Efficient homes are affordable homes with Eric Fowler

In 2025, over one-third of U.S. households skipped or cut back on medication, food, or other necessities to pay an energy bill. A quarter were unable to pay an energy bill in full, and in 2024, 2.7 million households had their utility service shut off due to non-payment.

A lack of affordable housing, rising energy bills, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions threaten the health and wellbeing of all Americans.

These interconnected problems won’t go away on their own. Energy prices are likely to keep going up. But despite volatility and upward pressure on energy prices, there is still a lot that Minnesota’s decision makers can do to keep bills from skyrocketing.

One of the best policy tools we have to address these problems is the energy code: by making our homes more energy efficient, we can also make them more affordable and emit fewer climate-polluting gases.

In this podcast episode, Eric Fowler and Isak Kvam go deep on why efficient homes are affordable homes and what role the energy code has to play.

Additional reading from the Fresh Energy blog:

• Efficient homes are affordable homes, Pt. 1
• Efficient homes are affordable homes, Pt. II

Fresh Energy’s mission is to shape and drive bold policy solutions to achieve equitable carbon-neutral economies. Together we are working toward a vision of a just, prosperous, and resilient future powered by a shared commitment to a carbon-neutral economy. Learn about Fresh Energy's work and our bold "Vision 2030: Fresh Energy's Strategic Framework" at our website fresh-energy.org.


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Transcript

00:00:11 Isak Kvam 

Hello, and welcome to Decarbonize, the Clean Energy Podcast from Fresh Energy. 

00:00:17 Isak Kvam 

Fresh Energy is a Minnesota nonprofit working to speed our state's transition to a clean energy economy. 

00:00:23 Isak Kvam 

My name is Isak Kvam, and I'm the Director of Communications here at Fresh, and I'm also your host today. 

00:00:28 Isak Kvam 

I'm excited to be joined by my colleague Eric Fowler, who is our Director of Building Performance. 

00:00:33 Isak Kvam 

Thanks for coming on the show, Eric. 

00:00:34 Isak Kvam 

Are you ready to talk about building affordability? 

00:00:38 Eric Fowler 

Absolutely. 

00:00:39 Eric Fowler 

Thanks, Isaac. 

00:00:40 Eric Fowler 

I am glad to be here. 

00:00:43 Isak Kvam 

Eric, you wrote in an in-depth two-part blog series this summer about building affordability. 

00:00:49 Isak Kvam 

And before we get into the importance of building codes and how we can make our homes more efficient and affordable, 

00:00:55 Isak Kvam 

I want to start with the personal story that you opened with in the series. 

00:00:59 Isak Kvam 

So you live in an older home, and you're a bit shocked to get an $820 utility bill for gas and electricity in your home this February. 

00:01:08 Isak Kvam 

Can you tell me more about that? 

00:01:11 Eric Fowler 

Yeah. 

00:01:13 Eric Fowler 

So it was just barely over $820. 

00:01:19 Eric Fowler 

And like you said, I am in an old household. 

00:01:25 Eric Fowler 

So there are reasons why it was so high, because at the time, they were not building energy efficiency in from the get-go, which is the easiest, most affordable time to do it. 

00:01:46 Eric Fowler 

We have basically no insulation. 

00:01:49 Eric Fowler 

It honestly could have been a lot 

00:01:53 Eric Fowler 

higher. 

00:01:54 Eric Fowler 

We keep our thermostat between 63 and 65 degrees in the winter. 

00:02:04 Isak Kvam 

I'm also a cold weather winter dweller. 

00:02:06 Isak Kvam 

I love keeping it pretty cold. 

00:02:07 Isak Kvam 

I don't do it as much for energy reasons as much as comfort, but like that does have an impact on your energy bill. 

00:02:13 Isak Kvam 

So even yours is set lower. 

00:02:16 Eric Fowler 

Yes. 

00:02:17 Eric Fowler 

Yeah. 

00:02:18 Eric Fowler 

And that that makes a huge impact. 

00:02:21 Eric Fowler 

Again, if we were setting it at 70, I haven't actually done the math, but that could have easily been $1,000. 

00:02:32 Eric Fowler 

I wouldn't be shocked. 

00:02:38 Eric Fowler 

The way that I connect this to the codes work is obviously it is important to invest in 

00:02:50 Eric Fowler 

programs that are doing weatherization work and deep energy retrofits in existing buildings, which which is most of them. 

00:03:03 Eric Fowler 

But the other lesson is, again, like I said, the you know, my home, they didn't do that from the start. 

00:03:12 Eric Fowler 

And so now any retrofit that that we do on an existing building 

00:03:19 Eric Fowler 

it's a lot more costly, invasive, time intensive to go back and try to improve the efficiency of a building later. 

00:03:31 Eric Fowler 

And so when we raise the floor of what is required by our energy code in terms of efficiency in the form of insulation, air sealing, 

00:03:48 Eric Fowler 

other envelope requirements as well as the mechanical systems, it makes a huge difference to just do it really well from the start and then have those benefits into the long run. 

00:04:04 Eric Fowler 

And like, you know, my household has the privilege to be able to pay the bill we got in February, but 

00:04:17 Eric Fowler 

You know, for a lot of. 

00:04:19 Eric Fowler 

People in Minnesota and across the country that could have been a life changing bill. 

00:04:27 Eric Fowler 

In 2025, over 1/3 of US households skipped or cut back on medication, food or other necessities to pay an energy bill. 

00:04:40 Eric Fowler 

We also know that order were unable to pay an energy bill in full and and 

00:04:47 Eric Fowler 

We also know that there are millions of utility service shutoffs across the country every year. 

00:04:55 Eric Fowler 

In 2024, it was a little over two and a half million folks who had their utilities shut off for non-payment. 

00:05:04 Eric Fowler 

So keeping those energy bills affordable is obviously hugely important. 

00:05:11 Isak Kvam 

Yeah, I think a lot of Minnesotans know that the way that your house is built, you literally pay for the decisions that were made when it was built, right? 

00:05:18 Isak Kvam 

If it was built to be really energy efficient, you're probably have lower utility bills every month that really helps you month to month. 

