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New York looks to be waffling on its commitment to ditch fossil fuels in new buildings.
In July, the state became the first in the nation to require all-electric appliances for most new construction. The rules, set to take effect on Dec. 31, would help New York reach its climate goals while slashing energy and health costs for its residents, according to several analyses. Modeling by the state’s grid operator shows that the grid can handle the added demand from electrifying new buildings.
But last week, 19 state assemblymembers — all Democrats — sent a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul arguing that the all-electric building standard threatens affordability and the grid isn’t ready.
“While I share the long-term goal of decarbonizing our state, I believe the imminent requirement to mandate all-electric new buildings must be paused pending thorough reassessment of grid reliability, cost impacts, and risk mitigation,” wrote Assemblymember William Conrad, who led the petition.
Delaying implementation would buck a timeline set by the 2023 All-Electric Buildings Act, the law that required the state to put together rules for zero-emissions construction.
Hochul, a Democrat, said at a recent press event that she would seriously consider the assemblymembers’ request. “I’m going to look at this with a very realistic approach and do what I can because my No. 1 focus is affordability right now, because New Yorkers are suffering too much.”
“This is purely a political maneuver,” said Michael Hernandez, New York policy director at electrification advocacy nonprofit Rewiring America. “These Democrats” — many in districts considered flippable — “are working with fossil-fuel interests and building developers to try to delay the All-Electric Buildings Act, … a state law that was enacted through the democratic process.”
For instance, National Fuel, which supplies gas to about 500,000 households in western New York, has funded a lobbying campaign against bans on the fuel.
For her part, Hochul has a “troubling track record on climate,” said Elizabeth Moran, New York policy advocate at nonprofit Earthjustice. The governor has paused or indefinitely delayed initiatives she once championed, from congestion pricing and electric school buses to the signature policy to implement the state’s 2019 climate law: an emissions-pricing program known as cap-and-invest.
“We are seeing tremendous misinformation from the fossil-fuel industry,” Moran said. “The governor should not cave to the fearmongering of an industry that is only interested in its own profits.”
Last month, a judge found the state violated the law when it slammed the brakes on the cap-and-invest program — a case that could serve as a template should Hochul issue an executive order to delay implementing the All-Electric Buildings Act.
Hernandez pointed out that the all-electric law proceeds in a phased way, initially affecting new structures up to seven stories tall and, for commercial and industrial buildings, up to 100,000 square feet. Bigger buildings won’t be subject to the requirement until 2029.
Moreover, the law exempts projects if the grid can’t accommodate them within a reasonable window of time. The Department of Public Service has proposed that builders can use fossil-fuel systems if utility upgrades for all-electric construction would tack on 18 months or more to the development process, compared with a mixed-fuel project.
Several analyses show that all-electric buildings are more affordable than those with both electricity and gas or other fossil fuels. Building all-electric homes in New York may cost more up-front, but a 2024 state report shows the payback period is 10 years or less, thanks to the benefits of superefficient electric appliances, like heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters. Over 30 years, households will save on average about $5,000, the report finds.
A 2025 study by climate-policy think tank Switchbox that considers mortgage payments, gas hookup costs, and fuel costs, as well as the loss of federal electrification incentives, found even bigger savings: an average of $12,050 over 15 years for households living in newly built, all-electric single-family homes instead of ones heated with gas or propane.
“The Building Code Council, by law, can only update the building code if it’s cost-effective,” Hernandez said.
In their letter, the assemblymembers expressed concern about the grid’s ability to handle electrification of new buildings, citing reliability assessments from the state’s grid operator, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO).
However, that fear is “based on a limited methodology that is not designed to identify blackout risks … and is based on a variety of extreme assumptions for which NYISO does not present factual support,” said Michael Lenoff, senior attorney at Earthjustice. NYISO’s projections “don’t justify delaying the All-Electric Buildings Act.”
NYISO uses two approaches to determine if it will be able to procure enough power for the grid in the coming years, Lenoff explained. One approach ignores common strategies to balance supply and demand, like utilizing backup systems called operating reserves, recruiting customers to voluntarily use less energy, and tapping emergency assistance from neighboring states. The method also assumes delays in major transmission projects, like the Champlain Hudson Power Express, even though NYISO reports that the transmission line “is nearing completion” and is scheduled to enter service in May of 2026.
As one might expect, this first approach paints a pessimistic picture, spurring NYISO to call for procuring more resources to supply power.
Under NYISO’s second approach — the industry standard to determine adequate power supply — the operator in fact finds that it will have plenty of planned generation resources to meet demand through 2034, even if the All-Electric Buildings Act is fully implemented. The blackout risk generally considered acceptable, striking a balance between greater security and higher costs to customers, is one event in 10 years. NYISO estimates that its risk in 2034 will be about one blackout in 20 years — twice as protective as the norm, Lenoff said. It’s even more protective in the years leading up to that.
