The IRA guide
Every incentive in the Inflation Reduction Act, drawn onto the part of the home it pays for.
- Role
- Creator & Product Lead
- Timeline
- 2022 – 2023
- Format
- A single illustrated guide
- Team
- Solo, fact-checked with Rewiring America
- Outcome
- 250,000 impressions · adopted by local governments
In short
- ProblemThe Inflation Reduction Act put thousands of dollars of home electrification incentives within reach of ordinary households, and almost nobody could tell which ones applied to them. The information existed, as agency PDFs and eligibility tables.
- ApproachI distilled the content into a single visual that could relate to any homeowner.
- Result250,000 impressions, and local governments across the country adopted it as their standard explainer for residents.
The problem
The IRA is the largest climate investment in US history, and for a homeowner it arrived as a wall of acronyms. Some of it is a tax credit you claim next April. Some of it is a discount at the point of sale. Some of it depends on your income relative to your area's median. The agencies published all of it accurately and none of it usefully.
The result was a market where the money existed and the demand didn't, because the people it was written for could not tell whether it applied to them.
The insight
Every version of this explainer I could find was organized the way the policy is organized: by incentive type, by agency, by tax code section. That structure is correct and it is useless, because it asks the reader to already know what a heat pump water heater is and whether they want one.
People do not think in incentive categories. They think in rooms, and in things they already own or are about to replace. The furnace is dying. The car lease is up. The panel is full.
Organize it the way the money is spent, not the way the money is appropriated.
Decisions and tradeoffs
Grouping by tax credit versus rebate, which is how every official source does it.
A reader arrives with a room and an appliance in mind, not a policy mechanism. Sorting by mechanism means they have to read all of it to find out whether any of it is theirs. Sorting by place in the house means they can find themselves in it in about four seconds.
Accurate ranges covering every income band and filing status.
Ranges are more defensible and less useful. I picked one household, stated the assumptions in the subtitle, and put the eligibility rules in a footnote. A real number a reader can compare to a real quote beats a correct interval nobody can act on.
One combined "savings" number per item, which reads better.
They behave differently. One reduces the price you pay in the store, the other arrives months later and only if you owe tax. Collapsing them into a single figure would have been the one simplification that actively misleads.
An interactive calculator with address and income inputs.
A calculator is a better product and a worse artifact. An image travels: it gets screenshotted into group chats, pasted into city newsletters, and printed for a library table. Reach was the whole point, and a URL that needs a form filled in does not reach.
What shipped
One drawing of a cutaway house, with every incentive attached to the thing it pays for. Rooftop solar on the roof, the battery on the garage wall, the EV in the driveway, the heat pump outside the bedroom, the induction stove in the kitchen, the heat pump water heater and dryer in the basement, the panel and the geothermal loop where they actually live.
Results
The honest caveat: impressions and adoption are what I can measure. I have no attribution on the thing that actually matters, which is whether anyone installed a heat pump because of it. That is the number I would want instrumented if I were doing this inside a company.
Why this one is here
Every device in that drawing is a device EnergyHub dispatches. Rooftop solar, battery storage, an EV on a charger, a heat pump, a smart panel: that is the enrolled fleet, drawn from the homeowner's side of it.
A VPP only has resources to dispatch if households buy and enroll the hardware first, and the thing standing between the incentive and the install is usually comprehension. I have spent several years on that specific problem, from the demand side, for an audience that had no reason to care until someone made it legible.
What I'd do next
Close the loop between the explainer and the enrollment. The guide ends at "this incentive exists"; the interesting question is what fraction of readers get as far as a quote, and which of the twelve upgrades actually converts. Attach that instrumentation and this stops being outreach and starts being a top-of-funnel channel with a measurable cost per enrolled device.