Envelope improvements and heat pump installations in the Upper Midwest
The Upper Midwest leads the country in quite a few areas—dairy farming, architectural innovation, great fishing, and of course, exceptionally cold weather. Homeowners and renters dealing with these freezing temps often find it difficult to keep the chill out during the winter months, especially in older homes.
To meet this challenge, motivated communities are looking into ways to reduce energy load while addressing the needs of all residents. This is particularly true for communities who don’t always have the resources available to make energy-efficient improvements to their home.
While there are barriers to retrofitting existing residential buildings in the Upper Midwest, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) created the Building America program to address these kinds of hard-to-solve technical challenges by demonstrating solutions.
Barriers to residential energy improvements in the Upper Midwest
Homeowners and contractors in cold climates have many factors (economics, environmental impacts, comfort, and fuel security) to consider when switching from natural gas heating to ASHPs (air source heat pumps):
| Each home or building has unique retrofit needs and solutions and every homeowner has different project goals. |
| Economic decisions, like high upfront costs and potentially higher utility bills which need to be balanced with environmental and fuel security priorities—like having back-up heating fuel or eliminating heating load directly reliant on fossil fuels. |
| Ensuring a rollout that positively impacts all residents, including those in Minneapolis Green Zones |
Overcoming these barriers can have a huge overall net gain for people in the Upper Midwest by improving health and quality of life and decreasing energy costs.
About the project:
Slipstream will serve as the research lead on a new Building America demonstration project funded by the DOE that will test ways to deploy scalable decarbonization in residential properties. We’ll be collaborating with the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE) and Elevate—along with manufacturer partners and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—and combining our breadth of experience to expand technology research and small-scale pilots to identify solutions that yield consistent and scalable outcomes. We’ll start in Minneapolis and create a path for other areas in the Upper Midwest to deploy retrofit programs at scale that meets the needs of residents in all communities.
It’s complicated to plan a residential retrofit while also navigating homeowner and contractor needs—not to mention also managing various trade partners. The residential retrofit industry currently has many proven envelope and heat pump technologies, but few business models support this type of custom planning per project.
However, there’s currently unprecedented funding through incentives from federal, state, and local governments and utilities for envelope improvements, heat pumps, and water heaters. Minneapolis is delivering programs that align closely with this work, and this research is able to build off that momentum and infrastructure.
Our Building America work will develop decision-making tools, methods, and training for practitioners (auditors and contractors) to incorporate building envelope improvement and we’ll share these insights with market partners through forums such as the B4 Conference and the Midwest Heating and Cooling Collaborative.
A major component of this demonstration study will be engagement with key groups and stakeholders:
- Auditors and contractors: to develop and test tools to support them in integrating envelope retrofits with heat pump upgrades.
- Rental property owner groups and community-based organizations: to understand the impacts of decarbonization-focused business models on customer decision-making.
- Residents/homeowners: to identify participants for our field data collection and analysis, along with qualitative data on their experience with heat pumps.
Our overall goal is to develop decision-making tools and a process for auditors and contractors to use with building owners to increase the percentage of owners who implement energy optimization solutions. We expect to see initial project scope results at the end of 2025, although our partnership lasts through 2028.
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