not just federal monies, although those are obviously quite significant. But states, localities, and utilities have programs, too. And so, I met this gentleman in Colorado a couple of months ago, and he — because we had, as part of what we're doing with this calculator, is we're bundling all of those incentives so that you can find out all the things that you're eligible for and make it easy. And this gentleman had a piece of paper because he wanted to electrify his house for his own benefit, but also to pass on to his kids.
And it was unbelievably complicated. And what he said was, he had taken two hours to figure out what he qualified for. So, this is the thing that we need to solve to make it easy for people to navigate.
David Roberts
In some sense, it's a good problem to have because, like, Colorado is heaping incentives upon incentives. Like, I don't know what the total EV is, like, I think if you buy an EV in Colorado, there's like $14,000 off or something like that, or something ridiculous. So, yeah, this brings me to my next question. An analogy you've made before and I've talked about before is, you know, when they passed Obamacare, there was money in there for what are called navigators, which are just people to go to communities and say, "Here's what the law did, here's what you can now access, here's how it works."
Just evangelists and explainers of what just happened. The IRA has none of that, which is, if there is one real critique I would personally offer of the IRA, it's just like, so much work and so much money and so little hype, so little, you know, so little telling of the story. So, you guys are trying to kind of play that role. So, talk a little bit about how you're doing that.
Ari Matusiak
Yeah. So, the way we think about this is that if it's a kitchen table solution, right — these five things that people make decisions about — we ultimately have to make it work for you at your kitchen table. And that means it has to be affordable, it has to be desirable, and it has to be better as an experience. And I have yet to meet, maybe you can break the pattern, but I've yet to meet anybody who has said, "I can't wait for the new model of the water heater to come out because I'm totally upgrading next year."
Like, that's not a thing that people do, I don't think. And so, this is not. These are not sort of choices that consumers know a ton about. They don't think a lot about them, and they don't feel empowered around them. And so, when the time comes because your furnace conked out or your shower is cold.
David Roberts
Yeah, do we know, like, percentage-wise, how many of these replacement decisions are made under duress because the machine broke?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, it depends. But it's a significant percentage. It's easily sort of half or more. And that creates a dynamic where now, if you are a household and the goal from a climate perspective is to transition to this better electric future and you're running into a status quo that reproduces a fossil fuel outcome, it's very hard to break that cycle. And so, the way that we think about this is that we have to create sort of an alternative path for households. So, one step of that was to create incentives that push the cost down. And that's the Inflation Reduction Act and a bunch of work that we and other organizations do in states around the country.
But it is, in addition, sort of making the process sort of simple. So, we have invested quite a lot of resources into building an amazing team of software product engineers who are designing tools so that you can sort of know what is right for you. And that's important because if you are empowered to sort of understand what the right answer is for your home, what incentives you qualify for, and it can be connected to a contractor that can do that work, it takes a lot of the kind of uncertainty and the complication out of the process.
We are also, to the point of the navigators, we are standing up a program that is doing exactly that to be kind of like the right hand to someone and help them sort of navigate the process. And what's actually, like, pretty amazing about this is that it taps into a desire from so many people to participate in supporting the transition. So we started off with this electric coaches program. It's like nine hours of classes that I went through and I scratched my way — I barely passed. So it was important to go through it.
But we've had almost 1,000 people just raise their hands and say they want to be a part of it. And they want to be a part of it because they want to be helpful in their communities to help households to kind of figure out what the path is. A lot of these people are retirees or former engineers or they are people who just have a passion for this stuff and went through the process themselves. And so the goal is to effectively put the resources around the household so that they have a trusted pathway to go through that makes it easy for them.
David Roberts
So theoretically, anyone here could go take the course, become an expert in home electrification, and then spread the news in their communities. So, you're empowering peer-to-peer, basically. Peer-to-peer navigators. I wanted to ask about: there's been some backlash from some quarters about, you've probably heard it all about, contractors don't know what they're doing, aren't familiar with this stuff. So, even if you sort of do the calculator and you know what you want, you often end up arguing with your contractor. And most ordinary people don't want to argue with their contractor, you know, and contractors doing sort of shoddy installations because they're not familiar with it, and then the thing doesn't perform the way it was advertised and then you're risking backlash basically to the whole program if people find their expectations disappointed. Is that, I mean, there's going to be backlash and kvetching about literally anything that happens in the world.
