The Energy Show

There is one thing for certain as you electrify your house. You’ll need more electricity. Duh! But getting more electricity from the street to your house is not easy. Bizarrely, it often takes longer to do these electrical upgrades than it does to install your new all electric appliances. When — not if -- your old gas hot water heater dies, you don’t want to wait months for a new 240 volt circuit...

The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, became law in August 2022. It's packed with incentives across the entire value chain, including domestic manufacturing, energy-efficient products, and clean saving energy. But these fantastic incentives do not yet match the realities of what you can get today for your electrification project. The table below shows the most significant IRA electrification incent...

Batteries were everywhere at September’s RE+ Conference in Vegas. I counted over 100 different battery company and system vendors. It was more of a battery and solar tracker show than a solar show — demonstrating the rapid evolution of these clean energy technologies. But out of a hundred batteries on the show floor, there are only half a dozen that I would recommend to homeowners. Home battery sy...

Proving the solar skeptics wrong, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) now expects that utilities will add 54.5 Gigawatts of solar generation capacity in 2023. And this capacity does not include 6.4 Gw of residential installations and 1.7 Gw of commercial installations expected in 2023. SIDEBAR: a Gigawatt is a billion watts of power. In 1955 the eminent Dr. Emmett Brown stated that th...

HEADLINE: Higher Electric Rates and More Blackouts Unfortunately, this is the new normal for most of the U.S. In other words: SNAFU This situation will not change. It’s a little-known fact that utilities use our money to influence politicians to maintain their monopoly. To the tune of $18m in California just in 2022. Government regulators are supposed to ensure that utilities provide inexpensive,...

Our society is moving rapidly towards electrification. Building electrification is good for the climate, good for our health, and good for our economy. We’ll all be using more electricity — it’s inevitable. Luckily, using all this extra electricity for our heating and our cars is inexpensive when you get it from rooftop solar and storage. But utilities have a monopoly on electricity distribution....

On this week’s show we’re talking about the first steps toward your home electrification project. What I call the Low Hanging Fruit. These are easy and cheap energy efficiency measures — most of which you can do yourself (DIY) or do not require any special contractors. Many people recommend starting with an energy audit of your home. However, unless you're working with a local energy auditor that...

More heat pumps were sold in 2022 than gas furnaces. And that was before the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) kicked in, which provides an $8,000 rebate for most heat pump installations — on top of a $2,000 federal tax credit and city/county incentives that can exceed $3,000. Heat pumps are cleaner, more efficient and less expensive than most conventional gas furnaces and air conditioners. But the va...

How would you like to reduce your home energy costs, improve your health and comfort, and at the same time do your part to improve the environment? If your answer is “yes,” then listen to this week’s Energy Show episode. If your answer is “no,” then maybe you don’t need your share of the $10,000-$40,000 incentives that are available for your home. The concept of Home Electrification is simple: you...

Batteries are becoming an essential part of home solar systems. With solar-connected batteries, homeowners can avoid paying peak utility electricity charges. Batteries can provide backup power during blackouts. And if you’re in California, after net metering ends in April 2023, you will need batteries to avoid peak electric rates. In the old days, automobile-style lead acid batteries were used for...

According to Wikipedia -- which has supplanted the Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopedia Brittanica as the world’s definitive source of information -- an Atmospheric River consists of narrow bands of enhanced water vapor winds that form over the oceans. In plain English, Atmospheric Rivers are windy rainstorms that dump a huge amount of water in a relatively short time. They account for about...

In our opening Energy Show we discuss frequently asked questions about residential solar.