A new analysis says Vermont is not on track to meet its 2025 target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with declines in thermal fossil fuel use driven mostly — though not entirely — by warming winters. 

The study, released last month by the Vermont nonprofit Energy Action Network, also shows signs of progress: Though rising temperatures are still the main driver of lower heating fuel sales, weatherization and electric heat pump adoption are starting to have a greater impact.

“Vermont’s efforts… are, ironically, being aided by the very global heating that we are working to do our part to help minimize,” the study says. “Relying on warmer winters to reduce emissions from fossil heating fuel use is not a sustainable strategy. … What [the warming trend] means for temperatures — and therefore fuel use — in any given year is still subject to variation and unpredictability.” 

Like most other New England states, Vermont relies heavily on heating oil and, to a lesser degree, propane and utility gas, to heat buildings. This makes the building sector a close second to transportation in terms of the biggest contributors to planet-warming emissions in Vermont and many of its neighbors. 

Vermont’s statutory climate targets, adopted in 2020, aim to cut these emissions by 26% below 2005 levels by next year, with higher targets in the coming decades.

“It’s technically possible” that Vermont will meet its thermal emissions goal for next year, but “at this point, primarily dependent on how warm or cold the fall and early winter heating season is at the end of 2024,” EAN executive director Jared Duval said. The transportation sector would need to see a nearly unprecedented one-year decline.

On the whole, EAN says it’s “exceedingly unlikely” that Vermont will meet its 2025 goal. 

Warmer winters ‘not the whole story’

EAN found that heat pump adoption and weatherization are not happening fast enough, and what’s more, the current trend sets Vermont up for a Pyrrhic victory at best: Rising temperatures in the upcoming heating season would have to be at least as pronounced as in last year’s record-warm winter in order to reduce fuel use enough to meet the 2025 target for the thermal sector. 

Either way, warming alone won’t get Vermont to its 2030 target of a 40% drop in emissions over 1990 levels, Duval said. The state wants to end up at an 80% reduction by 2050. 

“The only durable way to reduce emissions in line with our science-based commitments is to increase the scale and pace of non-fossil fuel heating solutions and transportation solutions,” he said.

The EAN study found that fuel sales tend to decline alongside heating degree days: a measurement of days when it’s cold enough to kick on the heat. Vermont is seeing fewer of these days overall as temperatures warm. 

“The reduction in fossil heating fuel sales as winters have been warming is not surprising,” Duval said. “Historically, fossil heating fuel use and therefore greenhouse gas emissions have largely tracked with heating demand, with warmer winters corresponding with less fossil fuel use and colder winters with more fossil fuel use. The good news is that’s not the whole story.”

In recent years, he said, fuel sales have begun to “decouple” from the warming trend to which they were once more closely linked. From 2018 to 2023, EAN found that Vermont fuel sales declined 12% while heating degree days only declined 8%. 

“Fossil heating fuel sales are declining even more than you would expect just from warmer winters alone,” Duval said. “And that’s because many non-fossil fuel heating solutions are being adopted.” 

Upgrades needed to accelerate progress

From 2018 to 2022, EAN found, Vermont saw a 34% increase in weatherization projects and more than 50,000 more cold-climate heat pumps installed in homes and businesses, with a 3.3% increase in the number of homes that said they use electricity as their primary heating fuel. 

The upshot: The number of cold days explains 50% of Vermont’s declining fuel use from 2018 to 2023, while heat pump growth explains as much as 28% and other efficient upgrades explain a further 15%. The remaining 7% of the decline couldn’t easily be broken down and could partly be from people shifting to wood heat during periods of high fuel prices, Duval said.

“In order to achieve thermal sector emissions reduction targets without relying primarily on an abnormal amount of winter warming, significantly more displacement and/or replacement of fossil heating fuel… will be necessary,” the study says. Upgrades like heat pumps will lead to more sustainable emissions cuts, it says, “no matter what the weather-dependent heating needs in Vermont will be going forward.” 

