By Michael Gold
Homeowners and multi-family apartment building owners in Westchester looking to reduce their energy bills and keep their homes warmer in the winter can use a program promoted by Westchester and New York State to identify where heat is escaping and close these gaps.
As the weather turns colder, it’s a smart move to consider.
The weatherization program is available through the Westchester Community Opportunity Program (West COP) and the New York State Energy Hubs program.
To register for the service, you need to verify your identity, address, income and Social Security number with WestCOP. If you qualify, an approved contractor and auditor will conduct an examination of the structure in order to locate areas in which warm air inside the building is escaping. The next step is to seal these gaps to ensure the building has a tight envelope.
“If you have broken windows or a malfunctioning boiler in your building or home, an audit identifies exactly where air is leaking out”, said Marvin Church, vice president and co-founder of Comrie Enterprises, an approved sub-contractor for the New York State Energy and Research Authority (NYSERDA) Clean Heating and Cooling program, which created the energy hubs effort.
Church and his business partner, Diana Williams, also lead Environmental Leaders of Color (ELOC), a nonprofit organization best known for its summer energy and environmental program for qualified high school teens.
Roofs and wall cavities are common, vulnerable spots where outside air can penetrate.
“A poorly insulated home works like a sieve,” Church explained. “Winter cold and summer heat seep in through the roof, windows and walls, forcing furnaces and air conditioners to run nonstop, and driving up utility bills,” he stated.
If your building or home is not well insulated it will be more likely that outside air will infiltrate the structure and make it warmer in the summer or colder in the winter. That means your heating or cooling system will have to work harder to keep the temperature comfortable.
“Contractors often use infrared cameras to measure thermal gaps and locate air leaks,” Church pointed out. “Creating a tighter building envelope through proper insulation is critical. It directly lowers your heating and cooling costs.”
New York State Rebate Program
NYSERDA’s Comfort Home program offers state rebate and cost reductions on materials used for weatherization. Federal tax incentives for making your home more energy efficient expired in 2025.
Improving the energy efficiency of your lights is also part of an audit.
“Installing motion-sensor lighting lowers electricity bills immediately,” Church explained. “The sensors automatically turn lights on and off as people enter and leave a room, eliminating wasted power.”
The Heat Pump Energy Efficiency Advantage
Heat pumps are another important way to run your home or building at top energy efficiency. They offer a clean energy heating and cooling alternative to fossil fuels, and are often cheaper than burning oil, gas or propane.
Comrie collaborated with NYSERDA, and the Urban League of Westchester to help educate homeowners, churches, landlords, storefront owners, and other businesses about the benefits of switching to heat pumps, to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels to power their electrical, heating and ventilation needs, a program called ACE (Adopt Clean Energy).
“We hosted community seminars explaining both air-source and geothermal systems, working as a NYSERDA contractor, from 2022 to 2025,” Church explained.
In winter, air source heat pumps take air from outside and move it inside your home or apartment. In summer, air source heat pumps transfer warm air outside. They can be used for a single room, or an entire house. Heat pumps use no oil, propane or gas, so they’re generally cheaper to use than fossil fuels.
They’re also more energy efficient. My brother uses five air-source heat pumps in his home in upstate New York, two on the first floor of the house and three upstairs for the bedrooms.
Geothermal heat pumps take heat from the ground in winter time and carry it by underground pipes into your home or building. In the summer, geothermal heat pumps move cool air from the ground and carry it into your house.
Like air source heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps don’t require fossil fuels. They’re more energy efficient than burning oil and gas for heating and cooling, which means they save you money. I have had a geothermal system in my house for several years and it works beautifully. It does require your contractor to drill a few hundred feet into the ground.
Church mentioned a man who owned a 8,000 square foot home and installed air-source and geothermal heat pumps, as well as a solar system. He lowered his utility bill from $8,000 to about $1,500 a month.
The ACE program also provided training for people to work as heat pump installation specialists.
“We graduated 35 participants, to prepare them for the field and helping them pass the federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) 608 certification exam,” Church stated. “Seventy five percent of our students earned their certification.”
A Green Energy Park for Mount Vernon
Comrie is also exploring a proposal for a 12-story apartment building on the site of the old YMCA on South Second Avenue in Mount Vernon, for teachers, police officers, fire fighters, nurses, health care workers and college students.
The building would also house a number of environmentally oriented businesses, essentially a green energy park.
“Mount Vernon has incredible creative energy,” Church pointed out. “We want to co-anchor an arts district while developing a green energy park where companies can operate and train residents in solar, geothermal and air source heat pumps, and other clean technologies.”
Obtaining funds for construction is the biggest challenge so far.
“Money is tight and interest rates have risen, so we are actively seeking state funding support,” Church explained.
Greenlight Award
I also asked Church for an update on ELOC’s recent work.
ELOC is once again competing in a Westchester high school environmental program, called the Greenlight Award, sponsored by Bedford 2030. Bedford 2030 is a community group based in Central Westchester, which works to conserve natural resources and reduce carbon emissions.
The teams are tasked with creating an advocacy or technological innovation project that improves environmental sustainability and cuts carbon emissions. Typical projects might focus on solar and batter storage installations, improving air quality, properly disposing of cooking oil, energy efficiency, reforestation, recycling or composting food scraps.
In 2025, ELOC’s Don’t Strain Your Drain team earned third place in the contest, for their project in Mount Vernon, which collected 51 gallons of used cooking oil in the city, preventing it from being poured down the sink.
“Improperly dumped grease clogs sewers, worsens neighborhood flooding during heavy rain and pollutes local waterways,” Church explained.
The oil can flow into local rivers, from the Saw Mill to the Hudson, further polluting the environment.
ELOC has earned a grant from the Long Island Sound Community Impact Fund (LICSIF) to expand its cooking oil collection program. So far, it’s prevented 600 gallons of cooking oil from being poured down the train.
The oil collection drive is expanding from Mount Vernon, New Rochelle and Port Chester to Tuckahoe, Mamaroneck, and sections in Pelham and Eastchester bordering the Hutchinson River, which has suffered the scars of pollution for far too long.
“Student environmental ambassadors from Mount Vernon, New Rochelle and Port Chester will lead education campaigns about proper disposal of fats, oils, and grease (FOG), medications, personal care products, pesticides and other household pollutants that contaminate local rivers and Long Island Sound,” states ELOC’s grant description on the LISCIF website.
“Our expanded ‘Don’t Pour Your Feast Grease Down The Drain’ initiative targets major holidays when cooking oil disposal peaks,” the grant description says.
Also, ELOC is launching a green jobs training program for young adults 17 to 24 years of age, in Yonkers, Mount Vernon and New Rochelle. They will get trained in geothermal heat pump installation and leadership skills. For more information, email contactus@eloc.earth, go to the Contact page of the ELOC.Earth website, which can be found by clicking the “About” drop down menu on the site, or calling 914-901-3562.
Additionally, ELOC is running a free advanced Saturday computer science academy, educating high school students on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and machine learning, at Westchester Community College’s Mount Vernon campus.
The organization, which just won an award for being a “small nonprofit changemaker” from Nonprofit Westchester, is working with Westchester County on ways to reduce waste and improve recycling awareness and efforts.
They’re offering visitors to their ELOC.Earth website an opportunity to take a short survey on their recycling habits, knowledge about the services offered at Westchester’s household materials recovery facility in Valhalla (H-MRF) and ways to improve residents’ access to the recycling resources available in the county. The goal is to help figure out ways to improve the county’s recycling services.
Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers.