Open Data Can Accelerate Home Electrification

The NODE Collective, a new nonprofit alliance, will create an open dataset to spur innovation in building decarbonization

It has been a slow couple of months in my corner of the internet. Life can get busy! I will soon get back to publishing more frequently, but in the meantime I want to bring to these pages news about a very cool (and wonky) project I’ve been working on.

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For the past several months my team at the Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC) has been collaborating with organizations like Eli Technologies and Rewiring America to create an alliance dedicated to solving a problem that few people, even those working in climate, are aware of: the fragmentation of data on electrification incentive programs.

The National Open Data for Electrification (NODE) Collective, was launched,

with ambitions to build the most comprehensive and up-to-date open data repository of every residential electrification incentive program in the nation, with plans to make the resource open and accessible to all. 

In How to Democratize Access to Electrification Incentive Data, I get into more details about the impact that we expect NODE Collective to have in the effort to decarbonize buildings (spoiler: innovation! affordability! speed!)

In this article, I want to address broader questions: why incentives are important, why this data is messy, and — the question I get asked the most — how to get access to it.

Why electrification incentives are important

Everyone lives in a building, so it is an area where individual choices can make a big difference. By electrifying how we heat the spaces and the water in our homes, the electricity we use, and even our cooking, we can make a dent in the 31% of global CO2 emissions attributed to the built environment.

In order to do that, we want to incentivize people to adopt electric technologies like heat pumps in favor of fossil technologies like gas furnaces, because electric appliances are not only cleaner, but more efficient than their fossil fuel counterparts. Heat pumps are three to four times more efficient than gas furnaces. Induction cooktops are two to three times as efficient as gas stoves. Electric is also safer and healthier: the scientific literature is pretty clear that, all other things being equal, the less methane gas and byproducts like NOx are floating in the air we breathe, the better.

In addition, electric appliances usually contain more modern technology. Take a heat pump: basically a fan able to extract enough heat from the outside weather, even in sub-zero temperatures, to keep an entire house warm. Technology like that doesn’t come cheap, especially in economies where it is not yet deployed at scale, so it’s no surprise that electric appliances require substantial upfront investment.

The calculations comparing lifetime costs of electric vs. fossil fuel appliances are highly dependent on the costs of electricity and natural gas, and on many other variables specific to each location. However, as a general rule of thumb, over the long term, an electric appliance is at worst cost-comparable, and at best significantly cheaper, than a gas-powered equivalent.

Unfortunately, superior products with better return on investment aren’t enough to decarbonize quickly, for two reasons. First, humans are notoriously bad at evaluating long-term savings against immediate expenses. This tendency means that even if an electric appliance promises substantial cost savings over its lifetime, the initial higher cost can deter potential buyers. Second, many people just don’t have the money. Even in developed economies, some families get by on a shoestring budget and cannot afford the many thousands of dollars that are typically needed upfront for electrification projects, even when resulting in lower monthly bills.

Ultimately, financial incentives that help people cover this upfront cost are an essential component of a broader strategy to transition to a decarbonized society. And there are lots of them.

But the data has a problem

A lot of effort and money goes into creating incentive programs. However, the average person finds them extremely confusing to navigate. In my BDC article, I point out that

There are thousands of electrification and energy efficiency incentives in the U.S., each with complex eligibility rules, frequent changes in funding levels and availability, and different application and qualification processes. Rebates from federal, state, utility, and local programs can often be combined. This “stacking” of incentives is essential for affordability, especially for customers in low-and-moderate income communities.

For better or worse, the United States has a patchwork of incentives that is difficult for anyone to make sense of. There are tax credits from the federal government, long-established statewide programs, federal tax dollars available through programs with similar (but different) rules in each state, rebates directly from utilities or community choice aggregators, and in some cases even counties and cities offer rebates. Many (but not all) require fuel switching, meaning gas to electric. Some (but not all) require equipment that meets minimum efficiency standards. While there are incentives available to contractors and the supply chain, most of them are targeted at consumers. In many (but not all) of such cases, consumers need to claim the rebate through certified contractors. Most (but not all) of these incentives can be combined, or “stacked”. Many (but not all) are intended to benefit low-to-moderate income households, with rules that determine income eligibility also varying by program. And that’s before you start to layer green bank loans and other low-interest financing options. Each of these programs has its own eligibility requirements and separate claim process. You might be confused by now. I am, too — and I get paid to understand this stuff.

In order to make these incentives intelligible and accessible for people, there needs to be an ecosystem of consumer-facing tools to aid in things like calculating expected changes in energy bills, finding and selecting contractors, managing a sequence of projects, and several other elements of the home electrification journey.

All these tools need to rely on accurate data about the incentives available to people. Unfortunately, given the landscape I outline above, it should come as no surprise that the data for all these programs is also fragmented, hard to find, unstructured, and inconsistent. All of which creates friction when bringing to market great tools to make electrification easier and more affordable.

This is where the NODE Collective comes in. It will create this database, aiming to source every residential electrification incentive in the U.S. It will work with programs to keep that data up to date. It will create an open data specification. And, most importantly, it will make the data available to all, for free. The Collective intends to solve this common problem for the entire buildings sector, so that organizations can stop duplicating efforts to create their own database of incentives, and instead can focus on innovating their services and products by leveraging this open data from a trusted source.

So, where’s the data?

The announcement generated quite a bit of excitement, and it was even picked up by David Roberts (the Volts guy).

Naturally, that raised one request from just about anyone: gimme the data!

That’s the top query I get these days. At the time of writing, incentive data is available only through each of the tools built by each of the founding organizations:

• The Switch Is On (BDC’s consumer initiative) has an Incentive Finder for California and Washington (my team maintains this tool; if you’re in CA or WA, I’d love to hear your feedback!)

• DSIRE is a directory with solid coverage for much of the U.S.

• Rewiring America has a calculator for federal incentives and data for a handful of states, as well as an API.

• Eli also has a calculator and API.

Going forward, all the data and documentation will be available for download, likely through a public GitHub repository. The NODE team is currently finalizing the open data schema, and merging all the above datasets.

I know this announcement is exciting for those who rely this data for their products. I can hear the chants of “just give us the data already!” We’ll get there, but for now we’re asking for some patience. If there was an easy solution to this, we wouldn’t need to establish a coalition of some of the most influential organizations in the decarb space just to solve this one problem. There are two big challenges ahead of us:

• This is going to take a lot of work. Creating an open standard and data for use by hundreds of applications and millions of users every day is not a simple task! Cross collaboration between founding members has been a lot of fun, we are all pooling resources and putting as much effort into this as our other priorities will allow. A lot of work is needed to structure this data. We’ll get to full coverage, but that will take time, maybe longer than many would like.

• We need more data. The vision of a trusted source of truth for all incentive data can only be fulfilled once we have up-to-date data from all programs nationwide, and NODE is certainly not there yet. Given its fragmented nature, the data will have to be crowd-sourced. A key area of focus is recruiting state energy offices, program administrators, and anyone else who has good incentive data, to provide it for inclusion in the database — for the collective good!

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Resources

• Get involved at nodecollective.org, and here’s the press release.

• My article How to Democratize Access to Electrification Incentive Data goes a little deeper.

• Over a year ago, Eli’s Jeff Coleman wrote about the need for an incentive data collaborative.

• NODE is hosting a webinar at the end of May. Register here.