“Procuring resources when industry-standard reliability metrics indicate the system is already overprotected risks gold-plating the system at consumers’ expense,” Lenoff said.
In its 2025 Power Trends report, which the letter directly references, NYISO also determined that building electrification is not a concern in the short term; rather, energy-hungry customers — namely hyperscalers and cryptocurrency miners — are.
“If the lawmakers are concerned about grid capacity and energy affordability, they should prioritize reining in large energy users like data centers and crypto-mines rather than cutting back on electrification,” Lenoff said.
“That’s a commonsense policy that will save people money while cutting climate pollution.”
Massachusetts lawmakers may double the number of cities and towns allowed to ban fossil fuels in new construction. A bill under consideration would add up to 10 communities to an ongoing pilot program that proponents say is already reducing emissions, making homes healthier, and lowering energy bills — all without stifling the development of new housing.
Cities including Salem and Somerville are lining up to participate in an expanded program, and some local leaders in Worcester are eager to take part, too. Boston, the state’s largest city, has previously expressed interest in joining.
“We’re a coastal community that’s going to bear the brunt of climate change,” said state Rep. Manny Cruz, a Democrat representing Salem. “We want to make sure we’re doing our part to mitigate the damage.”
As Massachusetts strives to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, it has prioritized policies that encourage the transition away from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. In 2022, as part of a wide-ranging climate law, the state created a pilot authorizing 10 municipalities to prohibit fossil-fuel hookups in new construction and major renovations. In 2023, it introduced an optional building code aimed at reducing energy consumption and preparing for an all-electric future, and later that same year, regulators issued guidelines for natural-gas utilities to evolve toward clean energy.
Massachusetts joins other states and cities pursuing such policies. New York this summer became the first state to commit to an all-electric building standard, though Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, is now under pressure to delay the implementation of these rules. Dozens of local governments nationwide have measures on the books barring gas use in new buildings and renovations, and some have policies to ratchet down fossil-fuel appliances in existing structures over time, too.
Advocates hope Massachusetts’ pilot paves the way for the legislature to allow all 351 of the state’s cities and towns to choose their own path on fossil-fuel restrictions.
The bill still faces committee votes in both the House and Senate. Single-issue bills like this one are rarely approved by the full legislature, but are instead wrapped into a larger package, said state Sen. Michael Barrett, a Democrat and chair of the legislature’s telecommunications, utilities, and energy committee, which heard testimony on the bill late last month.
Massachusetts’ all-electric pilot has roots stretching back to 2019, when the town of Brookline passed a bylaw prohibiting new fossil-fuel infrastructure. Supporters argued that the momentum behind the energy transition and forecasts of rising natural gas prices made the policy a responsible step.
There’s no point in installing new systems now that will only get more expensive to run and will end up needing to be replaced with electric equipment before too long, said Lisa Cunningham, cofounder of nonprofit ZeroCarbonMA and one of the forces behind the Brookline bylaw.
“It’s basically locking people into these huge energy burdens,” she said.
But Brookline’s policy was struck down in 2020 by the Democratic attorney general Maura Healey, who was later elected governor of the state in 2022. Healey argued that municipalities do not have the authority to supersede state building and gas codes, though she said she supported emissions reductions and felt she had no choice but to reject the bylaw.
So Brookline and several other towns petitioned the state legislature for special permission to implement their own rules. Lawmakers responded by including the 10-town demonstration program in a sweeping climate bill that then-Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, signed in 2022 despite expressing serious reservations about the impact the pilot might have on housing.
Indeed, detractors have long maintained that all-electric building mandates will drive residential construction costs up at a time when Massachusetts is facing an acute housing shortage.
However, none of the 10 municipalities in the current program have reported such a slowdown. Lexington, for example — which has adopted both the fossil-fuel ban and the more stringent building code — has permitted some 1,100 new housing units in the past two years, including 160 affordable homes.
Research also indicates that building and running an all-electric house does not come with a price premium. A 2022 report by clean-energy think tank RMI finds that the up-front cost and annual operating expenses for a fossil-fuel-free home in Boston are slightly lower than for a mixed-fuel building. Since then, Massachusetts has adopted discounted wintertime electricity rates for homes with heat pumps, making electrification even more affordable.
“The lowest-hanging fruit is to build all-electric,” Cunningham said. “Doing all these as retrofits is going to be a lot more difficult.”
In 2023, advocates and supportive lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow any municipality to implement its own gas ban, but the measure did not make it into the climate package passed later that session.
Proponents of expanding the pilot say it is important to offer the opportunity to a wider variety of communities across the state. Of the initial 10 participants, all but two are Boston suburbs, and only two have median household incomes below $125,000. Seven have populations below 50,000, with one, the Martha’s Vineyard town of Aquinnah, home to only about 600 people.