EAN is nonpartisan and doesn’t take policy positions, but research analyst Lena Stier said this data suggests that expanding Vermont’s energy workforce and tackling heat pumps and weatherization in tandem would spur faster progress on emissions cuts, while keeping costs low.

EAN based its estimates of fuel use and emissions impacts from heat pumps on the official assumptions of a state-approved technical manual, which Duval said may be overly optimistic. But Stier said the reality could differ.

“We’ve heard anecdotally that a lot of people who have installed heat pumps in their homes… are kind of primarily using them for cooling in the summer,” she said. “So our kind of assumption is that, in reality, it would be a smaller share of that (fossil fuel use) reduction coming from heat pumps.” 

While fuel use declined overall in the study period, he said this came mostly from people using less heating oil specifically — propane sales actually increased in the same period.

Duval noted that propane is cheaper than oil on paper, but actually costs more to use because it generates heat less efficiently than oil does. 

“Once you look at that, then heat pumps become that much more attractive,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated for clarity.

Study: Vermont’s warming winters ‘not the whole story’ for declining fossil fuel use 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.

Overnight in early July last year, Vermont solar installer Bill Chidsey got a call that a grocery store he worked with in his village of Hardwick was flooded. He arrived to find feet of water in the Buffalo Mountain Market’s utility room, spilling over from the rising Lamoille River in a record-breaking rainstorm. 

“The grocery store survived by an inch,” Chidsey said. “If it had rained fifteen more minutes, they’d have lost four compressors.” 

He’s now helping the co-op build a net-zero energy system that will use solar power and recycled waste heat from the store’s refrigerators. But it’s going to be a long project — just one of countless examples Vermont has seen since last year of how sustainable rebuilds in the wake of a flood don’t happen quickly. 

“I think we’re just getting started with this,” Chidsey said. 

Advocates, utilities and state agencies have seen slow progress and mixed success since July 2023 in trying to replace flood-damaged home and business energy systems with more efficient, cost-effective, low-carbon technology. Now, they hope to redouble these efforts as part of a long-term recovery — both to keep people affected last year from falling through the cracks, and to be more resilient in the next storm.

“We consider that we’re now about to start ‘phase two,’ where we hope to go back and talk about energy systems,” said Sue Minter, who leads Capstone Community Action in central Vermont. “In the emergency — with winter and nowhere else to go, and oh, by the way, no contractors available, labor shortage, material shortage, crisis — we couldn’t do the transition work, but that doesn’t mean we won’t.” 

Lessons from storm Irene

More than a decade ago, Minter was the deputy secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Transportation when the 2011 Tropical Storm Irene — comparable in its severity to the 2023 floods — washed out hundreds of miles of roads and bridges across the state. 

As the state’s Irene Recovery Officer, Minter spent the next two-plus years grappling with federal regulators and pushing through new policies and programs to rebuild “stronger, with resilience in mind,” she said. This included allowing easier upsizing of culverts and clearing development out of floodplains. 

Many places with these post-Irene resilience upgrades and reforms saw less damage in the July 2023 floods as a result, Minter said. Vermont officials even came to a recent meeting of the Maine Climate Council, after a pair of weather disasters there, to talk about their approach to flood-resilient infrastructure.  

“When you know you’re in an emergency, and you know everything has been destroyed, you also know it’s an opportunity to innovate … to rebuild differently,” Minter said. 

Vermont, often called a potential haven for future climate migrants, is nonetheless seeing more frequent and intense rain and floods as one of its top impacts from human-caused climate change. The state also relies heavily on pricey, carbon-intensive heating oil. 

After last year’s floods, Vermont leaders wanted to seize the moment to help affected residents make future-looking energy and efficiency upgrades on a widespread scale. 

“They’re ripping out drywall, they’re having to update systems — this is the time to make sure that you do it properly,” said Efficiency Vermont supply chain engagement manager Steve Casey.

Making emergency rebates accessible

Efficiency Vermont, a statewide energy efficiency utility, created an emergency flood rebate program for affected homeowners and renters, reallocating $10 million in pandemic aid already set aside for low-income weatherization projects.

