“Electrify everything” has become a mantra in the fight against climate change. Switching a home’s heating, cooling, and other energy-intensive loads from fossil fuels to electricity could drastically reduce planet-warming emissions. But electrification has often run into a major, and expensive, hurdle: upgrading a home’s electric capacity.
A home’s connection to the grid is rated by amperage, or amps, which caps the amount of current it can safely draw at once. The standard for houses built in the last few decades is generally 200 amps. Many older residences, however, have a lower limit because they were constructed when electricity powered little more than the lights, refrigerator, microwave, and perhaps the dryer. Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that roughly a third of homes in the United States have panel capacity of 100 amps or less. In the Northeast, that share rises to closer to half.
As people install heat pumps, induction stoves, and EV chargers, they can run i... Read more