00:05:27 Isak Kvam 

If your home was not built that well, you have much higher bills. 

00:05:31 Isak Kvam 

And that's really where the building code comes into all this because how we build our buildings in Minnesota has a huge impact. 

00:05:38 Isak Kvam 

the affordability of them, the bills that Minnesotans pay every month. 

00:05:42 Isak Kvam 

And it also has a big impact on our emissions in the state. 

00:05:45 Isak Kvam 

If we can build our buildings to be more efficient, we can help to reduce emissions in Minnesota. 

00:05:50 Isak Kvam 

For kind of next part of the conversation, there's this myth in the buildings world that wrongly spreads this message that making our building codes to be more strict and requiring homes to be more energy efficient will make them more expensive to build. 

00:06:04 Isak Kvam 

But we know that that's not necessarily true and that stricter building codes can actually lead to cost savings for a lot of families. 

00:06:10 Isak Kvam 

What can you tell me about that? 

00:06:14 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, there's a lot of noise about this right now, thanks in large part to actually a pretty-- I mean, it's not a large number of companies who are really driving this argument, but they are very large. 

00:06:31 Eric Fowler 

So there are some large home building companies that are trying to blame energy codes for the affordability crisis. 

00:06:43 Eric Fowler 

you know, which couldn't be farther from the truth. 

00:06:46 Eric Fowler 

And I'm excited to talk about both like some research and evidence as well as the concepts. 

00:06:53 Eric Fowler 

And I think so I'll start with that. 

00:06:55 Eric Fowler 

And we have the, you know, we have the benefit. 

00:06:59 Eric Fowler 

I'll share an anecdote that comes from some of the work of our our colleague Sam, who's on staff here at Fresh Energy. 

00:07:08 Eric Fowler 

There are thousands of 

00:07:12 Eric Fowler 

different ways to build a roof, a wall assembly, you know, and thousands and thousands of different ways to build a home, obviously. 

00:07:26 Eric Fowler 

And some of those methods are actually both cheaper and more energy efficient in the resulting product. 

00:07:39 Eric Fowler 

And some of the reasons for that is 

00:07:43 Eric Fowler 

One, insulation is cheaper than mechanical upgrades, right? 

00:07:50 Eric Fowler 

So when we put a little more into that building envelope, which is the separation between the indoors and the outdoors, when we invest more in that, it reduces what we call the heating and cooling load, which is just to say like 

00:08:11 Eric Fowler 

the demand. 

00:08:14 Eric Fowler 

So by doing that, not only is the end user going to save on their utility bills, but actually the builder or developer is going to save on the mechanical systems because now they can put in a smaller heat pump, maybe furnace, if they're putting that in, they will be able to downsize that equipment. 

00:08:39 Eric Fowler 

Another reason is that you can, by spacing out studs using advanced framing techniques, spacing them out in the exterior walls to be 24 inches apart. 

00:08:59 Eric Fowler 

and then using two by eights or maybe even two by tens, that does a number of things that can be really helpful. 

00:09:09 Eric Fowler 

One is you actually can get away with like fewer studs, which is helpful, which also means a little bit less labor in the construction. 

00:09:21 Eric Fowler 

And now we have bigger cavities to put that cavity insulation, which is just the 

00:09:29 Eric Fowler 

you know, technical term we use for that insulation that is, you know, between the studs within your wall. 

00:09:41 Eric Fowler 

And also by having fewer studs, we are reducing the number of thermal bridges. 

00:09:48 Eric Fowler 

I sorry, I don't know if I 

00:09:51 Eric Fowler 

checked in on how technical to get, but we're just going at it with the terms. 

00:09:55 Isak Kvam 

We're going right into the building terms. 

00:09:57 Isak Kvam 

And I think most folks that listen to this will appreciate the technicality. 

00:10:01 Isak Kvam 

If folks don't know the thermal bridge is, how would you describe that in one sentence for folks that might not know? 

00:10:09 Eric Fowler 

A thermal bridge is like anti-insulation. 

00:10:14 Eric Fowler 

I mean, that's a very simplified way of putting it, but it is 

00:10:19 Eric Fowler 

It is something that is going to conduct heat transfer a lot more than the insulation that is in the rest of the wall. 

00:10:31 Eric Fowler 

So if you take a thermal camera and look at a wall during maybe like a really hot summer day or a really cold winter day, if all you have is cavity insulation, 

00:10:48 Eric Fowler 

you know, if you just have the insulation between the studs, then in all likelihood you're going to be able to see those studs because they will appear warmer or cooler than the insulation around it because they are transferring heat between the indoors and the outdoors a lot more than the insulation. 

00:11:11 Isak Kvam 

The way I think about it is if you've ever been in an older house in Minnesota in the winter, if you put your hand on the cold wall in the winter, 

00:11:18 Isak Kvam 

If you're putting it on a stud, it probably feels a little colder because that stud is touching the inside wall and the outside wall. 

00:11:25 Isak Kvam 

And so there's more of that cold coming in. 

00:11:28 Isak Kvam 

Whereas if you move your hand to the right or left and it's over the cavity where the insulation is, it will be a little warmer because you have that insulation. 

00:11:35 Isak Kvam 

And so the thermal bridge is kind of where the studs are. 

00:11:38 Isak Kvam 

And the energy, whether it's hot or cold, can pass through. 

00:11:42 Isak Kvam 

And so having fewer thermal bridges in your house can make it more energy efficient. 

00:11:46 Isak Kvam 

And so when we're talking about building codes, there's all these little small adjustments that you can make to make a home more energy efficient that can also end up being cheaper to-- fewer materials or less labor, which makes it both more efficient and more affordable for homeowners. 

00:12:03 Eric Fowler 

Exactly. 

00:12:04 Eric Fowler 

I'm going to have to try that method. 

00:12:05 Eric Fowler 

I mean, in theory it's sound, but now I want to know, can I find the studs by the temperature differential? 

00:12:15 Eric Fowler 

So one other way that we see savings when building more efficiently from the start is if you can eliminate one of the utility hookups. 