The new program offered up to $10,000 per household to repair or replace flood-damaged energy systems and other appliances, on top of existing funding for efficient electric heat pump water heaters and electrical panel upgrades. Similar rebates for damaged businesses were just raised to a $16,000 cap. 

But uptake on this funding has been slow. As of January, only 155 households had received flood rebates of $5,100 apiece on average, according to state legislative testimony from Efficiency Vermont director Peter Walke.

It’s partly because the initial $10 million was “an overshoot to ensure we wouldn’t run out of funds,” allocated quickly “without knowing what the actual need would be,” said spokesperson Matthew Smith. 

But people also ran into myriad barriers to using the money quickly. 

Some lacked up-front cash to pay for upgrades that would be rebated later. In response, Efficiency Vermont has begun offering a 100% cost-coverage program for the lowest-income clients, where contractors are paid directly by the state. That program had paid out nearly $92,000 to 10 people as of January, per Walke’s testimony, with 58 more in the pipeline. 

“The households that are still in significant need at this stage were vulnerable households to begin with,” Casey said. “We do have this repeating situation where flood events kind of just exacerbate some vulnerabilities for certain households.” 

‘Life and safety first’

The timing of the 2023 floods was another complicating factor. The upcoming heating season loomed in the months after the disaster, and limited housing stock meant people couldn’t relocate from damaged homes, unlike after Tropical Storm Irene, said Sue Minter.

“In 2023, July, people had to get into their homes as quickly as possible,” she said. “You always have to have life and safety first.” 

The repairs and retrofits needed most urgently were not simple. Many people’s water and space heating systems and electrical panels were in basements, “the first place to flood,” said Casey. 

Parts of Vermont are trying to change this norm — Waterbury, for example, requires basements to be above flood elevation in new or substantially improved home construction, among other flood protections. 

Chidsey, the solar installer in Hardwick, said he and his electrician have tried to shift to putting electrical panels on the outside of homes, with any indoor subpanels out of the basement. Ideally, he said, the cellar becomes “just a hole in the ground that holds up the house, because water comes in often now.” 

But moving HVAC infrastructure out of a vulnerable basement, whether to meet a local requirement or voluntarily, isn’t easy, especially after major damage, Casey said. People may not have a ready space for that equipment on the first floor, or may need mold remediation before taking on serious flood-proofing. 

It means that the advocates working to facilitate upgrades have had to take a long view.

‘The promise that we’ll be back’

Last fall, Efficiency Vermont, Capstone, the state’s utilities and a range of other partners stood up a new system of Vermont Energy Recovery Teams, who went into damaged homes to help people plan and prioritize repairs before winter, including coordinating holistically across contractors and funding sources. 

Some homes were able to switch straight to heat pumps as a cheaper, cleaner method of water and space heating, officials said. But for many, a replacement oil or gas system was the simplest short-term option. 

Efficiency Vermont does not normally offer incentives for installing fossil fuel systems, but made exceptions for high-efficiency Energy Star-rated models as part of its flood recovery rebate program.

“In every case, we looked for something that was more efficient than what they had before,” said Vermont Gas energy innovation director Richard Donnelly, who was part of many recovery team home visits. 

In each of those visits, the teams would take note of residents’ long-term needs and goals for decarbonization, resilience, comfort and lower energy burdens, with an emphasis on heat pumps. 

“We left off with sort of the promise that we’ll be back,” said Vermont Gas CEO Neale Lunderville — that “there’s money available for some of these technologies, that we can help you with the same process.” 

The recovery teams are now under the umbrella of GreenSavingSmart, a pilot energy and financial coaching program for low-income residents run by the Vermont Community Action Partnership. They’ll soon begin revisiting last fall’s clients to facilitate a new round of resilient improvements. 

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s a hopeful pathway to allow these households to have — once they’re fully made whole and recovered from all of this — a lower energy burden and cost burden than the situation they were in to begin with,” said Steve Spatz, an account manager on the supply chain team at Efficiency Vermont. “It really is an opportunity to … upgrade the conditions for the household.”

