WEST LEBANON — Asked if she’d considered investing in renewable energy, weatherization or an electric vehicle, Marjie Blanchard shook her head as she loaded groceries into her car.
“We just have never thought of having something,” she said, standing in the West Lebanon Walmart parking lot Friday. “The cost is huge. It’s not an option.”
Blanchard, a nurse from Bridgewater, was not aware of any state or federal programs that would help her family “go green.”
“You have to qualify,” she said. “You have to be poor. If you make a good wage, if you’re middle-income, you don’t qualify. It would be nice if it was different.”
Four researchers at the University of Vermont conducted nearly 600 surveys and interviews to investigate the “justice” of renewable energy policies. Their findings suggest that low-income, non-white and renting Vermonters struggle to take advantage of the state’s green policies, although they would benefit most from energy savings.
“We argue that Vermont’s investment-based transition policy and assistance programs do not go far enough to improve participation in the energy transition,” they concluded in their September 2021 study.
In particular, they said, investment-based incentives, such as tax credits, electricity price guarantees, or increased home values, are available only to people who have disposable income and own their homes.
For people already struggling to meet their expenses, investing in renewable energy or electrification can seem out of reach.
Betsy Lahaye, a retiree who lives in a 55-plus community with her husband in West Lebanon, who was also shopping at Walmart, said such improvements weren’t feasible for them.
“We’d like to get something (a home) of our own again, but we can’t afford it,” she said. Weatherization or solar panels are rarely options for people who do not own property.
“We have no electric vehicle. We can’t afford it. We have no place to plug it in. We can’t just sit for two or three hours,” she said. She and her husband intend to keep their current car, which is eight years old, as long as possible.
Advocates say rising fuel prices may exacerbate the disparity.
“This year, we’re projecting it to be a very challenging year. Fuel prices for cooking and heating are high,” said Angela Zhang, a program director at LISTEN Community Services. The projected high fuel prices coming this winter are just one more factor in a state with aging housing stock and inefficient energy systems.
Federally, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, helps low-income households pay their heating bills. But Zhang said that many people whose incomes hover above the federal poverty line still struggle to pay their bills and cannot access full federal benefits. LISTEN often gives households up to $400 to fill in the gaps that LIHEAP does not meet.
It can also be a confusing benefit to access, especially in New Hampshire where the LIHEAP application is not rolled into the applications for other benefits such as food stamps, as it is in Vermont. LIHEAP has only a limited amount of funding for weatherization, which can permanently reduce energy costs.
“We often conflate sustainable energy as only for rich people, but it can have a lot of impact for lower-income people,” Zhang said. “It’s all part of the conversation of affordable housing. Heat in winter is critical.”
Locally, the nonprofit COVER Home Repair fixes and weatherizes homes in the Upper Valley. It estimates that its work kept 140 metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere in 2019 alone. Still, demand exceeds resources, and the nonprofit cannot accept any more clients in 2021 although cold weather has only just set in.
“It’s expensive to be poor, and that very much extends into energy,” said Sarah Brock, a program director at Vital Communities. “So much of energy is having to spend money to save money.”
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you cannot prepay a heating bill to lock in lower prices and you may be stuck paying a fine to unlock your propane tank. Renewable energy and weatherization often requires an upfront investment to take advantage of long-term savings.
“Weatherization is not expensive only if you’re middle- or high-income. You have to pay at least a few thousand dollars. The payback can be really great, but if you don’t have that money, you can’t get anything,” Brock said. Meanwhile, renewable energy and heat pumps are a “quantum leap beyond.”
Government programs are so complicated that it took a yearlong position at Vital Communities, funded by Americorps, to decode “the constellation of programs in the Upper Valley” and identify whom to call, who qualifies and where to go to apply.
“Chronically underfunded” weatherization programs in both Vermont and New Hampshire are “notorious for long waitlists,” she said. “They do not market in either state in part because there is no need.” They run out of funding before the end of the year without any outreach.
Indeed, there are incentives and programs that target middle-income Vermonters. For example, Efficiency Vermont offers a weatherization incentive for a four-member family making up to $111,600.
Local municipalities and service providers “impatient with state-level changes” started the Upper Valley Energy Advocacy Council in 2018, Brock said. They look for local solutions to households’ energy burden until there is enough “political will” on the state level.
Tim Briglin, D-Thetford, chairman of the energy committee in the Vermont House, said the challenge for many homeowners is “that upfront cost.”
“For things like weatherization, for things like investing in renewable energy on a personal level, what we’ve found is that over the long term they are really financially and economically beneficial ways to spend money — or save money and lower health care costs,” he said.
He said that pilot programs for on-bill financing (which distributes the cost of the initial investment of renewable energy or weatherization over many years) may help some Vermonters surmount that barrier. In the 2022 legislative session, he also said there is a “good deal of interest in increasing resources on a number of details in helping Vermonters weatherize their homes.”
“Energy is a really regressive cost of living for Vermonters,” he said. “If you’re lower-income, you pay a significantly higher part of your income to keep your pipes from freezing.”
He listed off the many co-benefits from weatherization beyond financial savings — reduced drafts and mold reduces health care costs, and then there are the benefits to the climate. Electrification is better-suited for state-level action, he argued; it’s easier to target large utilities than thousands of individual homes with their individual weatherization needs.
He said money from the American Rescue Plan and state programs may help. “There’s going to be meaningful dollars directed towards climate issues,” he said.
For Karen Broadwell, of South Royalton, though, some weatherization isn’t expensive. It’s something that she and her “significant other” can do themselves to cut their bills.
“We do plastics on the windows — shrink wrap. First we burn wood, then oil. My significant other is a builder, so our house is tight,” she said.
After they swapped their bulbs out for LEDs, their electric bill went “way down,” said Broadwell, who was also shopping in West Lebanon on Friday.
While she and her partner rented their home, solar was not an option. But now that they are buying the house that they now rent, she said that they hope to install solar “eventually.”
For her, going green is an economic decision, although she cares about the environment.
“Things are expensive,” she said.
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.