00:12:31 Eric Fowler 

So if you know, even even now, I don't know if people realize how far we've come, but we're we're at the point where gas is becoming optional even in a cold climate like Minnesota because of high performance construction and really 

00:12:59 Eric Fowler 

amazing cold climate heat pumps that are going to provide the vast majority of your heating throughout the year. 

00:13:08 Eric Fowler 

And if you can get away with, you know, one fewer hookup, that can potentially be a lot of savings. 

00:13:18 Eric Fowler 

How much savings is going to you know, your mileage may vary, but it's it's probably fairly significant. 

00:13:25 Eric Fowler 

One study estimated nationally 

00:13:28 Eric Fowler 

that all electric new construction would save about 5%. 

00:13:35 Eric Fowler 

Another kind of put the range as like 1800 to $10,000 saved per home, which, so that gives you a sense of like how wide the range is. 

00:13:47 Eric Fowler 

But, really, really ballpark around $5,000 maybe of savings that you might be able to realize by 

00:13:57 Eric Fowler 

going all electric because it is really efficient and because the heat pumps have come so far. 

00:14:06 Isak Kvam 

Will you talk a little bit about-- so Sam, who leads our buildings team here at Fresh Energy, has also built a lot of homes previously working at Fresh Energy. 

00:14:16 Isak Kvam 

And he collaborated with Habitat for Humanity up in Cohasset, Minnesota. 

00:14:21 Isak Kvam 

to work on an all electric cold weather home that he built affordably. 

00:14:27 Isak Kvam 

Can you talk a little bit about why this was such a great case study of kind of showing that Minnesota, not only can we have all electric homes in our cold weather state, but you can also build them to be all electric for the same price or even cheaper than a home that uses gas? 

00:14:46 Eric Fowler 

Exactly. 

00:14:47 Eric Fowler 

so this is where some of those concepts we were just talking about go into practice. 

00:14:54 Eric Fowler 

And so, Sam Friesen was a home builder before joining us here at Fresh Energy. 

00:15:02 Eric Fowler 

And then, did consulting with Itasca County Habitat on this home that is, we're calling it like a 2038 home. 

00:15:16 Eric Fowler 

because the way that our energy code in Minnesota, the way it's going is that we are going to be at what I call near 0 by 2038. 

00:15:33 Eric Fowler 

So these are super efficient homes. 

00:15:37 Eric Fowler 

And the goal working up there in Cohasset was to see can we build that 

00:15:45 Eric Fowler 

already right now and what they found with you know this is habitat that is to a you know some extent relying on volunteer labor and yet building to this much higher standard than the current code they found that they were able to do it at cost parity for their standard builds. 

00:16:07 Eric Fowler 

And one of the other huge benefits and I think we'll probably 

00:16:15 Eric Fowler 

We'll probably talk about some of the health benefits later, but while we're on the topic, one member of the family has asthma and moving from a home with gas. 

00:16:31 Eric Fowler 

And we know that combustion indoors, especially at the stove, is hugely impactful on human health. 

00:16:42 Eric Fowler 

And we're just learning how dramatic that impact is. 

00:16:46 Eric Fowler 

It feels like more and more every day. 

00:16:48 Eric Fowler 

That family now has seen the symptoms of the asthma sufferer have improved a bunch and they are now spending less on medical treatment, which is like another way of saving costs when your home is healthier. 

00:17:10 Isak Kvam 

I just saw a recent study that came out of Ohio. 

00:17:13 Isak Kvam 

I don't know if I've shared this with you, Eric, that there's a study done in Ohio that found that replacing your gas stove with an electric stove can help asthmatics as much as medication can. 

00:17:23 Isak Kvam 

And so like. 

00:17:25 Isak Kvam 

For folks that live in a home with a gas stove, you'd be surprised at how much better your air quality is and your asthma is if you can just replace two all electric. 

00:17:35 Isak Kvam 

So not only does how we build our homes matter for affordability and for remission goals, but it also has a big impact on human health as well. 

00:17:44 Isak Kvam 

You mentioned some additional evidence with this. 

00:17:46 Isak Kvam 

Is there other research you can talk about about this issue? 

00:17:51 Eric Fowler 

Absolutely. 

00:17:53 Eric Fowler 

I'm really glad you brought up that study. 

00:17:56 Eric Fowler 

It is very impactful. 

00:18:03 Eric Fowler 

Another one, and neither of these studies, the one you just mentioned and the one I'm about to mention, neither of these made it into the blog. 

00:18:10 Eric Fowler 

They weren't out yet, the two-parter that we're basing this episode on. 

00:18:17 Eric Fowler 

This is new content, but 

00:18:21 Eric Fowler 

Researchers in June, researchers from the University of Alabama released a study where they asked whether housing prices change with building codes. 

00:18:36 Eric Fowler 

And the short answer is no, there was no cost increase. 

00:18:40 Eric Fowler 

And furthermore, 

00:18:42 Eric Fowler 

there was no impact on the supply, which is one of the other claims that gets thrown out is that, oh, well, you're going to make building too expensive and then you're also going to suppress the supply of housing. 

00:18:55 Eric Fowler 

So to look at the costs, they examined 45 different instances of 

00:19:07 Eric Fowler 

raising the code in a jurisdiction of adopting a new code. 

00:19:13 Eric Fowler 

And they looked at 26 states from 2011 through 2022. 

00:19:24 Eric Fowler 

And the thing they found was that price changes were not statistically significant. 

00:19:31 Eric Fowler 

Actually, well, the authors did note that when they found 

00:19:38 Eric Fowler 

a little bit of a price change following a code update, the home prices were actually more likely to be decreases and that the decreases in price were greater than the increases when they did happen. 

00:19:58 Eric Fowler 

This is kind of buried down at the bottom. 

00:20:01 Eric Fowler 

The high level is that they did not find anything statistically significant. 