Months after devastating floods, Vermont renews efforts to aid climate-friendly rebuilds 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.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. 

The operator of New England’s power grid should establish a new position to engage with low-income and minority communities unfairly burdened by pollution, five Northeast states said last week.

Such a role could serve as a “critical bridge” between ISO New England and the communities it serves as the Northeast looks to transition to cleaner energy resources, officials from Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and Connecticut said in a letter to the nonprofit grid operator. ISO New England oversees the flow of power in those states and in New Hampshire.

The independent system operator, or ISO, would be the first regional grid operator to establish an executive-level position focused on environmental justice, or the notion that no one should be subject to disproportionate and excessive pollution. The role could be carved out in the grid operator’s budget plan, according to the letter.

“We encourage ISO-NE to be first in this critical area,” state officials said in their letter.

As it evaluates the states’ request, ISO New England has added a “placeholder” in its 2024 budget proposal for an environmental justice position, grid operator spokesperson Mary Cate Mannion said in an email Friday. The grid operator, whose mission is primarily to ensure electric reliability, is eager to continue discussing environmental justice issues with the states, Mannion added.

“The ISO has been actively engaged in developing cost-effective and efficient solutions to ensure a clean and reliable energy future and [is] currently working on several initiatives to facilitate wholesale market participation and delivery of clean energy across the region,” Mannion said in an email.

While ISO New England does not permit or site energy infrastructure, it plays a role in planning where new transmission projects are developed. It also sets rules geared toward promoting reliable and affordable electricity that can influence what types of energy resources are built.

A senior environmental justice official at ISO New England could advise the organization’s board of directors on how its own rules and policies affect historically disadvantaged communities, the states said. The position could also help build relationships with those communities, officials suggested.

“As community engagement and responsibilities grow, this executive position could build out and manage additional team members providing EJ expertise to ISO-NE and enhancing community, government, and industry engagement,” state officials continued.

Signers of the letter include James Van Nostrand, chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities; Anthony Roisman, chair of the Vermont Public Utility Commission; Katie Dykes, commissioner at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection; Christopher Kearns, acting commissioner in the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources; and Phil Bartlett, chair of the Maine Public Utilities Commission.

Phelps Turner, a senior attorney at the Maine-based Conservation Law Foundation, said that adding an environmental justice perspective to ISO New England’s senior leadership could have implications for electricity costs and the future energy resource mix.

Last year, 45 percent of the energy produced for electricity in the regional grid came from natural gas, according to the grid operator. All of the states signing the letter want to significantly expand renewable energy in New England and reduce the use of fossil fuels for electricity.

“Disproportionate air quality, environmental and human health impacts on low-income communities and communities of color often stem from our over-reliance in the region on fossil fuel-powered generation,” said Turner, who supports the states’ request for an environmental justice role.

“When the market design, as it has, favors fossil fuel generation and fails to create a level playing field for renewable generation, there are negative air quality impacts and resulting negative human health impacts on [nearby] populations,” Turner said.

ISO New England says it is committed to working with the states to meet their clean energy goals and integrate more solar and wind into the energy resource mix. It has also agreed to work with New England states in a joint effort with New Jersey and New York to identify transmission solutions for offshore wind projects.

Northeast grid operator weighs first environmental justice position 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.

Vermont is pioneering two novel approaches to try to maximize the benefits from electric vehicle rebate programs. 

Electric vehicles have so far done little to lower gasoline consumption, with one analysis estimating that 2.25 million EVs on the road in 2021 only reduced U.S. gas fuel sales by about half a percent. That’s in part because many early adopters have been either infrequent drivers with short commutes or owners of vehicles that were already relatively fuel efficient.

A pair of programs in Vermont are attempting to change that dynamic by targeting incentives to long-distance commuters and drivers of older, less efficient vehicles.  

Legislation approved in June at the request of the Burlington Electric Department authorizes electricity providers to incentivize high-consumption fuel users to switch to battery electric vehicles. The law defines high consumption as more than 1,000 gallons of gasoline or diesel annually. 

