Maine’s deepening housing crisis is colliding with the global climate crisis. 

The state’s population is growing faster than its housing supply — and that growth is driven in part by people seeking out temperate locations to call home in a rapidly warming world. 

Some advocates see an opportunity in tackling these two crises at the same time, if state leaders can steer new construction toward the type of denser, all-electric, energy efficient housing that can help bring down living costs and carbon emissions. 

Maine Conservation Voters policy director Kathleen Meil is part of the buildings working group of the Maine Climate Council, which is preparing to update its ambitious, four-year 2020 climate plan this fall. She hopes the next phase of their work will dig deeper into this intersection. 

“It’s one of the things that I actually find really exciting about this work and about everything related to climate action,” Meil said. “It feels much better than being overwhelmed with, like, ‘Oh, no, we have to accomplish all of these things at the same time.’ It’s like, ‘No, we get to tackle all of the most important problems that people face at the same time. How cool is that?’”

A snapshot of a deepening housing crisis

Maine’s population of nearly 1.4 million people grew as much as 5.9% in the more densely developed southern counties last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall, more than 30,000 new residents arrived in Maine from other states and nearly 3,600 emigrated from abroad between July 2020 and the end of 2022. 

It’s putting a strain on Maine’s already overstretched housing stock, which had a vacancy rate of 4% for rentals and just 0.4% for homeownership last year, according to the Census Bureau. 

Data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows Maine lacks more than 22,000 housing units that are affordable for the lowest-income people — those who make under $26,500 a year in a four-person household, which covers 30% of Maine renters, per the coalition.

“The waitlists are in the thousands — we’ve got a 12,000-plus waitlist for housing vouchers to help support people’s rent. We’ve got people living in unsafe housing,” said Maine Affordable Housing Coalition executive director Laura Mitchell. “We’re seeing the need everywhere.”

Meanwhile, the state has struggled to shelter thousands of unhoused people, including many in the Portland area whose encampments have been repeatedly razed by the city. And hundreds of incoming asylum-seekers are being temporarily housed in local hotels and at the Portland Expo. Conditions at the Expo sparked a protest in June and deadlines to move out are looming as local officials scramble to stand up new shelters and find other solutions. 

“Regardless of where they’re coming from, they need a place to live,” said Ruben Torres, the communication and policy lead with the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. 

Climate change poised to bring more residents

The new arrivals are likely only to increase as the climate warms. Northern New England states have been called potential “climate havens,” despite facing climate change impacts of their own — such as historically unheard-of levels of extreme heat, coastal sea level rise, and devastating inland flash flooding, as seen in Vermont in recent weeks. 

But experts say this region’s ultimately temperate and relatively wildfire- and hurricane-free climate is still poised to be a draw for those fleeing worse situations in the U.S. and abroad. 

“The pandemic may in fact be a snapshot of what climate migration will look like in the decades to come,” said Hans Carlson, the executive director for Maine’s Blue Hill Heritage Trust, at an annual statewide sustainability research conference in April, according to The Maine Monitor. 

Torres said people emigrating to Maine, lately from countries including Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, may not cite climate change as the topline reason they moved — but dig a little deeper and its signature can be seen throughout migration patterns worldwide. 

Historic drought and more sporadic rainfall are disrupting the food and farming systems in countries like these, creating economic disruption, social conflicts and new threats of violence that are pushing people to leave. 

“We certainly expect, as time moves on, to see more and more folks be displaced,” domestically and abroad, said Tobin Williamson, the immigrant rights coalition’s advocacy manager. “What we’re trying to do now is kind of just help our policymakers be prepared for that. If you’re going to have thousands of people moving into Maine, you know, now’s the time to build housing for them.”

This preparation also means infrastructure upgrades and other community planning improvements, he said. Groups like the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition supported a bill passed last year that will allow denser housing development in Maine, creating more places in which to build with access to existing utilities, transit and other social services, and with a smaller environmental footprint. 

Dwindling fossil fuel needs in new homes 

But in order to meet state goals for lowering emissions and to help combat the climate changes that are helping fuel this migration, the homes that Maine adds to meet the needs of new and existing residents will need to be built differently from those of the past. 

Maine relies more than any other on pricey, carbon-intensive heating oil to keep warm in frigid winters. Though electric heat pumps are increasingly efficient in cold temperatures, these and other climate-friendly upgrades can make for complicated retrofits in older, less weatherized homes — the kind that pervades Maine’s existing housing stock.

Maine has been pushing hard to overcome this challenge. The state announced in late July that it has already met an initial target in its climate plan for installing 100,000 new heat pumps by 2025. More aggressive heat pump goals for future years are based around reducing specific, computer-modeled levels of emissions from Maine’s homes and buildings, officials have said.

If putting upgrades like heat pumps and better energy efficiency is possible in existing homes, it’s perhaps “the single biggest no-brainer in the field” for new construction, said Matt Rusteika, the director of market transformation for the Building Decarbonization Coalition.

