 Hello, this 28-minute video will give you basic information about Warrant Article 5 introduced by the Town's Clean Energy Future Committee, endorsed by the Select Board, and sponsored by the resident group Clean Heat for Arlington. The following are three segments from the two-hour public information session held at Town Hall on February 27, 2020, where we hosted speakers that addressed energy, heating, and cooling, affordable housing, and climate change issues related to the Warrant Article. The article last winter was number 13, but it's been refiled for this Fall Town meeting as article number five. However, its content is substantially the same as it was last winter when we prepared these segments. Hi, everyone. Thanks again for coming out tonight. My name is Amos Meeks. I'm the co-chair of Sustainable Arlington, as well as one of the sort of steering team members for this Clean Heat for Arlington group. I'm going to do a sort of quick overview of the bylaw and sort of the concretely what we're proposing, just so that we all have sort of a common basis. And then I'm going to try to sort of allay some of the common concerns that we've seen up front, but a lot of these things will go into more detail as we go through it, and we sort of welcome all sorts of questions during the Q&A session. So the main meat of this bylaw, what we are proposing is prohibiting new fossil fuel piping. So it's important to notice that this is specifically affecting the piping in new construction and gut rehabilitation. So major rehabilitations that are sort of the level where you're gutting the entire house, and it's essentially like new construction. So what this means is that existing buildings are entirely unaffected. You know, smaller renovations, kitchen renovations, bathroom renovations, any of those things, there's no effect whatsoever, and additions are also entirely unaffected. Next. So that's kind of the meat. We also include a number of sort of common sense and practical exemptions. So I think if we, is this the first one? Okay, so we, first of all, this only affects things on the customer side of the meter. So this has nothing to do with sort of utilities, nothing in sort of the private right of way. It's all just from the meter and in the house. There is an exemption for backup generators. There is, you know, portable propane appliances, things that are not sort of attached to the house's fossil fuel piping. Those are completely unaffected. And then also all gas cooking appliances are sort of exempted. So you can still have fossil fuel piping for a gas stove or oven and restaurants which often rely on gas are sort of exempted for those. In addition, there's an exemption for, you know, work being done to repair or deal with any unsafe piping. There hot water for large buildings is exempted just because the technology to do that efficiently with electricity is not there yet. But there is sort of a clause in there that if the cost of these technologies come down and become comparable with gas, then that will hot water for large buildings will also sort of fall under the scope of the bylaw. Research and medical facilities are exempted. And then finally, because this has to do with the fossil fuel piping, there's no effect on kind of the non-fossil fuel piping related to a heating system. So if you need to extend an existing heating system, you can do anything you want with sort of the water pipes, that sort of things that is not affected by this bylaw. Again, this is only, this only really affects new construction in which case you're installing a whole new system anyways, or a gut rehabilitation which in most of the cases you're taking out the old heating system and installing a new one. But in the case where you didn't take out the whole heating system, you could still extend and modify the non-fossil fuel piping side of things. Okay, so now to quickly kind of cover a few common questions. One of the first things that people often ask when hearing about this is, you know, because so much of our electrical grid generation comes from natural gas, is there actually a benefit in terms of emissions to switching to a heat pump? And the answer is sort of definitively yes. There's a pretty significant immediate reduction in emissions of roughly half plus give or take. But really the sort of what you'll hear about later, the context for this is we're thinking ahead to the future and we're thinking ahead to our goal of being net zero by 2050. And so as the grid, as a whole moves towards this net zero goal, heat pumps have sort of lower emissions related to them, whereas natural gas and other fossil fuel heating in your home doesn't really change and continues to have a fairly high amount of emissions. The next question that a lot of people ask is, you know, does this cost a whole lot? It's at the end of the day, it really depends on the individual building situation. But a study was done for Massave that compared sort of a model natural gas home with a model heat pump home. And what they found is basically the cost difference in terms of insulation is less than a thousand dollars. And that's not taking into account sort of current generous incentives and that sort of thing. So in the overall cost of a building for new construction, a thousand dollars is not really significant. And then in terms of the sort of operating costs, they found the cost difference was around $40 per month, which compared to this is for a home that would cost over $1 million