Episode 120: Panama Bartholomy and taking pollution out of buildings

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

So last week we heard from PG&G, northern California’s largest utility about their innovation efforts and the need to meet rising load demand without building more expensive infrastructure that consumers pay for and without sacrificing decarbonization goals.

That effort takes technology, yes, but also partnerships, buy-in, policy levers. All the boring important complicated hard work that actually gets things done.

And so this week,let’s talk to someone who is leading an effort to bring all those things together to create the kind of momentum that lets us reinvent the world around us for the better. Starting with buildings.

Panama Bartholomy: My name is Panama Bertholomy and I'm the Executive Director and founder of the Building Decarbonization Coalition. And we're a coalition of business, government, and nonprofits that collectively are trying to eliminate pollution from the built environment in North America.

Molly Wood: How did you, what is the background story there? How did you come to found this and why?

Panama Bartholomy: I've been working on buildings and land use and climate for about 25 years now, about half of it in government for the State of California and half of it in the nonprofit sector. And I had the opportunity to live in Europe for about four years, working on an energy efficiency finance and came back in 2017 thinking, all right, time for that career pivot, go work in something, you know, go work in like renewable energy or go work in cars or force everybody to be vegan or something like that.

But I came back and there was a whole new conversation happening in America around buildings. For 40 years, it had been about efficiency and how do you squeeze more and more out of less and less. And all of a sudden, it was about building decarbonization and how do you completely eliminate pollution from buildings. And I'd had this opportunity to meet people at utilities and manufacturers and installers and design and construction firms.

And what I recognized when I went around talking to everybody is that everyone was basically saying the same thing about what we needed to do to completely decarbonize our building stock. But there was no forum for us to be able to work together on it. And so I wanted to be able to create that space where all these different entities could get together. And I said, we all agreed it was about 80 percent agreement. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to work on that 80 percent together to be able to create market momentum.

And then really faith in each other so that we can work on the 20 percent that we don't agree on yet. And so we've been going for about seven years now and seeing some just really amazing progress.

Molly Wood: I have a million questions about how you all work together and how it works, what were they, what was everybody saying? Like, what did you, you what was the 80 percent that everybody could agree on about building decarbonization?

Panama Bartholomy: Yeah, so there's a few things. People all agree that we need to do much better education of the consumer base, that people need just enough information to know they're supposed to ask for heat pumps or heat pump water heaters or induction stoves, ask for the electric alternative. There was really broad agreement that we had to bring down the costs of electric appliances to at least be even, if not cheaper, than fossil fuel appliances to make them competitive over the long term.

We had to control electric rates to reduce what's called the spark gap, the difference between what it costs to run an electric appliance versus a gas appliance for the same use, a common understanding of that.

We had to work on permitting and really streamline permitting for heat pumps, heat pump water heaters and electrification. There's broad agreement of those activities.

And then lastly, we had to really engage the installer community. Really the heroes of this movement. If you think of anybody that's going to be wearing a cape at the end of this story, it's going to be the installer community. And how do you get them more engaged and really playing their key role in it? So those were the areas of really broad agreement and plenty to work on for the first phase of this movement.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Remind us, we've talked about building decarbonization and the built environment on this show a fair bit, but I feel like it is never a bad idea to sort of restate the problem. Like remind us how significant this opportunity is.

Panama Bartholomy: Absolutely. So buildings collectively, when you look at the pollution that comes from generating the electricity that then goes to power the buildings, or burning gas directly in buildings and then the pollution that comes out of it, or the refrigerant escapes that come from the buildings. Collectively, buildings represent about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

And it's one of the areas where you're actually not seeing some of the same drops that you're seeing in say power generation, where over time as we're phasing out coal and bringing in more and more natural gas and renewable energy, you're starting to see a real reduction on that side as we're getting better and better cars and more and more efficiency, you're starting to see that. With buildings, we've basically been flatlined on emissions over time. And so that's good news in some way, because we're building more and more buildings and they're more and more efficient as newer buildings and newer codes come in. But if we're going to meet any of our clean air targets or our climate targets, we actually have to be seeing a reduction in overall emissions.

So that's the kind of the global or the climate. But we also have real local impacts of it. In a lot of communities with the worst air quality in our country, we're making great progress on things like industrial facilities, power plants, and on cars, and making almost no progress on buildings until the last few years.

