Neighborhood Scale Decarbonization
6/12/25 @ 3:00PM
Conti Room
The Basics
What does This mean?
Neighborhood-scale building decarbonization is an approach that focuses on transitioning street segments, developments, or even entire neighborhoods to decarbonized energy sources and electric appliances with the end goal of enabling a transition off of the gas system. It’s a strategy in which all stakeholders in a neighborhood—state and municipal leaders, utilities and workers, organizers and advocates—coordinate a broad and equitable transition to clean energy sources and electric appliances.
Neighborhood electrification is intended to complement, not replace, the whole-of-market approach where heat pumps are rebated for more affordable and easier access by consumers without a specific regional focus.
Why Does This Matter?
Neighborhood scale decarbonization is a systemic solution for a systemic problem: Buildings contribute to about 30% of U.S. emissions. About half of that percentage derives from on-site combustion, which typically occurs out-of-sight in water heaters, dryers, and gas furnaces.There are about 110 million buildings in the U.S. About 99 million of those are single-family homes. That means we’re talking about needing around half a billion individual decisions from homeowners, landlords, and building managers to upgrade various appliances, and these decisions are often deferred until appliances break down. The neighborhood scale approach helps us aggregate large groups of these decision-makers into a system a community can collaboratively tackle together. By coordinating entire neighborhoods and communities, we can reduce the total cost of the transition, create savings for ratepayers, ensure continued energy reliability and safety, and encourage an equitable distribution of clean energy benefits.
How can this advance equitable building decarbonization?
Decarbonizing the built environment block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and town by town makes possible a more comprehensive and equitable strategy for meeting our climate goals.A community-centered approach can reduce the consumer fatigue of managing discrete home improvement projects and simplify engagement by streamlining education, outreach, and time spent upgrading homes. It also allows us to focus our decarbonizing energy on historically underserved communities, putting them front and center in the transition to clean, affordable, healthy homes. By performing comprehensive home upgrades and appliance replacement all together at one time, neighborhood decarbonization projects can improve community structures with minimum disruption to residents’ lives.
Neighborhood decarbonization offers an opportunity to bring entire communities into the clean energy transition in a tangible, long-term, and meaningful way.