Buildings are a formidable source of planet-warming pollution: Their use of fossil fuels accounts for nearly one-tenth of U.S. emissions — a contribution that triples if you account for the gas and coal burned off-site to generate electricity. In Bellingham, the buildings sector accounts for 43% of the city’s emissions, according to a 2018 update to the Climate Protection Action Plan.
In Washington, Oregon and British Columbia, where carbon-free hydropower abounds and the use of clean sources like wind and solar is growing, experts consider the shift known as electrification to be a crucial piece of the decarbonization puzzle.
Cities taking action
Real estate developers already have the technology to replace gas furnaces, water heaters and cooktops. And because cities and towns control building and energy codes, those codes are one of the few areas where municipalities have the power to mandate deep emission cuts.
During her time on the Climate Protection Action Plan Task Force, McDade conducted an unofficial study on what could be achieved if Bellingham required all new commercial and multifamily buildings taller than three stories to be entirely electric. (Washington state does not allow cities to alter energy codes for single-family homes or two- and three-story multifamily buildings.) She estimated that by 2035 new buildings would be responsible for 17% of the city’s building-sector emissions.
When McDade first raised the idea in 2018, no cities in the country had banned natural gas in new construction. That’s no longer the case.
Berkeley, California, led the charge in July 2019, when it became the first U.S. city to pass such a law. Others have followed, including 48 other municipalities in the Golden State. In 2020, the city council of Vancouver, British Columbia, mandated zero-emission space and water heating in all low-rise residential buildings built after this year. And earlier this year, Seattle passed legislation to begin phasing out natural gas in new commercial and apartment buildings taller than three stories.
There’s more such legislation coming, said Alex Ramel, a state representative from Bellingham and an activist with Stand.earth, an environmental group with offices in Bellingham, San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia. But experience shows that it’s going to be a fight.
Earlier this year, Ramel introduced a bill in the Washington House of Representatives that would prevent new construction statewide from using gas for space and water heating by 2030. Even with its nearly decade-long buffer, his bill died in committee.
“There are still plenty of folks that I would talk to about this, and they’d say, ‘Well, can we even do that? Is that efficient? Is it affordable? Is there enough electricity in the grid?’ ” said Ramel. “There are good answers to all those questions, and if you can say, ‘Yes, I can explain to you why there are good answers,’ that’s one thing.
“If you can say, ‘We're doing it in Bellingham, it’s fine,’ that’s a quicker answer and sometimes more compelling.”
That’s a big if.
Bellingham’s city staff is now drafting an ordinance based on Seattle’s, and the city council isn’t expected to consider the proposal until this winter — more than three years after Erin McDade first advocated the idea. The delay is not just a result of the slow grind of local government. Bellingham has had to contend with the natural gas industry’s well-funded national campaign against electrification.
“Knowing what we need to do is the easy part,” McDade said. “How we implement it is, of course, the complicated part.”
Campaign in support of natural gas
Home to Western Washington University, Bellingham is a progressive college town in a blue state. It’s surrounded by nature and brimming with outdoors enthusiasts. The port city sits on the ecologically abundant Salish Sea and is bordered by evergreen forests whose silhouettes cut across vibrant West Coast sunsets. On clear days, snow-capped Mount Baker (aka Kulshan) is visible from downtown. It seems like a place where passing aggressive action on climate change would be relatively painless.
In 2005, the city council committed to the Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, a global initiative enlisting municipalities to take measurable steps toward cutting emissions and becoming more sustainable. Bellingham released its Climate Protection Action Plan two years later, ultimately leading to the task force McDade joined.
The nine people on the task force were volunteers, with one exception: Lynn Murphy, an employee of Puget Sound Energy, who represented the interests of her employer as well as Cascade Natural Gas, another utility. From McDade’s perspective, everyone on the task force except Murphy believed in the goal of mapping the city’s road to zero emissions. When the group voted on its final recommendations to the city council in 2019, all the measures passed unanimously, except those relating to building electrification and a handful regarding renewable energy generation. Murphy was the only one who voted against them.
In an email to Grist, Murphy touted her 13 years advancing energy initiatives in the community. She saw it as her job to weigh the merits of different actions: “My work on the task force was to evaluate the feasibility, costs, and impacts of proposed climate action measures as directed by the [City] Council’s resolution.” Puget Sound Energy, her employer, said it “felt some of the measures lacked feasibility and understanding of the potential negative impacts to our customers,” according to Janet Kim, the utility’s public relations manager.
Alyn Spector, an energy efficiency policy manager at Cascade Natural Gas, said in an email to Grist that the region cannot afford to limit innovation to “a single fuel source or technology, which is the basis of electrification.” The company believes that the best process empowers utilities to “embrace a suite of decarbonization solutions,” he added, including improved energy efficiency, hydrogen and renewable natural gas.
Renewable natural gas is a catchall term for methane captured from landfills, wastewater treatment plants and the manure pits found on animal farms. Environmental organizations have criticized its use in buildings on the basis that it is too expensive, in limited supply and introduces similar safety and health risks as natural gas, including methane leaks that contribute to global warming, pipeline explosions and indoor air pollution from combustion by-products such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.
Critics of electrification launched a public relations campaign when it appeared likely it would be included in the Bellingham task force recommendations. A building industry group, with the support of Cascade Natural Gas, sent pamphlets to homeowners in the latter half of 2019, claiming that replacing gas appliances from a typical Bellingham home would cost $36,050 to $82,750.
The pamphlet, which featured data from Puget Sound Energy, as well as fossil fuel and construction companies, concluded that going all electric could price more than 9,000 Bellingham households out of the housing market. It urged citizens to attend task force meetings to voice concerns.
Members of the local building and real estate industries were frustrated with what they viewed as a lack of engagement by the task force and the city, said Rob Lee, executive officer and director of government affairs at the Building Industry Association of Whatcom County, which created the pamphlet. Lee said his group believes in a property owner’s right to choose their energy source, rather than have it mandated. The costs in the pamphlet, he explained, were calculated by local builders.
Omitted from the pamphlet, however, were some facts about building electrification: For example, while heat pumps are more expensive than standard air conditioners, they’re often more efficient than natural gas furnaces and can save homeowners money on utility bills. Heat pumps also provide extra value to homes and businesses during heat waves, such as the deadly heat dome that slammed Cascadia this past summer.
The pamphlet also didn’t mention that Bellingham’s task force recommended replacing water- and space-heating equipment at the end of its life, not immediately, an important distinction. The real cost is not simply the full price of new electric equipment, but the difference between new natural gas equipment and new electric equipment.
That cost disparity is lessening. In fact, there is now evidence that all-electric construction is cheaper than the status quo of equipping a building to use both natural gas and electricity.
But the industry’s message took hold, McDade said. “They scared people pretty bad,” she said. “If I didn’t know anything about this, and I hadn’t been a wonk and done the math, I would have been scared.”
When McDade sat down to calculate the costs herself, the numbers penciled out much differently. She estimated that the cash cost of electrifying an existing building as its equipment ages out is, at most, $11,100, about one-third of the industry’s lowest estimate. She also estimated that building electrification would save a single-family household between $8,000 and $12,600 in utility bills over 20 years.
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