DLC Home Concierge: Our partnership with Duquesne Light

Pearl Edison and Duquesne Light Company are teaming up to launch DLC Home Concierge, a new service to support DLC’s customers with the switch to an efficient heating and cooling system.

In late May, Duquesne Light Company launched DLC Home Concierge - a partnership between DLC and Pearl Edison to make it simpler, easier, and cheaper for their customers to pursue home electrification and energy efficiency projects.

Using DLC Home Concierge, DLC customers can identify an efficient heating and cooling system that’s right for their unique home and goals, access rebates and incentives to reduce the cost of their new system, connect with an expert for support, and execute the project with a qualified local contractor.

And, if any of yinz are in the market for efficient HVAC, you can get an Instant Estimate for a rebate-eligible heat pump here: DLC Home Concierge

The opportunity for DLC customers

There are clear areas of opportunities for electrification in Metro Pittsburgh. For instance, we estimate that:

• Greater than 30,000 DLC customers lack air conditioning today

• Greater than 60,000 DLC customers have an abnormally high cooling load that is suggestive of an immediate opportunity to save energy and money. (This isn’t a wild guess - thanks to DLC, we’ve seen the data!)

• Greater than 60,000 DLC customers have either primary electric resistive heating or primary propane / fuel oil heating (and high heating bills as a result)

Of course, the same things that make Pittsburgh unique and awesome present unique challenges for heating and cooling and for residential energy efficiency broadly. Pittsburgh’s population exploded during the Steel City industrial boom in the late 19th / early 20th centuries, then stagnated through most of the 20th century. As a result, metro Pittsburgh’s housing stock is among the oldest in the nation.

The city’s old bones, industrial character, unique topography, dense neighborhoods, and distinctive architectural features with roots in its working-class heritage - yes, this is a Pittsburgh Potty reference - mean that a lot of Pittsburgh homes are less comfortable and less efficient than they could be.

It’s harder to pull off a heat pump retrofit in a city like Pittsburgh than in cities with younger (and usually, less unique) housing stock - like metro Austin, for example. Helping customers think through the costs and benefits of an energy efficiency investment is a little more complicated. Local understanding is a little more important. Best-practice system design, installation, and commissioning - always very important - are even a little more important.

That’s why we’re so excited about this partnership.

DLC’s focus on these unique areas of opportunity and understanding of these unique challenges - not to mention 113 years of earned trust and rich data to understand which customers might benefit most - position them well to serve as a trusted energy advisor to their customers. As for Pearl Edison - we’re focused, as always, on ensuring a great customer experience (quality customer support, quality pricing, quality system design, quality installs) and great contractor experience (lower-cost customer acquisition). We’ve spent the last three months learning Pennsylvania, and are excited to support DLC and their customers.

How it works

Through DLC Home Concierge, DLC customers can:

• Determine their eligibility for rebates and tax incentives. This includes DLC’s energy efficiency rebates, but also the forthcoming Penn Energy Savers rebate program (up to $34,000 for income-qualified homes for heat pumps and accompanying weatherization!) and other rebates and incentives available through federal, state, and local governments.

• Get a preliminary quote for a heat pump retrofit online in about five minutes. The estimate includes the price for the job after all applicable rebates and incentives, an itemized scope of work, and an analysis of the heat pump’s impact on operational cost and carbon footprint. The estimate also includes multiple options, to help DLC customers weigh tradeoffs between price, bill impact, and energy savings impact.

• Schedule a free Home Assessment. This 90-minute in-home audit is performed by a Pearl Edison Advisor - a BPI-certified home performance expert - to finalize the scope of work and figure out the right path forward.

• Obtain a low-interest loan. DLC customers can leverage a KEEP Home Energy Loan to finance any balance that isn’t covered by rebates and tax incentives.

• Execute the project through a qualified local contractor. Contractors that are approved for DLC Home Concierge projects are properly licensed and vetted for their technical qualifications and customer service track record. Pearl Edison is responsible for end-to-end quality assurance - system design, installation, and commissioning.

DLC’s targeted approach to electrification

The DLC team - in particular, the DLC Electrification Solutions team and the New Products and Services team- have been excellent partners. (Special shoutout to Clint Noack and Emily Phan-Gruber for their leadership on this.) One major reason - the DLC team is laser-focused on identifying the DLC customers who can benefit from electrification most, messaging the benefits of electrification effectively, and serving these customers well.

