Please Use Clean Energy

An Open Letter to my Friends and Neighbors

When are you switching to electricity for heating and driving? I ask because the sooner the better. Our planet is in a bit of a mess — burning fossil fuel is making it worse. Please stop.

One pathway to be free of fossil fuel is to live in a tent without heat or hot water and use a bicycle for errands. Another is to electrify your heating, cooking and driving.

Having made the switch to a fully electric home myself (after my wife nixed the “go primitive” option), I can tell you that the actual installation work required to become 100% fossil fuel free here in Maine can be done in two weeks by two people who really know what they’re doing. Or a dozen people who sort of know. (Licensing rules generally frown on hiring two experienced jack-of-all-trades to do all the work; you’ll probably need both an electrician and a plumber involved to pull a permit and they’ll bring in their own helpers and subs.) Of course, if you’ve ever been involved in a construction project, you’ll understand that a week of actual work by skilled installers requires effort ahead of time to plan and procure the equipment. But still, it’s really not difficult to get free of fossil fuel today.

Before you hire anybody, first decide which electric heating and which electric vehicle charging systems to buy. The Internet can help with that — there’s no shortage of do-gooders who have already made the switch and want to brag. You can find endless examples and YouTube videos explaining how to optimize your efficiency, electrify your equipment, and solarize your power. Here’s my take.

Our home started being built in 1828 and we’re still at it.

Our home was originally built in 1828 before indoor plumbing or fossil fuel were popular and long before electricity was a thing. This is what was required to bring it into the 21st clean energy century:

1. Tightening up the house with caulk around exterior seams and blown-in cellulose insulation in the walls and attic. I did the caulking in a few hours and a team of two people did the blown-in cellulose in two days. A note of caution: carbon monoxide is the leading cause of poisoning in the United States. While you’re burning things inside your home you should have a carbon monoxide detector and you should think twice before blocking airflow. Once you stop burning things inside your home, you eliminate carbon monoxide and can tighten up your house so you’re not wasting so much money letting outdoor air blow through while trying to stay comfortable indoors.
2. Upgrading our electrical service from the public grid so that we could go fully electric. The two existing 100-amp service panels wouldn’t cut it (one for the main house and one for our in-law apartment), so we added a 200-amp service panel on another meter. This prompted CMP to upgrade the transformer on the pole across the street and replace the wire between the old transformer and our house. Installing this new 200-amp service took our electrician and CMP’s crew a day. Now 400 amps can flow between our house and the grid, for a peak power flow of 96 kilowatts at 240 volts.
3. Swapping out our oil boiler for an electric boiler. This took a couple days to get all of the old equipment out of the basement (the oil tank and boiler) and then a couple days to run the wires and plumb in the new electric boiler. The new boiler uses the same hydronic distribution system so nothing needed to change except the boiler. The nice thing was that we could cap off the chimney that the old boiler was using, and later were able to knock it down in our attic so we didn’t have to flash around it when we replaced our roof. If we had a furnace (blowing hot air around our house instead of circulating hot water) we would have replaced it with mini-split heat pumps. Many years after upgrading to an electric boiler we actually did install a mini-split system with three indoor units and one outdoor unit — mainly for the AC in the summer.
4. Installing an electric hot water heater. We used to get hot water from our oil boiler, but with that gone we could make hot water much more efficiently. At the time (circa 2012), heat pump hot water heaters were not common. So we splurged and went with a solar hot water system that collects heat from the north side of our roof using tip-up heat pipe tubes that stay above the snow in winter. Most people nowadays would just put in a heat pump water heater and not bother with solar. The deluxe option would be solar tubes on a north-facing roof combined with an electric heat pump hot water tank.
5. Removing our propane stove and replacing it with an induction stove. It took a couple hours to add a bigger breaker to the panel, run larger wire to the outlet, and then an hour or so for me to muscle the old unit out of the way and get the new unit connected to power. It took the technician from our propane company about an hour to cap the lines and take away the propane tank. I listed the old propane stove online and within a couple days someone had carted it off for their camp.
6. Installing an electric vehicle charger. For the first few months after leasing a Leaf I just used an extension cord through the window. Then it got cold, so we installed an exterior 120V plug next to our driveway. That worked for a year or so until my wife was convinced these new fangled EVs really did work. Then we committed to a 240V ClipperCreek charging unit, which took a couple hours to install and works with every brand of electric vehicle. So far in our driveway we’ve charged Nissan, VW, GM and Tesla vehicles. The trickiest bit was deciding where to drill the hole to pull the wire from the panel to where we wanted to put the charger on the outside of our house.

That was that. No more fossil fuel for us.

We did all this years before our state and federal governments started giving away money to convince people to do this sort of thing. The good news for you, if you’ve got this work ahead of you for a home here in Maine, is that you can get free money from Efficiency Maine and you can save money on your taxes for doing it.

If you can spare some cash and hire a few people for a couple weeks, you can stop burning fossil fuel in your home and around town. Thanks for giving it some thought.

Sincerely,

Fred

P.S. Where will we get our electricity from? The sun.

You may have noticed all the solar farms springing up around Maine. We shut down our nuclear power plant and almost all of our coal power plants, replacing all that with natural gas. We kept many of our hydropower plants, plus a few token biomass and waste-to-energy plants. We started building wind power before realizing solar makes way more sense. You’ll hear a lot from politicians about off-shore wind, but what is actually getting built is solar. Lots of solar.

Through 2025 or so we can add grid-scale solar without batteries, but any day now our politicians and journalists will discover that we need energy storage. There’s a race among lithium-iron-phosphate, sodium-ion, iron flow, zinc halide, nickel hydrogen and a few more chemistries to store energy cheaply enough so that solar beats natural gas. (These batteries use safe and abundant elements because toxic or rare minerals like cobalt are too expensive.)

If you’ve got a sunny roof or a big patch of lawn you’d like to turn into passive income, put some solar on it! For the time being you can use the grid as a giant battery for free. When battery costs come down you can choose whether to stay on the grid or become energy independent.