00:20:08 Eric Fowler 

But I mean, that was very rigorously studied. The other, so the other piece that they looked at was this question of supply. And they compared border counties where one jurisdiction updated the code and the other one didn't. And they wanted to see does construction move 

00:20:35 Eric Fowler 

from one county to a neighboring county where the code didn't change and they found very little fluctuation in the rate of construction and what fluctuation they did find didn't even coincide with the code updates. So their takeaway is that codes do a lot of good. They were looking at 

00:21:04 Eric Fowler 

the full residential code. So that includes all the energy and safety and comfort and health benefits of the energy code, as well as the, you know, construction and mechanical code and elements that are also going to make homes more resilient to extreme weather events, for example. 

00:21:29 Isak Kvam 

This all kind of reminds me of, it seems like, you know, 

00:21:33 Isak Kvam 

Making a more strict energy code to make our homes more affordable and more efficient seems like a no-brainer. It seems like one of those things that every homeowner would want to have because who would want to pay higher bills or have a dirtier, more polluting energy source in your home. And you just shared this study that talks about how we know that strict codes can actually bring costs down. 

00:21:57 Isak Kvam 

But across America, you know, a lot of housing costs are rising. And so if it's not the energy code that's doing it, what are the cost drivers that you're seeing that are raising the cost of homeownership? 

00:22:09 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, there's there's actually a ton. And the ironic thing is that, you know, the the energy codes are actually one of the very few regulations on construction 

00:22:24 Eric Fowler 

that make buildings more affordable because it it requires a one time upfront investment that may or may not, you know, because of everything we've been talking about, like that upfront investment may or may not actually be very costly at all compared to how you would have done it. And then exchange for that one time investment, you have permanently lower 

00:22:54 Eric Fowler 

operating costs. So what are the drivers of high housing costs besides high energy bills? Some of the things that we look at are interest rates, are land value, insurance, tariffs on materials. I also think, you know, this 

00:23:20 Eric Fowler 

This is already a problem and and this is been a growing problem is is labor shortages, whether that is from lack of investment in employment and training or policies that drive workers out of the labor force or out of the country. We can also look at zoning restrictions and there are conversations happening about trying to make some improvements there in Minnesota. 

00:23:49 Eric Fowler 

And then there's things like, you know, luxury finishes or complex or oversized houses and then surprises, which is just like businesses typically like predictability. And, you know, that is part of our, you know, that's part of why we like the energy code trajectory that 

00:24:18 Eric Fowler 

has a pretty clear path of where we're going by 2038, and you know that way you are not getting surprised by where we're going, because we are laying it out from the start. 

00:24:35 Isak Kvam 

A lot of these 

00:24:36 Isak Kvam 

cost drivers that you bring up too is kind of interesting because we're talking about buildings today through the lens of climate and climate change in Minnesota too. And what's interesting is the feedback loops that climate change has already created with some of these drivers. And so I'm thinking about insurance premiums. And as the climate crisis kicks in, it's created this feedback loop where natural disasters become more destructive and more frequent, which causes more damage to property. 

00:25:03 Isak Kvam 

which then means that insurance companies have to charge higher premiums to cover the new normal of damages we pay. And I know this is a whole topic for a different day, but I think it's an important way to show that how important it is to address the burning of fossil fuels, because the longer we wait to reduce emissions in the building sector or to kick the can down the road on making a 

00:25:26 Isak Kvam 

stricter building code really has a really big impact, not only on climate emissions, but on our livelihoods, on our affordability and everyday decisions we make about our well-being. And so I think that's kind of why it's so important that as we're talking about climate change and inflation and home ownership costs, it's important to keep these things in mind and how climate plays an impact with that. Another thing we're seeing is we're seeing rising gas and electricity prices nationally. 

00:25:56 Isak Kvam 

How do those rising costs affect homeownership costs? 

00:26:02 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, that is a really good question. I want to answer that. I also want to touch on something that you just mentioned about, you know, the insurance kind of trajectory that we're on. And I think this is a great time to point out that one of the 

00:26:24 Eric Fowler 

strong benefits of keeping our codes, not just our energy codes, but all of our code books that dictate the minimum construction requirements and what should resiliency against 

00:26:48 Eric Fowler 

hail or fire or other issues like that, what should that look like? This is, I think, a good time to point out that having up-to-date codes is a really important lever for both mitigating climate change and slowing down our emissions and for adapting 

00:27:15 Eric Fowler 

to climate change, right? Our having strong up-to-date codes really helps with both of those things in pretty important ways. So yeah, so I wanted to throw that in there. And then in terms of the, yeah, the rising costs of energy, 

00:27:44 Eric Fowler 

That's huge. And that is a reason to continue investing in efficiency. So in 2023, Fannie Mae found that non-mortgage related housing costs comprise roughly half of the total cost of ownership for mortgage borrowers, which is the folks who 

00:28:11 Eric Fowler 

You know, mortgage borrowers basically means the folks for whom affordability would be a concern. Like if you are plopping down a pile of cash and buying a house, then I am less concerned about your ability to afford everything else, right? So so really we're like like for for everyone that we're talking about right now who who has a mortgage on a home and is paying for it over time. 

00:28:41 Eric Fowler 

the utilities piece of that budget is really important. And Fannie Mae found that utilities edged out both insurance and taxes as the number one non-mortgage housing cost. Now, as we've been saying, insurance rates are going up a lot with the impacts of climate change. So like I would 

00:29:09 Eric Fowler 

I would watch this space. I think when they next redo those numbers, maybe insurance will come out on top because we've seen a lot of change in that area. But yeah, utilities already a huge part of the affordability puzzle. And then a growing part. We looked at, so in February when my household got this bill, we looked at the consumer price index 

00:29:39 Eric Fowler 

and found that there was a nearly 5% increase in electricity prices and an almost 11% increase in natural gas prices over the previous 12 months nationally. So, a thing I like to point out to folks is that the affordability numbers, so the official 

00:30:07 Eric Fowler 

kind of cost savings calculations for energy codes get done at Pacific Northwest National Lab. And so for example, the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code, which is the most recent energy code that PNNL studied 

00:30:33 Eric Fowler 

at a state level specifically looking at Minnesota. It's not the one that we're moving to, but it is the most recent one where they they crunch the numbers specifically for Minnesota. And they found that going to the 2021 ICC would add between 121 and $192 per year to a 30 year mortgage. Well, how much 

00:31:01 Eric Fowler 

would it reduce energy bills by? They found that the energy savings would be between 220 and $376 annually. So the energy savings more than make up for any additional construction cost. And when they calculate those, that 

00:31:29 Eric Fowler 

doesn't necessarily account for the volatility of prices as they continue to rise like they make some assumptions 

00:31:43 Eric Fowler 

that costs will go up. But whenever energy costs go up more than the PNNL math geeks expected, the cost benefit ratio of codes only gets better and better the more those energy prices go up, because that just means that you are saving that much more. 