“It restricted it to these much wealthier, much smaller, less diverse communities. That’s just not equitable,” Cunningham said.
Broadening the program will also help the state collect more data about how these prohibitions impact emissions, public health, and housing costs and availability, said Barrett, who supports the bill.
“The more data we can get in about the cost of going all-electric, the better off we’ll be,” he said.
Somerville has been eager to join the pilot since the beginning. When the program launched, it was intended to include the 10 communities that had already asked the legislature for permission to implement fossil-fuel restrictions. The creation of the program, however, spurred more local governments to vote for such bans in hopes of joining the pilot if any spots should open up. Somerville was the first to do so, just weeks after the law was enacted, with its City Council passing the measure unanimously.
Having the authority to limit fossil-fuel growth would not only move Somerville toward its goal of being carbon-negative by 2050, but also lower heating costs for some residents and create housing with better air quality, said Christine Blais, the city’s director of sustainability and environment.
“We want to give Somerville residents the best chance to have a good quality of life,” she said.
In Salem, which has also passed a measure asking to join the pilot, City Councilor Jeff Cohen would like to see the bill passed, but he also thinks it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Allowing 20 of Massachusetts’ 351 municipalities to ban natural gas just won’t make a meaningful dent in the state’s emissions, he said.
“It’s time to do something,” Cohen said. “Ten at a time doesn’t seem good enough for me.”
Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced an energy-affordability bill that opponents say would undo years of work on policies to fight climate change and promote energy efficiency, all without actually saving consumers much money.
“The bill is retreating from a couple of decades of climate progress in Massachusetts,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
The legislation, which a House committee approved 7 to 0 on Wednesday, would make the state’s 2030 emissions target nonbinding, slash funding for energy-efficiency programming, reinstate incentives for high-efficiency gas heating systems, and limit climate and clean-energy initiatives that impact customers’ utility bills. It would also prevent projects in cities and towns with natural-gas bans from claiming energy-efficiency incentives for all-electric construction.
The bill’s author — Democratic state Rep. Mark Cusack, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy — has said these steps are necessary to get ballooning energy bills under control. Critics of the proposal, however, say this approach would trade minimal short-term savings for environmental damage and much higher costs down the road.
“We want good energy-affordability legislation. This is not that,” said Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. “The claim that climate policies are the thing making prices rise is just not based in fact.”
Electricity prices in Massachusetts have been trending upwards for a decade and are among the highest in the country. In May, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, unveiled energy-affordability legislation aimed at saving consumers around $10 billion over the next 10 years. A hearing on the bill took place in June, but it has not advanced any further.
Cusack’s rival bill includes many of the same elements as the governor’s proposal but takes a far harsher approach to efficiency spending and climate goals. The bill still has a long way to go to become law. It would need to clear the Senate committee and be approved by both the House and the Senate, which would require support from many legislators who have previously voted for the priorities it undermines. Then Healey would need to sign it.
Still, in a state that has long been a leader in energy efficiency and climate action, the fact that the bill has gained any traction reflects the increasingly popular idea that decarbonization is at odds with affordability. This adversarial notion has gained currency in the past year as politicians and policymakers throughout the region — and the country — scramble for ways to address rising power prices. These claims, however, are simply incorrect, say climate advocates. They argue the cost of energy-delivery infrastructure and the rising price of natural gas are what’s really driving up utility bills.
Climate, energy, and consumer advocates are particularly concerned about the bill’s attempt to scale back and rework Mass Save, the state’s energy-efficiency program, which is funded by a small charge on consumers’ utility bills.
The legislation calls for cutting Mass Save’s current three-year budget from $4.5 billion to $4.17 billion, and capping spending for future triennial plans at $4 billion. These savings would, in theory, be achieved by tightening the program’s scope to focus on weatherization and lowering energy use. Mass Save would no longer be allowed to consider whether an incentive would promote decarbonization or electrification when assessing its benefits, which could put rebates for equipment such as heat pumps or home batteries at risk, advocates said.
“It essentially does eviscerate Mass Save,” Chretien said.
The charge that funds the energy-efficiency program currently makes up about 7% to 8% of the per-kilowatt-hour electricity rate from major utilities Eversource and National Grid. Reducing Mass Save’s budget by 11% would only lower that number slightly.
At the same time, Mass Save cuts costs for consumers. Those who take advantage of the incentives can save thousands of dollars on new appliances or home improvements that can then create ongoing savings by reducing energy demand. By lowering power demand, the programming also helps reduce the need to expand the grid, producing additional savings for everyone. Mass Save generated a total of $2.8 billion in benefits for participants and nonparticipants in 2024, the program administrators report.
The bill also calls for eliminating Mass Save incentives for all-electric projects built in cities and towns that are part of Massachusetts’ pilot program allowing some municipalities to ban fossil fuels in new construction.
