Oct 30, 2025

Ari Matusiak

Co-founder, president, and CEO, Rewiring America

Ari Matusiak

Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo)

Ari Matusiak is the co-founder of Rewiring America, which aims to transform household energy infrastructure to address the climate and energy crisis in the U.S. Rewiring America has helped popularize heat pumps and other electric appliances by building products like personalized planning tools to help more than 15,000 homeowners understand available federal incentives and map out electrification upgrades like EVs, solar, and more. They’ve also invested in programs that educate homeowners on the process and benefits of electric appliances upgrades by training more than 1,500 neighborhood volunteer coaches. In September, Rewiring America partnered with BetterHVAC to launch a nationwide network connecting households with hundreds of trusted contractors who can implement electrification projects.

What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?

The single most important action we need in the next year is for utilities, governments, and companies—especially hyperscalers—to recognize and invest in households as energy infrastructure. We are living through the convergence of three forces: unprecedented load growth, a worsening affordability crisis, and the urgency of climate action. Household upgrades are the fastest way to add capacity to the grid, lower costs for families, and reduce emissions. Our latest analysis shows upgrading households to efficient electric devices could offset all projected data center demand growth over the next five years.

Treating households as energy infrastructure is not just a climate strategy, it is the pathway to reconciling affordability, reliability, and decarbonization while renewing the bonds of community. Once we lean into that work, the solutions—policy interventions, demand aggregation, and durable private investment—will come rushing through.

What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year?

This year I want my family to lean less on our gas car, which has basically become our “peaker plant” whenever kids’ activities pile up; tennis, flag football, soccer, two different school dropoffs—parents know this drill. We already have an EV, our daily driver, but the gas car sneaks into the mix more than I’d like. Maybe this will be the year that we fully retire that peaker plant and become a full EV household. At the same time our family has really taken to composting with the Mill Food Recycler. It really taught me how fast a new habit can stick. It’s become so normal in our house that “just mill it” is now a verb. The persuasion campaign for my own parents to follow suit is underway.

What is a climate solution that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?

A climate solution that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is insurance. As climate impacts intensify, the models we use to insure risk are breaking down, leaving households, small businesses, and entire communities exposed. In many parts of the country, families are already losing access to affordable homeowners’ insurance because of wildfire, flood, or storm risk. Without viable insurance, communities can’t build resilience, families can’t protect their assets, and entire local economies are destabilized.

We need new approaches that treat insurance as part of the climate solution. That could mean public-private partnerships to spread risk more fairly, new tools to reward investments in resilience and electrification, or community-based insurance pools that keep coverage available when the private market retreats. Getting insurance right is fundamental, because if people can’t protect their homes or communities, every other climate solution—from rooftop solar to heat pumps to EVs—is at risk of being out of reach.

What gives you hope about the future of the planet?

What gives me hope is that the solutions we need for the planet are also solutions that make everyday life better. This isn’t about sacrifice or giving something up. It’s about moving from a more constrained way of living to one that is more expansive, affordable, and inclusive—where households save money, communities are stronger, and the air is cleaner. That vision is inherently hopeful, because people want a better future for themselves, their kids, and their grandkids. The climate movement gains momentum when it’s not framed as loss, but as the promise of a better life.

If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next COP, what would you say?

If I could stand up at the next COP, I would tell world leaders this: stop treating climate action and economic well-being as a trade-off. It is a false choice to say that if we commit to solving the climate crisis, people will be worse off, more constrained, or more divided. The opposite is true. When leaders put people at the center of the climate agenda—making homes more affordable to run, communities healthier, and economies more resilient—they are also meeting their moral and political responsibility to take care of their people today, while investing in our shared and better future.

The future we should be aiming for is not an abstract utopia, but a tangible reality that people can feel and experience in their daily lives: lower bills, cleaner air, more secure jobs, stronger communities. Reimagining the social compact in this way is not only the path to a safer climate, it is also how leaders can deliver a better present for their citizens.

Correction, Oct. 30

The original version of this article misstated the number of neighborhood volunteer coaches Rewiring America has trained. It is more than 1,500 not 13,000.