Workforce Modelling for Ithaca’s 2030 Building Electrification Goal
by Byung Jae Cho
The Background
As a Siegel Family Endowment PiTech PhD Impact Fellow, I worked with the City of Ithaca to estimate the number of additional workers needed to achieve the city’s goal to electrify all buildings in Ithaca by the year 2030.
Motivation
Fossil fuel consumption in buildings continues to be the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (U.S), representing approximately 8.6% of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions (or 29% if factoring in buildings’ indirect emissions). Among the most effective strategies to curb emissions from buildings is through electrification, a transition from conventional energy sources to electricity for heating and cooking. Notably, the city of Ithaca took a pioneering step on June 5th, 2019, by adopting the Ithaca Green New Deal resolution, a government-led commitment to achieve complete decarbonization by 2030. A central facet of this initiative involves electrification of all buildings in the city by 2030. To accomplish this goal, the city of Ithaca faces the challenge of assessing the necessary workforce expansion in conjunction with its existing labor pool.
Figure 1) Average percentage of buildings electrified each year from 2024 to 2030 based on my model. The City of Ithaca acheives 100% electrification by October 2030 in this scenario.
Byung Jae Cho
The Project
As a Siegel PiTech PhD Impact Fellow, I collaborated closely with the City of Ithaca and partnered with BlocPower, a climate technology company, over the summer to develop a web application. The web application was designed to aid stakeholders, not only within Ithaca but across various municipalities in New York state, in estimating the quarterly workforce increase required to achieve the goal of complete building electrification by 2030.
The web application receives the number of buildings and number of workers as inputs and estimates the percentage of total buildings electrified by 2030. Drawing from the analysis, the City of Ithaca would need to hire at least 25 HVAC technicians, 18 plumbers, and 8 electricians per quarter from 2024 to 2030 to meet the demand of 100% electrification by 2030. By 2030, this will result in an additional 675 HVAC technicians, 486 plumbers, and 216 electricians who would have to be integrated into the city’s workforce. For context, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 80 HVAC technicians, 110 plumbers, and 150 electricians, currently based in Ithaca. The web application may be accessed through this link, which also provides a detailed overview of the assumptions and modeling decisions I employed for the model.
Figure 2) Inputs used for the scenario in Figure 1. 2,579 single family homes, 1,038 small multi-family homes, and 625 multi family homes are currently present in the City of Ithaca. 25 additional HVAC technicians, 18 plumbers and 8 electricians are assumed to be introduced to the workforce every quarter.
Impact and Path Forward
Despite my fellowship ending in August, I intend to continue my collaboration with the City of Ithaca. I will be presenting my findings with the City of Ithaca’s planning department in early September and discuss how they may be used to allocate budget for workforce training in the city. In addition, I plan to continuously improve the web application based on user’s feedback.
As it stands, the model makes various simplifying assumptions based on expert judgment; these assumptions will be further fine-tuned as we gather more data on the building electrification process which would allow more accurate modeling. I also foresee collaborating with stakeholders across multiple cities within the state of New York. Through the web application, users can easily modify inputs and assumptions, enabling stakeholders in different cities to leverage the tool for estimating workforce requirements tailored to their respective cities.