00:32:09 Eric Fowler 

having strong codes are critical to housing affordability. And they're also one of the things that we can control at the state level. Like we just talked about, a number of other factors that are huge, like tariffs, interest rates, global fuel prices. Unfortunately, those are kind of out of our hands at the state and local level, but better codes, which we can implement 

00:32:39 Eric Fowler 

save money and make us more resilient to disasters and also keep us healthier. 

00:32:48 Isak Kvam 

We've been talking a lot about building codes and affordability, how they affect our finances, the long term kind of financial impacts that they have on homeowners. But there's a lot more to buildings than just 

00:33:03 Isak Kvam 

Finances, we also can think about health and well-being too. And so you've written a lot about how building a better building envelope in your home can change everything about the home, not just the bill. Can you walk me through the other benefits of having a more efficient home? 

00:33:19 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, I get really excited about this. So when you have a better building envelope, basically everything about the building is better, right? 

00:33:33 Eric Fowler 

Why do we go indoors? To be not outdoors. And when you have better air sealing, or in other words, air tightness and better insulation, all you're doing is building a better barrier between you and the outdoors, which is why we build. So 

00:33:59 Eric Fowler 

Uh, you know, one of the, one of the big benefits is, is comfort. Like when you have, you know, excellent insulation and air sealing, you are not gonna have drafts. You are not gonna have these rooms where, you know, one room is, uh, five, six, seven, uh, maybe 10 degrees different from another room in the house. Uh, 

00:34:26 Eric Fowler 

because because of of of drafts coming in or you know because it it happens to be farther you know farther down the line on your duct system and so it's it's it's not getting enough and and the heat that it is getting is is just like leaking out there at the end we also 

00:34:55 Eric Fowler 

We also see huge benefits to noise reduction and sound insulation. And, you know, depending on the source and the volume, I mean, noise is a pollutant. And, you know, this is like one of those sleeper benefits. But I remember touring an affordable housing development 

00:35:23 Eric Fowler 

in Northfield that was really near to a highway, you couldn't hear a thing when you were inside because the, you know, the Venn diagram between, you know, sound insulation and thermal insulation is not quite a circle, but 

00:35:51 Eric Fowler 

is it's pretty close to a circle. So if you have, you know, if you're well insulated and air sealed, you're going to mostly keep out the noise as well. We also see benefits to smoke and allergen intrusion. Friends from the passive house movement have I think that's where the term smoke type comes from. 

00:36:17 Eric Fowler 

which is this concept that as wildfires become kind of the new normal, I mean, I don't think I ever realized how much wildfire smoke we would be living with on a regular basis here in Minnesota. And 

00:36:38 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, this is just another example of why it is good to keep the indoors in and the outdoors out is it gives you control over smoke. And then finally, the airtightness of the wall is actually really helpful for reducing moisture and mold risk. Air intrusion through a wall is 

00:37:07 Eric Fowler 

actually the number one way that moisture gets delivered into wall cavities. And if it can't dry, that's when you start to have problems. So we are the phrase that we are going towards is build tight, ventilate right. And if somebody is telling you that a house needs to breathe, 

00:37:37 Eric Fowler 

that is very outdated and they might be trying to sell you a substandard wall. 

00:37:46 Isak Kvam 

I think those are a lot of benefits of having a more efficient home. So we talked about comfort, sound insulation, but your point about wildfire smoke is maybe closer to folks' mind from the summer. We had a pretty bad bout of 

00:37:59 Isak Kvam 

air quality from the wildfires up in the Boundary Waters. I was actually on PTO when that was happening and every year me and my family go to a old lake resort near Park Rapids and we stay in these three season cabins and there's no HVAC, you just open the windows. And it was so top of mind for us because you immediately can tell when the air quality is not great because it's in your home and it starts affecting 

00:38:23 Isak Kvam 

your wellbeing, your coughing, I don't need to go into all the health impacts of that. But I think it really does bring home the point I was bringing up before about how as climate change is changing what our normal is, our buildings both mitigate and adapt. And so not only do we need more efficient homes to reduce the impacts of climate change, but also building it to be more efficient means you can be healthier in a world where climate change is making wildfires and smoke happen more and higher numbers and more often. 

00:38:54 Isak Kvam 

And this kind of ties to another area I wanted to go to. You've talked about in the blog series, hours of safety. And this is about how long you can be safe in your home in extreme weather or when your power goes out, et cetera. What can you tell me about hours of safety? 

00:39:13 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, I love this concept because I think it-- 

00:39:19 Eric Fowler 

I think it makes more tangible an idea that I've talked about for a while. I certainly didn't come up with it. But there's a concept in sustainable buildings around passive survivability, which is to say without 

00:39:45 Eric Fowler 

without utilities or without external support, like how survivable, how livable is the building going to be for at least some period of time and ideally longer is better, right? That's kind of nebulous. So 

00:40:06 Eric Fowler 

A thing I really like about this concept of hours of safety, it is a framework for comparing different buildings and getting really specific about how long we can expect them to maintain safe indoor temperatures under extreme conditions during a power outage. 

00:40:28 Eric Fowler 

And we can look at hours of safety both from a cooling summer 

00:40:35 Eric Fowler 

perspective as well as a heating season winter perspective. 

00:40:41 Eric Fowler 

But the thing I think it drives home is the fact that the, you know, the energy code is a life safety code because extreme temperatures are deadly. 

00:40:55 Eric Fowler 

And, you know, in fact, I mean, extreme heat is becoming increasingly up there on 

00:41:06 Eric Fowler 

I guess natural, is it natural causes of death in the country? 