Reducing incentives for efficient electric appliances leaves people paying more for energy-hungry systems, critics point out — even as both electricity and natural-gas prices are expected to keep rising.
“The best you could say is that it is going after short-term affordability at the expense of long-term affordability,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate-action nonprofit Acadia Center. “Unfortunately, because it misunderstands the actual drivers of cost, it will drive up costs for ratepayers.”
Advocates also question the logic behind the plan to make the state’s 2030 climate goals nonbinding. Cusack argues the move is necessary to prevent lawsuits against the state, should it not meet its targets, especially in the light of obstacles being thrown up by the Trump administration. Murray, however, finds this contention unconvincing: The likelihood of a successful lawsuit is too low to justify unravelling years of climate progress, he said.
Despite the bill’s success in the House committee, opponents could still defeat it by making their case to legislators, Boyd Rabin said. And there are a lot of opponents to speak up, she said, including not just climate activists but groups concerned with municipal operations, economic development, and equity.
“I am yet to have a conversation with anyone who supports it,” she said. “I would hope legislators would listen to what they’re hearing.”
Roasting coffee requires high temperatures — up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for as much as 20 minutes per batch. Today, the vast majority of that heat is generated by fossil fuels. Most of the world’s coffee is roasted in gas-burning machines that emit carbon dioxide and require elaborate venting and afterburner equipment.
Ricardo Lopez, CEO of Bellwether Coffee, has spent the past 12 years fine-tuning a more climate-friendly, electricity-powered alternative, one that, crucially, cuts down on some of the costs and complexities of other electric roasters.
“Our goal is to make a sustainable industry through coffee,” he said. For Bellwether, that includes working with small farms to source beans grown with environmentally friendly practices.
But Lopez, a former data-center construction manager, knows that making a new technology competitive in a crowded field takes more than good intentions. “You have to have a better product,” he said. “As long as you have a better product that’s more affordable from a cost standpoint, it can spread.”
Achieving that has taken quite a bit of ingenuity. For starters, Bellwether’s system doesn’t require the industrial-scale voltages that many European-made electric coffee roasters do. The company’s appliances run on the 240-volt or 208-volt current available in commercial buildings.
The machines also use closed-loop heat recovery to capture and filter the smoke and particulate matter that the roasting process produces, avoiding the ventilation, ductwork, and energy-intensive “afterburner” systems needed to clean up exhaust.
That makes the Berkeley, California-based company’s technology suitable for ordinary retailers. Bellwether refrigerator-sized or countertop-sized roasters are now in cafes and coffee shops in 40 U.S. states and more than a dozen countries.
“Distributed roasting means that every coffee shop can become a roaster,” Lopez said during a recent tour of Bellwether’s headquarters, which featured a sampling of some of the specialty blends sourced from farms the company works with.
That said, making the switch to roasting coffee beans in house isn’t cheap. Bellwether’s latest countertop roasters sell for $22,000, or $27,000 for its “continuous roasting” variant. This sounds like a lot, until you realize that a high-end espresso machine is about the same price, Lopez said.
And the savings from buying raw coffee beans for about $5 to $6 per pound rather than roasted beans at about $12 to $14 per pound add up quickly. Bellwether has a calculator to help determine how long it takes to recoup the up-front cost of its roasters — typical customers pay off their machines in two to 12 months, depending on the volume of coffee they roast, Lopez said. The company offers financing deals with monthly payments that can put most buyers at a cash-flow break-even point within the first month, he noted.
Bellwether’s electric roasters also appeal to large-scale roasting facilities seeking to make small-batch, high-end blends for an increasingly sophisticated coffee-drinking public. One example: the Hero collection from Red Bay Coffee, one of two Oakland, California-based industrial coffee roasters using the startup’s machines.
The closed-loop, electric roasting process is more energy efficient than traditional fossil-gas roasting — about 2 to 3 cents of energy spent per pound of roasted output, compared to about 10 cents per pound, Lopez said.
And, of course, the whole process is less emissions-intensive than relying on fossil gas to produce coffee. Roasting accounts for up to 15% of the coffee industry’s carbon footprint, and a Bellwether roaster cuts about 87% of the carbon footprint of traditional roasting, said Jonathan Bass, the company’s executive vice president of marketing and communications. That’s a significant reduction in what admittedly is a relatively slender slice of the industry’s overall climate impact, which is heavily tied to land use and deforestation.
But those emissions reductions are the end-of-day bonus to a fundamentally economic proposition, Lopez said.
“Our customers love the fact that this is the most environmentally friendly way to roast coffee, and love to communicate that to their customers. But most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if not for the quality benefits or the economics,” he said. “You’re able to take one of your highest expenses and cut it in half while having a better, fresher product that’s environmentally friendly because it’s no longer dependent on natural gas.”
