Building electrification

Written By George Kontaroudis

"Don't build anything new that connects to a flame". Those words of famed climate journalist Bill McKibben appeared in the New Yorker at the beginning of this year. The reason that this the only way to move towards a zero emissions future is because electricity is the only energy source that has the potential to have no emissions associated with it. I recently came across a book called Regeneration, by Paul Hawken, where he outlines actions that humanity can take to end the climate crisis in one generation. One out of the many dictates in the book is full electrification.

And just last week the NYC City Council passed Int. 2317-2021, a bill that in essence bans all fossil fuel combustion in new buildings starting in 2024 with its full effect taking place in 2028 with large multifamily buildings with affordable units.

Source: Urban Green Council, NYC’s all electric building law fact sheet

Following the City, the State legislature is also looking into introducing a bill that would ban fossil fuel combustion in new buildings and major renovations in the years to come.

But my question is: why does NYC need to wait until 2027 for large multi-family buildings to convert? It is known that any building system, whether that is gas or electric has a useful life of around 30 years before it needs to be replaced. Under the timeline of this law, buildings that get permitted by the end of 2027, would most likely be built and occupied by 2030 and will have their gas infrastructure in place until 2060, which is 10 years past the Paris agreement for complete decarbonization. Berkeley already banned new gas hookups for multifamily buildings in 2019, and more than 50 other municipalities in California have since done so with even more states following suit proving that the technology exists and is affordable.

Another advantage of electrification in buildings is that the overall amount of energy needed is less, and also, perhaps more importantly, by removing combustion from inside our dwelling units, with gas ranges, and in our common spaces, with gas and oil  furnaces, we create safer and healthier spaces. The Rocky Mountain Institute issued a report in 2020 about the health and air quality impacts of gas ranges. It's not good.

In New York City many new residential multifamily buildings, whether high-performance or not, already use heat pumps for heating and cooling, but still rely on gas for cooking and domestic hot water. Gas cooking is driven by the misconception of the efficiency and speed of induction cooking, while until recently heating water centrally was not as efficient with electricity, but that has now changed.

Mitsubishi “Hyper Heat” heat pump atop a passiv haus. Credit: Steven Vance

The bill passed by the city council was supported by many environmental and professional organizations, such as the Urban Green Council, which produced a valuable fact sheet about the bill, and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. RMI calculated that the benefits of this legislation translate to 2.1 million tons of carbon emissions saved by 2040, which is the equivalent of taking 450,000 cars off the road for a year.

There is concern about the added load to the electrical grid, but the Urban Green Council issued a report that goes along with a mapping tool, which found that the current grid in the city can accommodate 42% more demand in the winter months, as currently peak usage comes in the summer due to air conditioning. With the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps for heating and hot water, peak usage would shift to winter, and summer use would drop as heat pumps are more efficient than window air conditioners.

Source: Urban Green Council, Grid Ready report

The other concern that has been voiced is about the availability of technology. Naysayers of this new law say that we are not technologically ready to swap all gas for electric in homes. However, heat pump technology has been around for decades, it is widely used in Europe and Asia and is making its way into the US market as well. The technology is proven, and is economic. Project Drawdown calculates that heat pump implementation by 2050 could have a global cost of just 7.5% of its net savings with 5.2 gigatons of reduced CO2.

As Langdon Morris and Farah Naz put it in their new book Net Zero City, for every year of inadequate progress, the time window to reach Net Zero is two years shorter, meaning that for each year we delay, we have to then work twice as fast in our progress to Net Zero. The technology and knowledge to eliminate fossil fuels from our building stock  is already here. No new investments in gas infrastructure ought be done at this point, as not only we are moving away from humanity's net zero target, but we are also locking assets. Gas is a bad investment, and the new NYC law makes that even more clear.

George Kontaroudis
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