The technology and policies are falling into place. But we’ll need a revolution in U.S. home retrofit business models and financing to scale up enough to meet the climate challenge.

Jeff St. John is director of news and special projects at Canary Media.
The future of all-electric, high-efficiency, grid-interactive homes seems near at hand from the floor of the CES 2023 event in Las Vegas. The massive annual extravaganza has long been the showcase for high-tech consumer electronics, including the latest in “smart” home automation systems, energy controls and electric appliances.
Take the home product lineup from global electric equipment and technology giant Schneider Electric, which includes batteries, EV chargers, hybrid inverters and the latest iteration of its smart electrical panel. Much like similar smart panels from global competitors like Eaton or startups like Span, it allows homeowners to monitor and control electricity demands at the circuit level via smartphone app, switch between grid and battery power and keep electrical loads under the limits of household wiring or utility grid service.
Individual Wi-Fi-connected “smart plugs” add even more discrete control. Schneider’s CES-award-winning app and energy disaggregation technology from Sense, a startup partner, can help analyze data and automate the actions of all these devices to reduce utility bills, keep homes powered during blackouts or even sell home-generated and stored power back to utilities.

Schneider Electric’s app for monitoring and controlling household solar systems, batteries, EV chargers and major electrical loads (Schneider Electric)
Products like these and others showcased at CES 2023 are the building blocks of the home of the future — that is, a home that efficiently heats, cools and powers itself using electricity instead of fossil fuels, whether that electricity is coming from the utility power grid or the solar panels on the roof. In this not-so-hypothetical home, that electricity can also be stored in batteries, charge up electric vehicles, and even be shared with neighbors across power grids energized by a fast-increasing share of solar, wind and other zero-carbon resources.
“We’re still at a point where under 10 percent of homes in America have solar or storage or these advanced technologies,” said Jaser Faruq, Schneider’s senior vice president of innovation. But homebuilders, electrical contractors and even utilities are starting to see this home-by-home transformation as inevitable, he said.
It’s a transformation that can’t come soon enough. Burning fossil fuels in buildings accounts for roughly 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, according to think tank RMI, making the conversion to electric heating a primary target for decarbonizing homes. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
Add in the fuel burned by people’s cars and the carbon-emitting electricity that can be supplanted by rooftop solar panels, and the figures for these carbon emissions impacts rise to more than a third of the country’s total, according to nonprofit electrification advocacy group Rewiring America.
This makes home electrification a vital tool in combating climate change. The good news is that the technology it will take to achieve this vision pretty much already exists, as evidenced by the CES show floor.
But the home of the future is still out of reach for far too many Americans, and changing that involves a lot more than displaying a bunch of fancy gadgets at CES. Today’s high-end price points — about $10,000 for the full Schneider Home line of equipment, according to Faruq — must be moderated through economies of scale, government incentives and private-sector financing structures to make it economically feasible for Americans from all walks of life. That includes those living in midpriced single-family houses, multifamily apartments and condominiums; those who own their homes and those who rent; and those living in the coldest and hottest climates.
The rollout of these technologies should also be accompanied by broader energy-efficiency audits and retrofits that reduce energy waste and help customers lower their utility bills. But as yet, the business of whole-home weatherization and efficiency retrofits isn’t fully aligned with the business of selling solar panels, EV chargers, smart appliances and home control systems.
Finally, it’s vital that utilities be brought into the equation. The shift to electric heating and transportation will drive the biggest increase in electricity demand in generations, creating massive new strains on the grids that supply that power. EVs and electric heating and cooling could overload local grid circuits if they’re all turned on at the same time. They could also drive regionwide grid shortfalls during extreme weather events, or just on hot summer evenings and cold winter mornings — stresses that are already putting U.S. grids under threat today.
Eventually, entire neighborhoods could connect to form the building blocks of self-balancing, self-supporting clean energy networks.
Building the grid infrastructure to handle these emerging demands will take decades and cost billions of dollars. But if electric homes can be rewarded for coordinating when and how they use electricity to relieve those stresses, that could remove a barrier to their rapid growth while also making them more cost-effective for more people.
Eventually, entire neighborhoods could connect to form the building blocks of self-balancing, self-supporting clean energy networks, sometimes referred to as virtual power plants for systems that interoperate with the grid when it’s up and running, or microgrids for systems that can keep themselves powered when the larger grid goes down.
But to arrive at this future, we’ll need to solve a lot of fundamental challenges first.
From high-tech dream home to the real-life, nitty-gritty details
To begin to understand how to make the home of the future more accessible, we need to look beyond the technology-laden convention halls of CES to places like, say, the home of retired higher-education administrator Cheryl Ajirotutu in the Dimond District neighborhood of Oakland, California.
Ever since California’s 2000–2001 energy crisis, “I knew I wanted to go green,” Ajirotutu said. The rooftop solar panels she installed on her 1920s-era two-bedroom home have cut her electric bills roughly in half, but she knew that she could do more to make her home more efficient and climate-friendly. She just wasn’t sure where to start.
Through her work at Oakland’s Cypress Mandela Training Center, where she volunteers as a financial literacy educator, Ajirotutu heard about a home-electrification program from East Bay Community Energy, a community energy provider serving Oakland residents, and BlocPower, a New York–based startup that specializes in efficiency and electrification retrofits in underserved communities.
Ajirotutu applied to the program last year, and her home was selected as one of 100 to receive support. The first step was a whole-home energy audit whose purpose was to reveal “what you needed and why you needed it,” she said — an experience that changed her understanding of energy consumption.
The energy audit led to a whole-home retrofit. Local contractors reinsulated her walls, floors and attic, put in double-paned windows, and switched out her fluorescent lighting for LEDs. They also replaced the fossil-gas-fueled furnace that blew hot air through a single floor vent in her living room with a ducted-air electric heat-pump system that has eliminated the cold spots throughout her house — “it makes a real difference,” she said.