Electric coffee roasters have served as niche products for small-scale craft roasters for years now. But companies like Bellwether and others in North America and Europe are scaling them up.
Bellwether’s technology has evolved over the years. Its early coffee roasters were cobbled together with steel plating and wooden two-by-fours, Lopez said during the August tour of the company’s headquarters and manufacturing space in West Berkeley. More improvements have followed since its first commercial models rolled out in 2018, including a steep cut in their initial price of about $60,000.
Bellwether has put particular effort into honing its roaster’s closed-loop heat-recovery system, which retains much of the warmth that gas-fired roasters lose in their exhaust, Lopez said. Capturing heat that would otherwise be wasted also helps control for the variables of temperature and humidity that can make it hard to achieve consistent roasting quality, he said.
Plus, Bellwether has fine-tuned the “set-and-forget” software controls that allow busy employees to program precise outputs for each batch of green coffee beans being put through the roaster, Lopez said. “The freshness and consistency of the roasting has so much impact on the quality,” he said.
Just ask Keba Konte, founder of Red Bay Coffee. The photographer-turned-entrepreneur started roasting coffee in his garage and moved into a warehouse that has housed successively larger gas-fired coffee roasting machines, including his current one capable of roasting 120 kilograms of coffee beans per batch.
In 2023, Red Bay won a $643,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to defray the cost of installing eight Bellwether machines. The undertaking did require some wiring upgrades, Konte said — but that’s a lot less onerous than designing and installing the gas lines, vents, and other infrastructure required for his gas-fired roasters.
The Bellwether machines also “allowed us to engage in another segment of the market,” he said. “We work with farmers, and our team is super-interested in these experimental coffees. … There are so many interesting things happening in the industry right now.”
It’s hard to dedicate a batch run of Red Bay’s 120-kilogram roaster to these more experimental blends. With the Bellwether roasters, “we were able to distinguish ourselves by introducing some of these small lots,” including ones from former employees who’ve struck out on their own, he said.
Konte is also exploring how Bellwether’s technology could help the company expand to new markets. Rachel Konte, his wife and Red Bay cofounder, was born in Denmark, and the couple has been looking for opportunities to expand into that country. Denmark currently charges luxury taxes on gourmet coffee imports, which made the plan infeasible.
But “if we have a Bellwether sitting there, and we import the same raw green coffee that we have here, that’s sort of a production thing — and so now, that’s just industrial ingredients. There’s no barrier,” he said. “And then the machines, because they’re already preprogrammed — we have our master roaster here making adjustments based on age of coffee, based on humidity, etc. — we can be producing our coffee, branded, in that country.”
Coffee roasting isn’t the only industry that could deploy smaller-scale, lower-carbon technologies to decentralize production. Companies are developing factory-built, electricity-powered modular systems to purify iron for steelmaking, synthesize industrial chemicals, and produce ammonia fertilizer.
Food and beverage production is a particularly appealing target, given that nearly all of the industry’s current fossil-fueled heating needs are for relatively low-temperature processes well suited to electric heat pumps, electric boilers, waste-heat recovery systems, and other lower-emissions options.
Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner of investment firm DBL Partners, one of the lead investors in Bellwether’s $40 million Series B funding round in 2019, said mass-produced technologies like these have the potential to quickly drive down costs, similar to what has happened with solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
“The greatest way to increase the impact of sustainable technologies is to make them, one, affordable enough to be widely adopted, not niche, and two, to achieve greater quality than approaches that are more harmful to the environment,” Pfund said.
In the case of cafes and restaurants, “that allows them to pay employees more, or pay their rents,” she said. In the case of coffee-roasting facilities, it’s “affordably reducing air pollution in communities. All of that wonderful, good stuff — and you have this amazingly delicious cup of coffee.”
The first passenger terminal for air travel in the U.S. was an Art Deco celebration of aviation. In 1935, the fearless Amelia Earhart dedicated the building at the busy airport now known as Newark Liberty International, and within a few years, hundreds of thousands of passengers were hurrying through its marble-and-terrazzo lobby to catch commercial flights.
Now an administrative center called Building One, the former terminal has made history for a new reason: It’s the first edifice owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a bistate transportation agency, to undergo an all-electric retrofit.
“It’s so exciting to see [this kind of] reinvestment and making things new again,” said James Lindberg, senior policy director at the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, who wasn’t involved in the project. “Energy efficiency and decarbonization is part of that. … We know how to do it — we just need more of it.”
Buildings account for a whopping one-third of the nation’s carbon pollution. Every building — even the 80,000 structures that, like Building One, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places — must break up with fossil fuels to align with a cooler climate future.
Retrofitting any existing structure is going to be tougher than going with all-electric systems from the start. But engineers looking to upgrade historic buildings are doubly constrained by the need to maintain their charges’ distinctive architectural features; you can’t just tear down the walls of a landmark.
