IT WAS 7:45 IN THE MORNING, and five young men stood in a driveway in the Berkeley hills, staring at Michelle Falise’s roof and strategizing.
The crew was with Yellowjacket Heating & Cooling Services Inc., a fledgling HVAC company that specializes in heat pump installations. They were preparing to take on the day’s work in the late fall chill: installing six electric heat pumps in one home, the most they’d ever done on a single structure. It would enable the Falise family to make the switch away from gas to heat and cool their home with added efficiency.
Falise’s craftsman-style home had a steep roof — 45 degrees — and installing the new system would be tricky in the November dew. Andrei Smith, co-owner of the company, used a laser pointer to talk through the plan with Mike Trapani, Yellowjacket’s lead installer.
Less than a year ago, Trapani was out of work. After high school he spent time installing solar panels, but the jobs evaporated when regulators cut back the price homeowners could get for selling energy back to the grid, essentially flattening demand for rooftop installations. Trapani found himself high and dry. Then he learned about Yellowjacket.
It’s a startup less than a year old, but they’ve quickly found their footing in the home decarbonization market in the East Bay. It’s co-owned by Owen Grimsich, a former math teacher at Berkeley High (the company name is a nod to the hometown football team, but in 2025 they’re changing the company name to 1-888-Heat-Pumps), and two of his childhood friends. They’ve added four new employees in recent months, all young people from the Bay Area who are eager to learn a new trade.
Installers at Yellowjacket start at $20 per hour while they receive on-the-job training. Then they have the option to level up through a series of roles that allow them to make up to $50 per hour. Trapani has advanced this far in less than a year.
The model is unique in a moment of big questions about the quality of the jobs in the building electrification space. Replacing gas appliances is key to California’s goal to slash greenhouse gas emissions 85% by 2045, and 1.5 million homeowners have already made the change. The state has committed to adding a total of 6 million heat pumps by 2030. And the shift could help ease the overall transition away from oil and gas jobs; according to the national nonprofit group Rewiring America, residential electrification will directly produce over 1.1 million new jobs across the U.S. by 2035. Many of those will likely be in California, a state that has long relied almost solely on a network of natural gas pipelines to power its homes.
But the pay for those doing this critical work is all over the map. Unlike its large-scale commercial counterpart, home electrification work is rarely done by unionized workers. Instead, a growing number of independent contractors are taking on the work piecemeal, often hiring and training their own workforce. While some are providing good, “high-road” jobs, others are turning to day laborers and keeping wages low, making some of the people most essential to the state’s climate goals even more vulnerable.
That’s why a group of advocates — and contractors like Yellowjacket — are pushing to ensure that the industry decarbonizing homes also helps move those most impacted by climate change into jobs that can help bridge the state’s sizable income gap.
Building decarbonization: the Wild West
Although California’s efforts to electrify its homes may slow down under the second Trump administration, the state’s Equitable Building Decarbonization Program (EBDP) is scheduled to go forward in some capacity in 2025. It is set to invest $500 million in the direct installation of heat pumps in the homes and apartments of low- and middle-income people, a group that has not typically had the funds for them.
This equity-focused effort should also include a push for “high-road” jobs, or those offering prevailing wages, benefits, and training opportunities, advocates say. The language in the program suggests that groups doing this work — including community-based organizations and community choice aggregators — should include high-road job requirements in their projects because they will likely trigger laws that require prevailing wages be paid to employees on public works projects.
The push caused by the EBDP is a good start. But in many ways, the residential decarb space is still the Wild West. It relies on a predominantly Latino workforce, but some contractors report that trainings and certifications aren’t easy to find in Spanish. And the day laborers involved often work under the table.
“The small-scale residential market is pretty unorganized, under the table. There is lots of room for wage claim violations, exploitation, lack of safety, and lack of enforcement of worker rights.”
Chiara Arellano, formerly with Rising Sun Center for Opportunity
“Union contractors are not often interested in doing very small projects,” said Avni Jamdar, regional director of Northern California at Emerald Cities Collaborative, which is working with the City of San Francisco to bring high-road jobs to a building rehab pilot project. Part of her work is to facilitate community workforce agreement negotiations. “I’ll send (unions) the bids, and the RFP, and they won’t respond,” she said.
“The small-scale residential market is pretty unorganized, under the table,” said Chiara Arellano, former associate director of policy at the Rising Sun Center for Opportunity. “There is lots of room for wage claim violations, exploitation, lack of safety, and lack of enforcement of worker rights.”
Larry Waters, a contractor and the founder of Electrify My Home, says the expense of union labor is a barrier for him and others in his position.
“Big commercial projects are (worth) millions. (Smaller) customers don’t have the money to spend on having union people in their shop,” he said. Some residential electrification projects cost his customers around $35,000, but Waters said, “if I had to pay everybody prevailing wage … if I had to have five different locals as part of my company, that job would (cost the homeowner) $75,000.”
Prioritizing the lowest upfront cost to the customer can help widen the chasm between high- and low-road jobs, according to a report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation. The authors recommend policy changes to recalibrate the market and meet demand — without sticking workers with the bill.