But do you think that that's meaningful? Like, do you worry about backlash?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, I guess the way that I think about it is, what I worry about is creating a great experience for households and you end up in kind of a chicken and egg dynamic. Because there are hundreds of thousands of contractors in the United States. The vast, vast majority of them, probably eight out of 10 of them, maybe nine out of 10 of them, do less than a million dollars a year in sales. They are small business owners. So if you say to a small business owner, "Hey, I have this great idea, this bill passed —"
David Roberts
They love to hear that, customers —
Ari Matusiak
"There's a bill passed, and there's money for heat pumps, and you should totally sell heat pumps." Now, they might logically ask, "How many jobs is that going to be?" And if you say, "Well, I don't know, but it's going to be great," they might not take you up on the trade, right? They might say, "Well, I don't know, that seems risky." And so, this is the status quo because you have contractors who are trained and accustomed to installing, servicing, selling, promoting a certain type of machine. And you're talking about something that is new and different. Now, one of the ways that you can overcome that is if you have a lot of people in a community raising their hand, saying they want that thing, because now you have created a signal for someone that there's meaningful business to do.
And that is a way to kind of invest basically in the opportunity. That, for me, is a really important North Star, is that the way that you kind of crack through this market dynamic is basically by aggregating demand. And if you aggregate demand in local places, and it's relevant to this conversation because there's no such thing as a national market for HVAC, it's happening within the drive time of a contractor in their van. And so, if you can solve for the number of people raising their hand saying, "I actually want to go in this direction," then you have created actually the beginnings of a virtuous cycle where contractors are going to service that opportunity where people are getting the better thing, they're talking to their friends and neighbors. And it becomes a bit of a story that catches.
David Roberts
Are you doing any similar sort of training program for contractors? Are you working directly with contractors to sort of train them up and familiarize them with this stuff?
Ari Matusiak
We are starting a — we call it Rewiring Communities. And we're starting with this sort of place-based approach. As a part of that, what we are doing is we're working with manufacturers and ultimately identifying contractors to be a part of that program.
David Roberts
I want to set some context for this because this is what I'm most excited to talk about. So, I just want everyone to know. I can't even talk about it without laughing. So, earlier this year, you might have followed that there were these Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the big chunk of money in IRA for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which basically would direct grants to organizations in states and localities who have ideas about how to reduce greenhouse gases. There's a long application process, a long assessment process. And Rewiring America received a $2 billion — with a B — grant from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
Which means, like, we're no longer talking about, "Come to our website." You know, it's not just a website anymore. We're talking about big money. You still should go to the website. Big, big money, big plans, actual scale stuff. So that's the background for this sort of localized local focus programs. So just walk through, you know, you've picked a few communities to start with. Walk through the process of what are you doing with that community? Like, what are the steps?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, so it starts again with figuring out what's going to work for the household. And the way that we are thinking about this is starting with a solution for, let's say, heat pumps so someone can get the benefit of this better electric machine that's a magical device that heats and cools your home all at once. But it's super complicated to figure out. There are these incentives that are already there through the Inflation Reduction Act. What we're doing is we're saying, "Okay, we're gonna offer a solution that is a standardized solution for this heat pump in your home."
And we have gone out as a part of this to manufacturers and have said, "We are going to do this in communities and we would love for you to participate in this solution."
David Roberts
We're going to buy in bulk.
Ari Matusiak
We're going to bundle them all up. So, in order for you to participate as a manufacturer, because we need a partner, but we're going to be delivering all of these jobs, the trade there is to give us a discounted sort of price.
David Roberts
Right.
Ari Matusiak
And what you start to realize is that in the story of aggregating demand, you're saying, "Okay, we're going to create a common heat pump solution pathway for our households. We're going to standardize the equipment package that is going into that home. We're going to leverage the Inflation Reduction Act rebates and incentives that are already available in the market. There is carbon in these homes that if we can bundle up that carbon and sell it to a corporation that is looking for offsets, that creates a further subsidy to the household." All of those things push down the price.
