Bruce Mast has been in the energy industry for over two decades. He’s been looking for win-win solutions to help humanity and the environment for three decades since the Peace Corps. We really welcome him to discuss the beginnings of his latest mission: making homes more comfortable and electric. Bruce is working with heat pump technology to convert more home appliances from using natural gas to electricity. This is often called beneficial electrification, like driving electric vehicles instead of gasoline-powered ones.

---

TRAVIS:  Today, we have Bruce Mast. He is from Peninsula Climate Comfort. How are you doing, Bruce?

BRUCE:  I’m well. Thanks. How are you, Travis?

TRAVIS:  I’m doing well. We always like to start our podcast here with our ice breaker.  What was the first thing you remember wanting to be growing up?

BRUCE:  Well, that’s funny. As a child, one of my first career aspirations was to be a physicist. My aunt thought I was crazy because I would go to the school library and check out physics books to read for fun. She thought that was nuts.

TRAVIS:  Not really, huh?

BRUCE:  Yeah.

TRAVIS:  Wow, so you were quite the intellectual.

BRUCE:  I think it’s the scientific bent… I studied physics in college and actually got a physics degree, although by then I realized that I did not want to be a physicist.

TRAVIS:  Oh, okay.

BRUCE:  I had to reinvent myself, but that’s my formal education.

TRAVIS:  What do you do now, and how did you get to do what you do now?

BRUCE:  Now I run my own practice. Actually, my company is called Ardenna Energy. I’m a sole proprietor, but a big part of my focus is around helping customers electrify their homes, i.e. helping them convert from natural gas to electric. As part of that, Ardenna Energy is leading a pilot program called Peninsula Climate Comfort, which is sponsored by Peninsula Clean Energy, Peninsula Clean Energy is the community choice energy program that serves San Mateo County in California. In this pilot, we’re helping find households that want to convert their furnaces and hot water heaters to heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. We’re very excited.

TRAVIS:  There’s a lot in there. Let’s help our audience unpack that. You mentioned several things. First of all, you mentioned electrification. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BRUCE:  Yeah. I’ve been working in the energy efficiency world for a couple of decades. Of course, more and more of my attention has been shifting towards climate change. A few years ago, it finally dawned on me how much of our carbon pollution comes from the gas appliances that we find in our homes; our furnaces, hot water heaters, gas cooking, gas clothes dryers.

BRUCE:  All of these burn fossil fuels, and the emissions from that heat the planet. So, one of the most important things that we can do, especially in California where the electricity is already pretty clean, is to find some of those appliances, replace them with appliances that use clean electricity.

TRAVIS:  I see. Can you give us an example of something that’s … Oh, first of all, why is natural gas so bad for the climate?

BRUCE:  Well it’s a fossil fuel, so if extracted from deep in the earth. It’s a carbon molecule, so when you burn it one of the products that comes off of that is carbon dioxide. We are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and the higher the carbon dioxide concentrations go, the more heat that the atmosphere in the oceans retain. This is heating up the planet and causing our climate change.

TRAVIS:  I see. How bad is that problem? I grew up in Texas and in California. I don’t even think about electricity versus gas to be honest. Can you give us a little background? Is it a big problem for most people?

BRUCE:  Well, I mean for the planet, of course, climate change is this tremendous problem. Recent reports show that something like a million species are in danger of going extinct. Temperatures also rise by multiple degrees, which raises sea levels. The oceans turn acidic, and then the Barrier Reefs die off. We have wildfires. You can just kind of go on and on and on–all of the problems that we are already starting to see because of that.

BRUCE:  So, to slow and stop those changes we have to slash our emissions–our carbon pollution–by just an enormous factor. Like by 90%. It’s just a huge number that we need to drop, so we need to just be doing everything that is feasible. Some things are really hard. It’s really hard to build a low-emissions airplane, but it’s relatively straight-forward to install low-emissions technologies in our homes. So that’s actually one of the easiest things that we can do. It’s not cheap, and it’s not trivial, but it’s where we need to focus next.

TRAVIS:  Okay, so electrification is one of those things.