The big potential users of fossil fuel power in most homes are the space heating and cooling systems, water heating, stove and oven, and washer and dryer, plus potentially a generator, Rusteika said. Natural or methane gas is low-hanging fruit to power these features. But Maine has less home gas access than nearly any other state, especially outside its southern tip. 

“Maine’s lack of gas service puts it ahead on decarbonizing its homes,” Rusteika said. 

The upgrades to ducts or pipes involved in electrifying an existing home can be big cost drivers, he said, but “in new construction, that’s not an issue. So it can actually be cheaper to build a new home or a new building with electrification … than it is build something with fossil fuels.”

Requiring efficiency for affordable housing

This runs counter to some developers’ longtime claims that energy efficient building techniques and electric home infrastructure are uneconomical.

In fact, a 2022 law in Maine mandates that new construction funded by the state Housing Authority must meet a high-level energy efficiency standard, such as the Passive House certification or something similar. 

These approaches emphasize electrification, insulation and overall low energy needs, helping create healthy air quality and very low, predictable energy costs, said Naomi Beal, who leads passivhausMAINE. 

“We can’t afford” to continue installing fossil fuel-powered systems in Maine homes, she said — “like in a climate way.”

“And also, it’s not necessary,” she added. “It’s dirty, it’s expensive and volatile. … The value of a Passive House-level approach is that the costs are small and super predictable.”

She said these efficient, electrified building techniques are especially economical for larger multifamily developments — such as the new University of Southern Maine dormitory that’s set to be one of the largest Passive House residence halls in the country. 

‘What’s perfect’ vs. ‘what’s productive’

But regulations to help decarbonize in new housing must strike a tricky balance, said the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition’s Mitchell — improving housing quality, sustainability and affordability, without making projects too expensive to build or otherwise slowing the pace of development to house those most in need.

“There’s kind of that sweet spot, because there’s also a social equity issue involved in this,” Mitchell said. “The cost of energy efficiency and addressing climate change shouldn’t fully fall on the backs of people in need of affordable housing.”

She mentioned electric vehicle chargers in single-family affordable housing as an example of a potentially unproductive requirement. Maine’s new law requiring high efficiency standards in state-funded affordable housing projects includes charging access as one way for builders to comply. 

“It increases [construction] costs,” Mitchell said, “and when you think about the likelihood of those [chargers] being used, particularly over the short term, you do have to kind of think about what’s perfect and what’s productive.”

Maine is far behind on its electric vehicle adoption goals, which reflect the fact that transportation is the state’s biggest source of emissions — though carmakers are adding more affordable models, and electric vehicles’ lifetime costs tend to be lower than those of gas-powered cars. 

Encouraging community-scale change

The Building Decarbonization Coalition’s Rusteika said regulatory requirements can give developers more certainty, but aren’t always needed at a time when climate-friendly building alternatives are becoming cost-competitive. 

“There’s not necessarily the need for a blunt regulatory instrument,” he said. “A lot of people choose electrification on the merits. It’s not an ‘eat your vegetables’ thing.”

But he points to building codes as an unsung, community-scale tool in this effort. Maine has only had a statewide building energy code since the late 2000s — it currently uses the 2015 international code, and is now working on updating to the 2021 edition, according to the Fire Marshal’s office. 

The cities of Portland and South Portland are using that 2021 code as an optional “stretch code,” which the state says does more to encourage efficiency, carbon reduction and resiliency. 

“The question is,” Rusteika said, “what’s the best thing for the state to do, the most cost-effective thing for the state to do, to achieve that” emissions reduction goal? “I think we know it’s not to put the onus of achieving the goal on the most vulnerable people in the state.”

Progress with limitations

The West End Apartments, an affordable housing complex in South Portland, Maine, is an example of what’s possible and what kinds of compromises are still required. It was built to a near-Passive House standard with almost no fossil fuel utilities, said architect Jesse Thompson, mainly to lower operating costs for the buildings’ owner long-term. 

West End opened its first building in 2021 and its second earlier this year. Some of the 116 total units were set aside to house local asylum-seekers. The apartments have all electric heating, cooling, washers, dryers and stoves, plus robust insulation and a central ventilation system that captures and filters waste heat and recycles fresh air into the apartments. 

With construction costs still elevated since the pandemic, the price tag of electric or efficient upgrades can still be tough to fit into a tight budget. The West End buildings have heat pumps in their corridors and lobbies, but not in each unit. Thompson said they had to go with the cheaper option, electric baseboard heaters, instead. 

Electric baseboards are generally the most expensive way to heat in Maine. But Thompson said the hallway heat pumps and other design choices mean the baseboards don’t have to work too hard. The buildings’ owner, affordable housing developer Avesta, also opts to cover residents’ electric bills under tax credit rules for buildings like this. 

“If we built a ton of big buildings with electric resistance heat, it would tax the grid,” Thompson said. “The heat pumps are good because they sip electricity” — slowly and gradually — “so we can do a lot more buildings.”

There are two fossil fuel-powered features left in the complex. One is the gas-powered generator required to run the buildings’ elevator in an outage. Future developments might be able to use a battery — that will be the case in at least one new affordable housing in Boston, which also has Passive House construction and a rooftop solar array.