And what is left is an amount that the household can either pay directly, but it's a low price compared to the value and it unlocks the savings on the other side. Or they can finance that through us. And we use the money from the EPA through this greenhouse gas reduction fund to subsidize the cost of that so that it is a low interest rate. The whole premise of this is to bundle up as many households as we can in a place in order to create the market momentum. And that story is, we have to, you know, we're kind of going to crawl before we run here.
So, the goal next year is to do several hundred households, not, you know, several hundred thousand. But once we can solve pulling all those pieces together —
David Roberts
And the contractor piece, too. You're gonna find good contractors.
Ari Matusiak
And finding a good contractor and saying to the contractor, "Look, the opportunity here is to do lots of jobs," and delivering those, by the way, off-peak season. So there, when they're not busy and could use the work as opposed to when they are super busy and don't have time for it. This is all kind of part of the vision that we've had since the beginning with Rewiring, is that you need the policy signal and to shift the story about where we're going. But ultimately, the policy is not self-executing because households are making decisions every single day at their kitchen tables. And if we can make that decision easy to say yes to for that electric opportunity in the future and deliver the value on the other side, then you start to move communities and you start to move the market overall.
David Roberts
Right. So, just to review this because it's a little bit mind-blowing when I first heard about it. The idea is, you go to a community, you've bought heat pumps in bulk, you've taken the IRA incentives off, you've sold it as offsets. So, you've driven the cost of those heat pumps as low as, probably lower than any consumer can find on their own. You found contractors that do good work and are willing to do the work. And basically, all the consumer in the community has to do is say, "Yes, I would like this," and then you come install the machine. Voila. So, basically, you're taking all the burden off the household other than just saying "yes" to this offer.
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, just two things to kind of go into it in a bit more detail. We're not pre-buying all of the machines in bulk, but we will create a relationship and a partnership with manufacturers where they are able to participate in the sort of demand that we're generating. And we're going to work with local partners to fulfill this. So, you don't want me installing a heat pump in your house and I won't be, but local partners and local contractors will be doing that work. And again, the orientation here is there is a massive amount of value in the transition to an electric future.
And the value is hidden because it's super fragmented, because it's one decision at a time. And if we can break through that, when we break through that and show that it is right there and it is, is sort of organized in local communities and markets, not only is that a benefit to the household and to local contractors and to sort of other players in the community, it's valuable to the community itself and it unlocks, frankly, a lot more resources that can be reinvested in the community, that can support the resiliency of the community. And that's really what our goal is.
David Roberts
And so, like you said, you're going to walk before you run, you're going to test this out with communities, you're going to expand to other communities. But the vision, as I understand it, is in some, maybe not too distant future, that this will be effectively national and that any community will be able to take advantage of it. And is, I don't know how to wrap my head around $2 billion. Like, is $2 billion enough to take that national or is it like seed money?
Ari Matusiak
Oh, I'm so glad you said seed money. It is seed money. That's exactly how we think about it. And you know, the $2 billion was awarded to this terrific coalition that we're a part of with Habitat for Humanity, United Way, two organizations called Enterprise and Local Initiative Support Corporation, which are two of the largest multifamily, affordable housing development arms in the country. And the $2 billion is a really amazing investment and opportunity, and it is nowhere near enough for what we need. But what the important thing that it does do is that it allows us to start to arrange the players around the table who are going to be able to unlock that value.
And it allows us to invest in the infrastructure that we need to deliver this solution to households. And if you think about it, ultimately, and this was really the goal of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, was to mobilize capital in the private market to bring it to these solutions. And again, if you just think it through in a really plain way, if a household is investing in something that is saving them money on their monthly bills, increasing the comfort of their home, it's also increasing the asset value of their home. And they're getting it for a very good value.
They are a terrific credit to underwrite if you're a lender. They have more disposable income as a result, which is catalytic. And so, the amount of money that can start to come in behind and support what is ultimately sort of a lot of people raising their hands and participating is where the real transformative effect is. The last thing I'll say about that is it all comes back to it being a great value proposition for the household.
