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#001 February 2009/Energy/Green Building

This Old, Audited House

Audits uncover energy leaks in a Philly rowhome.
by Will Dean

On a brisk December morning, a white van pulls up outside a quaint, stone-fronted, two-story duplex rowhome in Mount Airy. There are a few people inside, myself included, and some ghostbuster-esque equipment, including fans, various detectors, meters and a big fan. The only invisible thing we’re

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February 1, 2009
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Plenty of our clients zero out their electric bill Plenty of our clients zero out their electric bill with solar. The real challenge is mastering PECO’s time-of-use plan, which requires shifting when you use power and when you sell power. If you do it right, you don’t avoid paying a bill — you earn money.

I pulled up our family’s energy bill and let my 11-year-old, Mira, see if she could understand it. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited. The short version is that PECO credited us $254!

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Micah Gold-Markel

#philadelphia #peco #solarenergy #solarpower #solarstates
Early in 2026 in the Oxford Circle neighborhood, 1 Early in 2026 in the Oxford Circle neighborhood, 115 Philadelphians representing 15 different nationalities sat down to enjoy dinner at the first in a series of 21 events across seven diverse neighborhoods. The social impact project, called “Breaking Bread, Breaking Barriers” and conceived by president and CEO of The Welcoming Center (TWC) Anuj Gupta, rests on the conviction that sharing food can bring strangers together for meaningful conversations that lead to better understanding, stronger neighborhoods and more civic engagement. Host sites such as churches, mosques and community centers invite both longtime and newly arrived residents of their communities to attend these complementary dinners. But TWC’s goal is far greater than giving neighbors the chance to sample many new foods.

Founded in 2003, TWC is a nonprofit whose mission is to provide pathways to economic growth and strengthen communities by assisting immigrants. Taj Sheikh, project manager for Breaking Bread, and Seth Myers, project coordinator, bring their mix of personality and professional experience to the myriad challenges of hosting large dinners citywide: coordinating logistics and providing up-to-date communications with the staff, host sites and a wide array of volunteers. Both Sheikh and Myers are transplants to Philly (Sheikh from Texas, Myers from Missouri), so they know what it means to be a new arrival to an established community.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Marilyn Anthony
📸 Taylor Ecker

#philadelphia #immigrantcommunity #immigrantstories #communitycenter #culturalcuisine
My daughter lay in bed, her dark green cast proppe My daughter lay in bed, her dark green cast propped on a stack of pillows.

“This sucks,” she said.

As a rule I discourage the use of the word “sucks,” an artifact of how I was raised. But after reviewing the facts — injured on the last play of the last game of the season, four days before a summer vacation that’s suddenly without swimming or circus camp — I had to admit she was right.

“Yes,” I said, “this sucks.”

In addition to the pain, she had to process the grief of the loss of summer plans.

As I read our climate chaos issue, I arrived at the same conclusion my daughter reached: This sucks. It’s positively heartbreaking that we humans disrupted the climate so greatly that there won’t be local apples this year. That Canada’s vast boreal forest may lose the ability to regenerate due to the pace of wildfires. That those fires — and their smoke — are no longer the exception, but the rule.

We need to process that.

➡️ Read the full note from our publisher at gridphilly.com

✍️ Alex Mulcahy

#philadelphia #climatechaos #climatechange #climatechangeisreal #climatechangeawareness
An empty shopfront on South Street is in the midst An empty shopfront on South Street is in the midst of transformation. Ennis Carter, the founder of Social Impact Studios, a Philadelphia-based “creative hub,” affixes bolts of colorful paper to a wall and unfurls a vibrant, refrigerator-sized hand-painted canvas beneath a banner proclaiming “Made with Artistry & Activism.”

For the month of July, the space at Seventh and South streets will serve as the site of a pop-up exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of Social Impact Studios.

The space, full of vivid posters encouraging viewers to “Make it Happen” and “Eat. Play. Live … Better,” feels a bit like a shrine to positivity, which, according to Carter, is exactly the point. “This is a really important moment to celebrate the idea of putting positive messaging out into the world,” she says.

Social Impact Studios started as a passion project, run out of Carter’s bedroom. Since its inception, the studio has morphed and grown into a widely recognized institution that has worked on thousands of projects alongside nonprofits from across the country.

“[We’re] like a creative agency, but for people who are making the world a better place,” Carter says.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Sophie Aanerud
📸 Taylor Ecker

#philadelphia #socialimpact #socialimpactstudios #creativeagency #artandactivism
Events happening in and around Philadelphia this w Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

➡️ One Art Volunteer Day: Every first Friday of the month we invite the community out to spend the day tending to the land, learning and growing with us.