for new construction. So when compared to the other monthly costs that are associated with that in terms of the mortgage, taxes, etc., this increased cost is about less than 1% of the total monthly costs. So it's a fairly small impact. And again, that sort of doesn't account for various incentives, cheaper to install, things like that. So for any other two sort of things, you might wonder about affordable housing. So what I talked about before, those were costs for new construction in Arlington, relatively large single family home, 3,000 square foot home, people who are buying that are buying like a million, $1.2 million house. For those who maybe can't afford to pay any extra costs associated with this, affordable housing is actually already leading the way. And we'll hear more about this from Bev and Bob later. But these are two sort of example, nearby examples. There's one currently being constructed, Finch Cambridge, which has 98 affordable housing units and uses entirely heat pump heating. And then the O'Shea House in Brookline, which is a housing authority property and has 100 units of affordable housing and also uses entirely heat pump heating. And this is, you know, without any of these existing bylaws, this is just already in our current system. It actually just makes sense to use this for affordable housing. And then at the end of the day, the total impact of this is expected to be relatively small. So the planning department did kind of an estimation of what is the total number of buildings that could possibly be impacted. And they found that it was about 70 buildings per year on average. You know, some years that might be higher, some years that might be lower. But we're talking sort of roughly half a percent of Arlington's total sort of 15,000 building, building stock. But then one more thing I want to say before we move on to Corley is that even with all of these exemptions, if there is kind of anything that's an issue, we do, there is built in a waivers and appeals process. So if there's anything that has an undue burden that's not sort of already taken care of, there's a process to sort of get that waived. The goal here is really to be very practical and economical and not create an undue burden on anyone. So now Corley. Hi everyone. My name is Jeremy Koo. I was invited by Ken Prude with the town of Arlington and the other members of the committee to give a bit of a primer tonight. I know there's a lot of heat pumps as a technology. I've changed a lot in just the last five years. We've really seen a remarkable shift in how homes, technologies and such are now available today. So I was asked to give sort of a quick primer on what exactly we're talking about as the alternative to gas in these buildings. Speak a little bit more about Arlington is not the only town that's considering this and certainly not the only town in the northeast that is installing heat pumps at a very rapid and quickly accelerating pace. And then also take a little bit of a deeper dive into the actually the cost example that I think Amos and I were looking at the same report that we pulled from that was done by NMR last year on incremental costs and new construction. So for folks who are not familiar, a heat pump is really it fundamentally is a technology. I'm not going to go through the actual like diagram and the thermodynamics behind it. But it's if the best way to think about it is it's you have the same technology in your home already. It's in your refrigerator. What is your refrigerator doing? It's extracting keeping heat out of a space that's cold and pushing it out into somewhere that's warmer. And another way the thing about it is it's an air conditioner that can run in reverse. It's transferring heat from the outdoor air into your building and then vice versa when acting when acting in a cooling capacity. I think I animated this unfortunately. So there are a lot of different heat pumps that are available. I think he hit it a couple of times. There are air source heat pumps. I think a lot of the examples that have been mentioned so far are air source heat pumps. There are a couple of examples of residential scale heat pumps that have been installed in Massachusetts in the last few years. Amos had mentioned variable refrigerant flow VRF heat pumps which are a commercial commercial scale version of these heat pumps that are available. And they there's our variety of options that are available that can work in any sort of building configuration. Ground source or geothermal heat pumps are another option that are available taking advantage of the fact that in a lot of new construction. There's a lot more space to work with fewer existing obstacles and being able to plan around using the ground as a more as a very efficient and constant source of heat. And for both heating and for cooling in the summer is an even more efficient way of heating and cooling a building. Water heaters are the third example of heat pumps that have been brought up here in this case since the proposed article excludes larger buildings. This is primarily an appliance that is going to be working in smaller residential capacities. But it's effectively taking the components of a heat pump and putting it on top of an existing water heater. And it's an otherwise fits in fits in a basement like any other any other storage water heater. There are a few common misconceptions I think about electric heat. I think when you think about both heat pumps and about heating with