The other fossil fuel user is the buildings’ water heaters, which run on gas. It was the cheapest option for the West End project, Thompson said, but it might not be for the next one like it.

“It’s changing really, really rapidly,” Thompson said. “We started designing this building six years ago. [Electric hot water heaters] didn’t feel affordable then. But the buildings we’re designing right now, we’re looking at it. … The machinery’s getting less expensive; the state is pushing much harder to do it.”

This story was supported by the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship. See more reporting from this project at The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit newsroom.

Making Maine’s next generation of housing fossil-free — and affordable 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.

Sustainability has long been promoted as a luxury amenity, with energy efficiency features marketed as a selling point for upscale residential and retail development — along with elegance, beauty and tranquility, and amenities such as private rooftop gardens.

For example, just south of St. Petersburg, Florida, Hunters Point Pearl Homes & Marina features high-end single-family homes, all solar-powered and LEED certified, designed in collaboration with the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. 

Each home design also carries a seven-figure asking price. 

Meanwhile, Hillcrest Village, an affordable housing development in Northfield, Minnesota, is virtually indistinguishable from market-rate housing. Yet it touts an 84-kilowatt solar array and net-zero energy usage through all-electric heating, cooling and appliances, along with other energy efficiency features — while maintaining rents far below the median for the area.  

The Northfield development challenges the notion that sustainability and affordability are mutually exclusive — if the definition of each is expanded to accommodate the greater public good of making the necessary upfront investment. The $5.5 million project was funded by both private investment and public funds. It serves as an example of a growing recognition on both the municipal and federal levels that subsidies are both necessary and a legitimate means of squaring the numbers for affordable and sustainable housing. 

Those benefits include long-term cost savings, because better-built buildings will last longer and require fewer repairs, as well as a healthier environment for occupants and aesthetics that integrate better into existing neighborhoods. And lower energy costs, including lower utility bills resulting from energy-efficient HVAC and appliances, help renters on tight budgets stretch their dollars further.

Stable, high-quality affordable housing also provides a benefit to the surrounding community, according to Brian Nowak, principal at Sweetgrass Design Studio, who developed the Northfield project on behalf of Community Action Center. 

“It’s an investment over time, to build resilient, energy-efficient housing,” he said. “That should be everyone’s goal. And if we don’t, for example, it affects our school system. It affects the employers at Northfield having people that are readily available to come in and fill the jobs that are needed.” 

Rethinking affordability

The notion that affordable housing requires shoddy construction and materials — never mind omitting any consideration of energy efficiency —  has increasingly come under challenge by practitioners like Ben Bentley. Bentley is the executive director and CEO of Knoxville’s Community Development Corporation in Tennessee, which oversees a number of affordable housing properties.

“I think housing needs to be built to a high standard regardless of whether it’s affordable or market rate,” Bentley said. “To me, it’s really important that it’s rather indistinguishable.”

Bentley said that poorly built public housing in the past “created sort of a stigmatization of certain areas.”

“As we’re building new things moving forward, and as we’re partnering on innovative technologies like that with [the Department of Energy], we’re really considering how we build to a standard where someone that drives by this neighborhood is not going to say, ‘Well, that’s where low-income families live,’” Bentley said. “They’re going to think, ‘Wow, that’s just a great place to live. That’s a great neighborhood.’ That’s what we’re trying to do.” 

Likewise, in Northfield, both sustainability and aesthetic appeal were integral. Making the units as indistinguishable from market-rate housing as possible was an essential consideration, according to Nowak.

“The houses on the outside are pretty traditional, or they’re traditional looking. And that was the intent,” Nowak said. “They have a certain percentage [of] workforce housing; another percentage is transitional in emergency housing. And they didn’t want the people that were in transition in their lives or in crisis to feel like they were walking into a home that was a science experiment or an art project. … They wanted them to feel like homes that these people would go anywhere in Northfield and live in. That was a primary concern.”

Making the numbers work

Especially when using public funds, there is always pressure to do things as cheaply as possible, which often necessitates difficult tradeoffs with architectural design and building construction. But these tradeoffs do not necessarily or inevitably equate with poor workmanship or bland design. Rather, intentionality in making choices and compromises is key, said Danielle Tillman, managing principal at bKL Architecture in Chicago.

“Every project has budget and cost constraints,” Tillman said. “I think there can be an education on materials and figuring out the details that can potentially make less expensive materials still feel nicer than whatever. I think there can be opportunities to create good design, large or small.” 

Incorporating sustainability and energy-saving metrics can actually ultimately translate into increased affordability, and by extension, play a significant role in allowing developers to generate reasonable returns on their investments. Likewise, taking a long-term approach to ownership is necessary in squaring the numbers.

That’s the calculation employed for making the upfront sustainability investments needed to achieve net-zero energy usage for the Northfield development — while maintaining low rents, around $800 a month, for residents, Nowak said.

“That’s a significant long-term benefit of a project like this. And that is not just your monthly rents on the building; it’s the cost of the utilities as well. When those utilities include your electricity and your heating and cooling that’s a really big deal,” Nowak said.