And what that means is that buildings are an increasingly larger part of air pollution at local level problems. And in some communities in our country right now, particularly in five of the worst air basins in the country in California, cars are actually, buildings are actually contributing more pollution to smog than all of the cars and power plants combined. And so as we're going to address local air pollution, we have to be stopping burning gas within buildings.

Molly Wood: I just as a storytelling don't want to point out the word you're using too, which is pollution. Like the organization is called the Building Decarbonization Coalition. Decarbonization is a big goal that a lot of us who work in climate understand, but pollution is a pretty universally-understood negative.

Panama Bartholomy:  Yeah, and I have to give all credit for my use of that term back to Mary Nichols, like the great former chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board. They did really great polling work and analysis way back in the the aughts and the 20 aughts about how to talk about this. And what they found exactly that, is that the pollution is something that resonates. Everyone hates pollution and it's far easier to get people around it.

Molly Wood: Okay, so let's talk about the, as you target decarbonizing buildings, what are, within this huge source of emissions, what are the largest sources of emissions?

Panama Bartholomy: Sure. So space heating and water heating collectively represent about 90 % of the emissions from a building. The rest is going to depend a little bit about that building, but generally cooking is 2 to 3 percent. You have other uses in there that make up like you may have a pool that's heated by gas. You may have a hot tub is heated by gas. You may have other little things like an outdoor, an outdoor barbecue or stuff like that, but 90 percent of it is space heating, and water heating. And so there's some of our really big opportunities.

As you get into the commercial space, the cooking makes up a larger percentage than residential, just because a lot of times you have water heating and cooking making up around half by itself for commercial. Just because a lot of commercial buildings, if they do have kitchens, they use a lot of gas in those kitchens.

But if we're gonna really be making a hard charge of this, it's those two areas. Like how do we address space heating? How do we address water heating?

Molly Wood: And so the answer I'm guessing, the answer I already know, I'm not going to play coy, the answer I already know is electrification. And, so talk about the kind of like solution sets that exist there and where we are in terms, you know, as you measure progress toward these goals, we'll sort of stick to the U.S. for now as a shorthand.

Panama Bartholomy: Sure.

Molly Wood: Where are we? What do you have to report as we start the year?

Panama Bartholomy: So the main solution is really moving over to high efficiency electric appliances, generally using heat pump technology, heat pumps for space heating and space cooling, and then heat pumps as well for water heating. For cooking, it's electric stoves or the radian or induction, but for the two major areas of water heating and space heating, we're talking heat pumps. Heat pumps are great. They're anywhere from two to four times more efficient than your best-in-class gas appliance for water heating or space heating. They can provide both space cooling and space heating, even though the name wouldn't suggest it and people still get hung up over the word heat pump. You can drop it in.

Molly Wood: Yep. We've been working on that storytelling challenge for a long time and I think we just had to roll with it. Like they're called what they're called.

Panama Bartholomy: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. They've been around a good 60 years. And whenever we talk to our manufacturing partners about the name, they always kind of roll their eyes and it's like, nope, you just have to live with heat pump. And I don't know, it's like, does the word furnace really resonate? Does that really like tell you about what it does or air conditioning, do people really understand? No, no.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

It doesn't sound like it cools either. Like a furnace is not a cooling word.

Panama Bartholomy: Exactly. These are great technologies, super efficient. And in many cases, like in the case of a heat pump, it can provide really, really comfortable heat as well and really comfortable cooling as well. With a heat pump, you leave it on all the time. And so you're just at a constant temperature that you want and it kicks on and off by itself, really quiet. So it's a wonderful technology and yes, how it's going.

So it's going really well for heat pumps in America right now. This is one of the areas where we've actually now vaulted into a global leader. Five years ago, we were third place for heat pump sales behind the European Union and China, and we're now the number one market for heat pump sales in the world. It's incredible. There aren't many sectors, transportation, power generation, battery production. There aren't many sectors where we hold a global leadership position in clean energy.

And this is one where in a very short amount of time, we have completely turned this market around and we now are finishing up the fourth straight year of heat pumps outselling furnaces across the United States. And so it's a real wonderful clean energy story for North America. Water heaters are taking a bit longer. They are, it's a similar up into the right trend when you look at water heater sales, but they're going to take a bit longer to really catch up. Whereas heat pumps right now are making up just about 56, 58 percent of sales in the HVAC space compared to furnaces. Water heaters and heat pump water heaters are still right around the 12 percent of the overall, but electric water heaters, both resistance and heat pump water heaters are over 50 percent of the overall market share.

