The following is a February 28 letter submitted to the Department of Public Utilities in connection with its inquiry into energy affordability for residential electricity ratepayers.

I RUN A RESEARCH GROUP called Laminar Collective, dedicated to making energy efficient appliances, such as heat pumps, accessible to the mass market by lowering prices for high-quality installations. More than 150-plus community members have signed up to follow our research updates, from all around the Boston Metro Area.

This letter is about the impact we’re seeing on the ground of high electricity costs. In the past half year, we have organized two Boston-based group buys based on our research, which will result in more than 50 households installing heat pumps at approximately 25 percent below the market average cost.

Collectively, we will have saved households hundreds of thousands of dollars in installation costs when installations are done by the end of the spring. Here’s the problem, though: the current cost of electricity, relative to gas, is still too
high for us to achieve widespread (more than 50 percent of households) deployment of heat pumps.

I’ve talked to some of our members who completed installations in the past few months. The ones who switched from heating oil are happy, but a few who switched from a gas furnace were surprised that they are paying more to heat with heat pumps. In fact, one buyer in our spring negotiating group dropped out after realizing that the cost wouldn’t pencil out with the delivery fees. There’s almost no better way to curtail word-of-mouth advocacy about heat pumps than high electricity rates.

As this is happening, Mass Save is spending billions of dollars every three-year cycle to incentivize activities such as heat pump adoption. While these incentives are great, and necessary (especially for weatherization!), we are still swimming against the current so long as electricity prices continue to be high.

Tackling high electricity prices across the board is a great way to amplify the
impact of Mass Save. It’s also necessary if we want to meaningfully decarbonize our residential sector.

What do I think should be done? While lowering rates for lower/medium-income communities may temporarily alleviate some of the equity issues that arise out of electrification, ultimately we need to go deeper than that. We need to lower electricity costs, not just shift them around.

Consider the chart from from a Keep Cool Climate email newsletter. We can’t keep on doing this.

What will it take to change course? Building more transmission from affordable Canadian hydropower in Quebec? Streamlining permitting for offshore wind? Permit reform for transmission? I’m all for any of those.

I’m going to do my best to continue to advocate for consumers when it comes to upfront installation costs. I’m hoping to see the same ambition from the DPU in the coming seasons.

Kit Wu, a resident of Cambridge, runs a community-led initiative called Laminar Collective that negotiates bulk discounts on heat pump installations. It is backed by a Mass Save community education grant.