The Port Authority’s Building One is an early example demonstrating that storied buildings can be electrified — all while keeping their vaunted status intact.
It “was the perfect project to show the art of what’s possible,” said Dennis Pietrocola, director of operations services at the Port Authority. “If we were able to undergo an electrification transformation to Building One” — among the most challenging of the Port Authority’s structures — “then it sets the stage for [decarbonizing] the rest.”
That’s coming. The Port Authority aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, a goal that includes its entire portfolio of more than 1,000 buildings — from storage and parking structures to terminals to offices — at its airports, bridges, tunnels, railways, bus stops, and shipping ports.
Building One is the bustling home base of 190 Port Authority employees, including operations and maintenance workers, police, and firefighters. In 2023, the building’s gas-fueled equipment was ready to conk out, making it a prime candidate for a decarbonization retrofit. Pietrocola and his colleagues carefully planned a series of cost-effective electrifying updates and hired an experienced general contractor, Constellation NewEnergy, to carry them out.
The team installed five large heat pumps on the roof to provide zero-emissions heating and cooling. They put in an energy-recovery system to recycle waste heat from the locker and IT rooms. The crew added a system that can dial down power use when the grid is strained by high demand. And in the parking lot, workers installed 29 new charging ports for electric vehicles.
The team also swapped the building’s gas boilers with electric-resistance ones. Operating with the same physics as big electric tea kettles, these provide an extra boost as needed to the building’s water-based heating system. Pietrocola had considered using heat-pump boilers instead, which can be twice as efficient because they move heat instead of making it, but he nixed the idea because it would’ve meant replacing the hydronic system’s distribution pipes with bigger ones.
Workers also made some more staid updates to lower energy costs: weatherizing the building, applying heat-blocking films on the windows, and replacing more than 1,500 light fixtures with ultra-efficient LEDs.
In total, the project took 18 months and cost about $15 million — $3 million more than it would’ve had the Port Authority stuck with gas-fired equipment, according to Pietrocola.
The Port Authority didn’t use any incentives to cover the expenses, in part because the team needed to act quickly to replace the building’s worn-out systems. But federal and state tax credits are available to private entities and public-private partnerships to electrify operations as part of renovation projects, Lindberg pointed out. Unlike the consumer credits for heat pumps, EVs, and other clean energy tech, the Rehabilitation Credit was left unscathed by Republicans’ federal budget law enacted this summer, he said.
Building One’s retrofit has slashed energy use by about 25%, Pietrocola said. Still, due to the area’s relatively high cost of electricity, he doesn’t expect the structure’s utility bills to fall.
Pietrocola plans to apply the lessons learned at Building One to other Port Authority structures as their fossil-fueled systems age out, he said. He’ll approach each project with a fresh eye to the building’s particular needs and the technology available. Next time, he added, the agency may go with hydronic heat pumps instead of the electric-resistance boilers.
Decarbonizing buildings “is a very important cause to me, personally and professionally,” Pietrocola noted. Recently, he worked with his 14-year-old daughter, Kayla, on a climate-change science project. “It made me realize, well, I’m part of the problem — the way I’ve operated facilities [in the past], perhaps with a closed mind.” After guiding the electrification of one of the country’s most storied structures, he feels like he’s become part of the solution.
Time is running out for Americans to get a federally funded discount on energy upgrades that can lower their utility bills and make their homes healthier and more comfortable.
The GOP tax and spending law passed in July swiftly phases out tax credits that help households afford heat pumps and other energy-saving electric appliances. The credits were supposed to last about a decade; now they sunset Dec. 31.
To meet this use-it-or-lose-it moment, electrification advocacy nonprofit Rewiring America last week launched the Save on Better Appliances campaign. It’s a nationwide effort to help homeowners and renters lock in the incentives — the Energy-Efficient Home Improvement Credit (25C) and the Residential Clean Energy Credit (25D) — before they’re gone.
“Most people don’t think about this stuff every day,” said Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America. “We’re talking about five or six purchasing decisions that you make only several times over in your whole life. … So making sure people have the resources and information available about [this] technology that is better and can save them money, is really important.”
The tax credits enable households to save thousands of dollars on their federal taxes when they invest in energy-slashing home upgrades, including electrical panel retrofits, weatherization improvements, and installations of solar panels, heat pump heater/air conditioners, home batteries, and heat-pump water heaters.
Such measures are especially salient as households grapple with inflation, tariffs, and rapidly rising electricity costs. President Donald Trump promised to lower power bills, but experts expect his administration’s anti-renewables agenda will keep them climbing.
Efficiency upgrades also help put a dent in planet-warming pollution. More than 40% of U.S. energy-related emissions stem from how people heat, cool, and power their homes and fuel their cars, according to Rewiring America.
