Think Globally, Act Locally – Personal Environmental Action in the Era of Trump 2.0
AKA it should be much easier to put in a heat pump water heater.
The chaos of Trump 2.0 is making it difficult to think about affirmative environmental action these days. At the policy level and in the courts, environmentalists are going to be playing defense for the next few years. Much of what is going on these days feels beyond the average person’s control and that can be cause for feelings of hopelessness or despair. If you are committed to improving our environment though, there are still many actions one can take at a personal level. Our family has, for example, slowly been attempting to decarbonize the house we purchased near UCLA some ten years ago.
Overall, we have found the experience to be relatively smooth. California and Los Angeles have many programs to ease the process. We recently had a bit of an experience with switching to a heat pump water heater that I will describe below. We are the happy owners of a new unit now, but the process was more difficult than it should have been.
When I started this process I found that even very few of my friends in the environmental community had any experience in taking these nuts-and-bolts measures at home. Thus, I thought this post might be useful for others.
Step-by-Step Home Decarbonization
A variety of steps to decarbonize our house were rather easy to make. We first took advantage of LADWP’s Home Energy Improvement Program. LADWP inspected our house and provided free LED lightbulbs. They offered to put in new insulation for free but determined that our house was already well-insulated. We purchased a solar array from LA Solar Group. The system covered 100 percent of our home energy use until we traded in our gas-powered cars for two EVs. We have not taken out our gas cooktop, but we purchased a stand-alone induction cooktop that works extremely well for most things we do.
We just completed a heat pump water heater retrofit (as I will describe below). The final major upgrade we need to make is to replace our HVAC system (gas heating, electric AC) with a heat pump system.
We have made some water-related improvements as well – purchased low-flow shower heads, removed the grass from our backyard, installed low-water toilets (free from LADWP). We put in low-water native grass in the front yard a few years ago, which is not optimal but we will consider a more complete xeriscaping project down the road.
Some Things Should Be Easier
Our recent experience in installing a heat pump water heater (HPWH) is a good example of both how substantial incentives are available and that the entire process of making the switch is much more difficult than it should be. I have a personal and professional interest in making retrofits and testing out the incentive processes, but I suspect that many other people would not tolerate the friction we faced in switching from a traditional gas-powered water heater to a highly efficient HPWH.
Why Heat Pump Water Heaters
Lawyers are not known for their facility with technology. It took me some time to get a handle on what technology should replace our 50-gallon gas-powered water heater. Many contractors we contacted suggested a tankless water heater (which can be gas or electric powered). These units are slightly more efficient than the old-school tanked water heater because it is hot water on demand, rather than a standing reservoir of hot water that is continually maintained at the desired temperature. But electric heating of water on demand is energy intensive and a gas-powered unit still uses fossil fuel.
My slow-moving lawyer’s brain then learned that heat pump water heaters are the most efficient technology. This post from a staffer at NRDC explains why:
Replacing old-fashioned, inefficient water heaters with heat pumps slashes energy consumption. That in turn drives emissions down; according to the New Buildings Institute switching to a HPWH saves more than 2,000 pounds of CO2 annually. It also drives utility bills down – according to ENERGY STAR a family of four would save $550 a year using a HPWH!
Contractors
A major barrier to taking the most environmental step in water heating was the attitude and knowledge level of most contractors we contacted. I was stunned at how difficult it was to find a contractor willing and able to install a heat pump water heater. More contractors than I can count attempted to convince me that a heat pump water heater was a bad idea. I suspect that most of them were simply selling the old technologies that they had always sold and understood the best.
I was finally able to obtain quotes from two contractors who were willing to install a heat pump water heater and were familiar with available incentives. As I was about to sign the contract with one of them, he said they could no longer do the job because their water heater guy just retired. The other company told me they were no longer installing heat pump water heaters, with no further explanation.
I finally found a company called Reliable Air Conditioning & Heating. Eli and Jenelle there are great. They understood the technology, could explain it to a Luddite like me, and were willing to work through the logistics of obtaining available incentives.
Available Incentives
It turns out there are extensive incentives for making a switch from a fossil fuel-powered water heater to a heat pump water heater. For us, there were three major incentives:
- Federal tax incentives (30%), from the Inflation Reduction Act;
- California state TECHClean incentives ($3,800 for a 65-gallon unit); and
- An LADWP rebate ($1,500).
For a project that cost slightly more than $7,000, this would mean the final project cost after incentives would be a mere $1,600. Not bad.
I subsequently found this Switch is On website, which provides good information (but also many of the contractors I contacted through the site were slow to respond or did not respond at all).