electricity. Electric electric resistance heating is inherently not very efficient and very expensive to heat with. You know the electric grid is somewhere between 30 to 40 percent efficient. And so even though you know that and that's what drives electric heat to be particularly expensive. What's being you know in in limiting the use of fossil fuels in new construction. The pushes towards heat pumps which are transferring heat and using electricity to transfer heat from one space to another not to actually create heat. So whereas an electric resistance baseboard or space heater is what we would call 100 percent efficient. Have a coefficient of performance of one air source heat pumps throughout the year will range from about 220 to 350 or more percent efficient and ground source heat pumps from 350 percent efficient and up. So not only is that does that result in you know it's a lot of folks will say that burning gas at the power plant level means that using electricity is actually less efficient. Then burning gas at home when you take those efficiencies into account. It's actually a more efficient use of the gas being burned at the power plant level than being burned on site at your in your home. So another another one misconception which is the one that my mother said when I told her I started working on heat pumps over five years ago. Is that heat pumps don't work in the Northeast the you know in and conventionally this has been this has been true. Heat pumps are a very common heating and cooling technology being used in the south in the mid Atlantic right now. There's I think I think 20 I think it was 28 million homes that use heat pumps across the south right now primarily as air conditioning and a bit of heating given their climate. Heat pumps historically have not been effective at performing air source heat pumps at least have been ineffective at performing at temperatures below 30 or 40 Fahrenheit. Neap the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships administers a certification program for heat pumps to be cold climate. Which means that they have to maintain air source heat pumps have to maintain efficiencies of at least 175% at five degrees of which all but about 30 to 40 hours per year in a typical year in Arlington are above. And you know like it or not it's that that may shrink more and more from year to year. So Neap Neap certifies a lot of cold climate heat pumps and those have been primarily the models that have been installed in Massachusetts to date. And you know one of the other points is that you know it's okay it's great that you're talking you know heat pumps are are more efficient but they're probably not ideal for serving as the only source of heat in the home. In 2017 which is only about four years after cold climate heat pumps became a thing in the Northeast in Massachusetts 10% of new homes were already using heat pumps as their only source of heating and cooling. That number has only increased since then we you know not to to discount ground source heat pumps as well which have been installed for for for decades across the US. These systems are intended to be the sole source of heating and cooling and take advantage of the more consistent heat in the ground to maintain efficiency and their heating output throughout the year. Even when you know when it's when it's a negative digits there was a great study that was done about five years ago about ground source heat pumps in Alaska so they're very much usable here. And then in the heat smart heat smart mass program of which Arlington recently participated in and was to date the most successful campaign of any of the 30 something heat heat smart campaigns I've supported across the Northeast. Dozens of dozens of homes opted to retrofit existing buildings with heat pumps with no backup system being used. We can definitely do this in new construction and even in it's still even possible in retrofits. One other another data point is that this is not something you know heat while you know general awareness of heat pumps is relatively low. What we've seen since the state clean energy center began rebating these systems in December of 2014 is that the is that the number of heat pumps installed have been accelerating from year to year between December 2014 and March 2019 when the program ended. Over 20,000 coal climate heat pumps were installed were rebated through the program and that growth directory even came with them reducing the the rebate twice over the over that over that time to make the make the budget last longer. So there they are continuing to accelerate now with even more incentives available through mass save. Mass is not alone main was actually one of the first states to begin incentivizing coal climate heat pumps starting in 2012. Since then they've incentivized over 30,000 systems and the governor recently set a target to increase increase that even more similarly Vermont. I'm missing about two years of data since it wasn't in their annual reports but they've also continued to accelerate in Vermont and New York. Also similarly has set set a lot of targets and in two years has rebated over 11,000 heat pump projects. So it's very much a reality in the Northeast and you know it's the time the timing is in a lot of ways right for for the market to have met a lot of the maturity that's needed to be able to drive more successful installations. You know I wanted to just take a quick look at that and certainly if you wanted you know want to dig