How the government will pay you to spend less on your utility bill✨

By now, you’ve probably been privy to the political furor around gas stoves and whether or not they should be regulated (spoiler alert: induction stoves are awesome for cooking and won’t give you asthma). But have you ever considered other sources of methane gas in your home, like clothes dryers and water heaters? Direct fossil fuel use in residential buildings is a sneaky source of emissions, but it’s a solvable problem. The recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offers unprecedented incentives that make transitioning to an all-electric, zero-emissions home not just feasible, but financially rewarding.

🔎 How much money are we talking about?

Consumers can save over $17,000 on electrifying their homes thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA offers two kinds of financial incentives: tax credits and rebates.

• Tax credits are essentially refunds on taxes owed that you claim when filing your taxes. By applying all of the IRA’s home electrification credits, you could save up to $3,200 in one year across all upgrade categories and get that money when you get your tax return.

• Meanwhile, rebates are cash reimbursements for eligible purchases. The best part? These rebates will be applied directly at the point of sale, including for installation, so eligible households will never have to front the cost of expensive electrification upgrades. The rebates will be issued by the Department of Energy to low- and moderate-income households (and for many households, they’ll cover 100% of the cost of an upgrade).

• How much money can you get with the Inflation Reduction Act? Check out the Rewiring America IRA savings calculator and their electrification home guides (for homeowners and renters!). But be sure to come back here for the playbook on how to level up your individual action into systemic change!

🏠 Which projects qualify, and are the upgrades worth it?

There's a broad array of projects that qualify for these incentive programs, from installing rooftop solar and home battery storage to weatherizing and insulating your home, to replacing fossil gas-powered appliances like stoves and water heaters with electric ones. All these upgrades may now be within financial reach for most households. And these small changes help the climate more than you may think: in the U.S., we could eliminate over 10% of annual greenhouse gas emissions just by electrifying homes, and that’s before we tackle the source of that electricity.

The home upgrades incentivized by the IRA aren't just about electrification. They also improve your home's overall energy efficiency, reducing your energy use and, ultimately, reducing your utility bills. Most households are expected to save an average of nearly $500 in annual energy costs. These federal investments are also specifically structured to reduce inequities for low- and moderate-income households and communities of color, who are disproportionately impacted by poor indoor air quality and bear 3x the energy burden as higher-income households.

Home electrification will also bring enormous advantages to our health and economy. Appliances that burn fossil fuels create harmful indoor air pollution and contribute to childhood asthma, not to mention the outdoor residential air pollution that accounts for over 15,000 premature deaths each year. And for the economy? The home electrification transition could potentially create over one million new jobs (calling all emerging contractors and installers!).

💬 Okay, this is awesome. Now what?

For individual home electrification choices to make a dent in U.S. emissions and generate wider systemic change, we need as many consumers as possible to take advantage of these new tax credits and rebates, as quickly as possible. In addition to talking about home electrification with your neighbors and personal network, it’s up to us to talk to our local elected officials and ask them to spread the word. Our reps regularly send newsletters to all the residents in their district, meet with key stakeholders and business associations, and have a stage to amplify policy messages. One of their top goals is to be re-elected, and turns out making life more affordable and helping businesses to grow can be a winning strategy. They’re ideally positioned to make noise about these existing tax credits and rebates, and we should use our leverage as voting constituents to urge them to do so.

👉 Get in on the action!

You want to do something meaningful about the climate emergency, so we make that simple. Our Action Plan outlines the three most productive, high-impact actions we can take as constituents. Each action comes with an easy-to-use, step-by-step Action Playbook and can be accomplished in 60 minutes or less. And we only focus on impactful stuff that has been proven to get results.

You can tackle the Action Plan anytime on your own or drop into an Hour of Action to complete a playbook alongside fellow changemakers (here’s what to expect on Zoom).

To learn more about home electrification incentives, dive into our full Issue Briefing.

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Featured photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

© 2023 Climate Changemakers

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