In August 2021, the Weatherization Assistance Program celebrated its 45th birthday. In light of our current climate crisis and the numerous technological advances made in recent years, it is natural to question the relevance of the Weatherization Assistance Program to our current dilemma. Wasn’t it created in large part to help low-income Americans cope with the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s?
We appreciate that Weatherization provided the trained workforce and the structure for inventions, diagnostic tools, and energy audit methodology that is used today. But if the present climate crisis requires us to make the move away from fossil fuels, how much does Weatherization help?
Know this: Weatherization continues to have a profound beneficial impact on our efforts to combat climate change in our homes.
Electrification – substituting electrically powered technology to heat, cool, and operate our buildings for systems fueled by oil and gas – is a key strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming. But in much of the United States, burning coal is still a major source of fuel for the electricity distributed by the grid. The positive impact that will result from large-scale electrification of the heating systems in our existing housing stock is directly related to our capacity to meet the increased demand for electricity with energy generated from solar, wind, and other renewable sources, and energy storage to increase reliability when weather conditions adversely affect generation.
Is our electrical grid ready for this increased demand? Will there be insufficient electricity in some areas to meet the increased demand? If not, how can we prepare buildings to use electricity efficiently for heating or cooking while we grow this capacity? How can we stretch the available supply of clean energy to cover as many customers as possible as we work to rapidly expand our clean energy supply and ready the grid to distribute this energy efficiently, equitably, and with a minimum of transmission and distribution loss?
We need to work on the technology going into the building, ensuring that it can meet the demand for heating on the coldest days in cold climates, and achieve economies of scale through wider adoption and strong demand. We need to strengthen and increase the capacity of site-based energy generation and storage, as well as the grid, to produce and distribute the additional electricity needed to power this technology once it is installed. For buildings, that means modernizing the nation’s electric grid itself.
Importantly, this includes the final step of upgrading electric service to many existing buildings, which may be necessary for the building to meet heating or cooking needs safely and reliably with electricity. In areas where the electric grid is already constrained, as in parts of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, providing this additional electricity requires building out additional supply, which should be sourced from renewables and savings that can be achieved from additional energy efficiency measures. Until a sufficient supply of clean electricity is available to a particular building, switching its building systems to electric heat may be impossible. In this situation, making the existing system as efficient as possible may be the best heating option until additional electricity is available to the building.
The very weatherization measures for which the Weatherization program is best known are fundamental to preparing buildings for the more advanced types of upgrades to electrify heating systems to use cleaner, renewable fuels.
The work of Weatherization on the cusp of the era of electrification is to prepare homes and buildings to make the most efficient possible use of energy from current and future sources to condition both air and water. The following core Weatherization measures all perform this function:
insulating the building shell (roof and exterior walls) and hot water pipes.
air-sealing around doors, windows, and other wall penetrations between conditioned and unconditioned spaces of the structure or the outdoors.
repairing or replacing damaged doors or windows with high-efficiency ones when necessary,
supplementing or restoring defective ventilation system components (fans, ducts, and other equipment) to maintain or improve indoor air quality. In many older buildings without mechanical ventilation systems, the normal amount of air leakage through the building envelope satisfied the need for fresh air. In some buildings, as we tighten this envelope to conserve, we reduce this air flow; we may need to supplement this “passive ventilation” by installing ventilation devices that exhaust indoor air from kitchens and bathrooms. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened awareness of indoor air quality to maintain a healthy home.
maintaining the heating distribution system to reduce heat loss and provide even levels of heating throughout the building. In addition to making sure everyone gets heat, this helps to prevent residents of overheated apartments from opening windows, which cools their apartments but forces the building to continue burning more fuel to heat underheated units.
Installing water-saving aerators and showerheads to conserve hot water.
Replacing older incandescent or fluorescent lighting with high-efficiency LEDs.
The above measures reduce the demand for energy in the building immediately. This achieves three important goals:
Affordability. Reducing energy usage lowers the overall costs of energy for occupants of the weatherized property, helping low-income households least able to afford their energy and utility bills. This enables them to use their limited resources for food, medical, and other needs. And, for renters, it reduces some of the upward pressure on rents by helping owners control operating costs. Keeping housing where low-income families live affordable increases their housing security – especially important since many lost work and exhausted their savings during the pandemic.
WAP serves low-income households who are least unable to afford to make improvements to their homes, despite often living in inefficient and deteriorating housing whose building systems are in the greatest need of upgrades. In multifamily buildings, this includes owners and managers of low-rent housing whose operating costs are rising faster than rents. If our climate imperative means that we need to reduce or replace our fossil fuel consumption everywhere, these actors will need help.
Our regulated affordable housing stock, managed by mission-driven nonprofits dedicated to preventing homelessness and providing healthy housing for low-income residents, includes many buildings heated by fossil fuels. In some areas like New York City, the price of electricity that would be needed to heat their homes is much higher than that of natural gas or oil. It is essential to preserve this affordable housing, protect tenants’ interests, and still improve building performance.
Supply. By concentrating on using energy efficiently, regardless of the source, Weatherization helps to reduce the total amount of renewable energy that must be generated for each weatherized property to be able to move away from fossil fuels. By helping us to stretch the available supply over more buildings, Weatherization is speeding our progress toward making enough clean, renewable energy available to enough customers (and eventually to everyone), ensuring that electrification has the intended consequence of reducing emissions on the scale needed to reverse the damaging impacts of climate change on our communities and our planet.
Right-sizing new systems. To optimize the impact on global temperature rise, extreme weather, and emissions, installers of new buildings need to select systems with appropriate capacity and energy use to meet the space conditioning needs of the property. We need to avoid the mistakes of the past that resulted in overheating or excessive cooling in the building. Performing key weatherization measures before heating systems are replaced enables the designer or contractor to estimate those requirements more accurately when planning the size and placement of new equipment, and the space it should serve — saving the customer money at the time of purchase and throughout the life of the system.
Weatherization is the thread that stitches energy efficiency, affordable housing, grid modernization, energy storage, and renewable energy development together, into a strategy to take our housing and our clean energy future by allowing us to combine short- and long-term solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change. #WeatherizationWorks!