Molly Wood: I feel like this is a good time to actually take a step back and talk about how the coalition itself works. Because you are a large nonprofit entity working with commercial manufacturers to sort of clear the way for these solutions. And I'd love to dive into a little of those mechanics before I ask you more about the kind of types of, before I make you just be like super helpful please, about where we are.

Panama Bartholomy: Right? Yeah, happy to. We're an odd coalition. We have utilities. We have most of the manufacturers of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, or HVAC. We have most of the North American manufacturers of water heating. We have designers, big construction firms, small construction firms, installers, nonprofits like Sierra Club and others, and then government agencies all coming together.

And we do a lot of shuttle diplomacy. We spend a bunch of time going between everybody,  understanding what their concerns are, what their fears are, what they're hoping for, and then really crafting policy positions out of that, writing reports based on that, communicating on behalf of all those entities to people like policymakers and others to help them understand and be able to really make programs and policies that are gonna work, gonna work for the utilities, gonna work for the manufacturers, gonna work for the installers, gonna work for the end consumers.

And what we found is, well, that's really hard and difficult and takes a long time, is you get better results out of that. Through that really broad reach and that understanding you're gonna get a better program design, a better policy design, and it's gonna be more resilient and easier to implement. You can do it faster, absolutely. You can run over people, absolutely, but there's going to be more friction and it's going to be harder to implement. And so it's a lot of shuttle diplomacy.

And the good news is that everyone's on the same page about where we all want to get to. The challenge really is the speed and whether or not everybody can hold up their end of the bargain. We joke that our manufacturers are kind of just like the rest of us, they just want TLC, transparency, longevity, and consistency is all they're looking for from policymakers. They just want to know what the schedule is, what the standard is, and then let them go ahead and innovate and be able to do it.

But it's when there's uncertainty, when there's changes, when there's things that they're not expected, that's when they get freaked out. That's when they start to pull back. That's when they really start to wonder, is government really committed to decarbonization and taking us down this path?

And so a lot of times we're really pushing for that and policymakers are surprised. They're like, wait a minute, the folks that manufacture the gas appliances are supportive of phasing out their gas appliance lines. And it's like, absolutely. They're ready to go, if government can be a good partner on this journey and provide them with that TLC.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about where we’re winning. Turns out Americans really love heat pumps. Also, that little controversy over gas stoves that got everyone slowly realizing gas stoves are poisoning you. And also, how there’s nothing gas can do that electric can’t do better.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Panama Bartholemy of the Building Decarbonization Coalition.

Because I am a nerd, Panama and I had a long chat here about the various levers that create change in a system, especially in a large coalition working on getting buy in from lots of corners. Those levers include policy, rules, incentives, the sticks and carrots that get large systems moving in the direction of change and progress.

Panama Bartholomy: But it's not actually the strongest lever.

We're really big followers of Donella Meadows, the amazing systems thinker that unfortunately passed away about a decade, a little over a decade ago. And she laid out like, what are the 12 most effective leverage points within a system? And her number one is you change the paradigm within which the system operates.

And this gets back to the wonderful work you've been doing on storytelling last year is really helping to change people's perception on gas and electric. And helping people realize, policymakers, the public, others, and really making them realize that we can't afford to continue on a path of natural gas. We can't afford it from a financial perspective. We can't afford it from a climate perspective. We can't afford it from a health perspective.

And once you start to change that paradigm, then everything else starts to flow a lot easier. The other levers get easier to pull and we started to see some of that around something colloquially called Stovegate or the big challenges, the big fight around stoves in 2023, where, you know…

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm for, for yeah, you're gonna explain it, right? Mm-hmm.

Panama Bartholomy: Yeah, in 2023, we had members of the Biden administration over in the Consumer Product Safety Commission start to talk about like, there's certain dangers around having gas stoves in your home. Like when the tests come back that in almost every test, you're finding benzene and other pollutants coming out of burning gas in your homes, having this open flare, should we as a government be doing something about that?

And so, huge backlash, huge conversation across America, tons of media attention to it. Ultimately, the Biden administration didn't move forward with anything like that. And there's all this talk afterwards about like, who won? Who won that debate? You know, like the Biden administration didn't move forward, therefore did they lose? Did the decarbonization folks lose?

