By Hudson Sangree

The electrification of residential and commercial structures is receiving increased attention at the start of 2020.

The City Council of Bellingham, Wash., is weighing a proposal banning gas heat from all buildings, including existing structures. If it adopts the measure, the city of 90,000 would go a step further than Berkeley, Calif., which last year became the first city to ban natural gas in new construction.

California lawmakers announced a “green new deal” proposal Monday that calls for the state to accelerate its goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Though still sketchy, the plan eventually could include building electrification mandates similar to those in proposals at the national, state and local levels in 2019. Los Angeles, for instance, adopted a plan last year that required city-owned buildings to become all-electric.

The Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy, released a report Monday showing that two states — California and New York — are responsible for 18% of building emissions nationally. The report cited U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

Both California and New York have pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050, but reaching such ambitious goals is proving problematic. In stakeholder meetings and conferences over the past year, industry experts have expressed confidence that they can reduce carbon emissions by 80% in the next decade but eliminating the remaining 20% remains elusive.

Electrifying buildings is seen by many as a key to achieving at least a portion of those reductions, along with the electrification of the transportation sector and phasing out natural gas plants in favor of renewable resources.

“Across the U.S. economy, gas has now surpassed coal in its overall contribution to climate change,” the RMI report said. “With coal’s decline, electric-power sector emissions have fallen by a quarter in the past decade, but emissions from fuels burned in buildings has not budged.”

The bulk of those emissions, about 450 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, come from gas burned in buildings for heating and cooking, the report said.

“There is precedent for rapid change in this sector: In the 1940s, coal was the dominant heating fuel in U.S. homes, but by the 1970s, its share had fallen to below 5% of households, and it was virtually eliminated by the 1980s,” it said.

“Although gas was the primary replacement, electricity has gradually eroded gas’s share over the past several decades. The most recent data shows that 25% of U.S. households and 29% of commercial buildings are all-electric, up from 21% each over roughly a decade ago.”

Utilities, Environmentalists Aligned

Electrification of buildings is controversial for home and business owners, who don’t want to give up their gas cooktops or to make expensive upgrades. (Some cities, including Seattle, have begun offering financial incentives to switch to electric heat pumps.)

But it’s popular with utilities that see electrification as a major source of demand and revenue going forward. The Electric Power Research Institute estimated in mid-2018 that electrification of transportation and buildings could boost U.S. electric load growth by as much as 52% by 2050. (See State Regulators Hear Challenges, Promise of Electrification.)

Edison International, which owns Southern California Edison, released a report in April touting the benefits of building electrification.

“We confirm that the electrification of buildings represents an important opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings both in the near term and long term, and can lead to consumer capital cost savings, bills savings and lifecycle savings in many circumstances,” the utility said.

The utilities’ views are in line with environmentalists, who laud the efforts of Berkeley and like-minded cities that want to do away with gas heating and cooking appliances.

“Climate-aware consumers and policymakers know too much is at stake to keep constructing new buildings that depend on an antiquated and polluting energy source, locking them into decades of higher costs and pollution,” Pierre Delforge and Merrian Borgeson, senior scientists with the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in a blog post Sunday.

“New buildings are the obvious place to start,” they said. “All-electric homes cost less and are faster to build than those heated with gas.”