How I’m Using OKRs to Electrify My House

How to Set OKRs For Your House

Here's how OKRs would work for our home. Our larger aspirational objective is to reduce our household's carbon footprint to zero by 2022. That would mean driving electric cars, purchasing carbon offsets for our air travel, not burning any natural gas at our home, and most likely getting more solar panels (or purchasing 100% solar or wind through our utility, Xcel Energy). Overall, this sounds difficult and expensive—and do we want to get rid of our outdoor gas barbeque grill? 

For a more realistic objective, we need to set an attainable goal. (This is referred to as a "committed OKR" as opposed to an "aspirational OKR"—it's good to have both.) Our committed OKR stops burning natural gas inside our home (which leaves us our outdoor summer BBQ options). Here are our Key Results: 

1. Switch our gas stove to the induction stove. We already have a two-burner induction stove and love it, so switching out the other gas burners will only happen when the gas stove breaks or replacing our butcher block kitchen countertop. This will be an expensive item, so we'll budget that for next year. Estimated completion: 6/30/20.
2. Replace our backup gas boiler (for both heating and water heating, since we have a ground source heat pump and hydronic heating, which covers most of our heating needs) with an electric air-to-water heat pump. This will be a large cost item, so we will not do this until our boiler needs replacement. Estimated completion: TBD, but by 6/30/21.
3. Replace the gas clothes dryer with a vent-less electric-powered clothes dryer. Again, this is a significant expense, so we won't replace it until our current one fails (which could be any day, since ours is ten years old and appliances don't seem to last as long as they used to). Estimated completion: TBD, no later than 6/30/22.

For outside the house, another thing to add that often people don't think about, especially in the winter: all of that gas-powered landscape equipment—lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, etc. So I'm adding to the list to switch to an electric lawnmower. Estimated completion: this summer (which cannot come soon enough!).

Indeed, we can't manage what we don't measure. Once we start measuring things like energy and gas bills for our own homes, we need to know our objective. Is it to reduce utility bills by 10 percent year over year? Rise has a whole host of advice and low-cost tips on making your home more energy-efficient, including getting an energy audit.

But if it's to decarbonize your house, then efficiency is only part of the equation. A budget must be set to both become more efficient and replace existing gas-powered appliances. It's okay to sacrifice some efficiency to get off fossil fuels. That might be blasphemous to some, but weaning ourselves off fossil fuels is the highest priority. And we can use OKRs to help us along the journey.

Do you have any OKRs for your home? Please share them with Rise—we'd love to hear about them!

*Note: We use methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20), which is 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide (CO2). Using the conventional GWP100 (over 100 years) of 34 dramatically underestimates methane's impact. We believe policymakers should switch to GWP20 or even GWP10—which shows that methane is 130 times more powerful. For more information, see this article in Scientific American.