This sounds really simple - but it’s also really rare.

Identifying the DLC customers who can benefit from electrification most

Explaining the value proposition for electrification requires a lot of specific context. Outstanding comfort and unparalleled efficiency are achievable on every properly executed heat pump retrofit - but project economics are a little more complicated. The value proposition for installing a heat pump depends on the unique characteristics of the home and the customer’s goals for the project.

As a result most of the guidance available to customers is either generic and unhelpful (“maybe, it really depends” - the approach taken by most contractors) or generic and potentially misleading (“yes, you could save big” - the approach taken by most absolutists / advocates).

The customer support solution to this problem is DLC Home Concierge - a platform that DLC customers can use to identify an efficient heating and cooling system that’s right for their unique home and goals.

But, equally important is the (upstream) marketing solution - targeting of narrow customer segments for whom electrification has the strongest value proposition. It’s difficult to advise a generic homeowner without good information about their home and goals. It’s not difficult to advise a homeowner with electric resistive heating and abnormally high cooling load who is rebate-eligible and wants to trim their bills.

Starting with this month’s air conditioning marketing outreach, we’re working with DLC to identify and reach these high-potential customer segments:

• DLC customers who have abnormally high summer cooling load and should consider a proactive replacement of their air conditioning system

• DLC customers who can leverage income-qualified rebates and tax incentives to add air conditioning for the first time

• DLC customers whose air conditioning systems fail during a summer heat wave and require service or replacement

• DLC customers who heat their homes with expensive electric resistive heating systems, with high potential for reduced bills and attributable energy savings for DLC’s Act 129 Energy Efficiency program

• DLC customers who heat their home with expensive propane or fuel oil heating systems, with high potential for reduced bills and attributable electric load growth for DLC

• DLC customers who are willing to pay a bit of a premium to switch from natural gas heating to all-electric heating to vote with their wallets on climate change

The list goes on…

We’ll let the data guide us on where to focus.

What we won’t do is spray and pray to DLC’s 600,000 customers, or extol a generic value proposition for electrification to these 600,000 when many of those customers might not realize those exact benefits in practice.

Messaging the benefits of electrification effectively

Many electrification advocates pitch heat pumps as part of a greater “movement” (e.g., “electrify everything”) or as a switch to a modern and inherently better premium appliance (“get modern heating” or “make the switch to all-electric”).

Both messages are true. They’re also not particularly effective. (Recent research by Rewiring America and the Ad Council and our own research with DLC generally corroborate this.)

If you’re reading this, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about energy efficiency and you probably think heat pumps are pretty cool. (We do too.) It’s worth remembering that this places us among a remote minority of Americans. Most people shop for a solution to an acute problem they are experiencing, not an appliance or a specific fuel source. This could be a functional problem (“my furnace broke”), a comfort problem (“the second floor has never been comfortable in the summer”), or an economic problem (“I’m paying too much for air conditioning”).

Romanticizing the heat pump is a great way for climate enthusiasts to reach other climate enthusiasts - and to be clear, this is important work. But it is not a scalable way to convince more “average joes” and “average jills” to install heat pumps.

Explaining experiential and economic benefits - the stuff that comprises the “kitchen table” argument - is a better strategy.

That’s why we’re so excited about DLC’s upcoming marketing campaigns. Heat pumps are great for the planet - but we’ll install more of them by explaining (concretely and honestly) why they’re great for the homeowner footing the bill.

Serving customers well

One of DLC’s corporate goals is to serve as a trusted energy advisor to its customers. We think they’re clearly living up to that here.

We believe that serving customers well means:

• High-quality information - in particular, to evaluate the right scope for the project and evaluate costs and benefits

• Access to expertise - live, human expertise

• A good price - a fair market rate for equipment and labor, protection against predatory upselling, and support navigating the complexities associated with various rebate and incentive programs

• A quality system design - grounded in best-practice design load analysis, equipment selection, and duct design

• A clean install - best-practice installation and commissioning by vetted local contractors

These priorities have informed all of the work we’ve done with the DLC team over the last several months to configure and launch DLC Home Concierge. We’re proud to support their work!

Reach out

If you’re at an electric utility and interested in doing similar work, then we’d love to hear from you! We are open to adding 1-2 additional utility partners in 2025.

Reach out to Pearl Edison Co-Founder Evan Anderson (evan@pearledison.com) to learn more.