But Molly, like the fact that tens of millions of people were exposed to media stories about there, or potential dangers of having a gas stove in your home, that's the kind of information that just sticks. Like it's sticky facts that you just don't ever get out of your head. And that starts to change the narrative, starts to change the paradigm within which the system we're trying to change operates and makes it a lot easier for people to say, yeah, you know, maybe when my water heater breaks, I do want to consider actually getting an electric one.

Molly Wood: Let's talk about gas a little more. I took a look through, so you put out a report, the 2025 wrapped because that is what we all do. Everyone's got a wrapped. But I want to go back to what you were saying and point to actually in the wrapped report about gas infrastructure being a really expensive problem. One of the members of your team who I love, has often said to me, there's nothing that gas can do that electric can't do better. And I don't think people know this, that gas infrastructure is really expensive, that this isn't a sustainable literally, or commercially rather, way to keep growing. And I'd love for you to just explain a little more about that.

Panama Bartholomy: Yes, there's an amazing race happening right now and it's the race of gas utilities in America trying to get as much pipe in the ground before climate and clean energy regulations can catch up to them.

About 20 years ago, if you looked at your gas bill, one third of your gas bill was paying for infrastructure and two thirds was paying for the commodity, the natural gas itself. That's flipped now. You look at your gas bill now, two thirds of what you're paying is for the infrastructure, the very pipes that are delivering that gas to your home and only one third is the commodity. And that's even with the price of gas going up.

And so what's happened, Molly, is in 2010, we had this really terrible disaster in California called the San Bruno explosion that Pacific Gas and Electric very unfortunately had a pipe that exploded and killed a number of people, injured a number of other people in a neighborhood in the South Bay area. And right after that, the federal government in somewhat in response to that released new standards for pipeline safety. And you saw an absolute explosion of investments happening from gas companies replacing pipe, not just building new pipe, but replacing a whole bunch of their pipe systems. And about a quarter of the pipe, the gas pipe on the distribution side in America is over 50 years old and really in need of retirement. Notice I don't say replacement, in need of retirement.

And what we've seen is an absolute doubling of expenditures into the gas infrastructure system over just three years from 2010 to 2013 and then it's remained stable. And so we're about $50 billion a year of rate payer funds are now going into gas infrastructure replacement and sometimes expansion. And it's having a huge impact on our bills. The only thing that's going up faster than inflation, the only thing that's going up faster than electric rates are gas rates. Gas bills are going up twice as fast as electric rates last year and four times faster than the rate of inflation last year.

And this is in part driven by the infrastructure investments that I told you about, but it's also being driven by America's exports of liquidified natural gas. And so at the end of the year in North America, you could get about, about four and a half dollars for a million BTUs of gas. If you're selling it through the LNG market, it's about $7 a million BTU. So there's a real benefit for North American gas producers to be able to try to sell that internationally rather than pipe it around here. And so that increased competition is also raising prices of gas for American consumers. And so we're getting hit on both sides, both on the commodity and the infrastructure side.

The real tragedy of it is, as you said, electric appliances can do everything that gas appliances can do, except they can do it better. They can do it more efficiently. In a lot of ways, they can do it more powerfully as well when you're talking about things like cooking.

And so we find ourselves in the scenario where we're making really large scale investments in two energy systems right now. We're trying to invest in the electricity system to build a long-term, resilient, clean, safe, affordable grid. And we're investing in the gas system, a system that if you believe we have to fight climate change, if you are concerned about air quality in local communities, we have to be getting off of that system. We have to be retiring that system over the next 25, 24 years now.

And yet, we're investing billions of dollars into that, that we should be investing into the electric system, that we should be saving for rate payers. And so I'm really excited when I see things like Governor Hochel in New York at the end of last year, she stopped a subsidy, a long-term subsidy that was expanding the gas system in New York, where anytime you hooked up a new building to the gas system you got a subsidy from all the other ratepayers to buy down the cost of that hookup. And she ended that and that's saving six hundred million dollars a year for New York ratepayers now by ending that subsidy.

And so it's things like that that we're going to have to do to stop investing in the gas system so that we can afford to invest in the electric system that we all know we're going to need into the future.

Molly Wood: Right. I did see in your report that, and then things you don't even realize are happening that, legislators in Oregon, New York and California ordered a gas company, ordered utilities to stop charging customers for lobbying and marketing. Just systems level change, everyone.