Additionally, cross-referencing construction costs with energy efficiency goals generates savings that can significantly reduce or offset higher upfront expenses,  according to AJ Patton, founder and CEO of 548 Enterprises in Chicago.

“People just assume that sustainable is more expensive without even doing the research or talking to the construction community,” Patton told the Energy News Network in January. “It may just be different, not more expensive. For example, we have buildings that we’re installing solar on that will create $40,000 a year in savings [in electricity costs]. If I could save you $40,000 a year, I have your attention, right?

“And then you extrapolate that out over several years, you’re going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by that commitment of renewable energy. If you paired that with efficient HVAC and lighting systems, high-efficiency windows — now we’re getting closer and closer to almost six figures a year in energy savings — real savings, real dollars. If everything else kind of historically pays for itself somewhere between six and six and a half years, if I plan on holding this property for any significant period of time, I’m in the black real quickly.”

Nonetheless, upfront costs of sustainability and energy efficiency present a significant obstacle, even for designers and developers with a sincere intention and desire to incorporate them.

Subsidies and other financial support, including DOE and IRS tax credits,  provide a needed incentive for developers, both public and private, to construct, upgrade and properly maintain affordable housing. For example, subsidies and tax credits were applied to incorporate new appliances, energy-efficient LED lighting and other improvements in Western Heights, Knoxville’s Community Development Corporation’s largest affordable housing development, originally constructed in 1939, Bentley said.

“If I have a property that’s producing $2 million in revenue and I have $600,000 in net operating income, rather than continuing to let my asset depreciate and not reinvest in it, which historically has been what has been forced to happen because of some of the rules and regulations in public housing, I can now [incorporate needed maintenance and upgrades] through tax credits,” Bentley said.

Unintended consequences

Another major challenge is ensuring existing residents aren’t displaced by the gentrification that often follows when the building stock is renovated in a disinvested community. Intentionality in minimizing displacement while integrating economic resources and other amenities in disinvested communities is a necessity, Bentley said.

“Chicago and some of the big cities tend to be a little further ahead of it, but mixed-income housing is important for a number of reasons,” Bentley said. “I think it’s important to tear down some of those historic patterns of segregation by race and by income. It’s important that we are investing in neighborhoods that have a wide range of incomes.

“And let me be very clear when we do that, we have to protect first and foremost the people, whether they’re low, moderate income or whoever it is, the folks that already live in the neighborhood. But then we have to look beyond that and say, how do we bring in new amenities and new people and get a vitality and a diversity of incomes in the same place?” 

Indeed, the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation has largely entailed replacing outdated public housing projects with economically diverse neighborhoods, consisting of new construction boasting energy-efficiency features, along with making extensive energy-conscious renovations to existing developments that were left standing. 

However, to date, the plan has also resulted in a sizable net reduction of available public housing units in both new construction and rehabilitated developments, even as former residents displaced by demolished units languish on waiting lists, and market rate developments are green-lighted on former public housing sites.

This fact, along with the integration of affluent — and often White — market-rate renters and homeowners in newly designated mixed-income developments, has resulted in the displacement of large numbers of Black and Brown public housing residents, creating skepticism and resistance to renovation plans. 

This was the case for Andre Brumfield, principal and design director for Gensler in Chicago.

As a young architect working at the time with Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Brumfield encountered significant skepticism when he signed on to execute the transition of a notorious Chicago Housing Authority project, Stateway Gardens, into a mixed-income community.

The assignment often involved hearing out residents’ grievances as much as discussing the actual design. Pressing issues that had not been addressed by the housing authority or city council members, such as non-working elevators and rampant gang and drug activity, initially dominated the meetings. 

The discussions were often challenging for Brumfield, who had never lived in public housing — let alone high-rise subsidized structures.

“Here I am, talking about working with the housing authority, who hasn’t addressed the concerns these families have for decades, about how this plan is going to not only change their lives, but how they can actually have a voice in this process,” Brumfield said. “Convincing them that this change is going to happen and explaining how they can actually be a part of this change is an important conversation to start with.” 

However, the content and nature of the discussions shifted over time. 

“It went from these meetings where we were talking about the day-to-day issues, which, in some cases, we were already starting to address, to having a conversation about density and dynamism in their neighborhood,” Brumfield said. “They start thinking about their views overlooking the lakefront and White Sox park and can start to feel inspired about the building’s future. 

“Eventually, the discussion started to be talking about the future — their future. There was already a community there. How do we keep that sense of community? How do we stay here, and then beyond that, how do we keep that sense of community even though our built environment is changing around us?” 

Needed policy changes

Political will and a continued recognition that investment on the front end is a worthwhile use of resources — including municipal, county, state and federal funding — is necessary to address and resolve the return-on-investment dilemma of sustainability in affordable housing development, Bentley said.

“I want to give credit where it’s due. I think HUD has recognized this and the congressional folks have recognized it, through [the rental assistance demonstration] program. … They’ve come a long way over the last 10 years in recognizing the challenge to the existing [public and affordable housing] inventory and trying to make it better,” Bentley said. 

Nowak says a holistic approach is needed, along with a willingness to move forward, even with the recognition that the process often presents significant challenges.

