When it comes to all-electric buildings, California moved last week at the policy equivalent of the speed of light.
San Francisco officials said on Tuesday that they are introducing legislation that would be much like Berkeley’s ban on natural gas hookups in new construction.
Just a few days earlier, the utility Pacific Gas & Electric said it would support the growing push for state rules that require new buildings to be all-electric.
These are all steps toward the possibility that there will be a statewide policy after California officials decide on revisions to the state building code that would take effect in 2023.
The pace of change is so rapid, “it’s taken even some of the advocates by surprise,” said Panama Bartholomy, director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a group of companies, advocacy groups and local governments working to move California toward all-electric buildings.
This speed is in contrast to previous changes, such as the decades it took for the public and policymakers to embrace rooftop solar, Bartholomy said.
His organization started in 2018. Berkeley’s gas ban happened in 2019, and now 30 California cities have policies that ban gas or at least encourage all-electric construction in some way. The movement is happening in other states as well, with cities in Massachusetts also passing rules and many others considering similar actions.
But Bartholomy said he also is well aware of how far there is to go in his group’s efforts, considering that only about one percent of California’s buildings are all-electric.
I asked Bartholomy for the big picture of why it’s important to decarbonize buildings. He said that all-electric construction is essential because new natural gas hookups are locking in the use of gas for decades at a time, when the entire economy needs to stop using fossil fuels. This electrification is part of broader changes that would include a transition to relying completely on renewable sources for electricity and all-electric vehicles for transportation.
“Ultimately, every customer we hook up to the gas network is digging the hole that much deeper, and we’re installing a 60- to 80-year asset for a building in a state here in California which has said in the next 25 years we need to completely decarbonize,” he said.
San Francisco Proposal Would Be Landmark for All-Electric Buildings
The San Francisco legislation was introduced on Tuesday by Rafael Mandelman, a member of the city and county Board of Supervisors, joined by Debbie Raphael, director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
“This ordinance is San Francisco’s way of acknowledging that we do not want to build in a dependence on natural gas,” Raphael said in a news conference. “We need to make sure our buildings of the future are resilient and ready for a city that is committed to tackling climate change.”
If adopted, the rules could ban natural gas in nearly all new buildings starting in January.
San Francisco wouldn’t be the largest city in California to adopt such an ordinance — that would be San Jose — but it would be a milestone in the growing popularity of these types of city actions.
PG&E Becomes Largest Gas Utility to Support Rules for All-Electric Construction
PG&E said in a letter last week that it supports cities’ push for electrification. The utility, which is trying to emerge from bankruptcy, said it favors all-electric buildings “when feasible and cost-effective,” leaving uncertainty about when, and to what extent, it may back electric construction.
The letter makes official a stance that electrification advocates have known about for a while, which is that PG&E has not been standing in the way as cities in its territory have adopted rules banning gas and requiring new buildings to be all-electric.
But it’s significant that the company is making this unofficial stance an official one.
“It’s a really big deal,” said Bartholomy, whose group’s membership includes PG&E. “They are the fourth largest distributor of natural gas in the country. That wasn’t done lightly. They spent a year and half internally working on every aspect of this.”
But PG&E also sells electricity, so a transition to all-electric construction doesn’t necessarily hurt its bottom line.
In other places, gas utilities are the main adversaries of proposals to require all-electric construction.
How Do Low-Income Residents Fit into the All-Electric Movement?
With dozens of California cities passing building codes requiring all-electric or mostly-electric new construction, Srinidhi Sampath Kumar, sustainable housing policy and program manager at the California Housing Partnership, is working to make sure affordable housing is included in the transition.
The combined financial and health benefits of electrification—the use of natural gas in households is linked to respiratory illnesses—make eliminating gas from low-income residences an urgent concern and will ensure housing remains affordable in the coming years, she said.
California’s building market is transitioning increasingly toward electric construction.
Unlike with standard construction, affordable housing developers can’t just make up for higher costs associated with electric construction by raising rent to compensate, since the goal is to keep rent as low as possible, Kumar said.
She hopes that a state initiative designed to reduce the carbon footprint of new low-income residential buildings will help facilitate the shift from gas to electric construction for affordable housing developers, who already face limited budgets and tight timelines.
Many such developers are new to all-electric construction. If funding is specifically allocated to provide technical assistance, it will make the shift more feasible, she said.
But “new construction is really just the starting point,” she said. California’s existing buildings will need to be retrofitted to rely on electricity instead of natural gas.
The state’s Low-Income Weatherization Program electrifies existing affordable housing, but it currently has an 18,000-family waitlist.
All-electric retrofitting is riskier and more complicated than starting from scratch. It involves considerations like rewiring and upgrading of the technologies already in place. Once this new equipment is installed, tenant protection becomes the next concern.
With these upgraded technologies, “what are utility bills going to look like?” Kumar asked. It’s one of many questions that government and nonprofit leaders will be asking as all-electric buildings become the norm in California.
Reporter Nicole Pollack contributed to this story.
Dan Gearino covers the U.S. Midwest, part of ICN’s National Environment Reporting Network. His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICN’s Inside Clean Energy newsletter. This column is published as a collaboration between the Bay Area News Group and InsideClimate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