According to Darren Springer, Burlington Electric’s general manager, the company decided to pursue such a program — ostensibly the first in the country — after reviewing research from Coltura, a nonprofit that advocates for accelerating the transition from gasoline to cleaner fuels. 

Coltura has found that 10% of U.S. drivers consume about a third of the gasoline used by light-duty vehicles. 

“We’re slowly getting people to understand that you can more cost-effectively reduce emissions from the transportation sector if your resources prioritize the highest mileage drivers,” said Rob Sargent, Coltura’s policy director.

And there is an added equity bonus, Sargent said, because a majority of these superusers (56%) are also below the median household income. Many of them are commuters forced to drive long distances because they can’t afford to live close to where they work, and end up spending a lot of their limited income on gas. 

Focusing electric vehicle incentives on maximizing gasoline displacement “aligns the climate imperative with the very appropriate need to focus on equity and access,” Sargent said. 

Because Vermont requires annual vehicle inspections, proving how far you drive in a year is a matter of comparing odometer readings on those inspection reports from one year to the next. 

Springer said the company is in the process of figuring out how to structure the program, which, with approval from utility regulators, will likely be offered in January to Burlington’s 21,000 customers. 

“We’re thinking about what level of miles traveled per year would qualify someone for this program,” he said. “Burlington drivers are driving less vehicle miles annually than the state as a whole, because the city is a relatively compact urban area compared to many other parts of the state.”

The other challenge is figuring out what incentive level will drive adoption, he said. The company will offer an enhanced EV incentive for superusers beyond their existing programs’ current range of $1,300 to $3,000, depending upon the buyer’s income level and the type of vehicle being purchased.

Cash for clunkers

Meanwhile, a state program called Replace Your Ride, launched last September, is offering income-eligible drivers a $3,000 incentive to scrap a gas-powered vehicle that is at least 10 years old and replace it with a new or used electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle. 

At the time of trade-in, the owner must submit a form attesting that the car is being disposed of by one of the state’s approved scrapping partners or a company certifying it will be auctioned for parts. 

“The quicker we’re taking vehicles off the road and replacing them with cleaner transportation options, the better off we are for progress toward our climate goals,” said Patrick Murphy, sustainability and innovations projects manager for the Vermont Agency of Transportation. 

Setting the right incentive level to convince people to trade in their old vehicles has been a challenge for the program. Between last September and the end of June, the program only removed 32 old cars from the roads, Murphy said. 

Sixteen of those rebates went toward the purchase of used electric or plug-in vehicles, and 13 were for new vehicles. (The average age of the trade-ins was 15 years.) The remaining three rebates were for a third option: a pre-paid mobility card for getting around by other means, such as public transit or car sharing.

“We did not get the interest that we had hoped for, but it was really driven by market factors that came into play after the program had been enacted,” Murphy said. “The used vehicle supply became very tight, especially for those vehicles that got very good mileage or for plug-ins. Those being traded in were still able to get $3,500 or $4,000 on the market. In ordinary times they wouldn’t have been worth that much.”

In an effort to boost participation, the state is upping the incentive from $3,000 to $5,000, effective July 27. That incentive can be stacked on top of other state incentives, potentially cutting the cost of a new or used vehicle by as much as $10,000, Murphy said.

Beyond cost, a number of other factors complicate the decision to go electric in Vermont, including the availability of charging infrastructure in the state’s many rural areas. Still, Murphy said, “we’ll see what additional interest we might get. We are starting to see some saner used vehicle prices at this point.” 

Vermont wants to win over the state’s biggest gas-guzzlers with new EV incentives  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.

Vermont Gas Systems is offering to install electric heat pumps in their customers’ homes, the latest example of how state policy is nudging the utility to adapt its business model. 

In order to comply with the state’s climate mandates, the utility is building a broader portfolio of thermal systems that will help both the business and its customers make the transition to a decarbonized future, said Richard Donnelly, the company’s director of energy innovation.