David Roberts
Well, also, like the manufacturers, it's good for the manufacturers, it's good for the contractors, it's good for the consumers. So, presumably, once it's up and running and that's demonstrated, money will come in.
Ari Matusiak
Exactly.
David Roberts
Money will come in and start to support. Also, the other part of the vision, which I also find insane, is you're going to go beyond heat pumps eventually. Like, eventually, people in these communities will be able to check the box saying, "I want a heat pump," or "I want the heat pump plus the induction stove package," or "I want the heat pump plus the induction stove plus the solar on the roof package." Or maybe they can just do one checkmark and say, "Electrify the crap out of everything. Like, go-for-it package."
Ari Matusiak
That's the name of this.
David Roberts
Yeah, which is the one I want. And all of which will be easy and running eventually on private capital. You're just sort of trying to catalyze this thing into existence. Just awesome. So, we got about 10 minutes left. I promised we'd have some Q&A. I could talk to Ari forever, but I'd love to. Where are those boxes?
Host
Oh yeah, we got the, we got the catch boxes. Who's got the green one?
Ari Matusiak
Oh my.
Audience Member 1
I don't even know if this is a question or a statement, but.
David Roberts
No, no, no, no, no, no. Only questions allowed. We do not want any statements.
Audience Member 1
Whenever I want, I am an elected official.
David Roberts
Is that how democracy works?
Audience Member 1
Yeah, pretty much. Welcome to America, bud. So, we've done a lot of this stuff in our county. P.T. Wood, Chaffee County, Colorado, best place in America. We've adopted an electric-preferred model where you have to wire for electricity even if you put in gas, all that stuff. But, we suffer extended outages consistently and that makes it hard to sell. Right? Half our county is in a co-op, the other half is in Xcel. And Xcel sucks.
David Roberts
True, true fact.
Audience Member 1
And I know my buddy from Xcel may very well be here, but I've already told her that Xcel sucks.
David Roberts
She's great.
Audience Member 1
She's great. I mean, electricity is super challenging. How do we bridge that gap?
David Roberts
This is the number one thing, by the way, I hear from people when I go out and evangelize about induction cooktops, which I do with annoying frequency, is, "I want to be able to cook when my power's out." Right. So, the more you electrify, the more dependent you are on the grid, basically. And the grid, depending on where you are, is not super dependable. So, how do you address that? I mean, maybe in some bright future, we'll all be in nested microgrids and we'll all be able to have local, you know, self-reliance. But today, how do you think about that?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, I would just say that outages happen in the energy system, period. They happen on the grid, they happen with gas. This is not a — it's not one or the other. And the future state, as you said, like the shiny happy path. Like to your question about how you bridge the future, you know, the zoom forward view is when everything is electrified is actually that is the most resilient solution that we have because there are batteries in our cars that are backing up our homes that allow us to shave load when at peak times, which reduces like intensity on the grid.
David Roberts
Having like thousands of controllable home loads presumably will help prevent —
Ari Matusiak
Exactly. So, the way I kind of think about it is, we need to start thinking about the household as part of our distributed energy infrastructure, not separated from it. But the concern today about what do I do for my family is a real one, and we can't sort of like, jump past that. And so, the good news there is that the sort of trajectory in terms of where these machines are going is, you mentioned induction cooktops, the future there is going to be that there's a battery in the stove.
David Roberts
Yes, I was going to hype Impulse.
Ari Matusiak
Yes, we should hype Copper.
David Roberts
Copper and Impulse. There are two now competing companies who are making induction cooktop stoves with embedded lithium-ion batteries, which A, will allow you to cook when the power's out, but B, will also allow surges of power greater than anything you can get from either a wall outlet or from gas. This is going to enable all sorts of cooking stuff that you couldn't imagine before, a whole different pod, but, like, cool stuff.
