S8E4 Serving Communities in a Changing Climate

Like a lot of the country, we're really in this phase of, uh, changing weather.

So traditionally, you wouldn't have needed cooling in Oregon.

And a lot of the old housing stock, a lot of our low-income households, they don't have any cooling, and it's just getting hotter and hotter.

So, you know, I think one of the biggest change-- I've been in my current role for 12 years, and I did not have a background in any of this.

[chuckles] But in my 12 years, that's, that's one of the biggest changes, is the impacts of climate on what the needs are for weatherization in the house.

I mean, our winters are m- way milder compared to, you know, Northeast.

I lived in New York for a while myself, so I've lived in some harder climates.

But it's, you know, it's wet here most of the year, though we do get power outages from a freak ice storm or whatever, um, that it does happen, just not as often.

You know, we don't get the snowfall.

Um, it's, it's the rain.

But this January, for example, we've had almost no rain, and the conversation is around snowpack, and the snowpack isn't up on the mountain, and that's gonna impact, you know...

In the summer, we don't really get rain.

We get it seasonally.

People think it rains here all y- all the time, but in the summer, we get no rain, really.

So we rely on snowpack, and where if there's no snowpack, that's gonna impact the heat, but also your energy needs and costs because, you know, we have a lot of hydro here as our power source.

So weather is really-- it's different on the, um, in the Pacific Northwest.

But because of the changes, it's, it's how we're having to adapt to it.

We're doing a lot of heat pumps now for various different reasons to, for, you know, GHG reduction goals, but also because people really need cooling in summer.

And when I moved here 12 years ago, you really didn't.

It might have gotten hot one week out of the summer.

Now you really are starting to need it almost the entire summer, and people aren't ready for that, haven't been ready for that.

So a lot of push on our work and at the state level and here locally in Portland to do, to get cooling into people's homes.Um, that, that's just such a big change.

I really appreciate that you talked about that.

Like, I mentioned the power outages and the snowstorms and whatever, although, you know, the Northeast is kinda...

We're, we're sorta used to our snow.