FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Washington, DC, January 16, 2024 — Building off its national Pace of Progress report, Rewiring America is launching a new Local Pace of Progress tool to provide states and local communities with the specific annual pace of residential and vehicular electrification their communities will need to hit to meet America’s 2050 climate commitments.

This localized planning tool provides granular information across appliance and vehicle categories for local governments, community-based organizations, small businesses, and citizen advocates.

The Pace of Progress finds that Americans must install 24 million heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, induction stoves, electric vehicles, and rooftop solar systems over current baseline sales between 2024 and 2026 nationally. The Local Pace of Progress tool goes deeper, providing state-, county, and city-level targets for each clean electric machine category.

Check out the tool here.

“We see in poll after poll that most Americans want to do something about the climate but most believe their individual actions will not make much of a difference,” said Ari Matusiak, Rewiring America’s co-founder and CEO. “42 percent of U.S. energy emissions come from decisions we all make about what cars we drive, how we heat and cool our homes, how we heat our water, cook, and dry our clothes — and what power source we use. Every household can make a difference. And these ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ decisions about a handful of machines in our lives make our homes healthier and more comfortable, and in many cases, lower operating costs.”

“In Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond we need to install 8,000 heat pumps in the next three years to hit our emissions reduction targets. In a region with more than 128,000 households is this ambitious? Yes. Doable? Absolutely,” said Sarah Phillips, Program Manager for Energy Smart Eastside. “This tool allows us to answer the question from our city councils, ‘What would it take for us to hit our emissions reduction targets?’ in a very concrete way, and gives our state and local policymakers the data they need to implement effective incentives.”

“The Local Pace of Progress tool gives us the data we need to make a more efficient and electric future a reality,” said Shawn Miya, Assistant Director of Sustainability for the City of Bloomington, Indiana. “Whether it’s when we’re applying for a grant to help invest in residential solar or working with elected officials and our community to set goals for more heat pump installations, the Pace of Progress makes the case clear: We need to act. And faster than we are now."

The Local Pace of Progress tool is supported by an analysis of the Energy Information Agency's 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey and begins with an estimated count of the machines that heat our homes, transport our families, and cook our food in each state and county across the country. For each city, county, state, and type of machine, the tool then charts the target sales curve needed to ensure that all household appliances are efficient and electric by 2050, as is necessary to meet our emissions reduction goals. A full breakdown of the methodology can be found here.

Highlights

Space Heating:

• Thanks to a historic prevalence of electric heating in the region, states in the Southeast, including Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have a head start and are currently ahead of the pace of progress needed for heat pumps.

• Cities in the Southeast are not far off from their target adoption rates, either. Atlanta, Georgia, with its 230,000 households needs to install 7,000 heat pumps over expected sales to hit its pace of progress by 2026. Charlotte, North Carolina, and its 370,000 households are in a similar starting position, needing to install an additional 10,000 heat pumps in the next three years over expected market growth.

• Sedgwick County, Kansas is home to Wichita and over 200,000 households, of which about two-thirds currently use gas or delivered fuels. But even with that level of fossil fuel reliance, Sedgwick County needs to install only 15,000 more heat pumps over the next three years.

Water Heating:

• Water heaters reach their end-of-life relatively quickly, meaning there are more opportunities to educate consumers, and therefore a gentler pace of electrification is required for the appliance over the next few years. States like Delaware, Montana, Vermont, and Maine need to install only a few thousand units each over baseline sales over the next three years.

• Looking at major cities and counties, though, it’s clear there’s work to be done. Los Angeles, California is expected to install just 700 heat pump water heaters by the end of 2026 but needs to ramp up to 9,000 to stay on pace.

• Cook County, Illinois —home to Chicago and 2 million households — is on track to install just 1,000, but needs to install 13,000 heat pump water heaters in the next three years.

Cooking:

• Seattle, Washington with over 360,000 households needs to install just 2,000 more induction stoves above its current projected 6,000 units to hit the pace of progress for 2026.

• Boulder County, Colorado — home to over 137,000 households — needs to install 1,500 induction stoves above expected sales to hit its target of 3,115 in the next three years.

Rooftop Solar:

• Currently, states across the Southwest with abundant sunshine are, unsurprisingly, ahead of or nearly matching the needed pace of progress when it comes to solar installations. That includes Arizona, Colorado, and Utah.

• Outside the Southwest, counties with major mid-sized cities have ambitious but achievable targets. Hudson County, NJ — home to Hoboken and Jersey City — needs to install only 600 units above baseline, for a total of 49,000 installations by the end of 2026.

Find more state- and county-level targets here. For interviews: media@rewiringamerica.org.

Rewiring America is the leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities. We develop accessible, actionable data and tools. Rewiring America helps Americans save money, tackle nationwide emissions goals, improve health, and build the next generation of the clean energy workforce. We believe in an abundant, flourishing, climate-safe future, and know that, together, we can realize one.