BRUCE:  Yeah. It’s just like the same reason we want people to buy electric cars and take mass transit or to install solar panels and windmills. All those things shift our economy to renewable and cleaner energy ,so we can lower our emissions, so that we can continue to thrive here on this planet.

TRAVIS:  You mentioned that one of the problem is the high cost, and we’ll get to that in a second. But I wanted to go over what are some of the things that people would be replacing that’s running natural gas in their homes to electrify them?

BRUCE:  A great one is your hot water heater. A standard home has this big 40-gallon storage tank with a gas burner at the bottom using flames to heat the water. You can take that same hot water heater, replace it with a heat pump hot water heater, which also has a tank. But it heats the water with a heat pump technology, which is the same technology that basically keeps your refrigerator cold.

BRUCE:  It’s using electricity to pump heat from low concentration, which is the atmosphere, into a higher concentration, which is the warm water in a tank. So it’s heating water with electricity. That’s very efficient and very clean.

TRAVIS:  I see. That sounds pretty good. Have we been trying this, or is this a brand new technology?

BRUCE:  Yes and no. It’s relatively new in the U.S. There’s been a lot of new improvements in the technology in the recent years. But in places like Japan, this is standard practice. All through China, this is standard practice. Some other parts of the world are ahead of us in terms of developing and getting these technologies in the marketplace.

TRAVIS:  Well if it’s so good, why aren’t we using it already? Is it the same reason we Americans don’t have mass transit? What happened in history? Why do we have all these furnaces everywhere then?

BRUCE:  A part of it is policy. In California, for a couple of decades, the official policy was to actually encourage people to use natural gas. This was before the heat pumps were really available. Back then, the standard way of heating water was just resistance heat, which is just running electricity through a wire until that wire gets hot that’s. That’s not terribly efficient.

BRUCE:  So it’s expensive, and the gas technology was considered more efficient. For a couple of decades, all of our state policies really pushed people towards the gas appliances. Now we are realizing, “oh, we’ve got these heat pumps, even better than the gas, and cleaner.”  The pendulum is shifted back the other way.

TRAVIS:  Oh okay, so is the State of California behind what you’re doing now?

BRUCE:  Yes, in a way. The state’s policies are behind this direction, but the regulations that run everything, those are taking a while to catch up. There is a lot of work right now to rewrite the regulations to reflect the higher level policies that we’ve set.

TRAVIS:  You mentioned that high cost as a problem. I remember 10 years ago I thought about getting an EV (Electric Vehicle), but it seemed so costly at the time. It was just hard to work out the math, and the choices was more limited. Can you tell us a bit about where are we on electrification of homes?

BRUCE:  Yeah, so the best time to make the conversion for a hot water heater for your furnace is when it’s time to replace the old equipment. You’re going to need to spend some money anyway replacing a furnace. Even if you’re just putting in a gas furnace it’s going to cost you a few thousand dollars.

BRUCE:  The heat pumps tend to cost a little bit more than the gas alternatives. A heat pump might be $5,000 to 10,000 versus your $4,000 to $6,000 for a furnace. A water heater might be $2,000 to $4,000, compared to $1,000 to $2,000 for the gas appliance. So right now, we’re still in the early adoption stages. We think that it will get more use out in the marketplace, and more readily available. Contractors are working on figuring the installation costs, and we expect to see those prices coming down.

TRAVIS:  If someone is interested in getting one of these things … Let’s say mine just broke down, and I can afford something a little bit more expensive, how would I go about doing this with your organization?

BRUCE:  Yeah, so in a few years, it will pretty much be the standard practice, I predict, for all the new homes to be built with electric appliances, including water heaters.  This is where new construction is going. This pilot that we’re running, it’s really to figure out how to help people do exactly what you asked.

BRUCE:  Right now, there are still lots of obstacles, and contractors aren’t very familiar with the technology, and we’re not widely available yet. The goal of these case studies is to really get down into the weeds. Figure out what the problems are and how to develop solutions for those, so that we can then design programs that are more scalable to serve more households.

Continue reading part 2 of this interview with Bruce Mast where he talks more about how Peninsula Climate Comfort would make a home more comfortable while helping fight climate change.