Beneficial Heating to Reduce Carbon Emissions: Central Hudson

The majority of customers in Central Hudson’s service territory heat their homes with fuel oil and propane; transitioning customers to beneficial heating provides one of the biggest opportunities to reduce carbon emissions for customers. Central Hudson is looking for innovative beneficial heating programs that inform and provide affordable heating options to customers to support carbon reduction.

The objectives of this opportunity include:

1. Provide customers with affordable heating options to reduce carbon emissions, address gas constraints and most importantly, increase comfort and provide value to customers.
2. Leverage CenHub, Central Hudson’s Customer Engagement Platform and brand for interactive customer offerings
3. Use CenHub’s data to help educate customers to make purchasing decisions and help them improve the comfort of their home while not disrupting their lifestyle

62% of Central Hudson’s 256,000 residential customers heat with fuel oil or propane and with no or limited access to natural gas.

Central Hudson is interested in partnerships that include the following elements:

• Partnerships should support innovative programs with a shared risk reward structure including potential combined utility and 3^rd party investments.
• The partnership should support a business model that are cost effective and scalable.
• Partners should have a track record of implementing programs that provide value to customers

The proposals should include:

• innovative programs that provide affordable electric heating options to customers.
• bundle pricing and financing options
• customer engagement and education to understand heating options and provide tools that help customers understand how the options could provide value through lowering their bills, reducing their carbon impact and providing comfort.

The program should have the opportunity to scale to all residential customers and should also be able to be incorporated into existing customer programs.

The Beneficial Heating program will advance the REV goal to lower carbon emissions and support fuel diversity.

The proposed programs should not include elements that are duplicative of current NYSERDA programs.