Future developers “must take the leap and do it,” Nowak said. “They just have to, first, do a resilient design, and then they have to implement that resilient design, and then figure out how to fund it. So those three parts are a challenge. It’s not a walk in the park.”

Architects and design practitioners also have a practical role in shaping human experience, along with exercising creativity in their work in designing developments — including affordable housing, Tillman said.

“I think that it is lofty to think that architecture can save the world, but it is a social science. It is the built environment and the neighborhood. And your experience as you walk through neighborhoods is important to your day-to-day life, how you experience outside and inside. And what that feels like is important to everyday life,” Tillman said. “Everyone deserves to have a pleasant experience, and design should definitely be considered as development happens throughout neighborhoods and cities.”

Can affordable housing be energy efficient? These developers say yes 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.

A Twin Cities solar co-op and affordable housing group are piloting a new approach to helping renters benefit from solar.

Cooperative Energy Futures recently completed rooftop solar installations on five Minneapolis apartment buildings owned by Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, a nonprofit that provides deeply affordable housing and social services to residents who have experienced homelessness or who are living in poverty.

Through a somewhat complicated arrangement that involves net metering, third-party ownership, and an exchange of renewable energy credits and other incentives, the organizations have devised a way to finance projects that immediately slash renters’ utility bills by about a third — far more than a typical community solar subscription.

It’s all possible thanks to a two-year-old change to Xcel Energy’s Solar Rewards program that opened the incentives to non-homeowners. Beacon and Cooperative Energy Futures believe their projects are the first to take advantage of that change.

“By combining low-barrier, cooperative ownership of their own rooftop energy source with ongoing and growing cost savings over time, our residents have access to the broad benefits of clean energy and look forward to a brighter future,” said Kevin Walker, Beacon’s vice president of housing.

Beacon and Cooperative Energy Futures also took advantage of a green cost-share program in Minneapolis that targets low-income neighborhoods.  Isaac Evans, sustainability program coordinator for the city’s Green Cost Share Program, said he had not seen any other solar developer use the same approach of tying solar energy installations directly to individual apartments.

Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, program manager for Cooperative Energy Futures, was among a group of housing and clean energy advocates who worked with the utility and state Department of Commerce in 2021 to open the program to renters. Previously, participants had to own their residences.

The solar developer had already worked with Beacon on multiple projects, including a community solar array serving one of its downtown Minneapolis apartment buildings and rooftop arrays at three other locations that helped power common areas but not individual apartments.

After the Solar Rewards change, DenHerder-Thomas saw the potential for a new approach that would combine various utility and city incentives to directly benefit renters. He pitched the project to Walker, who had worked with Cooperative Energy Futures on other solar projects.

Beacon became the first customer of Cooperative Energy Future’s affordable solar program.

Despite the contractual complexity, the advantages are stark for residents, who can expect to see their electricity bills drop by about a third as installations have begun to be activated. A typical Cooperative Energy Futures community solar subscription would reduce a resident’s electric bill by about 15% over a 25-year contract, according to its website.

Beacon residents are typically earning 30% or less of the region’s median income — around $35,200 for a family of four — so helping to reduce their energy burden is critical to its mission of helping people get back on their feet.

Here’s how it works:

• The developer and a nonprofit partner knock on doors to explain the opportunity to building residents. Those who are interested sign a contract transferring various incentives to a third-party investor and agreeing to buy solar power from Cooperative Energy Futures at a rate less than what they currently pay for electricity.
• The developer installs multiple, separate rooftop solar arrays, each sized to 120% of a customer’s average use. The arrays are wired directly into individual apartment meters, where they offset power drawn from the utility’s grid. 
• Participants get two monthly bills: one from Cooperative Energy Futures for the cost of power generated by their solar system, and a second from Xcel Energy for any remaining electricity balance for the month.

“We have to build the system just like you would on someone’s house,” said Dan Grantier, solar development manager for Cooperative Energy Futures.

The contracts are structured so that if a tenant moves, the system transfers to the next resident. Cooperative Energy Futures administers the billing and payments, but the systems are sold to an investment company, which claims the tax benefits from them for a decade.

Walker said the five projects, along with three more that will be finished soon,  are projected to save Beacon and its residents as much as $500,000 over the next 25 years, with about three-quarters of that accruing for residents.

At least a quarter of residents in Beacon’s larger buildings chose to participate, along with nearly all residents in the smaller buildings. In one case, residents who share a single meter receive benefits from the program.

Altogether, 105 households are participating.

Toya López, Cooperative Energy Futures’ outreach and engagement associate, worked with the nonprofit Community Power to try to sell Beacon’s residents on the concept. It wasn’t a quick or easy process, often requiring coordination with caseworkers or interpreters. One challenge was convincing them it wasn’t too good to be true.

“A lot of these communities have been preyed upon by folks who said they had awesome deals,” López said. “There’s definitely a lot of trust we have to earn from community members.”

The complicated invoicing system was also a disincentive for some residents who were unsure about receiving two monthly electricity bills. Participants also had to be persuaded to share energy use data for use in sizing the systems.

