Net-zero ready homes could help lower carbon footprint, but more skilled workers are needed to build them
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GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. — Heidi McCullough is working on her computer in the lobby of the Glenwood Hot Springs Athletic Club on a snowy November morning, but it’s a lot noisier than usual — mainly, due to construction. The whirring noise of some equipment interrupts our interview — and at my confused expression, she smiles.
“I can tell you what it is,” she said. “It's a specific type of little saw. It's for cutting drywall.”
Even though McCullough is not working on this particular job, she’s familiar with all kinds of construction. She’s a building specialist for Clean Energy Economy for our Region, or CLEER.
“I provide technical support for people looking to build high efficiency or high performance buildings, as well as people who’re looking to improve or upgrade the buildings they already have,” she said. She also helps people and businesses find grants and rebates to make these changes and upgrades.
One of the biggest sources of carbon emissions in our region is our built environment — including infrastructure, buildings and neighborhoods.
There are ways to reduce the residential carbon footprint, through energy-efficient buildings and moving away from natural gas to power our homes.
McCullough does a lot of work with net-zero ready homes, which the U.S. Department of Energy defines as being so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all of the home’s yearly total energy use.
She says these homes are often more resilient to climate-driven risks, like severe weather events that threaten the power grid.
“These buildings with renewable energy on site, often with battery storage, using less energy and buildings that are more well-insulated, have the ability to ride out power outages in a way that other buildings just can't,” she said.
One of McCullough’s clients through CLEER is Habitat for Humanity Roaring Fork Valley.
Gail Schwartz, CEO of Habitat, says that when they started building the Basalt Vista neighborhood in 2019, they hadn’t set out to build net-zero ready homes.
“Holy Cross Energy stepped up and said, ‘You don't really need to bring a gas line up to this neighborhood. Why don't you think of an all-electric neighborhood?’” she recounted.
She says at the time, that was a pretty unique concept.
“And then taking it one step further, making sure we had energy-efficient envelopes,” she said. “We had solar onsite. So it's generating more energy than it's using.”
That neighborhood now houses Roaring Fork School District and Pitkin County employees in 27 net-zero ready homes — all of which are deed-restricted to be affordable. And these homes aren’t just climate friendly — they save residents money.
“When your household is paying $14 a month for all the utilities but water, you have true, affordable living as a result of this efficiency,” Schwartz said.
At the time, Schwartz acknowledges, it wasn’t easy working with things like heat pumps, which use electricity to heat and cool air and move it to different parts of a building.
“It was trial by error,” she said. “We had to move through a couple of different (subcontractors) to find someone who really had mastered the technology because it was fairly new at the time. Getting heat pump installers, people that understood the technology that reliably could come into the site and install them.”
Other net-zero communities in our region include the Geos neighborhood in Arvada, Colorado, and Living Zenith in Salt Lake City, Utah. In Boulder County, Willoughby Corner is net-zero ready and uses solar and geothermal energy, and, like Basalt Vista, is affordable. In Wyoming, net-zero and net-zero ready development is mostly limited to single-family homes, though money for energy efficiency upgrades in Jackson is available through Energy Conservation Works.
There’s a reason there aren’t very many of these communities. Building net-zero or net-zero ready homes at scale, the way Habitat does, requires a workforce that understands the technology, equipment, and efficiency requirements.
Mike Herrick, the owner of Patriot Heating & Cooling, a Meeker-based HVAC company, installs heat pumps across the valley. He has participated in some of CLEER’s workforce development courses.
He says keeping up with new technology is a lot of work, and many people in the industry aren’t getting any younger.
“Last time I checked into it, for every five of us that retire, there's only two coming in to take our place,” he said. “So that's an issue.”
According to a recent study done by the upper valley’s Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), the demand for a green building workforce in Garfield, Eagle, and Pitkin counties is growing. It estimates that the three-county area will see a demand of 204 new jobs in skilled-trade jobs in the next year, many of which will require knowledge of energy efficiency or green building technologies.
Herrick says he’d like to see education for skilled trades start as young as high school.
“You have contractors like us out here in the field that will take on having a student that we want to come do a ride-along at work for, you know, two days to a week with us just to see and get a feel for it and understand what it's like,” he said. “I personally would be completely on board with that.”
This January, Habitat for Humanity will break ground on a facility in Rifle to build modular housing. Schwartz says the modular houses can be built to those net-zero ready requirements, will be affordable and can be transported all across our region.
The facility will also offer on-site workforce development and on-the-job training — mostly indoors.
Schwartz says this is also an attempt to make trade jobs more resilient to a changing climate — whether it’s 13 or 113 degrees.
“This is a hardship on our workforce that is working outside,” she said. “We can have a controlled environment to do exactly what we're doing outside and move it indoors and do it more efficiently and do it year round.”
There are other barriers to workforce development for green construction jobs.
In CORE’s workforce study, one identified barrier is language.
“Our immigrant community… have moved to the U.S. and are willing and able,” said John Dougherty, CORE’s CEO. “But we don't have the training and… the competency to optimize their engagement, particularly if they're not English speaking.”
But, Dougherty says, skilled trades present opportunities to expand what we think of as being “environmental” or “green jobs.”
“They're changing the health and well-being of the community,” he said. “That's a whole branding shift. Because that's not what we sell HVAC equipment and plumbing equipment and solar as doing… but that's what it's doing.”
He says a lot could change if we think of heat pump installers in high-elevation resort communities as helping to save our climate, one heat pump, one household at a time.
Note: This story is part of Aspen Public Radio’s three-part series, “Finding a Fix: Investigating Local Solutions to Big Climate Challenges.” The series is supported by a grant from the Aspen Skiing Company’s Environment Foundation. If you have a story idea for their ongoing climate coverage, please reach out to news@aspenpublicradio.org.
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