Panama Bartholomy: Yes, yeah, we're still at the beginning in a lot of these…

Molly Wood: Oh, boy. In the efficiency space, people talk about how there are still so many light bulbs to be changed, right? You can talk about big fancy efficiency solutions, but there are just, still lot of bad light bulbs out there. And I feel like this is metaphorically that.

The other thing that I want to talk to you about is the approach of, is the approach of net neighborhood level, neighborhood scale decarbonization, like taking it instead of a building by building by building approach, which is obviously difficult, trying to approach this in sort of a neighborhood kind of way. Tell me more about that.

Panama Bartholomy: So you can imagine, you know, we need to change out all the gas appliances. Your space heater, your water heater, your stove, your other stuff. And generally people only do those when they fail. There aren't a lot of people that are waking up and just being like, you know what, I'm gonna mess with that water heater today. I'm looking for a fun project. You do it when you absolutely have to do it and then hopefully you don't have to think about it for another 15 to 20 years after that.

And when you think about trying to run a grid and knowing how much energy you're gonna need for that grid and how much electricity you're going to have to provide to homes and buildings to understand when you could actually start to cut off gas pipelines from the rest of system, trim branches as we call it in the industry.

You have no way of knowing. You have absolutely no way of knowing when everyone's stuff is gonna break, when it's gonna be replaced, if they're gonna make the right decision or not. So from a grid planning perspective, and therefore a climate perspective, it's incredibly hard to plan based on the current model of just, well, figure it out when everything breaks.

And unfortunately, it also doesn't work well for helping vulnerable communities. Over time, more and more people are electrifying and more and more people are therefore getting off of the gas grid. And those fixed costs that we talked about, the things that we're all paying off those pipes, if you have less and less people on the pipe and there's less throughput going through that pipe, those of us that are left on the pipe have to pay higher and higher rates in order to pay off those fixed costs.

And eventually what you see is that'll force more or they'll encourage more people to electrify. So there'll be less and it's a continual cycle of rising rates until you get to a point where the only people left on that system are the people that either can't afford to get off the system, don't have the agency to get off the system, like they can't choose what appliances they have, renters, or industries that have a hard time transitioning. It's just too expensive to be able to get off that system. And that'll then become politically unpalatable and we'll have to have public intervention in it and so vulnerable communities have a very high chance of just being left out of this transition or left at the back end of it.

And then lastly, just rate payer protection. If this is going to be very hard for utilities to be able to plan for what they'll do is they'll continue to invest in the electric system while at the same time investing in the gas system.

And so we'll be investing in the gas system because we won't know when people are switching out their appliances. And so we're making these really expensive choices into the future. And so, yes, we need to electrify and decarbonize, but the current model of just waiting for everything to break and hoping people make the right decision isn't good from a grid planning, climate planning, protecting vulnerable communities or protecting rate payer perspective. And so we need something else. We need a backstop. We need a climate and justice backstop to be able to make sure that we're going to meet our targets. We're going to be able to prioritize vulnerable communities in the transition and we're going to do it in the most economical way possible.

And so our organization and others have done a lot of work thinking through, how do you actually start to take whole neighborhoods off of the gas grid at once? How do you have an assessment of all of the homes on a part of the gas grid that's going to come up for replacement? And instead of replacing it, you send in a team of installers that go in and they electrify all of the homes, the buildings, the commercial buildings over a time period. And then you're able to cut off that gas system, cut off the pipe to that system as everything's electrified.

Right now it's costing about $6 million a mile in California to replace gas distribution pipeline. It's three to $6 million a mile in New York. It's about $3 million a mile in Illinois. This is really expensive stuff to replace. And instead we could be using that money to electrify those neighborhoods, clip that gas system, and start to be able to wind down the system.

We are starting to see utilities do this across the country, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, here in California, you're having utilities start to really experiment with this business model to see how it's gonna work. So we're at the early stages of it, but it's really promising and exciting.

And one of the main areas I'm excited about is it doesn't force everybody to become an expert in their heating and cooling system. It takes the pain of those choices away from the homeowner or the occupant and it actually lets the experts come in and work with them and give them choices in a non-emergency scenario where it's just like, my god, I just want to get my shower back. It's like, no, we have experts here that are ahead of time going to help you be able to make this transition. So that's some of the reasons why we're seeing this big transition starting to take place.