Going forward, Xcel Energy has agreed to let Cooperative Energy Futures design systems based on the apartment’s square footage and total building consumption, eliminating the need to collect and analyze residents’ power use, which can vary depending on the household size or the presence of medical or other equipment.

Three more Beacon buildings are expected to have installations by the end of the year. The concept has proven successful enough already that Cooperative Energy Futures is partnering with another nonprofit, Project for Pride in Living, on similar projects on four of its affordable apartment buildings. 

The first installed projects on Beacon’s buildings are expected to be activated this month with customers seeing the difference in their electric bills in March.

“It’s been a really positive experience,” Walker said. “It’s been a bit of a long road but I’m thrilled to see we’re turning on solar at several buildings.”

A new solar model is bringing bigger savings to renters in Minneapolis 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.

In some ways, the success of the home energy efficiency project in this corner of Carrboro, North Carolina, began with the failure of Family Dollar. 

In 2015, residents stopped the retail chain’s plan to pave over a stream to build a store on the edge of their neighborhood, about two miles from the state’s flagship public university in Chapel Hill.

The experience helped people understand the power of collective action, said Tamara Sanders, a key organizer in the fight. “Coming together as a community,” she said, “pushing back.” 

When Sanders learned the county was offering grants to weatherize and preserve affordable housing, with a focus on racial equity, she knew she and her neighbors could pull together again to make change.   

“As a single White woman, [I] was not going to be a good candidate for this,” she acknowledged. But her community was. “This is a historically Black neighborhood.” 

Sanders found a company eager to do the retrofit work and asked the nonprofit North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association to administer the program. It was an easy sell.

“Part of our mission is clean energy, accessible to all,” said Daniel Pate, the group’s energy program manager. “Often, clean energy is viewed as not accessible, but what’s overlooked is energy efficiency for those facing high energy burdens.” 

With $90,000 from Orange County’s Community Climate Action Grant Program and another $10,000 in-kind from the Coastal Federal Credit Union, the Neighborhood Energy Resiliency Project was born. 

By the time work wraps up this summer, the project will have benefited nearly two dozen mostly low-income households in the 15-block territory. They’re getting insulation, improved attic seals, and other home improvements at no cost to them — reducing energy waste and lowering monthly bills. 

Like Orange County, dozens of communities around the state have climate or renewable energy targets, and advocates want the program here to serve as a role model for them. 

“We’re talking about the ability to replicate this,” said Dr. Rita Joyner, senior advisor at the Sustainable Energy Association, “this has become a positive case study.” 

An estimated 1.4 million people in the state live with unaffordable energy costs, according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, largely due to energy inefficiency. Decades of redlining and other discriminatory housing policies mean impoverished communities and people of color, especially, tend to live in manufactured homes or those built before the advent of energy conservation codes. They’re also more likely to rent, while those who own lack the capital for major upgrades like new appliances and windows. 

The pandemic deepened these disparities, leading Congress to nearly double weatherization assistance funds flowing down to the states. North Carolina’s annual share has now risen to about $40 million. Yet distributing it comes with a host of challenges, from identifying and building trust with those in need to recruiting and training workers to perform the services. Less than 3,000 households are apt to benefit each year. 

Duke Energy, the state’s predominant monopoly utility, has its own programs to help customers make energy efficiency improvements, but those, too, reach a vanishingly small fraction of those who stand the most to gain. According to a report to regulators, less than one-tenth of one percent of eligible low-income customers have benefited from Duke’s Weatherization Program and Equipment Replacement Program since its inception. 

Keys to success

The Carrboro project, by contrast, is reaching about a fifth of the 120 homes it targeted. The Sustainable Energy Association attributes this effectiveness to several factors — starting with Sanders.

“When we did the canvassing, whether she was with us or not,” said Joyner, “she was able to put her reputation on the line. What was successful was to have someone in the neighborhood who could vouch for the fact that this is a good program.” 

Close coordination with the weatherization agency that serves Orange County was another key. By working with Central Piedmont Community Action, Pate’s team identified homes in the project territory that had sought federal weatherization assistance but couldn’t qualify because of urgent repair needs like a broken door or leaky roof.

Last fall, $60,000 in federal pandemic relief funds were leveraged from the Department of Environmental Quality to pay for the necessary fixes at six homes. 

“There’s just a long list — at every weatherization agency — of homes that can’t get services until they get these structural issues addressed,” Pate said. Once they were, “it was a one-two punch, double impact: first structural issues, then energy efficiency.” 

The company performing the home upfits also makes a difference. Greensboro-based Energy Reduction Specialists has been doing energy performance contracting since 2010, said company vice president Paul Swenson.

“There’s a big need to have good contractors,” said Swenson, who has a background in home repairs for low-income households. “Programs don’t succeed with bad contractors.” 

Too often, Swenson said, specialty contractors insist their singular product — an HVAC system, say, or a window — will solve customers’ problems no matter what. By contrast, his company takes a “whole house” approach to energy efficiency.

“It’s not just overpriced new windows and poorly installed installation,” he said. “It’s air sealing. It’s duct sealing. It’s ventilation. It’s moisture control. It’s comfort. There’s so much more to it than what people typically think of.” 