00:41:18 Eric Fowler 

There's a good paper. 

00:41:21 Eric Fowler 

It's from a little while ago, but put out by RMI. 

00:41:29 Eric Fowler 

I one of the reasons I like it is because they they looked at uh different construction types in Duluth and compared they said okay if we look at a winter power outage in Duluth how many hours could you expect the indoor temperature to stay above 40 degrees Fahrenheit 40 degrees is a kind of threshold for um when 

00:41:59 Eric Fowler 

when you start to go from uncomfortable to unsafe. 

00:42:05 Eric Fowler 

And they found that a code compliant 2009 home, which is a little lower than our current code in Minnesota, but fairly close, that would give you 45 hours of safety compared to a certified passive house. 

00:42:23 Eric Fowler 

which is close to where we're going. 

00:42:27 Eric Fowler 

It's a little beyond where we're going in 2038, but the certified passive house provided over triple the hours of safety at 152. 

00:42:41 Eric Fowler 

And, you know, they didn't crunch the numbers for summer hours of safety, but 

00:42:51 Eric Fowler 

I think that is an area that deserves more attention is the fact that when we invest in a really excellent building envelope, it is actually a matter of safety and well-being. 

00:43:10 Eric Fowler 

It is comfort and comfort is important, but it's about more than just comfort. 

00:43:17 Isak Kvam 

And I think it's not just about power outages too. 

00:43:19 Isak Kvam 

This also has a big impact on if you still have a furnace or if you switch to a heat pump. 

00:43:25 Isak Kvam 

Another way to think about it too is if that malfunctions and goes out, suddenly you really care about. 

00:43:31 Isak Kvam 

how long your house can stay comfortable. 

00:43:33 Isak Kvam 

And that's where that hours of safety really come into play. 

00:43:37 Isak Kvam 

Last winter, when we had a cold snap in December, I still have an old gas furnace and it went out and pretty quickly, my main problem was not just that my furnace was out, but that my home wasn't comfortable. 

00:43:48 Isak Kvam 

And I was really having to find someone that could come out and fix it quickly and get it up and running because in Minnesota's cold winters, obviously how warm your home is very quickly becomes a very serious problem. 

00:44:02 Isak Kvam 

And pretty interesting that the study you talked about came out of Duluth. 

00:44:04 Isak Kvam 

I think Duluth is a great example because it gets really cold in Duluth. 

00:44:06 Isak Kvam 

So it's a great place to study how this actually truly matters. 

00:44:13 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, exactly. 

00:44:16 Eric Fowler 

And I think we want to give due air time to the health and safety benefits of this efficiency. 

00:44:29 Eric Fowler 

But this concept is also really important and really helpful for the grid. 

00:44:36 Eric Fowler 

You know, hours of safety is sort of like one way to apply an idea about energy storage. 

00:44:46 Eric Fowler 

Like, you know, how long can you go between, 

00:44:58 Eric Fowler 

How long can you go, you know, between kind of like power inputs? 

00:45:03 Eric Fowler 

That's maybe a weird way of saying that. 

00:45:05 Eric Fowler 

But I the way I think about this is that I think people know that batteries like chemical batteries that that store electricity chemically. 

00:45:18 Eric Fowler 

I think people know that those are increasingly important. 

00:45:23 Eric Fowler 

The amazing thing about a super well insulated and air sealed home is it kind of is a battery in an interesting type of way because it becomes less important exactly when you are running your air conditioner or your heat pump if you can kind of coast along 

00:45:52 Eric Fowler 

And that has major grid benefits. 

00:45:56 Eric Fowler 

You and I know and probably most of our listeners know that our entire energy system is built around providing energy during peak demand, right? 

00:46:08 Eric Fowler 

When everyone has everything turned on all at once, that is what we have to meet. 

00:46:15 Eric Fowler 

And by building in that 

00:46:20 Eric Fowler 

thermal storage into our home by holding on to that comfort for longer and requiring less energy to provide the comfort in the first place, those peaks start to shrink. 

00:46:35 Eric Fowler 

And not only do the peaks shrink, but we can sort of, we can like misalign them 

00:46:46 Eric Fowler 

we can decouple them from when the peak temperature event is. 

00:46:50 Eric Fowler 

When everybody's home is super inefficient, then your cooling basically has to happen at exactly the same time as your peak cooling has to basically exactly coincide with your peak outdoor temperatures. 

00:47:09 Eric Fowler 

that's no longer true once we start having these really super efficient homes. 

00:47:15 Eric Fowler 

And so you might be able to rotate and say, okay, well, this family's home, their air conditioning is going to run and then it can cycle off. 

00:47:25 Eric Fowler 

And then the next door neighbors, now theirs is going to kick on. 

00:47:29 Eric Fowler 

And now those peaks just keep going down and down as we're also able to time shift because of that 

00:47:37 Eric Fowler 

thermal storage or when it's in the home, we're probably more likely to call it thermal inertia. 

00:47:45 Eric Fowler 

There are also dedicated thermal storage technologies, which are a really cool area to watch. 

00:47:52 Eric Fowler 

And I'm excited to see where we go with those in the residential space where it's literally like a huge cooler that is going to store maybe ice, maybe hot rocks, 

00:48:05 Eric Fowler 

And you're actually just storing a temperature differential, which has some major benefits as compared to using a chemical battery, which faces more degradation over time, stuff like that. 

00:48:21 Eric Fowler 

Anyway, I'm going to cut myself off there on this one, but those are some of the many, many benefits to being able to decouple 

00:48:34 Eric Fowler 

when you need your equipment to run compared to when the temperature extremes are happening outside. 

00:48:43 Isak Kvam 

I think shout out to fellow systems level thinkers who really like thinking about how more efficient and clean homes also interplay with a more efficient and clean grid. 

00:48:52 Isak Kvam 

And I think that's one of the cool things about Fresh Energy is we have these different teams. 

00:48:55 Isak Kvam 

We have a buildings team, an electricity team, a transportation team. 

00:48:58 Isak Kvam 

And increasingly, there's a lot of spaces like this where they overlap. 