Oakland resident Cheryl Ajirotutu added solar panels to her 1920s-era home. With the help of Mark Hall, CEO of Revalue.io, she’s also upgraded her insulation, installed double-pane windows and LED lights, and replaced her fossil-gas furnace with an electric heat pump. (Canary Media)
All told, these improvements are expected to reduce the energy consumption of Ajirotutu’s home by an estimated 88 percent. Once she replaces her gas-fired water heater with a heat-pump model later this month, she’ll be able to stop using gas entirely, a big goal of hers.
All of this work came at no upfront cost. Instead, Ajirotutu will pay $310 per month, a rate that equates to a zero-interest loan for the cost of the project.
“It wouldn’t have happened without that support,” Ajirotutu said. She doesn’t have the spare cash to put down on a project of this scope, and she’s generally leery of home renovation offers that seem too good to be true.
“At the same time, there are these houses that are, for lack of a better word, in decay,” she said. “We need help. How do we get that help?”
“That’s the genius of what Mark is doing,” she said. “He makes it affordable.”
Mark Hall is CEO of Revalue.io, the Oakland-based energy-efficiency project developer working with BlocPower to develop and execute its East Bay projects with local and minority-owned contractors and workforce-development organizations. So far, the projects he’s developed have led to an average 40 percent reduction in home energy use, he said.
But Revalue.io’s customers and contractors have a lot to do before the heat pumps, smart electrical panels or energy management systems go in, Hall said. First off, “we encounter a significant amount of remediation work — cleaning out debris, taking care of asbestos and moisture concerns,” he said. Some efficiency programs and tax credits don’t pay for this remediation, which can effectively bar homes from being able to access them.
Nor can Revalue.io count on its customers being able to access cash or credit to cover the cost of retrofits, Hall said. “Qualifying for traditional lending programs with credit scores and documentation — that’s a barrier for many folks,” he said. “BlocPower provides flexible financing for our projects. That’s how our partnership is structured.”
“Another issue is the contractor workforce,” he said. Revalue.io considers it part of its mission to connect local contractors and young people from the East Bay’s economically challenged neighborhoods to the training and customer flows that will enable them to thrive in the emerging home-electrification industry. “A lot of the contractors out there focus on a few things, not all of them, to deliver electrification. Others aren’t really recommending particular electrification equipment, or they’re out there doing gas systems.”