When:
Friday, July 10 (12:00 PM - 5:00 PM)

Where:
5150 Warren Street
Philadelphia, PA 19131

➡️ Linvilla Orchards’ Blueberry Festival: Celebrate the height of blueberry season at Linvilla Orchards during the annual Blueberry Festival, a summertime tradition featuring fresh local blueberries, family-friendly activities, live entertainment, and delicious seasonal treats.

When:
Saturday, July 11 (8:00 AM - 6:00 PM)

Where:
Linvilla Orchards
137 Knowlton Road
Media, PA, 19063

➡️ Nature Walk for Families of Toddlers and Preschoolers: A walk from the Schuylkill River Trail’s South Street entrance, headed south then back. We’ll learn about the nature we see along the way.

When:
Saturday, July 11 (11:00 AM - 12:00 PM)

Where:
Schuylkill Banks Boardwalk
Philadelphia, PA 19103

#philadelphia #philly #phillysupportphilly #eventsinphilly #phillyevents
The past three summers in Philadelphia have seen s The past three summers in Philadelphia have seen smoke drifting overhead, making for beautiful sunsets and, when it settles close to the ground, hazardous air. That smoke came from forest fires that burned thousands of miles away in the boreal forests of Canada. These woods cover 270 million hectares (or about one million square miles) in Canada, equivalent to about 29% of the United States’ land area.

To better understand what might be the new abnormal, Grid called up Yan Boulanger, a biologist with the Canadian Forest Service who studies the impact of climate change on the boreal forest.

➡️ Read the full interview at gridphilly.com

✍️ Bernard Brown
📸 Photo courtesy of Lynn Johnston, Canadian Forest Service

#borealforest #climatechange #forestfire #wildfires #wildfiresmoke
In the gray light of early morning, four activists In the gray light of early morning, four activists snuck onto a bridge overlooking U.S. Route 202 in Pennsylvania. There on the chain-link fence, they clipped their banner and unfurled it in view of the sleepy commuters just starting to pass below. Spelled out in 90 feet of white paint on fluttering black canvas was the message: “Vanguard has a climate problem.”

The activists, or “rebels,” were members of the Philadelphia chapter of Extinction Rebellion (XR), a global protest group that uses civil disobedience to demand that governments, companies and other powers take the climate emergency seriously.

XR formed in the United Kingdom in 2018, following the release of a United Nations special report on climate change that starkly outlined the Earth’s trajectory toward nearly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Spurred by the severity of the report and lackluster government response, a group of British activists and organizers launched Extinction Rebellion on Oct. 31. With colorful banners, joyful noise and firm resistance in the face of arrest, over a thousand protesters shut down the road outside the Houses of Parliament and recited their “Declaration of Rebellion.”

The propulsive energy of the new movement spawned satellite XR groups across the world.

Philadelphia’s chapter was founded in early 2019. That May, holding a green banner with the words “Rebel for Life,” XR Philly lent its voice to the global movement with a protest on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Sarah Ruiz
📸 Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion Philadelphia

#philadelphia #climatecrisis #climatechange #climatechangeisreal #climatechangeawareness
Philadelphia, a city wedged between two rivers, ha Philadelphia, a city wedged between two rivers, has a long history of getting swamped by dangerous floods. Its future, which is forecast to bring increasingly climate-fueled deluges, doesn’t appear any brighter. That leaves a pertinent question for the present day: What are city officials going to do about it?

As chronicled previously in Grid, the answer all too often has been: not much. But in a stroke of good news this spring, the City of Philadelphia helped its residents by joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Community Rating System, a federal designation that essentially amounts to a rewards program for good flood-planning behavior by cities and townships across the country.

The primary benefit is that most property owners — residents and business owners — who hold a flood insurance policy will now automatically receive a 15% discount when their annual policy renews. With policies averaging about $800, that would mean typical savings of about $130 a year — a measurable difference for households squeezed by increasing costs of living, according to Chris Miller, principal agent of Miller Insurance, a FEMA-preferred flood insurance provider in Philadelphia.

“For a lot of families, that’s a big deal,” says Miller, who travels annually to Washington to hear from lawmakers about flood insurance. “Every single year, flood insurance affordability is at the top of the list.”