“We offer natural gas, energy-efficient products, weatherization, renewable natural gas, heat pump water heaters, and now heat pumps,” he said. 

Expanding its offerings also puts the company in a good position to comply with the state’s new Clean Heat Standard, which became law last week after the legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Phil Scott. Once implemented in 2025, the law will require fuel dealers to reduce the amount of fossil fuel they sell over time, or earn “clean heat credits” by doing things that offset building emissions, such as weatherization services and installing heat pumps. 

Under the new heat pump program launched this month, the state’s only natural gas utility will use its in-house service technicians to install centrally ducted, cold-climate heat pumps in qualifying homes. The highly efficient systems use electricity, rather than fossil fuels, to heat and cool homes. 

Customers will be able to either buy or lease the systems at rates that factor in the heat pump rebates available through the state’s utilities in partnership with Efficiency Vermont.

“We’ll process that rebate up front for a purchase, and bake it into our lease prices as well,” Donnelly said. 

Each system will use the home’s existing ductwork, and be integrated with the homeowner’s gas furnace, which will serve as a backup heating source during extremely cold weather. A smart thermostat will automatically switch back and forth between the heating sources according to the customer’s settings. 

“We are offering our customers an opportunity to diversify their heating system, adding in the benefits of resiliency,” Donnelly said. “This is also an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint.” 

In order to qualify, homes must already have ductwork that delivers heat through vents. They must also have a fairly efficient furnace.

An estimated 14,000 of the utility’s 55,000 customers could be eligible. Most homes in the company’s service area have hydronic heating systems with radiators or baseboard radiators; Donnelly said the company will begin offering heat pump solutions for those customers in the future. 

The new program comes just over a year after Vermont Gas announced it would begin installing electric heat pump water heaters for its customers. The company is also looking for a site to test its first fossil fuel-free networked geothermal project, another possible business to branch into as the state moves away from fossil fuels.

“As a distribution utility, energy efficiency utility, and integrated energy services provider, Vermont Gas is uniquely positioned to help its customers take advantage of the latest and most cost-effective technology,” said Dylan Giambatista, the company’s public affairs director.

Vermont’s climate mandates call for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2025, 40% from 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% by 2050. 

“We are going to need a lot of different partners” to meet those goals, said Johanna Miller, energy and climate program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. “To the degree that our utilities like Vermont Gas will lean into and help their customers cut costs and cut carbon, I think that that is important.”

Gas heating customers switching to electric heat pumps won’t necessarily save money, at least for now. While the heat pumps are more efficient, gas is currently the cheaper source for heating, Donnelly said. 

But the company is developing an online calculator that will allow customers to see how setting the system to swap over to the furnace at 20 degrees versus, say, 25 degrees will compare in terms of carbon reduction and heating costs. They will also be able to measure the carbon and cost impact of adding in renewable natural gas. 

“A lot of our customers are motivated by carbon reduction, but they don’t know how much a heat pump would help in terms of their overall consumption,” Donnelly said. “We’re taking that role to educate.”

Giambatista said he installed a heat pump in his 1945 house last fall. He set the smart thermometer to swap over to his gas furnace when temperatures dropped to 25 degrees. Over the winter his gas usage dropped by about 60% compared to previous years, he said. 

To date, about 45,000 ducted and ductless heat pumps have been installed in Vermont under the state’s rebate program, according to Phil Bickel, HVAC and refrigeration program manager at Efficiency Vermont. 

They are primarily in homes that heat with fuel oil, the majority of homes in the state. 

“We’ve seen the cost of all fossil fuels go up and down over the years,” Bickel said. “The main thing about making the switch to heat pumps is it provides a little bit more of a stable cost. They are three times more efficient than oil or propane, and they also provide the low carbon benefit, as well as the cooling benefit.”

Efficiency Vermont does recommend that homeowners maintain a backup source for heat. The heat pumps work well down to about -15 degrees, “but in Vermont, there are those times when we are going to have a long cold snap,” Bickel said.

This Vermont gas utility is getting into the electric heat pump business 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.