00:49:01 Isak Kvam 

And when Eric is talking about hours of safety and how your home can be a thermal battery and kind of change. 

00:49:09 Isak Kvam 

how much electricity it uses and when it uses it has really big impacts on our electricity team when we're talking about peak load and distribution infrastructure. 

00:49:19 Isak Kvam 

And I won't get into all that, but I think there's a lot of fun for people that are interested in climate and thinking about systems, not only between sectors, but then also how climate change is a feedback loop affecting the sector itself. 

00:49:31 Isak Kvam 

And so there's a lot of fun interplay there. 

00:49:33 Isak Kvam 

I'm also excited that you brought up thermal storage. 

00:49:36 Isak Kvam 

listeners, sneak peek, we're going to be doing an explainer on thermal storage in the near future. 

00:49:40 Isak Kvam 

So if that sounds at all interesting, that's going to be a fun thing to get into. 

00:49:45 Isak Kvam 

Let's shift gears now. 

00:49:46 Isak Kvam 

Let's talk about where do we go next? 

00:49:49 Isak Kvam 

And so what can you tell me about where Minnesota's energy code stands right now and what you're working on to advocate for more efficient, more affordable, cleaner buildings in Minnesota? 

00:50:03 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, so 

00:50:04 Eric Fowler 

Our current residential energy code is very overdue for an update. 

00:50:12 Eric Fowler 

It is roughly equivalent to the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code, which is that is what we use as kind of the first draft of our energy code here in Minnesota. 

00:50:31 Eric Fowler 

I, you know, I think I 

00:50:35 Eric Fowler 

I don't want to give an exact date, but within the next few years, we are going to be moving our residential energy code to the 2024 IECC, and that is going to see a lot of energy savings. 

00:50:52 Eric Fowler 

And in particular, the insulation requirements are doing a lot of that work. 

00:50:59 Eric Fowler 

We also-- so I want to mention the commercial energy code because that is where our multifamily buildings live. 

00:51:09 Eric Fowler 

And that can be a little unintuitive because obviously multifamily buildings are residences. 

00:51:18 Eric Fowler 

But because of their size and scale, they do fit better in the commercial energy code. 

00:51:28 Eric Fowler 

I. 

00:51:28 Isak Kvam 

Didn't actually know that they were considered commercial. 

00:51:31 Isak Kvam 

It makes a lot of sense for the reasons that you brought up about how they're bigger. 

00:51:36 Isak Kvam 

I never knew that though. 

00:51:36 Isak Kvam 

That's really interesting. 

00:51:38 Eric Fowler 

Yeah, it is. 

00:51:41 Eric Fowler 

These lines get divided differently in so many different spaces. 

00:51:45 Eric Fowler 

Actually, in the most recent update, the Department of Labor and Industry, we're actually moving where that line 

00:51:58 Eric Fowler 

is. 

00:51:59 Eric Fowler 

So it used to be that small multifamily buildings could still follow the residential energy code. 

00:52:09 Eric Fowler 

We are now moving all of those over to the commercial energy code and the residential energy code will only apply to single family townhomes and duplexes. 

00:52:23 Eric Fowler 

Anything else 

00:52:24 Eric Fowler 

will go in commercial energy. 

00:52:26 Eric Fowler 

And the commercial energy code is a little farther away, or I mean a little farther along, that is to say, has been updated more recently and is going to be moving forward to ASHRAE 90.1, the 2025 version. 

00:52:48 Eric Fowler 

is another one of these model codes by an entity that holds a whole lot of meetings between a whole lot of experts to write that model code, which I call the first draft. 

00:53:04 Eric Fowler 

So that's sort of where the actual code is. 

00:53:11 Eric Fowler 

Right now, that's kind of on the administrative side. 

00:53:15 Eric Fowler 

Department of Labor and Industry handles those updates. 

00:53:19 Eric Fowler 

On a bigger picture, at the legislature, we have supported laws that are going to require us to get to near zero before 2040. 

00:53:37 Eric Fowler 

That is my shorthand. 

00:53:39 Eric Fowler 

The specific requirements are for residential, it's by 2038. 

00:53:47 Eric Fowler 

For commercial energy, it's actually by 2036. 

00:53:51 Eric Fowler 

And it's slightly different percentages based on slightly different benchmarks. 

00:53:55 Eric Fowler 

But the point is, you know, near zero or near passive, you might also think about these as 

00:54:04 Eric Fowler 

that our energy code is going to be required to get there before 2040. 

00:54:11 Eric Fowler 

And I think I'm really excited to watch the continued innovation. 

00:54:17 Eric Fowler 

I think when those laws passed, it was based on sort of at the time, what are the current theoretical limits of efficiency? 

00:54:29 Eric Fowler 

But those limits are changing because of, continued innovations and improvements. 

00:54:38 Eric Fowler 

In the last few years, we have seen some cool improvements in air sealing. 

00:54:46 Eric Fowler 

particularly with the ability to use Aeroseal, is you sort of spray it into the air and then you pressurize the home and this mist of sealant just finds its way to all of the cracks and crevices that might be left in the envelope. 

00:55:08 Eric Fowler 

And I would expect to see continued innovation in 

00:55:12 Eric Fowler 

Triple pane windows are becoming more common and the price is coming down. 

00:55:17 Eric Fowler 

They're kind of getting decoupled, I think, more and more from the luxury windows so that it is increasingly possible to get a non-luxury tripane. 

00:55:31 Eric Fowler 

And also heat pumps 

00:55:35 Eric Fowler 

are continuing to reach deeper and deeper into the cold, you know, and provide more of our heating. 

00:55:45 Eric Fowler 

We're seeing more development of geothermal. 

00:55:47 Eric Fowler 

And since you brought up the storage, let me tell you, Isaac, one of my like nerdy it's not even a soapbox. 

00:55:57 Eric Fowler 

It's just a it's just like a thing I get really excited about is what happens when we combine 

00:56:05 Eric Fowler 

residential thermal storage with the advancement in cold climate heat pumps because the thing that determines the efficiency and effectiveness of the heat pump of the air source heat pump is the outdoor temperature. 

