April 2024 Great Story

The Spartan Housing Cooperative believes in stewardship, of homes, of our community, of the planet. That’s why I wanted to work with them. The Spartan Housing Cooperative believes in affordable housing, in affordability in housing, and that’s why I wanted to work with them. The Michigan Healthy Climate Plan sets a target of limiting the energy burden of low-income households to not more than 6% of annual income- energy burden for the SHC’s 18 houses in the past few years varies between 3% and 8% of the HUD’s local 2023 Extremely Low Income limit. Lots of that money goes towards paying for natural gas, to heat homes and water, so there’s a pretty substantial opportunity to improve the climate impact of these houses by moving to electrify or at least improve those systems. In order to understand where our money (and potential grant money) would be best spent, we need to understand the existing climate impact of each of our houses, and understand what areas for improvement we may have.

Because our biggest electric utility doesn’t interface with Energy Star Portfolio Manager directly, we have to enter our energy usage data manually- So getting historical data is no easy task! For the seventeen houses we have data for (Our most recent one is in the process of opening as a cooperative for the first time, so we won’t have good data on it for a while), we have decades worth of old paper bills stored in our organization’s archives. In order to get that data in a format that E*PM can read, we’ve got to first find those bills, organize them by utility type, and then enter that data manually from the paper bill into a spreadsheet. Of the bills we’ve managed to digitize so far, they run between 2005 and 2017. Twelve years, seventeen properties, four utilities (Electric, gas, water, waste disposal)- that’s thousands of bills to enter. We’re probably missing some, but a lot minus a few is still a lot! Over the last few weeks, we’ve had six (and counting!) member volunteers come and spend almost 50 hours in total to sort all of those bills, and we’ve already entered nearly 600 bills into a spreadsheet over the past three workdays. 

In addition to building out our historical data, I’ve been looking at our records for gas-using appliances like furnaces, boilers, water heaters, and dryers, to see what models in which houses are due for replacement soon. Because these appliances have such an impact on carbon emissions and utilities cost, and they’re so expensive, replacing them with the right option when they’re at the end of their service life is a great opportunity for improvement! 

By combining our historical utilities usage information with digital tools like Energy Star Portfolio Manager, LBNL’s BETTER, and NREL’s PVWatts and REOpt, we can understand which sustainability improvements made to each of our houses can improve our energy burden and climate impact. Our members are an integral part in building that understanding! Once we have a better handle on what we need and have some good information that we can include in grant and rebate applications, we’ll be well on our way towards an electric future!