Home Decarbonization - Working Notes towards a Research Agenda

2026-03-24

Ok so here's a big brain dump of questions that are interesting to me:

How do different actors or sets of actors frame home decarbonization?
- What meaning(s) do these frames create?
- What work do these frames do? For the framers? For their ecosystems?
- What do these frames preclude / close out / enclose?
- How should we think about home decarbonization vs. electrification?
Why does home decarbonization matter?
- What benefits does it provide?
- What risks does it help mitigate?
- What are the frameworks for articulating the impact and nature of home carbon impacts (i.e., is there a Scope 1/2/3 equivalent when we're talking about home emissions/efficiency impacts?)
What are the drivers for home decarbonization?
- System (policy, technology, culture, etc.) and individual (motivations, desires, pains, leverage, etc.)
- What are the system bottlenecks? What are the barriers to action?
  - What's creating drag for home decarb scale up?
- To what extent is this a whole-system transformation vs. an incremental set of changes within a larger BAU framework?
What are the options for home decarbonization today?
- How do the various possible choices recombine into sets? Why do certain things hang together (e.g. technical reasons, policy/incentive reasons, because vendors like to sell/install certain things together, financial reasons, etc.)?
  - To what extent do people go all-in vs. pursuing changes incrementally over time? What determines that set of choices?
What are the systems that make up a typical Canadian home? How do they interact?
- Where can homeowners intervene to decarbonize?
  - When we're talking about bits of hardware, how do these things actually work (e.g. heat pumps)? What matters (as far as manufacturing quality, design decisions, etc.) in terms of performance? In terms of quality of life for the homeowner?
Who pursues home decarbonization?
- Are there common sets of characteristics that pattern behaviour? Can they be grouped into personas or segments?
- What do they get from the process? What do they think they're going to get? What do they think they've gotten? Does it all line up?
- What are the typical journeys for home decarbonization?
  - Are there underlying dynamics (i.e. common emergent system behaviours)? Are there underlying service/action patterns (i.e. repeatable sets of human or organizational behaviour)?
- What tools and resources do they draw on throughout the process?
- What are the breakdowns / hurdles / frictions / fall-out triggers for these folks?
  - Who almost-but-doesn't-quite pursue home decarb projects?
What are the markets at play around home decarbonization?
- Who provides services?
  - What's the typology of these actors (there's obvious stuff like type of provider, size of firm, etc., but are there other characteristics that meaningfully group service providers, like age of firm/age of leadership, proximity to research clusters, etc.)
  - What role do they play?
  - How are they structured?
    - Internally
    - As a field of actors
  - What barriers or frictions do they experience?
    - What barriers or frictions do they impose?
- Who manufactures inputs?
  - What's the typology of these actors?
  - What role do they play in the system?
  - How are they structured?
  - What barriers or frictions do they experience? .. do they impose?
- Who constraints or enables some or all of the system?
  - What kinds of institutional actors can or do play a role?
    - What are the explicit roles? What are the tacit or hidden roles?
  - What kind of government policy and program can / does play a role? Who's creating it?
  - What are the second-order players that shape the ability of the system to transform?
Where are design decisions fucking things up?
- What's the E2E journey and service layer look like today? Where's it busted? What could we do differently if we took the problem really seriously? Who would need to change and in what ways?
  - What incremental changes can discrete actors in the system make to improve both system and local outcomes without transforming the whole system?
- What new kinds of organizations would we stand up if we could? What tooling would they use?
- What new kinds of tooling would we push to existing orgs in the space?