Green Our Heating and Cooling

Concord Area Humanists Jan 4, 2023 meeting.

Green our heating and cooling in an equitable way – without straining our electric grid or raising our energy bills. Audrey, with co-Executive Director Zeyneb Magavi, has developed an innovative solution to transition natural gas utilities from natural gas to city-wide systems of networked ground‑source heat pumps. Several networks are being installed in Mass. & NY.

Audrey Schulman is a co-founder and co-executive director of HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team). HEET was founded in 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by local people who were alarmed by climate change. They organized work parties on weekends to lower their emissions and energy bills by making their homes more energy efficient.
In 2013, supported by the City of Cambridge, HEET organized the Cambridge Solar Challenge, a program to help homes get photovoltaic panels installed on homes. HEET negotiated a 20 % discounted price for solar installations and sent publicity to every home with good solar exposure and followed up with a canvass. This resulted in an increase in the average number of annual residential solar installations in Cambridge by a factor of 10. HEET then ran the same program in Somerville.

Audrey created the first-in-the-nation statewide zoomable public map of utility-reported natural gas leaks. Through her co-leadership of the[ FixOurPipes.org](http://fixourpipes.org/) study, she helped municipalities coordinate with utilities to find solutions to fix utility natural gas leaks faster and at less expense. She started the Large Volume Leak Study, which discovered a way for natural gas utilities to identify super-emitting gas leaks and repair them.
In recent years Audrey, together with HEET co-executive director Zeyneb Magavi, has developed HEET’s innovative solution to transition natural gas utilities from gas to GeoMicroDistricts, or systems of networked ground source heat pumps. There are now several gas utilities installing thermal networks in Massachusetts and New York.