Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Billionaire Moguls and a Trillion Trees (NYT)
Leaf-Peeping Season is Changing (WSJ)
Vermont’s biggest utility dramatically expands home battery subsidies (CM)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
SHINE Technologies, a next-generation fusion tech company, raised $70M in funding led by Baillie Gifford and Fidelity (PRN)
Regent, an electric seaglider startup, raised a $60M Series A co-led by 8090 Industries and Founders Fund (TC)
On-demand personal rapid transit startup Glydways raised a $56M Series B led by New Science Ventures (PRN)
Perch Energy, a community solar servicer, raised a $30M Series B from Nuveen (BW)
Erthos, a Tempe-based utility-scale solar company, raised a $24M round led by Capricorn’s Technology Impact Funds (FN)
JetCool, a liquid cooling company for data centers, raised a $17M Series A led by Bosch Ventures (BW)
Vibrant Planet, a wildfire protection and ecosystem restoration startup, raised a $15M Series A led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund (FN)
Jetson, a startup building an eVTOL you can own and fly for short point-to-point flights, closed a $15M seed round led by will.i.am and other angel investors (EU)
Bedrock Energy, a startup designing, constructing, and delivering geothermal heating and cooling systems, raised an $8.5M seed round led by Wireframe Ventures (PRN)
Wanda Fish, an Israeli cultivated fish tech startup, raised a $7M seed round led by Aqua Spark (TC)
Sustainable packaging startup FlexSea raised a $3.7M seed round led by Indico Capital Partners (FN)
Green Theory
The Ramp to More Amps
You awake in the morning and stumble to the bathroom. Splashing some water on your face, you find it surprisingly frigid. Concerned, but staying cool, you twist on the shower’s hot water and wait. Your fears confirmed—it’s ice cold—you now know your water heater has failed.
“This is the last thing I need today!” you may be thinking. “Why me?” you ask, but you’re not alone. Today, 44,000 other major residential gas appliances will break down, too. Every day in the US:
7,500 gas ovens go cold
9,000 gas stoves break down
16,500 gas water heaters bust
12,750 gas heating furnaces expire
Dialing up a home appliance professional for help, householders in need, today, are unlikely to end up with an electric replacement. We’ve discussed lack of renter agency, higher upfront price tags, and concerns about electrical supply as holding back electrical appliance adoption. Still, new and improved offerings are overcoming these objections, and driving home decarbonization forward.
At the critical moment when a home is without a needed appliance, what else can we do to tip the scales toward a cleaner, greener future?
Defaults at Fault
The easiest way to make change last is to enact one you can set and forget. Having your alarm clock ring at the same time each weekday is far more reliable than trying to remember to set it each weeknight. In this vein, behavioral economists pay extra attention to changes that the individual doesn’t even need to actively set: defaults.
Since our residential appliances are defaults we rarely adjust, they represent potent climate levers for permanently reducing up to 40% of US emissions. Wharton professor Katy Milkman sat down with a UCLA professor Shlomo Benartzi to unpack the importance of defaults:
“People are cognitively lazy, and the easiest choice is not to make a choice …
We’re all bombarded with offers on our phones with messages, with emails, with retargeting campaigns by Facebook and Google and others. And I think we have no mental bandwidth left to think about all these choices” —Professor Shlomo Benartzi
The appliances in a house form powerful defaults for everyone in it. Sure, you could use an electric space heater instead of your gas furnace, or plug in an electrical hotplate instead of cranking up your gas stove burners. More realistically, you’ll use the gas appliances until they break down.
The moment of replacing an appliance offers a higher-order default to consider. Before the homeowner’s ultimate choice, the outcome will be guided by the professional installer’s recommendation.
What’s the US default? Unfortunately for our climate goals, a plumber is unlikely to recommend an electrical heat pump water heater over a new gas one—a pattern of gas-defaulting found across home appliance installers.
Gas-to-gas pipeline
Even if a homeowner is excited about an electrical appliance, and can afford the price tag, there are two more barriers that get in the way.
First, because of the relatively low demand, home repair firms keep limited stock of electrical appliances on hand, if any. This dynamic makes it much easier to pitch gas machines (“I can have the gas one installed and running tomorrow”), and deepens a vicious cycle that suppresses electrification. IRA incentives are designed to limit this issue, as described by climate tech leader Janet Brunkhorst, in a recent article.
Second, even when considering firms that stock electric appliances, the complication of upgrading the main electrical panel or home wiring adds another headache which installers prefer to avoid. Without this wrinkle in the process, perhaps more firms would opt for a balanced presentation of electric options.
Low-amp Camp
Since roughly two-thirds of single-family homes lack a 200-amp main electrical panel, and about two-thirds of US houses are single-family dwellings, that means at least 40% of residential gas appliances (about 18,000 every day) are breaking down in houses with severe electrification constraints.
Main panel upgrades slow down project timelines, often require more extensive permitting, and many appliance sellers simply lack the requisite expertise to manage main panel upgrades in-house—even solar sales organizations. If a house can get by with one more electrical appliance, homeowners will often be advised to wait to upgrade, simply because the installer would prefer to finish the project and move on.
Down to the Wire
Even if one more electric appliance fits, with no upgrade to their electrical load, houses with low-amp electrical panels will keep facing the same barrier to electrification, every time another appliance breaks down. Tens of thousands of new gas appliances will then be installed, and lock in another decade of greenhouse gas emissions, each day that these electrical panels go un-upgraded.
Shelling out thousands for a main panel upgrade can be slightly offset by the IRA tax credit (up to $600), but the decision to upgrade usually comes up when homeowners are already facing down an expensive appliance replacement. Alternatively, it’s difficult to convince homeowners to rewire or upgrade as a standalone project: why upgrade until I actually need to, for new electric appliances? To make electric appliances the default, main panel upgrades can’t be ignored: an even more sticky default, reset every 30-40 years, than replacing an appliance (done every 5-10 years, if lucky).
Despite the complexity and the cost, we know that over 50 million US homes will need main panel upgrades in the next 10 years, if not sooner. Whether the solution is funding more electrician training programs at community colleges, a consortium of home appliance professionals developing a shared main panel upgrade strategy, or something entirely different, there’s $110B in main panel upgrades waiting in US single-family homes alone.
The Closer
Getting into the hippo pics lately. (Credit)