Now for the fine print. If you’re a Philadelphia homeowner wondering if you have flood insurance, you probably don’t. Very few standard policies cover flood damages, meaning a homeowner needs to go out of their way to obtain one. In Philadelphia, only a few thousand homeowners have taken that step, according to FEMA.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Kyle Bagenstose

#philadelphia #climatechange #flooding #floodinsurance #floodresilience
When research was needed to create a climate resil When research was needed to create a climate resilience plan for the neighborhood surrounding North Philadelphia’s Tacony Creek, leaders of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership (TTF) had something more ambitious in mind than a traditional written study.

“We were going to bring together environmental organizations and leaders in this city, … then have experiences together where we’re seeing relevant climate resilience firsthand and hopefully getting inspired by that and using that as the foundation for action,” TTF executive director Justin DiBerardinis says.

Unsure what that could look like in practice, DiBerardinis and TTF’s director of community organizing and public programs, Cesali Morales, put their heads together. The result was an idea inspired by longtime Philly gardener Iris Brown and based on Morales’ commitment to incorporate the cultures of the people TTF serves into the organization’s work.

“When I think about Philadelphia and I think about the neighborhoods that surround Tacony Creek Park, I think about how influenced it is by Puerto Rican culture,” she says. “We don’t often get the chance to learn from the places that we left, … from people on the front lines that are facing this climate crisis and get to share in that, and learn and prioritize the cultures that reflect us.”

So, on March 12, Morales and DiBerardinis, with a group of community leaders and state and city legislators in tow, boarded a plane to Puerto Rico in search of culturally relevant climate resilience techniques that could be implemented in North Philadelphia.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Gabriel Donahue
📸 Photo courtesy of Paul Racette, Pennsylvania Environmental Council

#philadelphia #taconycreek #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateresilience
Philadelphia is heating up — and too many of our n Philadelphia is heating up — and too many of our neighbors can’t escape it. In parts of North, West and South Philadelphia, summer temperatures can soar 20 degrees higher than in greener, wealthier parts of the city. Heat is deadly — it’s a public health emergency that exposes the deep inequities shaping who stays safe and who suffers when the heat rises.

Our conclusion is clear: Cooling must be recognized as a basic human right.

Extreme heat is an equity crisis.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Philadelphia Climate Justice Collective
📸 Chris Baker Evens

#philadelphia #summerheat #heatwave #heatsafety #coolingsolutions
The helicopter was worth a shot, Dave Fahnestock t The helicopter was worth a shot, Dave Fahnestock thought. The owner of Hands on the Earth Orchard in Lititz, Lancaster County, which sells apples and peaches at farmers markets in Clark Park, Rittenhouse Square and Bala Cynwyd, hoped the downdraft from the propellers would mix warmer air with the freezing air hugging the ground across his 15 acres of fruit trees. In the days leading up to April 20, he had watched the forecast for the overnight low temperature go from worrisome to disastrous. “What could I do?” Fahnestock says. He and his crew lit fires around the orchard to show the pilot where to fly, and from 3–8 a.m., the helicopter went around in circles as Fahnestock kept an eye on a thermometer. “When he went over top, I could see it jump up 4 degrees, but till he circled back, it was cold again.”

In spite of the helicopter, only the peach trees near the signal fires emerged with some healthy flowers; they should produce just enough fruit for Fahnestock’s family to enjoy — “Literally just a handful.”

This year’s cold snap means that orchards across a wide swath from Ohio to southern New York will produce very little fruit this year. The tough question farmers are facing is how to prepare for a future of difficult spring weather.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Bernard Brown
📸 Photo courtesy of Linvilla Orchards

#philadelphia #farming #pafarm #producefarm #climatechange
Could anything be worse than an early spring? In Could anything be worse than an early spring?

In February, as we shivered under a shell of icy snow, we all looked forward to the melt. We imagined saying goodbye to our parkas and snow boots so that we could swap them for linen shirts and sandals. When that April heat came, we took to our porches and lingered outside to chat with our neighbors. It was lovely.

But farmers were getting nervous. They knew that the early heat could be a setup. Perennial plants can be tricked into flowering and fruiting ahead of schedule, only to be blindsided when temperatures lurched back down below freezing.

Climate chaos is local, regional and global all at once. In 2023, the snow blanketing the floor of boreal forests in Canada melted too soon, exposing deep layers of decaying twigs and conifer needles to the heat of a warmer summer. The dried-out fuel burned out of control when lit by bolts of lightning. It happened again in 2025. We’d better get used to it.

In this issue, we take a look at some of the dominoes falling as we heat the planet, but we also take a look at how we might cope. How can the City make it easier to get flood insurance? Could we learn about climate resilience from Puerto Rico, an island battered by supercharged hurricanes?