Molly Wood: What are the mechanisms, how does it, what is the mechanism to make that happen at a neighborhood level? Like you're like, yeah we can go in and do that. Who's the we and who pays for that and who, you know, and clearly it's coalition work to drive that forward but how much more can you, I might have, I might be taking us down like a way longer conversation that we need to have but I need to know. It's sort of like that part of the book where they go and then I you know then I went all around the world and started a business and invented a da da da and I'm like wait a second there are 10,000 steps here and I need at least 7,000 of them

Panama Bartholomy: Yeah. So the end of this decade is all going to be about pilot projects for this, right? Like this is the prove it part of the decade where it's like, okay, this is the concept. Now let's try a whole bunch of different approaches to this, but I'll tell you about what the early approaches has been.

So we have utilities that are putting out contracts and hiring teams and saying, here's all of the areas where we have pipeline replacement projects coming up, where we're going to be spending that three to $6 million a mile. And we want you to go out to these neighborhoods and convince everybody in this neighborhood that are on this pipe that we're going to replace to agree to take a check from us. And this is like a, we're talking a $35,000 check to go ahead and completely renovate the, all the appliances, the gas appliances in their home and get, make them electric.

And then at a certain date, we'll be clipping off that gas line to your area. And so these are teams, contractor teams that are doing everything from the outreach to the homeowners or the building owners, going in and then assessing the building, understanding the cost, the electrical upgrades that are needed, any other remediation. Actually doing the work, doing the post-work analysis of like, is it working? Is everything okay? And then all the follow-up with them about, okay, here's how to get onto your new rate plan as well.

So a lot of this is gonna be led by the utilities themselves. And it's gonna be up to policymakers to set in place the right business model, the right rules to be able to create the right business models for utilities that they're going to want to do this. And what we're seeing right now is particularly dual fuel utilities to do both electric and gas. They're seeing the writing on the wall, Molly. Like they're seeing where this is going, particularly in states with climate laws.

And they're just like, we're going to be stuck holding the bag with hundreds of billions of dollars of gas investments, and we need to stop digging the hole any deeper. And it makes sense just economically right now for us to be trying to do this. So that's who some of the leaders are in this right now, trying out some of these models.

Molly Wood: I love it. What do you need? What makes your job easier? And that listeners of this show, in addition to, I assume, voting, can accomplish. Listen, at the end of the day, people, you get what you vote for.

Panama Bartholomy: Yes, yeah, as we're seeing, absolutely. What we need is a lot more of the last seven years, which was real interest and excitement and explosion of this technology. When we started this movement seven years ago with others, you know, we would have articles about like, what's a heat pump? All the time. And last year, New York Times and Associated Press both had articles about how to choose the right heat pump for your house. Like, we have definitely jumped to a new time period.

And so what we need is we need political will to be able to continue the types of policies and investments that we've seen over the last seven years out for the next seven years.

We need the utilities to be able to build a strong, resilient grid and to keep electric prices stable for people.

We need the manufacturing and installation community to continue down this path, to see the inevitability of this transition, and to be able to continue to install more and more heat pumps and heat pump water heaters out into the future. And then we need customer demand. We need customers to stay on board. We have passed through the threshold of the first stage of this movement, and we're into that second stage of the movement, where we're reaching the early to mid mainstream.

And so now it's beyond the people who are willing to like go through a little bit of friction to get their water heater. Now it's people that just want their water heater, they heard it's supposed to be electric and they just want it to be easy for them.

And so I'll go back to the heroes of this movement. And this is like, depend a lot upon the installers. And this next five years, the success of our movement is going to rely heavily on how well we're able to engage and support the installer community so that they can be the ones to help the homeowners be able to make this as frictionless of a transition as possible.

Molly Wood: Panama Bartholomy is the founder and CEO of the Building Decarbonization Coalition. Thank you so much for the time. Appreciate it.

Panama Bartholomy: Thank you, Molly. Had a great time.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

So now that we’ve talked about the hard work of piloting and innovation and coalition building, the next two weeks will bring us some cool electrification tech!

Next week, the sexiest heat pump in town, and the week after that, the sexiest induction range in town. I mean, listen, storytelling is a lever and sex sells, right?

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in[at]everybodyinthepool.com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybodyinthepool.com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice. Thank you to those of you who already have.

Together, we can get this done. See you next week.