At the end of 2019, just a few weeks before the first coronavirus case in the United States was discovered 60 miles south, the Bellingham City Council in Washington, DC, gathered to hear from the Climate Protection Action Plan Task Force: Nine community members are responsible for planning roads Bellingham's map of achieving its carbon emission reduction goals.

In front of a crowded house, the working group presented more than 50 suggestions to Parliament for most of the 90 minutes. One thing that sets the audience apart: the phasing out of natural gas in Bellingham buildings[1] to support electricity, starting with new buildings, and gradually spreading energy to existing businesses and households.

According to the group’s proposal, gas stoves and water tanks will be replaced with heat pumps [2], which run on electricity to heat and cool buildings and effectively heat water. Gas stoves and ovens will be replaced by electric or induction[3] models.

The public comment period later that day lasted nearly two hours. Most people who oppose the measure are members of the natural gas, construction and real estate industries, and a few community members have joined.

An older man wearing a red Trump 2020 hat stepped onto the podium and called the working group's speech "stupid." Another commented: "How many people really believe that cooking and heating with fire in winter is a major threat to humans? Sorry, it just doesn't resonate with me." One-third of people warned the city council if Without natural gas, restaurants or small businesses will not survive. Calm commenters asked the committee to continue to study the cost and feasibility of operating buildings without fossil fuels.

Local environmental groups have summoned other community members to speak out for this measure. The owner of a local green construction company assured him that he could build an all-electric house at market prices. An 18-year-old woman urged the local government to take action on climate change for the benefit of her generation.

There are also parents who worry about their children's future on an overheated planet. "We cannot breathe carbon dioxide, nor can we eat money," one person said. "When my children look at me after 20 years, I don't want them to say,'You did nothing.'"

In 2018, Bellingham pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions[4] to less than 85% of 2000 levels by the middle of this century.

Erin McDade, a member of the team working on Construction 2030, said that the collision of natural gas is inevitable. Construction 2030 is a non-profit organization dedicated to decarbonizing [5] buildings. She said that if households and businesses continue to use natural gas, the city will not be able to meet its emission targets. "The use of on-site fossil fuels in our buildings is not carbon neutral," McDade said. "Whether [the city] knew it or not, when they wrote this down in the climate action plan, they had already had a conversation."

Buildings are an important source of global warming pollution: their use of fossil fuels accounts for nearly one-tenth of U.S. emissions—a contribution that would triple if natural gas and coal burned off-site to generate electricity were considered. According to the 2018 Climate Protection Action Plan update, in Bellingham, the construction sector accounts for 43% of the city's emissions.

In Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, carbon-free hydropower abounds, and the use of clean energy such as wind and solar is also increasing. Experts believe that this transformation, called electrification, is a key part of the decarbonization problem.

Real estate developers already have the technology to replace gas stoves, water heaters and stoves. Because cities and towns control building and energy regulations, these regulations are one of the few areas where municipalities have the right to require deep emission reductions.

During his tenure in the Climate Protection Action Plan Task Force, McDade conducted an unofficial study to study what would be achieved if Bellingham required all new commercial and multi-family houses above three floors to use electricity. (Washington State does not allow cities to change energy regulations for single-family homes or two- and three-story multi-family buildings.) She estimates that by 2035, new buildings will account for 17% of the city's building sector emissions.

When McDade first proposed this idea in 2018, no city in the country banned the use of natural gas in new buildings. This is no longer the case.

Berkeley, California, pioneered this accusation in July 2019, when it became the first city in the United States to pass such a law. Others followed closely, including 48 other cities in Golden State. In 2020, the City Council of Vancouver, British Columbia, requires all low-rise residential buildings built after this year to achieve zero-emission space and hot water supply. Earlier this year, Seattle passed legislation to begin phasing out natural gas in new commercial and apartment buildings over three floors.

State representative from Bellingham and an activist for the environmental protection organization Stand.earth, Alex Ramel said that there are more such legislations coming soon. Stand.earth is a company based in Belling, San Francisco. Umm and an environmental organization with offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, but experience shows that this will be a struggle.

Earlier this year, Lamel introduced a bill in the Washington House of Representatives that would prevent new buildings statewide from using natural gas for space and water heating by 2030. Even with a buffer of nearly ten years, his bill died in the committee.

"There are still a lot of people who will talk to me about this, and they will say,'Well, can we even do this? Is this efficient? Is it affordable? Is there enough power in the grid?'" Mel said. "All these questions have good answers, if you can say,'Yes, I can explain to you why there are good answers,' that's one thing.

"If you can say,'We do this in Bellingham, that's great,' this is a faster answer and sometimes more compelling."

This is a big if.

