The Retrofit & The Built Environment Starter Pack
From Heat Pumps to Financing Hacks: Your Crash Course in Decarbonising Existing Buildings.
👋 Welcome to Climate Drift: your cheat-sheet to climate. Each edition breaks down real solutions, hard numbers, and career moves for operators, founders, and investors who want impact. For more: Community | Accelerator | Open Climate Firesides | Deep Dives
Hey there! 👋
Skander here.
Buildings are the quietly humming giants of the carbon ledger. Every time a furnace kicks on or an office tower’s lights flicker to life, we add to an emissions tab that already reaches 39 % of global CO₂: 28 % from simply running the places we live and work, and another 11 % baked into their concrete, steel, and drywall.
That’s the bad news.
Here’s the good: unlike in many hard-to-abate sectors, the kit to slash those operational emissions is sitting on the shelf today. Heat pumps that double as air-conditioners, rooftop solar that turns dead space into power plants, and battery systems that flatten peak demand are no longer moon-shot prototypes: they’re dropping in price, scaling fast, and (shh… don’t tell your gas bill) already out-performing fossil incumbents on comfort, health, and lifetime cost.
Next week we are diving into the Built Environment: First with a State of Built Environment followed by company pitches. Join us next week for our Open Pitch session next week Wednesday at 9am PST | 18:00 CEST. Register here, places are limited as always so we can have an actual conversation on how to market better:
So today driftie Tessa is giving us the Starter Pack of the Retrofit & The Built Environment.
🌊 Let’s dive in
But first, who is Tessa?
Tessa is the founder of Dawn Energy, an early-stage venture dedicated to helping Ontario electrify and decarbonize its residential building stock. She began her career as a strategist with Bain & Company and Worldpay before deciding to focus on climate. She went on to join the leadership team at Material Evolution, a UK-based low-carbon cement startup, where she served as Chief of Staff and worked to scale a novel solution to decarbonize heavy industry.
After witnessing firsthand how much progress was being made abroad, Tessa decided to return home to Canada, where she was struck by how far behind the country remains in electrification and climate action. She founded Dawn Energy to help Canadians transition their homes off fossil fuels and unlock the economic and health benefits of electrification.
The Retrofit & The Built Environment Starter Pack
Buildings are really bad for the environment. The solutions to decarbonise this sector exist, yet emissions continue to rise each year.
Buildings are emissions monsters. They account for 39% of total global emissions (more than cars, planes, and ships combined). And even though we have the technology to fix this, emissions from buildings keep rising every year.
That 39% breaks down into:
Operational Emissions (28%): from the energy buildings use day to day
Embodied Emissions (11%): from materials and construction.
To keep this Starter Pack focused and actionable, we’re zeroing in on operational emissions in existing buildings (retrofits).
Operational emissions come from heating, cooling, lighting, hot water, appliances, and ventilation. The impact depends not just on how much energy buildings use, but whether the energy comes from fossil fuels like gas and oil, or cleaner sources like wind, solar, and hydro.
In short: decarbonizing operational emissions means decarbonizing energy use in buildings.
Beginners can start digging in by checking out the IEA Buildings Dashboard or the IEA’s Tech Pathways for Zero-Carbon-Ready Buildings by 2030.
There is reason to be optimistic. The technology to decarbonise operational emissions largely exist (at scale and cost parity)
I’m an optimist at heart. And that’s why operational emissions are so compelling. The tech to decarbonize exists. In many cases, it’s not just better for the planet, it’s better for comfort, health, and cost too.
Tech to Watch
Heat Pumps
Overview: Heat Pumps 101 by Shreyas Sudhakar (Founder & CEO of Vayu)
Climate Drift POV: What’s Stopping America from Going All In on Heat Pumps?
Cool Company Alert: Harvest Thermal (featured on Volts)
Residential Solar
Overview + Climate Drift POV: Guide to Residential Solar
Cool Company Alert: Swift Solar (featured on Volts)
Battery Energy Storage Systems
Climate Drift POV: The BESS Market in 2025
Cool Company Alert: Base Power (featured on MCJ)
Despite promising technology, decarbonisation of the built environment lags
We know how to decarbonize buildings. So why are we still installing gas furnaces in 2025?
It turns out that retrofitting the ~2.5B existing buildings on the planet is a big, expensive, time consuming job! But, we are going too slowly. At the rate we are going, it will take hundreds of years to decarbonize North America’s housing stock.
Imagine the retrofit transition as a house we’re all building together.
At the base are the foundational layers. The solid ground that everything else rests on:
Data & Insights show us where to lay the first bricks and how to design structures that hold up over time.
Financing acts as the scaffolding that gives every building owner the means to participate.
Economic Viability ensures that, even without subsidies, this house stands strong on its own merits.
But on top of that foundation rise the pillars of challenges: the vertical supports we must shore up to keep the structure intact.
Pillars of Challenges
The Installer Bottleneck
I’ve spoken to hundreds of homeowners who were ready to go electric until they discovered no one in their town actually installs heat pumps (or worse, they found a contractor who says they install them, then talks them out of it). The ones who are available often make better margins swapping in another gas furnace, so… why rock the boat? And this issue compounds since installation of electric systems often require additional training and expertise. Until we flood the market with trained, electric-happy tradespeople, demand will keep hitting this wall.
The Experience Barrier
Early adopters might tolerate a clunky app or a long install because they love new gadgets (or the planet). But most homeowners just want to stay warm without thinking about how they're staying warm. And since the familiar system (which is gas-based) still works, the new tech has to significantly outperform the old one. This is classic Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve in action. Sleek design, on-time installs, and a smoother experience (ideally at a better price) are what move the needle.
Complexity & Confusion
It’s still way too complex and time-consuming for homeowners to figure out how to decarbonize their home. In her piece “How to Make Your Home a Climate Champion” Driftie Jennie shared that it took her 80 hours over 6 weeks just to research and create a net-zero plan—and that’s before coordinating a single install. I’ve lost count of how many people (both single-family and multi-unit owners) tell me, “I know electrifying is the future. I just don’t know where to start.”
Only by reinforcing each pillar while maintaining a strong foundation can we build something resilient enough to transform the built environment at scale. I share these challenges optimistically. Out of challenges come opportunities, and despite everything happening in the world, I see retrofitting (and electrifying) our buildings as a powerful reason for hope. Technologically, the hardest parts are behind us. Economically, many solutions already outperform their incumbents. The main hurdle now is scaling deployment. And that’s the part we can solve together.
Come learn more and join the conversation at our Open Climate session next week.
 | A guest post by
|