Members of the Las Cruces Sustainability Office held meetings with residents in October 2024 to gauge interest and offer information about heat pumps. (Courtesy of the City of Las Cruces / Kelsey Hiss)
Las Cruces is moving forward with a project to cool the city’s hottest homes, but on a much smaller scale, city officials said, after the federal government pulled funds with little official communication.
“I don’t want to say canceled because formally no one has told us that,” said City of Las Cruces Sustainability Officer Jenney Hernandez. “But no one has also told us or talked to us since announcing that they have been — so to speak — on pause.”
Since 2022, the city was committed for $1.5 million in state and U.S. Department of Energy grants to install the heat pumps with a plan to outfit between 130 to 150 homes in two years.
Between funding received from the New Mexico Legislature and some leftover federal funds and vouchers, the program has about $700,000, Hernandez said, nearly half of what the city had secured initially.
“Now that all of this happened, it just means we have to reduce the initial amounts of home we anticipated to serve,” Hernandez said. “Quite honestly, we’re limping a lot at this point.”
The cooling program is only becoming more urgent as increasing heat threatens Las Cruces residents’ health.
“It’s a life threat for people experiencing high temperatures in their homes, with no other options for cooling,” she said.
In 2020, Las Cruces mapped the urban heat island effect by measuring the heat-trapping power of concrete and asphalt and the cooling impact of shaded green spaces. Las Cruces found the effect made low-income neighborhoods as much as 14 degrees hotter than higher-income neighborhoods, making it feel like 112 degrees when the air temperature measured 107 degrees.
These neighborhoods include some of the city’s oldest homes with many low-income families or seniors.
“You have a very sensitive population residing in these homes that have to deal with almost three months straight of triple-degree weather,” Hernandez said. “If you’re lucky, a swamp cooler in triple-degree weather and humidity will cool your house to about 90 degrees, which, after several consecutive days, is really detrimental to your health.”
Based on those findings, the city developed a plan to bring cooling into low-income neighborhoods by installing all-electric heat pumps. Despite the name, the heat pump also offers efficient cooling of outside or underground air. Heat pumps work in more conditions than swamp coolers and may be cheaper than air conditioning over time, Hernandez said, noting incentives for such pumps through both the federal Inflation Reduction Act and state programs.
In January, when about to sign one grant contract for $400,000, the city received an email from the grant contractors that said “The DOE team has asked us to reschedule all sessions for the rest of the month,” and which canceled all meetings booked into April.
A second DOE grant, which Las Cruces first won in 2022, and was anticipating securing another $400,000 from in March, was “postponed,” according to an email from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Hernandez said federal agencies have told the city the funding is under review, but has no answers for a timeline or if funding opportunities will be restored.
“Our office of Sustainability has — I don’t want to say lost — but is being ghosted on the money that has been awarded,” Hernandez said.
Source NM emailed requests for comment on Wednesday to the U.S. Department of Energy, but had not received a response by publication time.
The city is committing to selecting 30 pilot homes in the first year, and anticipates adding another 40 in the second year, much smaller than the initial scope. Hernandez said she’s seeking additional funding from outside grant sources, but doesn’t know if the program can continue beyond the first two years.
“I don’t know if there will be a third and fourth year,” she said. “And if there is, the amounts the residents will have to pay out of pocket will be much more substantial than we ever wanted, because we don’t have the money to help any more.”
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