Onsemble

We’re incredibly proud to be program partners with the San Francisco Environment Department to bring heat pump water heaters to hard-to-reach low- and middle-income homes right here in our hometown. 🌁 With Onsemble, qualifying homeowners in San Francisco received up to $10,385 in upfront rebates. We then take care of everything: from connecting them with the right contractor to maximizing rebates and handling all the paperwork, we make the transition easy, affordable, and stress-free. Here’s a picture of a very happy Onsemble homeowner with their new Rheem Manufacturing ProTerra tank! …..and soon, we’ll be coming to a new state to help even more homeowners go electric ⚡🗽

🌍🔋 Building Momentum for Energy Efficiency Day with VPP Innovations! Our recent VPP workshops with leading energy providers are fueling our #EnergyEfficiencyDay efforts! We’re proud to spotlight MCE, New York Power Authority, Sunrun, Sunnova Energy, and Onsemble for providing insights to create actionable recommendations, tackling the challenges in the DOE's VPP Liftoff report [https://bit.ly/3ZJsPGn] and building on the valuable work from DNV [https://bit.ly/3uG5Dvg]. These sessions focused on how Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) can revolutionize energy efficiency—making Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) more accessible and transforming our grid into a more resilient, equitable system. Together, we're leading the charge toward a cleaner, more efficient future! ⚡ #ActiveEfficiency #EnergyEfficiency #VPP #CleanEnergy #EnergyEquity #DER #EEDay2024

🚨 More team updates! Ross Jensen recently joined the Onsemble advisory board. He brings extraordinary climate and social enterprise experience to the Onsemble team. With deep understanding of the broader climate ecosystem and complex financing stack required to scale meaningful solutions, Ross has already been such an asset to the team. Over the last decade, Ross helped build Emerson Collective (EC), which designs and develops opportunities and solutions in education, the environment, immigration, and health equity through philanthropy, creativity, and investments. Ross joined Emerson Collective as its 12th employee in 2014 and helped build EC's philanthropy and investing practices, the Waverly Street Foundation, and climate strategy across the EC ecosystem. Prior to EC, Ross helped to grow Teach For America (TFA). He began his time with TFA as a fifth grade teacher in Newark, New Jersey, for which he was a national finalist for the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching award. No surprise on this one to us at Onsemble — we’ve already learned so much from Ross! Welcome (officially) to the team.

We’ve been closely tracking the rollout of the IRA'S Home Energy Rebates across the country. So far, states have applied for over $4B in rebates -- locking in federal funding for affordable home efficiency upgrades. Homeowners in Arizona, New Mexico, New York, and Wisconsin are currently benefitting from these rebates, with many more (including our home state of California) joining soon. But let's be real: just because the funds are available doesn’t mean they’re easy to access. Finding the right contractor, navigating the rebate process, and choosing the right appliance can feel overwhelming. That’s where the Onsemble team comes in! …and soon, Onsemble will be expanding to a new state to help more homeowners and contractors across the country take advantage of these rebates. #homeelectrification #inflationreductionact #decarbonization

🚨 Big team news! We’re thrilled to welcome Ryan Hledik on board as an advisor. Ryan is is one of the foremost thought leaders on virtual power plants and the potential of electric water heaters - the “hidden battery sitting idle in millions of homes" - that can provide critical grid balancing services to smooth out demand and provide resource adequacy in times of fluctuating supply. This aligns with our vision at Onsemble that not only is replacing gas water heaters with the heat pump alternative a meaningful step in decarbonizing homes, but that those appliances can be a powerful force in enabling a clean and reliable grid. ⚡ As his day job, Ryan is a Principal at The Brattle Group, where he has supported clients in matters related to energy storage, load flexibility, distributed generation, electrification, retail tariff design, energy efficiency, and grid modernization. His work has been cited in regulatory decisions establishing procurement targets for energy storage and demand response, authorizing billions of dollars in smart metering investments, and approving the introduction of innovative rate designs. 🤓 Here at Onsemble, our team has been nerding out over Ryan’s reports for a long time now…so we’re excited to officially have him on the team!