Yellowjacket’s model: the importance of training
Grimsich’s business philosophy is rooted in education. In addition to certifications and real-world training, he’s made an effort to connect Yellowjacket’s crew with seasoned tradesmen who can help them learn.
“We’re getting a lot of young kids wanting to be part of the trades again. There’s a bubbling up left and right, almost like a renaissance,” said Grimsich. “(We’re) connecting with people who have been in the trades before, who can pass down their knowledge, providing spaces for that, and then supporting these kids to get certified and trained.”
Co-owners Grimsich, Smith, and Tenzin Soepa are able to do this in part because of a combined nest egg from their first careers. Teaching, coaching, and car sales enabled the trio to invest right away in paying employees well — sometimes at the cost of paying themselves. Thanks to this cushion, Yellowjacket isn’t beholden to the lowest upfront cost model. “Every single month, our head installers make more money than (each of) us three,” said Soepa.
Even beginners feel supported. Jaxon Bera, who hung the indoor segment of the heat pump system at Falise’s house in November, had only been with the company for six months. He had practiced the work with Grimsich at the warehouse before Falise’s install, going over details that would help him level up.
When asked whether he thought he was paid and treated fairly, Bera paused in his work to look up and nod, laughing at the question.
Not all companies make learning this accessible. And many contractors prefer that their workers learn new skills on their own time. Meanwhile, a great deal of the existing training programs are designed to funnel people directly into unions.
“There are no union roles in residential retrofit. Ergo, workforce training is not serving the needs of the residential retrofit market,” said Cooper Marcus, CEO of QuitCarbon, a company that helps walk residential customers through the process of electrifying their homes. “Subsidies (for high-road training) are a way of trying to address all of that.”
A growing cohort of change
Case in point, 1-888-Heat-Pumps is working with The Rebuilding Together East Bay Network and the City of Berkeley on a Just Transition Pilot replacing gas appliances with electric heat pumps in low-income homes. The hope is to provide “family-sustaining jobs” for a diverse workforce. The project is one of multiple collaborations aimed at changing the way skilled laborers in the home electrification space are treated.
Emerald Cities is also focused on partnering with apprenticeship programs that prepare a diverse workforce amid largely white trade unions.
Rising Sun Opportunity Center, which connected 1-888-Heat-Pumps with one of their newer employees, runs a collaborative effort with a broad array of environmental justice organizations and labor and workforce partners. Together they have established a set of standards, and they’re hoping to help build an industry in which immigrant contractors, contractors of color, and women-owned businesses have the tools and support to become high-road employers.
Rebuilding Together runs a building and construction trades training program that teaches students at two North Bay high schools how to build tiny houses and equip them with all-electric appliances. Each school group builds two houses per year, and the houses themselves are designed to end up in the backyards of low-income homeowners looking for rental income or a way to house a caretaker.
The two-pronged approach that takes both workers and low-income clients into account equally is key to Rebuilding Together’s model. “Whether it’s going in swapping out gas devices or creating energy efficiency, if the work doesn’t promote and develop high-road workforce opportunities for historically disinvested-in community members, it’s not part of a truly just transition,” said JW Frye, the organization’s executive director.
Another promising solution is zonal or neighborhood-scale decarbonization: removing aging sections of the gas infrastructure and using the funds utility companies would spend on maintaining those pipelines to instead electrify all the homes on a specific block. In September Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 1221, which will result in nearly a dozen pilot projects to bring zonal decarbonization to life in a range of neighborhoods across California. It’s a way to potentially bridge the gap between residential work and larger union bids.
In Richmond, where a number of entities are hoping to land some of that pilot funding, the City Council passed a resolution in October supporting a project labor agreement with building trade unions that would prioritize high-road job opportunities for locals. The project being planned there would electrify between 40 and 80 homes.
“If we do this right, we will not only be giving people high quality, middle class jobs right now, but we will be training the next generation,” said Tim Frank, a board member of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Contra Costa County who hopes to see the Richmond pilot come to pass.
The stakes for workers and the planet
Labor movements and environmental work are often at odds, even though this kind of work is frequently done by folks from the communities most impacted by climate change. Experts call this a false dichotomy.
“These movements need to be united because they’re dependent on one another,” said Maurissa Brown, transportation equity program manager at the Greenlining Institute, another nonprofit working to improve conditions for workers in the energy transition.
Plus, if the home is decarbonized inefficiently, homeowners could end up spending more to heat and cool their homes. “There’s job quality for the workers, but there’s also the quality of the actual work that’s done. When we think about the decarbonization projects that need to happen, the quality does really matter, and has a lot of payoff for how much energy savings the resident actually experiences,” said Arellano.
Opinions vary on this — some say that a heat pump is a heat pump, no matter who installs it. But if we can’t grow the labor force needed to do the sheer volume of heat pump installations California requires in the next five years, it won’t matter.
“If we don’t prepare a workforce, and if we don’t prepare the jobs to be quality jobs for that workforce, we’re just not going to meet our climate goals,” said Arellano.
Additional reporting on this story by Twilight Greenaway.
This article was produced with support from the Climate Equity Reporting Project at Berkeley Journalism.
The post Why climate change is fueling efforts to bring pay equity to home electrification industry appeared first on Local News Matters.