We’re stuck with this mess, but we’re not helpless.

➡️ Read the full Climate Chaos Issue now at gridphilly.com

📸 Cover photo courtesy of Alamy

#philadelphia #climatechaos #climatechange #climatechangeisreal #climatechangeawareness
One of the most common questions I get is, “Why sh One of the most common questions I get is, “Why should I pay for a composting service when I can compost on my own?” And my answer is, “If you can compost on your own, you should!” Many people don’t have the time, space or inclination to compost — that’s why our business exists — but making your own compost can be magical. So let’s talk about the three primary ways you can compost at home.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Tim Bennett
📸 Photo courtesy of Delpixart/iStockphoto

#philadelphia #compost #composting #foodwaste #zerowaste
On June 5, 1926, a family of five from Iowa, the M On June 5, 1926, a family of five from Iowa, the McHenrys, arrived in Philadelphia to visit the recently opened Sesquicentennial International Exhibition. John Wanamaker, who had proposed the idea 10 years earlier, envisioned the greatest world’s fair in history — an “astounding presentation of the capacity and productive power of the United States,” he wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer — in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On the day of the McHenrys’ visit, the “Sesqui,” as it was colloquially called, had been open in South Philadelphia for about a week.

With a reporter from The Philadelphia Bulletin tagging along, the McHenrys breezed through the two exhibition halls, where only 5% of all pavilions had been constructed, in under 30 minutes. After that, they visited the few completed exhibits scattered across the fairgrounds — a model post office, a replica of the Washington family home in England. By early afternoon, the family had seen all there was to see.

The underwhelmed Midwesterner’s reaction is one of hundreds dug up from the archives and compiled by historian and Temple University professor Thomas H. Keels in his 2017 book, “Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926.” Keels’ “Sesqui” is a kind of tragicomedy of idealist ambition and chutzpah: a noble idea delayed by war, hamstrung by infighting and undermined by outside interest groups; propped up and milked for cash by corrupt politicians and their business cronies; shoddily thrown together months behind schedule; and finally, soon after the gates closed, bulldozed and forgotten.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Ilan Ackelsberg
📸 Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art

#philadelphia #sesquicentennial #sesqui #worldfair #phillyhistory
Some people turn to the ocean for philosophical re Some people turn to the ocean for philosophical reflection. The vastness, the rhythm of crashing waves — it gets the mind pondering. But for me, farms teach the same lesson on a more human scale. On a farm, a particular crop may only be around for a few weeks or months. You have a limited window to enjoy what the world offers. Gather ye blueberries while ye may.

That’s why, when I ran into Joshua Smith of Frecon Farms at the opening of the new Kimberton Whole Foods in Exton on April 24, I was stunned, and then heartbroken, to hear that Frecon’s apple trees were unlikely to produce fruit this year. A stretch of warm weather followed by a hard freeze had doomed the crop.

And it wasn’t just Frecon. A week later, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that apples and peaches at Linvilla Orchards were either lost or in jeopardy. Soon after, New Jersey officials estimated that the state had suffered roughly $300 million in crop losses.

In a press release, representatives from Linvilla said, “For a farm deeply rooted in pick-your-own traditions and seasonal harvests, the impact is both emotional and economic.”

I feel that.

➡️ Read the full note from our publisher at gridphilly.com

✍️ Alex Mulcahy

#philadelphia #climatechange #phillyfarm #pickyourown #supportlocalfarmers
On Sept. 27, 2025, a wood thrush flew past the Dav On Sept. 27, 2025, a wood thrush flew past the David Rittenhouse Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania on its way to Central America. We know this because a tiny solar-powered radio transmitter on the bird’s back sent out a signal that was picked up by a receiver on the roof of the building. That ping landed in the database, enabling researchers to follow the bird’s migration. Now, the data from that wood thrush (known as number 63179) can help shape conservation efforts from Canada to Central America.

Motus, a collaborative effort run by Birds Canada, consists of a network of more than 2,400 receivers called stations. Those stations pick up signals from radio transmitters (“tags”) that researchers attach to birds and bats. Researchers interested in a particular species’ migration can now collect data as their animals fly all over the hemisphere.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Bernard Brown
📸 Photo courtesy of Sally Willig for the David Rittenhouse Laboratory

#ornithology #birdmigration #birdtracking #birdresearch #woodthrush
Events happening in and around Philadelphia this w Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

➡️ Juneteenth Farmers Market & Vendor Village: Join us for our kickoff Farmers Market and Vendor Village this Juneteenth! We’ll be featuring a variety of Black and Brown farmers, growers, florists, artisans, and other small businesses we absolutely LOVE. We’ll be continuing this series all through the season every first and third Friday.