Bellingham staff are now drafting a Seattle-based ordinance, and the city council is not expected to consider the proposal until this winter-three years after Erin McDade first proposed the idea After more. The delay is not only the result of slow actions by local governments. Bellingham had to contend with the well-funded national campaign against electrification in the natural gas industry.

"Knowing what we need to do is the easy part," McDade said. "Of course, how we implement it is the complicated part."

Support the movement of natural gas

Bellingham is a progressive university city located in the Blue State. It is surrounded by nature and full of outdoor enthusiasts. This port city is located on the ecologically rich Salish Sea, surrounded by evergreen forests, with its silhouette crossing the vibrant west coast sunset. On a clear day, you can see the snow-capped Mount Baker (aka Mount Chur) from the city center. This seems to be a relatively easy place to take positive action on climate change.

In 2005, the City Council committed to the “City Climate Protection Campaign”, a global initiative designed to mobilize municipalities to take measurable steps to reduce emissions and improve sustainability. Two years later, Bellingham released a climate protection action plan, which eventually led McDade to join the working group.

The nine members of the working group are all volunteers, with one exception: Lynn Murphy, an employee of Puget Sound Energy, representing the interests of her employer and another utility company, Cascade Natural Gas. From McDade’s perspective, except Murphy, everyone in the working group believes in the goal of mapping a city’s zero-emission roads. When the organization voted on its final recommendations to the City Council in 2019, all measures were passed unanimously except for measures related to building electrification and a few measures related to renewable energy power generation. Murphy was the only one who voted against them.

In an email to Grist, Murphy touted her 13 years of experience in advancing energy projects in the community. She considers weighing the advantages of different behaviors as her own job. "My work in the working group is to evaluate the feasibility, cost and impact of the proposed climate action measures based on the resolutions of the [city] committee." According to Janet Kim, the public relations manager of the utility company, her Employer Puget Sound Energy stated that it “sees that certain measures are not feasible and lack an understanding of the potential negative effects of customers”.

Alyn Spector, energy efficiency policy manager at Cascade Natural Gas, stated in an email to Grist that the region cannot limit innovation to "a single fuel source or technology, which is the basis of electrification." The company believes that the best process enables utility companies to "adopt a set of decarbonization solutions," including improved energy efficiency, hydrogen [6] and renewable natural gas.

Renewable natural gas is a general term for methane captured from landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and manure pits on animal farms. Environmental groups criticized its use in buildings on the grounds that it is too expensive, has limited supply, and poses safety and health risks similar to natural gas, including methane leaks that cause global warming, pipe explosions, and indoor air caused by burning. Pollution-products such as nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.

Critics of electrification have launched a public relations campaign because it seems likely to be included in the recommendations of the Bellingham Working Group. With the support of Cascade Natural Gas, a construction industry group sent a brochure to homeowners in the second half of 2019, claiming that replacing gas appliances from a typical Bellingham home would cost between US$36,050 and US$82,750.

This booklet features data from Puget Sound Energy and fossil fuel and construction companies, and concludes that all-electricity may remove more than 9,000 Bellingham homes from the real estate market. It urged citizens to attend working group meetings to express concerns.

Rob Lee, executive officer and director of government affairs of the Whatcom County Construction Industry Association, said members of the local construction and real estate industry were frustrated by their perception of the lack of involvement of the working group and the city government. booklet. Lee said his team believes that owners have the right to choose their energy, not enforce it. He explained that the cost in the brochure was calculated by the local builder.

However, some facts about the electrification of buildings are omitted from the brochure: for example, although heat pumps are more expensive than standard air conditioners, they are generally more efficient than natural gas stoves and can save homeowners on water and electricity bills. Heat pumps also provide additional value to homes and businesses during heat waves, such as the deadly heat dome that hit Cascadia this summer.

The brochure also fails to mention that Bellingham’s working group recommends replacing water and space heating equipment at the end of its useful life, rather than immediately, which is an important difference. The real cost is not only the full price of the new electrical equipment, but the price difference between the new natural gas equipment and the new electrical equipment.

This cost difference is shrinking. In fact, there is now evidence that all-electric buildings are cheaper than the current situation where buildings are equipped with natural gas and electricity.

McDade said, but the industry's information has gained a foothold. "They scared people. If I didn't know anything about it, and I was not a nerd and did math, I would be scared."

When McDade sat down to calculate the cost for himself, the numbers drawn in pencil were very different. She estimates that as the equipment ages, the cash cost of powering existing buildings is at most $11,100, which is about one-third of the industry's lowest estimate. She also estimates that building electrification will save single-family households between US$8,000 and US$12,600 in utility bills within 20 years.