00:56:19 Eric Fowler 

Well, what if in the winter you could run your air source heat pump during the day instead of during the night? 

00:56:29 Eric Fowler 

And now you're getting the efficiency of those daytime winter temperatures instead of the nighttime. 

00:56:35 Eric Fowler 

So anyway, we'll have to nerd out about this offline. 

00:56:40 Isak Kvam 

That sounds great. 

00:56:41 Isak Kvam 

I'm excited to get into it. 

00:56:42 Isak Kvam 

Listeners like you're going to get all the details in a later blog post where Eric's going to get into this. 

00:56:48 Eric Fowler 

I love this. 

00:56:50 Eric Fowler 

So, and I think, you know, I'll just, I'll wrap up this thought by saying we are continuing to advocate at the legislature in Minnesota to protect and maintain the consensus there that, you know, our energy code is a critical piece of energy and housing affordability. 

00:57:13 Eric Fowler 

We're working closely with partners at the Minnesota Efficient Builders Coalition, 

00:57:20 Eric Fowler 

which we're really excited to be partnering with. 

00:57:22 Eric Fowler 

It is a place to lift up the voices of practitioners who are excited to support and promote efficiency in buildings and the policies that promote it. 

00:57:41 Eric Fowler 

All of this progress, it is really important because 

00:57:49 Eric Fowler 

So to zoom out really briefly, this progress is all super important because Minnesota's building sector, the way that Minnesota Pollution Control Agency breaks down our greenhouse gas emissions by sector in Minnesota is they separate out residential and commercial buildings. 

00:58:14 Eric Fowler 

And 

00:58:16 Eric Fowler 

Residential and commercial buildings don't make up a very large piece of the emissions pie, but they are part of the pie that is actually still increasing. 

00:58:34 Eric Fowler 

So that means we have not yet turned the corner to have emissions from the building sector decreasing. 

00:58:44 Eric Fowler 

The electricity sector, we have turned, I mean, it is still a huge piece of the pie, but the good news there is that we rounded the corner and those emissions are now going down. 

00:58:55 Eric Fowler 

Part of the reason this work in buildings is so important is because we still haven't bent that curve to start decreasing the emissions and we need to do that as soon as possible. 

00:59:09 Eric Fowler 

And our codes 

00:59:12 Eric Fowler 

are one of the critical tools we have to do that. 

00:59:16 Eric Fowler 

And along the way, as we have said, it is not only going to help with mitigating that climate pollution, but they are also helping us to adapt to a changing climate due to the emissions that have already happened. 

00:59:34 Eric Fowler 

So keeping those codes strong and up to date and enforced is 

00:59:43 Eric Fowler 

is absolutely critical when we think about our changing climate. 

00:59:50 Isak Kvam 

Yeah, you bring up a good point where folks might not know, but Minnesota's electricity sector used to be the highest emitting sector in the state. 

00:59:57 Isak Kvam 

We are now halfway decarbonized since 2005. 

01:00:00 Isak Kvam 

We are burning much less coal, which is the big impact, and we've had a big increase in wind and solar and other clean electricity. 

01:00:08 Isak Kvam 

And so as electricity has decreased, now transportation is actually our highest emitting sector. 

01:00:13 Isak Kvam 

Buildings isn't as big now, but in the 2030s and 40s, it's going to become a larger and larger problem in Minnesota because we still have to slow this course. 

01:00:21 Isak Kvam 

And when you think about homes, homes are long lasting things. 

01:00:25 Isak Kvam 

The way we construct our homes today is going to have a very big impact, not only on Minnesotans livelihoods and wallets, but also on our emissions. 

01:00:34 Isak Kvam 

And so if we're building homes 

01:00:36 Isak Kvam 

much more smartly in the 2020s, we're going to have a much easier time reducing emissions in the 30s and 40s. 

01:00:43 Isak Kvam 

Whereas if we aren't able to improve the code, we will be stuck with these high emitting homes for a very long time, and it will also be more costly to bring down the emissions. 

01:00:56 Eric Fowler 

Exactly. 

01:00:58 Eric Fowler 

You know, my hope is that, so I live in a 100 year old home, which means that I am living every day 

01:01:06 Eric Fowler 

within the decisions that, you know, that people made about this house 100 years ago. 

01:01:15 Eric Fowler 

And my hope is that we can protect the energy affordability, that comfort, the safety, and the health and well-being of people 100 years from now who are going to be living inside the buildings 

01:01:34 Eric Fowler 

that are based on the decisions we are making about our codes and our construction practices here and now. 

01:01:44 Isak Kvam 

I think that's an excellent place to close our podcast today. 

01:01:47 Isak Kvam 

Eric, thanks so much for talking to us about building affordability. 

01:01:51 Eric Fowler 

My pleasure. 

01:01:52 Eric Fowler 

Thank you, Isaac. 

01:01:53 Isak Kvam 

We have a variety of blog posts on the Fresh Energy website that we referenced today that you can read to learn more. 

01:02:01 Isak Kvam 

Eric's two-part series we've been discussing today is called Efficient Homes Are Affordable Homes, parts 1 and 2. 

01:02:07 Isak Kvam 

When we were talking about the Cohasset building that Sam built up north, you can read that blog post called Could This Cohasset Home Be the Future of Minnesota's Buildings? 

01:02:17 Isak Kvam 

And if you'd like to learn more about building codes and all the technical things Eric was discussing in the latter half of the episode today, read our post, What's Up with Building Codes? 

01:02:27 Isak Kvam 

Thank you for listening to Decarbonize the Clean Energy podcast from Fresh Energy. 

01:02:31 Isak Kvam 

You can stay up to date on Fresh Energy's work at fresh-energy.org or by following us on social media like Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn. 

01:02:42 Isak Kvam 

Head to our website for the latest news to make a donation and register for upcoming events like our 2026 benefit breakfast with special guest Jesse Jenkins. 

01:02:52 Isak Kvam 

Thank you to the band Palm Psalm for providing our theme song, DGAF. 

01:02:56 Isak Kvam 

their album Otuhaka. 

01:02:58 Isak Kvam 

Get the latest from the band at palmsalm.com and thank you for listening.