When:
Friday, June 19 (5:00 PM - 8:00 PM)

Where:
One Art Community Center
1431-39 North 52nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19131

➡️ Birding with Pride with Philly Queer Birders: Come celebrate Pride Month in the Wissahickon with a morning of birdwatching and community building! Join Friends of the Wissahickon and Philly Queer Birders for a gentle hike along Forbidden Drive as we keep our eyes and ears peeled for birds summering in the park.

When:
Saturday, June 20 (8:30 AM - 10:30 AM)

Where:
Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19128

➡️ 2026 Juneteenth Parade & Festival Vendor Marketplace: Join us for the largest Juneteenth Parade & Festival in the country — a powerful, high-energy celebration of freedom, resilience, and culture.

When:
Sunday, June 21 (12:00 PM - 7:00 PM)

Where:
Malcolm X Memorial Park
5100 Pine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19143

#philadelphia #philly #phillysupportphilly #eventsinphilly #phillyevents
Patrick Berkery didn’t always love pizza. His firs Patrick Berkery didn’t always love pizza. His first memory as a youngster in Willingboro Township, New Jersey, was of a “typical neighborhood flavorless garbage pizza with rubbery cheese.” It wasn’t until his parents discovered Marra’s, the legendary Passyunk Avenue brick-oven Neapolitan-style pizzeria, that the then-8-year-old Berkery had a pizza epiphany.

In December 2025, Berkery, a senior newsletter editor for The Keystone and an in-demand professional musician, turned his passion into a biweekly newsletter, “Pizzavania: The Only Delivery That’s Better Than Pizza.”

His intent is not to review pizza places, but to share the interesting stories of regionally distinct pizzerias in a fun-fact-filled, chatty report. The newsletter provides a regular outlet for the field research Berkery has been informally conducting for decades, often aided by readers’ suggestions.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Marilyn Anthony
📸 Taylor Ecker

#philadelphia #pizzeria #pizzareview #phillypizza #pizzavania
At 86, Chestnut Hill resident Sandra Folzer regula At 86, Chestnut Hill resident Sandra Folzer regularly smashes running world records, but her pursuit of physical excellence is secondary to her environmental goal: to remove single-use plastics from racing.

In 2024, Folzer, a breast cancer survivor, shaved an astonishing 30 minutes off the 12K record in the women’s masters 85-89 age category. The next year, she set new world records in the Rothman 8K (50:39), where she finished 702nd out of 2,114 women and set a record for the indoor mile. This January, she broke that record, and then did it again in March, when she also set an 800-meter record. Folzer just keeps getting faster.

It started in 1976, when a friend told her that if she could run the Schuylkill River loop twice, she could run a marathon. She tried it and then ran the Philadelphia Marathon, finishing fifth. Three years later, she ran a 50-mile ultramarathon in Maryland and has run various distances ever since, incorporating training alongside her career as a licensed psychologist and raising her three daughters, Amma, Laura (a running partner) and Victoria, all of whom live nearby. 

When she isn’t blazing a trail with her feet, she is advocating for social change.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Dawn Kane
📸 Tracie Van Auken

#philadelphia #broadstreetrun #singleuseplastics #refillablebottles #reducewaste
If you’ve been following energy news across the re If you’ve been following energy news across the region, or even just looking at your electric bill each month, you know that rates are up. Again. Last year, PECO asked regulators for permission to charge you more while it reported $814 million in profit. Not revenue. Profit.

Here’s what that means in practical terms for your electric bill. The average residential rate has climbed steadily for years, and, due to the cost of maintaining or replacing aging infrastructure coupled with the intensely high energy demands from data centers, prices are climbing at a faster rate than they have in the past. This seems unlikely to reverse. Solar has always been a hedge against runaway prices, but the way you access that hedge has changed significantly in the last 12 months.

For years, the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit made the math simple: Install a system, get 30% back on your taxes. That credit expired at the end of 2025.

But the expiration of the tax credit didn’t kill solar economics. It changed them. And in some cases, it created better options for working families who didn’t have the tax liability to claim the credit in the first place.

➡️ Read the full story at gridphilly.com

✍️ Micah Gold-Markel

#philadelphia #solarenergy #solarpower #solarpowered #solarstates
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