Ari Matusiak
But I think, basically, the way I kind of think about this is every household is on their own path. And when you think about what you're doing as a local leader and elected official, this is where this idea of creating community, aggregating demand, and creating sort of community momentum becomes really important and unlocking because it allows you to start thinking about how the solutions can be bundled up in a way that provides the resilience and peace of mind to your constituents while also accelerating the transition. And that's kind of how I would think about that.
Audience Member 2
Hello there. So, my question is kind of about this awesome support that you guys are providing when a lot of us here are in those small communities that have those issues with contractors. A lot of fears come up when people talk about the transition to a new economy, to new equipment. And it was really cool to hear that there's this large-scale, on-the-ground support coming to towns across the country. I'm curious how you think decision-makers should consider that in implementing policy going forward. Because a lot of times we approach, they're like, "Oh, my gosh, this is scary. We don't have people that can install heat pumps." It's like, "Oh, in five years, maybe there's large programs that do that." How should we consider that going forward?
David Roberts
Yeah, and to add to that, is there a way communities can get in line for this or, like, sign up, say, "We want to be one of your test beds," or whatever?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, we had, as part of the application to the EPA, 156 communities raise their hands. The goal is to have hundreds upon hundreds of communities raising their hands. And so we are. This is the future that we very much want to be building toward. Absolutely. If people want to be a part of what we're doing, we would love to figure out a way to partner with you.
David Roberts
Well, like a decision maker in a community, what is the practical, realistic timeline that they could expect support to show up?
Ari Matusiak
Yeah, I mean, our goal next year is to be in four places. And we are being real careful because it's important to — you're talking about something very intimate and precious, which is a family making a decision about what's right for them. And so we talk a lot at Rewiring America, about moving at the speed of trust. So that's a very important premise, and we have to be intentional and deliberate about that. That said, our view is that once we start to create the learnings and that and sort of figure out the model, it becomes repeatable much more quickly.
And so, we're really hoping within three years to be in dozens of communities around the country. And we're going to have to sort of live up to that and figure it out. But that's the exciting challenge that's in front of us. And when it comes to local decision-makers in terms of how to kind of lay the groundwork for this transition and all the rest, I mean, first of all, we would love to learn from you about ideas that you have and how we can think about them and collaborate with you. But I would say a couple of things.
I really do believe that this is ultimately a civic project. We are working with households and we are talking to them at their kitchen table, and it needs to work for them. But communities have such a powerful role to play. And I know we're running out of time, but I'll just share a quick story and try to tie it back to your question. The first page of our application to the EPA was about a community in South Georgia called De Soto. De Soto is not a mountain town, but it is a town of 116 households in the rural south.
And it is very far away from any sort of metro area. We went there and worked with the local elected official, the mayor, to have a town meeting and talk to the community about electrifying their homes. Ultimately, out of the 116 households, about 80 of them are going to electrify their homes through this effort. What's really incredible about that is that it started with a woman who didn't have hot water. Last Christmas Eve, she got a heat pump water heater, and people in that town didn't believe that anything was going to happen.
And then Ms. Carter got her heat pump, water heater, and people said, "Well, it works for Ms. Carter. I'm like, maybe I'm interested in that, too." The lesson that I pulled from that is that that was a community commitment and community momentum that built and it enabled households to have the trust to believe that they could participate and that it would work. And so when I think about local decision makers, I think you all have an opportunity in these mountain communities to basically come together and leverage your strength. And your strength is the connectivity that you all have as communities, because you all know one another.
You've been there for generations. There's a lot of change that you're also dealing with at the same time, but those are shared challenges and opportunities that you have. And that creates an opportunity to say, "You know what? We want to create a shared commitment to move our communities forward." And when you do that, you actually have power because you are combined. You are unlocking a value proposition for your individual constituents, neighbors, and friends. But what you're doing as a part of that is you're uniting around that shared value proposition that allows you to move forward faster.
That's what we're super excited about, working with communities like these all around the country. But I think it's also where the agency and empowerment is for the communities themselves.
David Roberts
Well, we are beyond out of time. Thanks so much, Ari. Thanks. I look forward to seeing you shovel those $2 billion out the door. Subscribe to Volts.
Host
Give it up one more time for Ari Matusiak and David Roberts.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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