With the long lead time often needed to get quotes and book contractors, households realistically need to decide if they’re going to pursue clean energy projects in the next several weeks to get the federal discounts, Matusiak said.
Accordingly, the campaign, which runs until the end of October, is a full-court press of resources and tailored support. Rewiring America is also coordinating with elected officials, manufacturers, utilities, and grassroots groups on the effort. Among those partners is the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors, which last month committed to helping constituents take advantage of the tax credits.
“It’s really disheartening to see the federal government take away financial assistance from Americans at a time where they need it more than ever,” said Casey Katims, U.S. Climate Alliance executive director.
Rewiring America has set up a central hub where homeowners and renters can launch their electrification journey. The nonprofit’s Personal Electrification Planner allows users to estimate how much an upgrade is likely to cost up front and save them on their energy bills over time. Individuals can also search for independently vetted contractors and look up incentives with the nonprofit’s savings calculator, which lists federal as well as local rebates and tax credits in 29 states.
For people looking for more support, Rewiring America is holding weekly drop-in Zoom sessions with certified, trained “electric coaches.” They’re volunteers who can offer free, impartial guidance to help people troubleshoot the gnarly complexities of making energy-efficient home upgrades. The first session is on Wednesday, Sept. 3.
Rewiring America is also securing deep discounts on heat pumps for homeowners — in Rhode Island and Colorado, to start. The organization has teamed up with manufacturers and contractors to drive costs 20% to 30% below standard market pricing by pooling customers together — an approach national nonprofit Solar United Neighbors has used for years to get better deals on solar panels. A Rewiring America spokesperson declined to specify how many households have enrolled so far.
Rewiring America had longstanding relationships that made these two states particularly fertile testing grounds, Matusiak said. But if it succeeds, the organization plans to expand the group-purchasing initiative. In a few places, others are also leveraging collective market power, including installer Vayu in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles and Laminar Collective in the Boston metro area.
Overall, “the goal here is to create broad awareness for people to take advantage of incentives that are theirs to take,” Matusiak said. For individuals open to going electric, “we hope they access our resources — and do that right away.”
At the end of June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law AB 130, a sweeping bill that aims to make it easier to build housing, reforms that many lawmakers and experts agree are long overdue given the state’s severe housing crisis.
But one provision could needlessly slow the state’s progress on its climate and clean energy goals, according to advocates. The law pauses updates to state and local building codes — the mandatory construction standards meant to ensure that new buildings are safe and energy efficient — for the next six years.
Buildings account for a quarter of California’s carbon pollution. And the state’s building standards, which are normally revised once every three years, have been a powerful decarbonization tool. The latest statewide energy code, already finalized, takes effect Jan. 1, 2026, and encourages developers to build all-electric homes with both heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters — super-efficient, zero-emissions appliances that are safer than gas-fired options. In addition to updating codes, California has eliminated subsidies for new gas lines.
These regulations are working; “California is an electrification-forward state,” said Sean Armstrong, managing principal of Redwood Energy, a design firm specializing in net-zero, all-electric affordable housing development. In 2023, 80% of line extension requests by builders to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric were electric-only, according to the California Energy Commission, the agency responsible for developing the building energy codes. The commission expects that the majority of new houses built under the latest code will be all-electric.
Now, though, the state will skip a scheduled 2028 residential code update, blocking it from pushing builders to go further to cut emissions. Starting Oct. 1 this year, the new law will also prevent local jurisdictions from updating their own, more ambitious building standards, known as reach codes.
These could include measures not yet enacted in the state rules, such as encouraging heat pumps for multifamily buildings, mandating all-electric renovations, and requiring that broken central air conditioners be replaced with heat pumps that can both warm and cool spaces. That last idea is an inexpensive way to decarbonize heating, according to Matt Vespa, senior attorney at nonprofit Earthjustice.
Seventy-four local governments in California have passed reach codes that encourage or require all-electric new construction. With the pause on updates looming, San Francisco is now racing to get an all-electric requirement for major renovations on the books before the Oct. 1 deadline.
AB 130 does allow for some exceptions that could let local governments implement stricter building requirements even after the cutoff date.
The law permits the state commission and local governments to update building codes in emergencies to protect health and safety. Perhaps the climate emergency will qualify, said Kelly Lyndon, cochair of the advocacy alliance San Diego Building Electrification Coalition.
Cities and counties can also adopt updates that are necessary to carry out greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies spelled out in their state-mandated general plans. These road maps must have been adopted by June 10, 2025, and code updates can’t ban gas.
“At least one of these exceptions is going to work for folks who want to make further progress on climate,” said Merrian Borgeson, director of California policy with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate & Energy Program. “Unfortunately … [AB 130] makes it more complicated and creates more red tape.”
Vespa pointed out that many jurisdictions may be able to take advantage of the exception for preexisting aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the 482 city plans, 409 mention “greenhouse gas” — an indicator that local leaders are pursuing emissions cuts. The phrase also shows up in 52 of 58 county general plans.