Similar battles are raging across the country. In the Pacific Northwest, natural gas companies have invested millions of dollars in local efforts to promote fossil fuels as part of a clean energy future. According to reports, in New England, a large utility company outlined a strategy to prevent decarbonization in buildings at an industry conference earlier this year. Several states, including Texas, North Carolina, and Florida, have passed or introduced legislation to deprive municipalities of the power to phase out natural gas.

According to advocates to ban the use of natural gas, every city that passes the building electrification ordinance provides lessons for those who want to be the next city to adopt the electrification ordinance.

Sean Armstrong, co-founder of Redwood Energy, an all-electric design and engineering company, said that Berkeley’s laws attach great importance to public safety and target explosions and fires related to natural gas infrastructure. When a California restaurant group filed a lawsuit arguing that the city could not legally support one energy source over another, it helped it gain a foothold in court.

Deepa Sivarajan, Washington Policy Manager for Climate Solutions, a Seattle-based clean energy non-profit organization, noted that San Francisco's zero-emission building task force engaged with unions before the city banned the use of natural gas in new buildings. touch. The city announced a natural gas ban in November as it began to develop policies for recycling water and drainage pipes. The water policy promises to create pipeline laying jobs and help replace jobs lost due to natural gas projects.

Duane Jonlin, an energy regulatory consultant for the City of Seattle, draws on his experience in enacting the city's electrification laws to help other municipalities educate local developers on how to build all-electric structures. Jonlin said that there is a significant difference in the bid amount of contractors who have already built the heat pump water heater construction and those who have not. Jonlin said that this is just the result of experience, and he expects the gap will eventually narrow.

"The miracle of capitalism has begun, people have started to compete on costs, and they have found smarter ways of doing things," he said.

Jonlin said the challenge now is to figure out how to make the building transition more smoothly. "I don't think there is any jurisdiction in the world that really solves this problem of existing buildings," Qiao Lin said. "Whoever cracks this puzzle and comes up with a very beautiful thing, anyone will win the Nobel Prize."

The problem of powering existing buildings is very complicated because it requires the upfront cost of the building owner, whether it is the homeowner living on the property, the landlord or the business.

McDade has some ideas on how to deal with these financial challenges: There are natural "intervention points", such as when a building changes ownership or needs to replace equipment, and when the owner may need to choose electric power instead of gas, she said. To pay for this cost, the homeowner can bundle the cost of the renovation with a mortgage, or the power company-the beneficiaries of all this electrification-may need to provide a low-interest loan, which the customer repays through monthly electricity bills.

Several local environmentalists and policy makers expressed the need to remove barriers to financing at the state level. For example, the Seattle-based Sightline Institute recently pointed out that regulations in Washington and Oregon prevent utility companies from providing incentives for customers to convert natural gas equipment into electricity.

For residents of affordable housing, relying solely on electricity to power buildings may be a major upgrade. Cheaper utility bills make the most sense for low-income households who spend most of their income on energy costs.

On the other hand, experts and advocates worry that if it is not combined with the regionally coordinated transition of natural gas, the enactment of electrification laws will make poorer households bear the cost.

Low-income people are more likely to live in old buildings that do not need to be upgraded. If widespread electrification causes natural gas companies to lose customers, residents who continue to use natural gas may face skyrocketing bills as utility companies try to recoup the millions of dollars invested in natural gas distribution networks.

Carmelita Miller, senior director of climate equity at The Greenlining Institute, a California-based nonprofit organization, said the state needs a large-scale transition plan to address these issues-the California Public Utilities Commission began considering this last year.

"Currently, a large number of Californians cannot pay utility bills," Miller said. "And we can't imagine that the situation will get worse if there is an unplanned transition away from natural gas."

For now, Bellingham may introduce a building electrification decree for new buildings. But Washington State Representative Lamel said that the long and bumpy road to success may hinder attempts by other jurisdictions. He could not tell his colleague Bellingham of the legislature how to formulate the building electrification policy, and soon, the story is more about how expensive and time-consuming it is.

"Citizens are upset about what they read from their cousins ​​on Facebook," Lamel said. "It's not true, but the city council had to spend a whole meeting to respond to it."

Nevertheless, McDade still hopes that, in the long run, Bellingham will benefit from its difficult start. She said Bellingham may eventually become the country's first legislation to eliminate carbon emissions from all its buildings, a move that may be adopted by cities and towns across the continent.

"Being the first person on something is more than just a feather on top-you are creating a reproducible precedent," she said. "Once an existing building electrification policy is formulated, suddenly all the remaining dominoes will fall more easily."

This report is provided by Grist, a non-profit media organization dedicated to reporting on climate solutions and a partner of InvestigateWest's one-year reporting program "Zero Emissions". InvestigateWest's work is partly supported by the Investigative Journalism Fund.