Our New Years resolution is to electrify everything in our home and transportation. We want to be on 100% renewable energy by 2025*.
Our current (pun intended) situation, like most folks, is about as far from that as possible:
Our house uses gas heat, gas hot water, gas stove, gas washer/dryer, and a gas fireplace. And we drive 2 gas cars.
To add to the complexity, we are also planning an outdoor renovation in 2022. The original designs included a gas fire pit, a gas grill, and a hot tub, so we'll be revisiting those decision too.
We are now a few months into the process and I am shocked (i love puns so much) at the cost & complexity of it all. It's also hard to find reliable information. And we're coming into this highly motivated, informed, and able to afford the current (i love puns) upfront costs. So if it's hard for us, we're never going to get 100 million homes converted in time. So I decided to write it our experience as we go. I'd expect large swaths of it to be boring, and other parts to be unique to our specific situation. But maybe there will be some useful nuggets of wisdom in there. Or at least some puns.
PS This blog (probably) won't go into all the details of why we MUST to clean up the power grid and why electrifying everything with renewable energy is our inevitable future. You can read books by better writers than me: Electrify by Saul Griffith or Speed and Scale by John Doerr are quite accessible. Or if you're more of a podcast person, here's an interview with Saul on Vox.
Onward and upward!
* 2025 is arbitrary. We want to be really aggressive with our timeline, but we also don't want to throw relatively new and working appliances into a landfill. So it could be sooner or later. The tradeoff between committed emissions (how much our existing fossil fuel machines will continue to pollute) vs trashing appliances before their end-of-life is one example of a really hard question we're facing. Do we drive our gas car into the ground? Or trade it in ASAP? What about a stove? Hot water heater? When is the "best" time to upgrade appliances, environmentally speaking?
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