Home electrification prioritized over envelope efficiency improvements?

[semipro]

A discussion I thought some here would find interesting:

Electrification Over Insulation: Why "Fabric First" Isn't Climate First - CleanTechnica

"Fabric First" policies fail to cut emissions effectively. Explore evidence showing electrification as the fastest path to zero-carbon homes.

cleantechnica.com

Quote from the conversation:
"For probably five years now, I’ve been saying I don’t care if people have high home heating bills—as long as they’re using electricity and that electricity is green. From a climate perspective, that’s good enough. If people in Texas want houses made of doilies and walls of fans, that’s fine, as long as the energy is clean."

I have to admit that this has been our strategy thus far. We've installed solar PV, more efficient appliances and devices, and heat pumps for both HVAC and domestic water heating; all DIY. We're now working on upgrading our house's envelope, which is taking much more time and will likely take years more.

 

[woodgeek]

Good article. I definitely agree. Green energy (in practice electrification) first, then worry about efficiency later.

I switched from oil space heating to ASHP in 2009, and ripped out a working boiler on 2012. Bought my first BEV in 2014.
BEVs do both things... less than half the primary energy AND even grid average energy is half the carbon intensity of gasoline.
And fossils are not getting greener, while the grid is.

How did we get here? Until maybe 10 years ago there was a reasonable argument that renewables would always be more expensive. And that at a societal level, someone had to pay for the switch, rich folks paying for poor folks, rich countries paying for poor countries... and so that ofc went nowhere.

In 2025 the argument is between 'abundance' and whatever the opposite of that is... 'reductionism'. We have had hippy scolds yelling at us since the 70s that the environment requires us to sacrifice hard to reduce all our demands. And that never took off with more than a few % of people.

So, electrify everything (and don't worry about Jevon) is very IN in 2025. But the environmental movement is still largely being controlled by scolds. The activist kids at sunrise rebellion are scolds, not abundance cornucopians.

Maybe the energy scolds can all switch to something else while the engineers build out global green energy... maybe scolding us to switch to plant-based meats?