Dear friend,

This was the year electrification went mainstream. And the year the world got wise to wiring. The President uttered the words "heat" and "pump" in sequence. And heat pump adoption soared across Europe, as well as in the U.S., in response to Putin's evil machinations.

It was also the year of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The largest climate bill in history is projected to get the U.S. much closer to its climate targets, reducing greenhouse gas pollution by one billion metric tons and providing billions in incentives and rebates that can help American households save on energy costs. Every household in America now has an electric bank account to help them swap dirty machines for clean ones. And if we leverage the full benefit of these provisions, we will see $858 billion in electric potential realized.

However, there remains a 500 million metric ton gap between what the IRA can deliver and President Biden’s net-zero-aligned target of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas pollution 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The federal government can help close this gap by another two-thirds. We wrote a report that explains precisely how.

In Electrify My Government, we offer up nine actions the government can take to reduce emissions in extremely high-impact ways, from electrifying all federal buildings and vehicle fleets to packaging every federally guaranteed mortgage with an electric loan. Just yesterday, we learned that the U.S. Postal Service will purchase zero-emissions delivery trucks almost exclusively by 2026. We applaud this work and hope to see more of it in the coming weeks and months.

At last week’s first-ever White House Electrification Summit, our co-founder Alex Laskey talked of the scope and scale of this, our epic electrification effort. “The federal government can do more, as they’ve already announced in their whole-of-government plan. We have government-owned housing. We have weatherization programs. These need to become electrification programs.”

We made nine beautiful posters to illustrate key findings in the Electrify My Government report. Download them here.

REWIRING REVIEWED: ALL THE THINGS WE DID THIS YEAR

We pumped for peace. We called it Electrify for Peace. It was an effort to connect the dots between a petrostate dictator and the price at the pumps. And to get the President to use the Defense Production Act for heat pumps. People said it couldn’t be done. The President said heat pump. And signed the executive order. Our CEO and co-founder Ari Matusiak wrote about it in an op-ed with Senator Heinrich (D-NM) here.

We are the Inflation Reduction ACTivators. We got electrification on the federal policy agenda, building and working in coalition to add heat pump and breaker box tax credits (25C), electrification rebates (HEEHRA), and low-cost financing (GHGRF and LPO) to the IRA. The biggest climate investment in history with $100 billion for electrification, NBD.

We pulled people and pumps into our network like a super magnet, including: 50+ meetings with companies, 140 CEOs, 102 local elected members, 211 volunteers, 52 Electrification Caucus members, two pilot chapters, and a dozen heat pump costumes.

We built a calculator! And hundreds of thousands of people used it. 380,000 and counting, to be sort of exact.

We thrilled theater-going audiences with powerful (heat)pump performances. And we made other video content, too! Like this induction stove piece, which explains just how quietly unsweaty induction cooking is. We talked about the benefits of electrification to anyone who would listen. This year, that was upwards of 80 publications.

We launched all the electric things. Like Rewiring Schools (call your schoolboard today!) and our first Electric Education campaign cohort, including Airbnb, Redfin, Lyft, Duquesne Light Company, Mosaic, Arcadia, and Propel.

We powered our panel. We welcomed new people (approximately 30 of them!), built processes, and started laying the electric tracks.

We invited all the electric enthusiasts to our world, including you. We launched our first chapters, spoke to hundreds of volunteers, and made tools to help our ever-enthusiastic electri-friends electrify everything. Because this movement must be ground up, not just top down. And it will take thousands, maybe millions of people, talking to their friends and neighbors about heat pumps, to electrify at the clip we need.

Thank you so much for reading, resharing, and Rewiring! We look forward to a brilliant 2023 with you!