Energy Reduction Specialists is also willing to forego or delay business if there’s a problem another contractor should fix first, Swenson said. “We’re willing to say, ‘You should spend your money with somebody else.’ And there’s a lot of contractors that just won’t do that.” 

Even with the Carrboro project, where customers are getting the services for free, the philosophy is still important. “We want to make sure that the work that we do through this program in Orange County is the right work to be done,” Swenson said, “and it’s done efficiently and effectively — so that it’s an easy decision to get more money to do more work to help more people.”

‘We try and look out for each other’

Still, perhaps the biggest factor in the success of the project is the tight-knit nature of the community itself.  

“I love this neighborhood,” said Anissa McLendon, who lives adjacent to the wooded lot where the Family Dollar was proposed, in a bright purple house that once belonged to her grandmother. 

With Sanders, McLendon was another leader in the campaign against the store, hosting meetings every Saturday to plot and act. Residents unite around other common purposes, too, like arranging for food and flowers when someone dies or gets sick. 

“A lot of people come home, and they don’t know what’s going on with the neighbor to the right nor the left — and they don’t care,” McLendon said. “But people on our street do care about each other.”  

McLendon was one of Sanders’ first recruits. She notified her neighbors with email blasts and by word of mouth. She enrolled in the program herself – helping to cut her Duke Energy bill — and got her mother, who lives next door, signed up as well. 

“I am appreciative of what I got,” McLendon said. “I’m appreciative of everything in both these houses.”

With some wealthier people slowly moving to the community, existing residents also had a powerful motivation to participate in the program, Joyner said.  

“These are people who are committed to this community. But gentrification is real,” Joyner said. Long-term savings on energy bills might help existing residents “maintain the community,” she said, “and be able to afford the property tax increases that come about.”

The final ingredient for the project’s success was the grant itself. In Orange County, that money came from a quarter-cent property tax increase commissioners adopted in 2019.

But the 2021 federal infrastructure law could provide another funding source: block grants. The state’s 37 largest cities and counties were awarded a total of $6.1 million for energy efficiency and conservation projects. Another $3 million was allocated to the state of North Carolina to funnel to smaller communities. 

Hopefully, advocates say, the availability of funds and the Orange County project’s success will inspire other communities.

“Ideally it’s a concept that other local governments can adopt,” Pate said. “We were able to show that this design works.”

How fighting big retail helped a N.C. community organize around energy efficiency 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.

Renovating a 50-year-old landmark structure in the heart of the nation’s capital is expected to save dozens of low-income Virginia families thousands of dollars on their electric bills.

It’s possible because of a new green pledge between neighboring entities that is simple yet trailblazing.

The District of Columbia-based American Institute of Architects (AIA) will offset greenhouse gas emissions generated from its major modernization by funding the bulk of 360 kilowatts of solar power on the roofs of Habitat for Humanity Virginia homes.

Jeff Heie, who directs the nimble startup Give Solar, will coordinate the installations over the next two years. AIA’s $500,000 donation will cover enough panels for 72 houses, he estimated.

“It’s huge,” the solar champion said about the gift’s role in crushing barriers to renewable energy. 

Two years ago, he initiated a Give Solar-Habitat Virginia partnership via a pilot project with the housing nonprofit’s Central Valley affiliate. Both organizations are based in the Shenandoah Valley’s Rockingham County. 

Since then, due to Heie’s doggedness, more than half of the 39 Habitat Virginia affiliates have either completed solar conversions or expressed interest in doing so.

“What makes me feel good about my work is getting solar in the hands of people who just don’t have access,” Heie said. “It’s part of lifting up low-income people and helping them break out of cycles of poverty.”

The first inkling of AIA’s interest in Give Solar’s ties with Habitat arrived in Heie’s email inbox as a vague query from a San Francisco architectural firm in October 2021. That tickler launched negotiations that led to the announcement of the joint AIA-Habitat pact in late February.

“The way I look at it, this donation is buying us some time to figure out how to make this an ongoing sustainable model for installing solar on Habitat homes.” 

AIA anticipates breaking ground this year on the transformation of its iconic Brutalist style headquarters built in 1973, and adjacent courtyard and garden. The overhaul will fully electrify the building, reduce energy use by 58% and tap into a 100% renewable energy mix.

The professional trade group, not the homeowners, has dibs on the solar renewable energy credits because it’s the entity offsetting the carbon emissions.

“We are excited about AIA’s building renewal, and we appreciate Habitat for Humanity’s assistance to address the embodied carbon from the project,” said association CEO Lakisha Ann Woods. She added that the decarbonization goals demonstrate a cost-effective and replicable approach to climate action. 

‘Soft opening’ in Fauquier County

Give Solar delved into its first AIA-Habitat rooftop array a week earlier than the scheduled March 1 start date to accommodate the schedules of some volunteers.

“It was like a soft opening,” Heie joked about the Feb. 24 installation on a new two-story home in the Northern Virginia town of Warrenton.