Other Barriers
We had a few other snafus along the way. Our old hot water heater broke in June 2024, but the California TECHClean incentive fund had been exhausted for the year just the month before. TECHClean staff did not have a clear sense of when the incentives would return, so we spent several months in limbo. We finally got notice on December 5, 2024 (six months later!) that the TECHClean incentives had returned. Eli and his team installed the new HPWH on December 17th.
We opted for a non-hybrid heat pump water heater that does not have a backup electric heating element (which uses 10x the electricity of the heat pump). The potential downside of a non-hybrid unit is that recovery times are longer if we run out of hot water (say from a certain teenage family member taking typically long showers). So far this has not been a problem, except in two instances: once when we accidentally set the unit to vacation mode (dropping the water temperature to 50 degrees F) and another time when a family member who shall remain unnamed accidentally left the water running in the utility room all night. But these were both human errors, not the fault of the technology.
Conclusion
If I want to be honest, it took much more work than we had expected to put in the most climate-friendly water heater option. I worry that people won’t make the switch because of the various friction points I have identified here. This entire process should get easier for others with accumulated experience – but for now contractors, homeowners, and the agencies running the incentive programs will need to put in additional effort to make it easier to do the climate-friendly thing.
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2 Replies to “Think Globally, Act Locally – Personal Environmental Action in the Era of Trump 2.0”
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About Alex
Alex Wang is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He is a leading expert on en…
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Thank you for highlighting the critical decarbonization role of homeowners and vehicle owners! 42% of US GHG emissions are due to household energy emissions, and replacing the emitting infrastructure is necessary. (Behavioral shifts like moving the thermostat or biking or taking transit more often are useful, but do not have enough scale for our emissions crisis.)
Buying an EV and arranging for charging in an owner’s home is relatively straightforward, but installing a heat pump for space heating or a heat-pump water heater can get complex in a hurry. And few landlords want to install these. While there are (were?) many federal and state incentives for such residential or commercial infrastructure, specific incentives can depend upon your income level, zip code, whether the program is currently funded, and other factors.
Many non-profit groups are springing up to help educate buyers of home appliances and vehicles. They help people to plan for clean energy adoptions when a new furnace, vehicle, or other appliances are needed—because the moment of purchase is when 10-20 years of emissions are either locked in or avoided. Some groups are bringing up networks of free coaches and some are experimenting with micro financing for low-income families.
Some excellent websites:
Rewiring America; Clean Energy Communities Fund; Electrify Now; Go Electric Colorado; Electrify Oregon; Berkeley coolclimate calculator
Book: Electrify by Saul Griffith
Alex, your experience parallels mine. It was exceptionally difficult to manage the rebate process. My plumbing company was listed on the Switch Is On website as qualified to manage the TECH Clean CA rebates. It was not. I had to get behind the curtain, so to speak, to manage it on their behalf.
Having the rebates go through the contractor is a major problem. One might be under the impression that they’re supposed to net the discounts on their invoice. One would be mistaken. At their insistence, I had to front the money and depend on their (non-existent) competence and (fortunately existent) honesty to get the rebate–six months after installation.
All bids I got were inflated by roughly the amount of the taxpayer-funded rebates, compared to a standard installation. This is an extremely expensive approach to electrification. Assuming just the $3800 HPWH rebate and 15 million homes, that’s $57 billion.
A much better way to reduce GHG reductions and spur electrification is to put a tax on fossil fuel products at the producer level, and rebate the revenue in equal shares to all taxpayers. The tax wouldn’t have to be very high to inspire appropriate long-term planning on the part of fossil fuel majors to scale out of those products and redirect their considerable resources to other forms of energy, starting with geothermal, for which they have ample assets and expertise. And taxpayers would be protected by the rebate, and would even be net-positive to the extent their GHG output was below average, which would be true for the overwhelming majority of middle-class and lower incomes. Only big spenders would be net payers.
Another real impediment to electrification is high electric rates. Lowering rates by moving public purpose programs off the utility bill and back to the state budget where they belong is part of that. Another could be to direct any new, incremental Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) revenue from the upcoming reauthorization of CARB’s cap-and-trade allowances to rate reduction.
As part of that reauthorization process, the state should undertake an unbiased assessment of the cost and efficacy of existing GGRF programs. Some are very high-cost, low impact. The Legislative Analysts Office has already done work in this area. Perhaps that just needs to be taken seriously. Programs found to be very inefficient could be scaled back, and the revenue now dedicated to them by statute could be reallocated to programs with higher near-term efficacy at the consumer level–like rate reduction to support electrification. (I’m looking at you, hi-speed rail.)