A recent Onsemble customer shared that they’d failed repeatedly to upgrade their water heaters. Incentives were too hard to understand, and contractors were too hard to find. Then she downloaded our app. When Julia and I started Onsemble, we knew that home decarbonization was a massive lever for climate impact: homes represent more than 20% of all carbon emissions in the country. But homeowners we talked to had no idea that their home was such a big part of the climate crisis. When we asked how they might address the issue, they all said: I don’t have time to make this a priority. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know where to start. For the handful of homeowners who had tried to decarbonize, they had a common experience: they’d call one contractor, only to have the contractor try to talk them out of the transition to a heat pump appliance. Or information about incentives was difficult to find and seemed contradictory. (Or both!) Few made it all the way through. We talked to the contractors: why weren’t they telling their customers about the many incentives available that would dramatically reduce the cost of those upgrades? Once again, we heard the same responses: paperwork was too confusing, it took too long to get paid back (if they got paid back at all). So contractors mostly ignored the incentives. (And can you blame them? Either they’d have to float the incentive dollars indefinitely, waiting for payback, or they’d have to collect full payment upfront from the customer and then promise to reimburse them when – if! – they got paid back.) Reducing home emissions is critical to addressing the climate crisis. But to do so at scale requires meeting every stakeholder where they are – and eliminating the friction preventing electrification from happening more quickly. This was why Julia and I started Onsemble. Back to my house: I downloaded the Onsemble app and scanned the photos of my existing water heaters. That’s it. The app identified the incentives I qualified for – in my case, reducing my out-of-pocket costs by over 60% – and paired me with one of Onsemble’s quality contractor partners. Less than two weeks later, the gas line in my garage was capped and I had two new Rheem Manufacturing heat pump water heaters. The installer received the incentives from Onsemble; I paid the difference. Onsemble handled the incentive paperwork and ensured that the various incentive authorities got the information they needed to pay Onsemble back. Onsemble made what seemed impossible, simple. And now that my new water heaters are installed – and connected to the Internet – I not only have a more efficient, climate-friendly appliance that saves money each month, I have a wealth of data that’s already identifying additional opportunities for further savings and efficiency improvements. (That’s next week’s post.) #heatpumpwaterheaters #decarbonization #homeelectrification

🤝 Was so fun to sit down with our friends at Harvest to chat about how we're orchestrating home electrification. "Electrification doesn't have to be hard. It can actually be delightful. That was one of the founding principles of how Onsemble is designed. We make it really easy for someone maybe just at the beginning of their journey to learn more about what electrification is. Our app helps them understand what rebates are available to them personally, and we do all the work of finding a quality contractor and managing the installation process." - Julia Y., Onsemble co-founder and President. The electrification movement is bigger than any one company. And it's a fight that's made a lot better with friends like Harvest in it with us. ⚡

Join us this Wednesday during SF Climate Week to hear Onsemble's Julia Y. and friends from Quilt, Rewiring America, Impulse, and Berkeley Lab talk about making tackling emissions from homes through delightful customer experiences and products 🏡 ⚡

Bay Area homeowners, come join us this Saturday for the Home Electrification Fair in Berkeley! No better way to celebrate Earth Week than to learn about how to electrify your home -- one of the most important steps you can take for the planet 🌎 Thank you to the Citizen's Climate Lobby Alameda for hosting this great community event, and thrilled to be there among friends in the home electrification army like Harvest, QuitCarbon, Channing St. Copper Co. and more ⚡

“Why is it so hard to get help switching to a climate-friendly heat pump?” This is the question driving the recent op-ed from Andrew Heath in the Los Angeles Times. And it’s the question that motivated us to build Onsemble. In California, homeowners have access to generous federal, state, and local incentives to make the switch affordable. But as Heath said, the process just isn’t good enough: “What I found was a tangle of red tape, well-meaning but tragically ill-informed customer service representatives, and hours upon hours of filing forms, chasing down obscure information and questioning contractors — all in a quixotic quest to claim my local, state and federal rebates.” That’s where Onsemble comes in. We stack every rebate, handle the incentive paperwork, and manage the contractor start-to-finish — making the right thing for the planet the easy choice. ⚡ 🌎 “We’re living in an era of amazing technological innovation, and we have public policies designed to catalyze consumer adoption of these breakthroughs. But if the same old bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of access to those programs, no one wins.”