up that study look at a little bit more it's called the you know mini split incremental cost baseline study. I was done in 20 late 2018 I believe it compared what would be the installation of a traditional gas furnace and central AC and a tankless tankless gas water heater with a mini split air source heat pump and a heat pump water heater. In a new construction in a home that that's built built to code so the installed costs again before any incentives that are available was about $700 in difference out of you know I think it's a Mr saying this for this home would be about 1.2 million in construction costs. I don't even know if that included avoided cost of the gas connection. If you were to eliminate gas entirely which would be another few thousand dollars that would be removed from that as far as annual operating costs. I think as I said it's about $40 a month over the course of the year higher for the heat pump and that's just the reflection of gas prices being particularly low and electric costs being particularly high. But in new construction there's also both at a push at the state code level and also in terms of ease of ease and cost to put rooftop solar on new buildings. And if you were to power all that equipment with solar PV it would cause you know and this is assuming you don't own the system somebody else owns it and you're paying for the electricity from it. It would actually result in a net in a savings of $150 a year no extra in increased costs to do so. So there are a lot of I think there's a lot of opportunity here. You know certainly you know given the you know I think the exemptions that are written into the law the the proposed article cover some of the variations here was you get into larger buildings. There's different different needs with those buildings particularly with research facilities and you know larger hot water uses. And so the you know those are exempted from the spy law but certainly I was also looking at the Arlington Assessor data over the last five years. I think about 80 percent of the buildings where are their townhouses are single family homes so that essentially covers the majority of the new construction that will be happening in the near future. And so happy to answer questions at the end of the period. So thank you very much. I think actually Jeremy did a great job and covered an awful lot of the stuff that we would normally say so that's fantastic. Well exactly. Including covering our own our programs for us. We do appreciate that. We are so I should just tell you who we are. Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. We are a quasi government agency funded by a small surcharge on your retail electric bills. And we use that to run a bunch of programs to encourage clean energy energy efficiency. Startup technologies etc. Wanted to to say one thing at the outset that as a government agency we don't really kind of comment on legislation or things like that. But we do certainly encourage the use of all sorts of clean technologies. Air source heat pumps are fantastic. And I want to give you a little overview of where we've been through this and again and Jeremy kind of touched on some of this. But we started the ground source heat pump pilot with the Department of Energy Resources our sister agency back in 2013. And then we committed was that 48 million dollars to our five year clean heating program. And again you saw that that uptake over those years. 2019 will skip ahead. Well we did the heat smart as as and you all participated in that which was fantastic. And then in 2019 we started the whole home heat pump challenge. So what we've been trying to do with all of our program is just sort of push the envelope right and to drive this adoption of what is relatively new technology that cold climate air source heat pump. And now we have through that through our efforts we've gotten MassSafe to pick that up. And that's why you know you have this sort of widespread statewide rebates available through MassSafe. Then for for more details sort of on the technologies and how that affects cost. I'm going to just turn it over to Beth. So Jeremy covered a lot of this. I just I want to emphasize again like one of these misses that it's it's not going to work in our climate. Totally not true. Alaska Northern Canada all kind of Maine. Can you hear me now. Okay. So they definitely work. No question about it. When we start talking about affordable housing it's usually multifamily. And when you start looking at first costs it's even less dramatic of a difference in multifamily. So you're usually in a multifamily building going to cost out about five different heating system options. And at this point you also need to add cooling. So heat pumps because they heat and cool you're not talking about two different systems you're talking about a combined one. So when you price it out for multifamily new construction you're usually finding heat pumps in one of the lower two of the five options. So that's first costs very reasonable and we're seeing like a huge movement and it's really only the last two years or so. Everything multifamily is going all heat pumps. It's just not even a push to talk to developers about it. They they go for it very easily in terms of operating costs. Again when you compare to a single family home stretch code communities when you build a new construction multifamily. So it's it's a better envelope less outside surface area right. And so it's actually more efficient to be