What Can I Electrify?

A. Anyone with an electric bill.  This includes not just renters and homeowners, but also businesses and whoever is responsible for the ‘house circuit’ electrical bill in multi-family developments (typically the home owner association, property manager, or owner).

A.  Community Solar programs provide clean energy and reduce your electric bill for 20 years.  If you move within your electric utility’s service area, your community solar credits and savings move with you. If you move outside the service area, you can transfer your credits to someone else or cancel the subscription.  You can also opt out at any time with 30-90 day notice (depending on contract), typically with no charge.

A.  Yes.  But participants should be aware that their enrollment in a Community Solar Program will not change the quantity of renewable energy certificates purchased from your utility green power program. If you enroll in both, you could be purchasing renewable energy products through two programs to offset the same electricity use. If you don’t not want to participate in both programs, you may unenroll or change you participation level in your utility green power program when you sign up for community solar – or make the change when your community solar project goes live.

A.  The Oregon Community Solar website has a more detailed set of FAQs.  Local community solar providers also have FAQs: Oregon Shines and Neighborhood Power.

A.  Net metering, as implemented in Oregon, means that electric utilities must credit consumers for any excess electricity they send to the grid – at the same retail electricity rate.  This means that when solar panels produce more than the house uses, the meter runs backwards.  If solar panels produce more electricity than gets used in a month, the homeowner gets a credit that automatically applies towards future electric bills. These credits expire each spring, so you can’t keep growing a surplus from year to year.

A. Not necessarily. Since your car, home heating, and water heating account for most of your household’s carbon emissions, electrifying those first are the best thing you can do for the climate. From there, if the grid near you has a lot of fossil power plants on it, solar panels can help further reduce your emissions.

A. Unfortunately, your solar panels won’t work during a blackout if they’re also connected to the grid. To protect the safety of the people working to fix your power when it goes out, your solar panels are automatically shut off during outages. But if you have a home storage battery, your solar panels can be configured to recharge the battery, which will let you run some circuits from the battery during outages.

A. Yes! You can also put them in your yard or field if you’ve got a lot of space. And even if you don’t have a roof, yard, or field, you can still join a Community Solar project to buy solar power.

A. Yes! Modern induction cooktops are much more energy efficient than gas cooktops. They also get hotter faster, boil water faster, and allow for more precise and repeatable control. Induction cooktops are safer both because they only heat the pan, and because they get rid of the indoor air pollution from burning fossil fuel in your kitchen.

A. You can test whether your pots and pans will work with an induction cooktop by seeing if a magnet sticks to them — if it does, it’ll work! That’s because induction transfers energy to the pan through a magnetic field. You can also buy an “induction converter” that will get hot and let you use your otherwise non-magnetic pots and pans.

A. Induction cooktops are generally safe. They’re safer than gas stoves because you’re less likely to burn yourself on them, and they don’t produce indoor air pollution from burning natural gas in your kitchen. But people ask about their safety because they use EMF (Electric and Magnetic Fields) to transfer energy to the pans. Here are responses to two main concerns. If you’re still concerned, just get an electric resistance or radiant cooktop instead.

For pacemakers: Yes, there’s a chance they could interfere with pacemakers. So if you or someone in your family has a pacemaker, talk to your doctor before getting one.

For cancer: There is no conclusive evidence that EMF has any long-term effect on health, whether the EMF is from your induction cooktop, your cell phone, or your microwave.

A. When your current cooktop fails, then yes, consider induction. But until then, you’re better off spending your time and money on electrifying everything else in your home.

A. When your dryer fails, yes, consider switching to a heat pump or condensing dryer, which uses less energy than electric resistance clothes dryers. Either way, you’re best off hanging your clothes to dry and spending your time and money on electrifying everything else in your home.

A. No! These are modern electric appliances, often with computer control, that makes them work much better than the outdated machines they’re replacing.  Electric appliances don’t create fire opportunities for young kids, leak methane even when turned off, or cause health impacts due to poor indoor air quality.

A. Electric resistance heating uses a lot more energy than a heat pump. Let’s assume that 100 percent of the energy from electricity goes to making heat in an electric resistance heater. A heat pump — whether for space heating, water heating, or clothes drying — can produce 300 percent as much heat (or more!) while using the same amount of electricity. So even if you have electric resistance heating for your house, you can save money by replacing it with a heat pump.

A. If their electric heat is expensive, they might be using resistance heating. Ask your friends for more details about their system, and suggest a heat pump if it’s resistance heating — their bill might drop by two-thirds with an air-source heat pump!

A. Heat pumps obey the laws of physics, but it is somewhat magical how they’re able to take heat out of even very cold winter air and pump it into your house to make it warm inside. Of course, since air conditioners and refrigerators are also heat pumps, they’re pretty magical too, when you think about it!

A. It used to be that instead of keeping a tank of water hot all day, it made sense to just heat the water when you need it, and “tankless” on-demand heaters were considered more efficient. But now Heat Pump Water Heaters have become the most efficient, since the energy they need to keep the tank hot is a fraction of the energy used in even a tankless version.