Healthy Homes and Buildings

Ensuring everyone has a comfortable, healthy home and safe places to learn, work, and play.

Everyone deserves healthy buildings and homes in which to live, learn, work, and play.

Burning methane gas to heat our buildings, cook, and heat water is dirty, bad for our health, unreliable, and expensive. It is as dangerous as living with a smoker. Transitioning to fully electrified buildings will lower our bills, improve comfort, save lives, and protect us from climate instability.

When our neighborhoods are intentionally divided by race and class, the poor and people of color unfairly suffer from fossil fuel pollution.

The legacy of racist redlining policies keeps the poor and people of color overpaying for cramped, low-quality housing with polluting appliances and poor ventilation. People of color in Wisconsin are exposed to 81% more air pollution from residential appliances than the Wisconsin average.

Poorly weatherized housing also leaks heat in the winter and cool air in the summer, leaving families with high energy bills that take up a large portion of their income, a situation known as high energy burden. Wisconsinites have some of the highest rates of energy burden in the nation. Energy burden is linked to chronic stress and mental health issues, heat stroke, hypothermia, poor sleep quality, heart disease, respiratory illnesses, allergies, suppressed immune function, arthritis, and premature mortality. When families struggle to make ends meet, they are often forced to make difficult choices between basic needs like groceries or medicines. Energy burden is also associated with malnutrition and increased hospitalizations. Even after controlling for income inequality, the independent impacts of high energy burden harm life expectancy and self-reported health.

Burning fossil fuels in our buildings makes people sick.

Wisconsinites are made sick when we power our homes with fossil fuels. Particulates and other pollutants like benzene from fossil fuels pass through our lungs into our blood, brains, and even cross the placenta. Air pollution from fossil fuels has been shown to cause preterm births, stillbirths, delayed cognitive development in children, asthma, heart attacks, COPD, cancer, strokes, and dementia. Studies suggest 13% of childhood asthma cases are caused by gas stoves alone. Gas stoves can leak cancer-causing chemicals like benzene into the home even when turned off. This is concerning, considering people spend approximately 90% of their time indoors. Fossil fuel use in Wisconsin buildings is linked to over $5 billion in health costs and over 450 deaths a year.

Burning fossil fuels in buildings doesn’t just impact the people inside them, but the whole community. Gas-burning household appliances like water heaters, furnaces/boilers, fireplaces, and clothing dryers are vented outdoors, contributing to outdoor air pollution. US building appliances release 425,000 tons of harmful nitrogen oxides each year—more than oil refineries.

Lastly, burning fossil fuels in buildings worsens climate change. Residential and community buildings make up approximately 17% of Wisconsin’s greenhouse gas emissions. Wisconsin and Michigan are set to gain the most benefits from investing in energy efficient buildings than any other state in the nation. For every dollar spent, Wisconsin stands to gain an additional $0.50-0.71 in climate and health co-benefits.

We have the technology to power our buildings in a way that is healthy, comfortable, and lowers bills.

The first step is to weatherize our homes. Adding insulation, sealing leaks, and providing ventilation can cut our energy use and save money while providing clean air to breathe. Appliance changes can improve our comfort and safety.

Heat pumps can both heat and cool indoor air; they are far more efficient than gas or electric resistance, and they are powerful enough to work without backup in the coldest climates. They can do this all while producing zero emissions. Because they both heat and cool, they can keep people safe during heat waves, which is particularly important in rural areas, where cooling centers are less realistic. Using a heat pump in a well-sealed and insulated home with dedicated ventilation not only saves money but also provides a haven when outdoor air is dangerous due to wildfire pollution. Meanwhile, heat pump water heaters are far more efficient than any other active water-heating system; they save people large amounts of money, and they provide flexibility of energy use, which can help stabilize our electric grids. Induction stoves provide a clean, quick way to cook that gets emissions as low as possible. Connecting a fully-electrified home with solar and a home battery or electric vehicle provides resilience during severe storms or other climate instability.

All of these benefits are also available to the other buildings where we learn, work, and play. It is particularly important that we electrify our schools to improve air quality. Kids should not have to get asthma while they are learning

Efficient, electrified homes and buildings offer an unprecedented opportunity to build wealth.

Through energy savings alone, fully electrified homes would save the average American homeowner $2500/year. Beyond that, we now have the ability to automatically and imperceptibly make minor shifts in the timing of energy use in these appliances, a concept called load control. Building owners can save significantly on their electric bills by allowing their utilities to do this.

When smart electric utilities combine many such homes and buildings together into a large group, it is known as a virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs are the cheapest way to provide electricity, because rather than adding new generation capacity to cover spikes in demand that only happen 1% of the year, we can shift that demand to times when we have generating capacity sitting unused. This reduces energy costs for everyone because the real cost of our electricity is not determined so much by how much electricity is used, but by having to be ready for when it is used all at once. In the old way of doing things, we could not control the timing of electricity use and had to build power plants that sat unused 90% of the year, waiting for rare spikes in demand. Electrification lets us smooth out that demand so we can more efficiently use what we build. Lastly, load control lets us shift the timing of electricity use to when solar and wind output are strong, so we can get more of our power from cheap renewables.

Forward Together

Our state motto is Forward, because across all zip codes and backgrounds, Wisconsinites are innovators who believe in moving toward a brighter future together. We all deserve homes for our families that are healthy and comfortable, with clean air and pure water. We deserve to not have to worry about what our energy costs are or whether our appliances will make us sick. We want children to grow and thrive free of illness. We can have that future by weatherizing our buildings, running them on electricity, and powering them with renewables. When we come together, we can make sure everyone has access to a healthy home and a bright future. Join us in building that world together.

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