multifamily than single family. And when you have that good envelope the difference between the electric and gas on the heating is very low. And often multifamily buildings are cooling dominated. So you actually end up cooling the capacity of the system is determined by the cooling and you end up using cooling a decent amount more. So cooling with heat pumps is much more efficient than a central air AC. So when you balance the heating and cooling it tends to be even just in a stretch code building going to be about the same. Next slide. So I think you guys already have in the warrant article an exemption for central hot water. And that's really important because heat pump water heaters are great for single family homes and maybe up to about eight units or so. That would be fine. But once you get past that you're going to want to go to a central system in almost all cases. I mean you could do electric resistance individual tanks for every one but heat pump water heater technology is not really here yet. It's in Europe it's in Japan but it's not really here yet. So I do think having you know provision it sounds like you're going to think about that in the future too because that may change in the future. The other one thing we talked in Brookline as well and I guess our agency has sponsored quite a bunch of passive house affordable housing grants. And so the Finch project that was mentioned is the first one that's being built. But in that process we've been learning sort of about when you do not have gas in it what other challenges are there. And I would say the one thing that we didn't mention in Brookline but I think can be an issue is heat recovery ventilation. If you don't have any ability to have gas it may be a decent amount more expensive. So heat recovery ventilation. So the warm air in here when you exhaust it. Instead of just wasting that heat you should put a heated exchanger in and you capture 80 to 90 percent of that heat and preheat the fresh air coming in right. And then the heating system doesn't have to work very hard. So that's passive house or very high performance buildings in general are going to use that technology a lot. And again if you go all electric it could be a little bit more expensive. So next slide. So it's not we definitely should be thinking about affordability. And I'm really glad you guys came and asked us to come speak about affordability. So energy burden for different people of different incomes is really an important issue. So most people in Massachusetts spend less than one week of their annual budget on energy costs. When you get to somebody more middle income so say a one earner family as a teacher it might be more like two weeks of their annual budget. When you get to someone below 60 percent of state median income it's often a month or even two months. And so that's why affordable housing or one of the reasons that affordable housing has been on the leading edge of green building because they're mission driven. They want to make sure that the energy costs are very low for their tenants. When they're an owner they want to be able to provide more services instead of spending it on energy. Next slide. But what we're finding is in new construction it's really going all electric is not really an additional cost. Like I mentioned before especially when you calculate the cooling in as well you're talking about sort of a net wash on a new construction building. So as long as the bar for requiring or not allowing any gas is a gut rehab that's a very high level gut rehab where you're going to be triggering energy code and you're going to have to do a lot of envelope improvements you really shouldn't see a big increase in costs. So I will say Brookline I think put some kind of exemption in their housing authority actually was going all electric on a number of their buildings and was not worried about it but there could be examples I guess of masonry brick buildings where it's tough to do a lot of envelope improvements. So that might be the one place where your costs might be slightly higher if you don't have some kind of appeals process for specific ones. Next slide. That's it. So I will say affordable housing these days is incentivized quite quite a bit for new construction to go to passive house levels. So passive house is basically the most energy efficient standard in the world. It ends up for a multifamily building being about 40% more efficient than what you would standard build. It uses as heat recovery. It has a lot more ventilation so it's actually more healthy for tenants. But we're also seeing like those projects that would go for low income housing tax credits they would get more points in getting chosen between different projects if they come in with a passive project. So we're seeing massive incentives which every multifamily in the state should look at and those benefits to being more likely to get your tax credits you're going to see a lot of affordable housing going passive. And in that case they're going to be all electric anyway all eight of the grants that we provided to passive house projects they all went with heat pump heating and cooling technology. Moving to these segments about the clean heat for Arlington warrant article, which will be voted on at special town meeting, starting November 16. If you have questions want more information, or would like to volunteer. Please email us at clean heat for Arlington MA at gmail.com, or go to our website. www.cleanheatforarlingtonma.org