That yet-to-be-occupied Fauquier County house fills the bill of the 70-plus homes Give Solar will be outfitting with 5-kilowatt systems. Generally, Habitat homes, modestly sized between 1,200 and 1,400 square feet, are models of energy efficiency.

Thus far, Heie has lined up six small solar developers across the state willing to provide labor and materials at a discounted sum of $10,000 per 5-kilowatt system. 

“A connection with Habitat is a valuable asset because companies can show how they are community-oriented,” Heie said. “We’re reaching audiences who would otherwise be shut out. Installers like that message.”

AIA dollars cover equipment. The price tag of the 12 to 14 panels for each house, plus racking, wiring, inverters and other materials, add up to $6,300 of that total. The remaining $2,700 is the cost of labor.

Habitat homeowners will cover that balance by rolling a little extra — an estimated $11 to $23 — into their monthly mortgage payment.

“This is so homeowners have skin in the solar game,” he said. “Habitat builds affordable, subsidized housing and it doesn’t give that away for free either.” 

The family that eventually moves into the Warrenton home — served by Dominion Energy — will lower its electric bills by $65 to $75 monthly. That amounts to a whopping $27,000 in savings over the 25-year “lifespan” of the array, assuming electricity costs rise 2% annually.

“Statewide, Habitat homeowners will be benefiting from solar much more than they are paying in,” Heie said. “I see it this way: we’re putting money back into pockets and contributing to generational wealth.”

Most families served by Habitat affiliates in Virginia earn between 25% and 60% of the area median income, according to the nonprofit’s statistics.

Executive director Overton McGehee, who oversees all Habitat Virginia affiliates, traveled to Warrenton from his Charlottesville office to witness the Feb. 24 event. 

“This is big,” he said about the financial boost from AIA. “It will save hardworking, low-income homeowners money on their electric bills.” 

He referred to the embrace of rooftop solar as Habitat Virginia’s “second big leap forward in sustainability.” The first jump involved the adoption of stricter energy efficiency standards about 17 years ago.

Give Solar is in the midst of creating a how-to video for Habitat builders that lays out solar-ready construction practices. For instance, crews are instructed to run conduit from the electric panel to the attic before drywall is in place. 

“Going forward, we hope all Habitat houses with suitable roofs will have solar panels,” said McGehee, who initially connected with Habitat decades ago as a volunteer. “It’s just so logical and the technology is so far ahead.

“We were excited about solar in the Carter administration and now it’s so much more advanced.”

Conservation rooted in family tree

At the Warrenton installation in late February, an energetic Kim Monge Fera, operations manager with Charlottesville-based Virtue Solar, directed a crew of Habitat and Give Solar helpers that included five students from the Environmental Club at Flint Hill School in nearby Fairfax County.

One of the teenagers was James Jackson, who had reached out to Heie several months ago to inquire how he could aid Give Solar’s aim.

In January, Jackson dove in by setting up a GoFundMe campaign that has thus far raised $2,000 to defray labor costs of the inaugural AIA-Habitat endeavor.

“I think it’s great that they are doing this work together … to make the world a better place,” Jackson said about the solar partnership. “One day, we hope to meet the family who will move in.”

Jackson explained that the conservation ethic of his grandfather, Charles Wurster, inspired him to actively address climate change. Wurster and two others founded the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy organization, back in 1967.

Heie was impressed — and touched — that Wurster backed his grandson’s enthusiasm for solar energy by traveling to Warrenton.

“I had no clue about this connection when I first talked to James,” he said. “It’s very symbolic, this passing of the torch from grandfather to grandson.”

Heie, too, continues to mold a generational legacy.

He instigated what he christened “solar barn raisings” before 2018, the year Give Solar became an official offshoot of the New Community Project, a multi-pronged nonprofit also headquartered in Harrisonburg. That’s when helping nonprofits transition to clean energy became his nascent organization’s wheelhouse. 

Barn raising is a tribute to the region’s Mennonite and Amish heritage and their tradition of mutual aid when neighboring farming families pooled their know-how. On a solar site, it translates to qualified professionals steering rooftop preparation, array installations and net metering hookups, while a cadre of versatile volunteers are on hand to tote panels, lift them to the roof and undertake other chores.

Recruiting volunteers to rub shoulders with professionals not only strengthens camaraderie, but also shrinks costs a tad.

To finance that first Habitat solar project in March 2021, Heie and the Central Valley affiliate devised the concept of a Solar Seed Fund. Individuals, faith communities, advocacy organizations and family endowments rallied around a cause that has now solarized 10 Habitat homes around Virginia.

While Heie is exhilarated that the AIA donation will add 72 more houses to that mix, he’s eager to broaden that sphere. He’s thinking $5 million to $6 million is a doable, albeit ambitious, goal for the seed fund.

In the big picture, he’s aware that a sprinkling of rooftop solar rooftop projects won’t halt the climate crisis. But even a slight dent is more productive than fretting.

“What we’re doing is not utility-scale solar,” Heie said. “I guess you could say it’s small potatoes, but for Habitat families, it’s not.”

Carbon offset pact will put solar on dozens of Habitat for Humanity homes 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.