C15 -- One House at A Time: Implementing Energy Efficiency and Decarbonization in Low Income Urban Households PDF

The City of Philadelphia has set a goal to reduce GHG emissions by 80% and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Central to that goal is reducing the GHG footprint of the residential building stock in Philadelphia. The City has also set a goal to improve the quality of life of its poorest citizens. The quality of life includes both economic and health considerations. Central to that goal is improving the quality of the environments in which they live. The intersection of quality of life and quality of the environment is realized at the individual level in the safety, stability and comfort of the living conditions of those individuals – their residences. The City’s residential stock presents a challenge. The median age of (single family) residential property in Philadelphia is over 80 years old, so energy efficiency was not the byword when they were built. Improving the performance of those properties requires significant financial input. At current, approximately 25% of the city’s residents live at or below the poverty line, thus they have limited household financial capacity to upgrade their properties. While there are various programs designed to address each of these issues, a continuing problem is that the programs operate in silos which at times work against each other and create an execution labyrinth for low-income homeowners that too often grinds to a halt before truly meaningful progress can be made. To address this confluence of issues, the Philadelphia Energy Authority created the “Built To Last” (BTL) program in 2021. BTL was developed to provide a ‘one stop shop’ for low-income homeowners to marshal resources to effect basic home repairs, address health issues exacerbated by indoor environmental conditions and save energy. Within that context comes the opportunity to convert select properties from fossil fuel fired plants to high-efficiency heat pump systems which lend themselves to the decarbonization effort. This presentation will provide an overview of the BTL program; its intake and selection process; results to date and some of the challenges faced in fully realizing or quantifying the energy use reduction and GHG reduction objectives.