Sacramento’s general plan, for example, stresses “a continued focus on improving the performance of both new and existing buildings.” A local code update to swap old air conditioners with heat pumps could fit within AB 130’s exemption, Vespa said.
But it’s too soon to say who might try the strategy first. “Some jurisdictions are really looking towards their legal experts to interpret [the exception language],” said Madison Vander Klay, senior manager of government affairs at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition.
But even with its exclusions, the moratorium “is a big problem for emissions, affordability, and cost savings,” Vander Klay said.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D) and Assemblyperson Nick Schultz (D), who authored the initial standalone bill to pause building codes, AB 306, championed the idea as a way to help solve California’s housing affordability crisis and spur rapid recovery after the wildfires that torched areas of Los Angeles County in January. That bill eventually got folded into AB 130.
“California home prices are double the national average, and the rent is too damn high. So many folks cannot afford to live in California,” Schultz said on the Assembly floor in April. “This pause … will provide stability and certainty in the housing construction market by temporarily freezing the standards by which people need to meet to construct their home.”
It’s unclear whether the bill will actually make homes more affordable, though. “Building codes have never been what drives high costs in California — certainly not the energy code,” Borgeson said.
A 2015 study conducted by the University of California LA for Pacific Gas & Electric backs that up; the authors noted that they couldn’t find a statistically significant relationship between California’s energy-efficiency code and home construction costs.
“There isn’t a lot of evidence that waiving codes helps affordability,” Vander Klay said. “The building codes overall are required [by law] to be cost-effective.” Any up-front costs must be outweighed by savings.
The standards have delivered, sparing Californians more than $100 billion in avoided energy costs over the last five decades, according to the Energy Commission. The code that takes effect next year is expected to net more than $4.8 billion in savings over 30 years.
Research also shows that building all-electric homes is typically faster and cheaper than building those with gas. A 2019 analysis by energy consultancy E3, for example, estimated that building a new all-electric home in most parts of California costs about $3,000 to $10,000 less than building a home that’s also equipped with gas. Similarly, a 2022 study by the New Buildings Institute found that constructing an all-electric single-family home in New York costs about $8,000 less than a home with gas. A UC Berkeley team used these and other findings to conclude in an April report that the most cost-effective way to rebuild after the LA fires is likely all-electric.
With the moratorium, the commission will have to skip the 2028 residential code cycle. That omission could result in tens of millions of dollars in lost utility bill savings for households, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. Notably, the commission will be able to work on the following code update, so it can take effect as planned in 2032.
In the wake of AB 130, the Building Decarbonization Coalition’s Vander Klay is urging the Legislature to reauthorize California’s successful cap-and-trade program to support home electrification by making heat pumps and other decarbonizing tech more affordable. “There is still an opportunity … this year for the state to look at carving out funding to provide incentives,” she said.
In passing AB 130, state lawmakers took aim at rules that they contend stifle development. Underpinning this strategy is a notion popularized by a recent book, “Abundance.” Authors Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Derek Thompson, contributing writer at The Atlantic, make the case that well-intentioned but overly protective regulations can foster scarcity — in this case, of housing — and thus interfere with leaders’ ability to deliver on the promises of a better life.
But Vander Klay argues that lawmakers should view strong building codes as a way to help create abundance. “Abundance is this idea that we should all have access to housing, we should all be able to afford our energy bills … we should all be able to have access to clean air and clean water and healthy homes,” Vander Klay said.
Clean energy technologies like heat pumps are part of an abundant, safer, more climate-resilient future, she noted. “We have building codes as a tool to support building what we need safely and quickly and affordably.”
A surge of housing development in a Boston suburb is providing evidence that natural-gas bans and strict energy-efficiency standards do not slow new construction or make it more expensive. Indeed, these guidelines can even boost the growth of affordable housing, say local advocates.
In 2024, Lexington, Massachusetts, banned gas hookups in new construction and adopted a stringent building code that requires high energy-efficiency performance. Yet these regulations have not stopped the town of roughly 34,000 from permitting some 1,100 new units of housing — 160 of which will be affordable — over the past two years.
“Opponents said, ‘It’s going to cost so much, you’re going to stop the development of affordable housing.’ But that clearly wasn’t the case,” said Mark Sandeen, a member of the town select board and the board of the Lexington Affordable Housing Trust.
As Massachusetts aims to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the state has for several years prioritized policies that encourage the transition away from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, which heats about half of the state’s homes. In 2022, Massachusetts launched a pilot program allowing 10 communities — including Lexington — to prohibit the use of fossil fuels in new construction and major renovations. In late 2023, utilities regulators issued an order that makes explicit the state’s goal of getting off natural gas, and lays out strategies and principles for reaching this goal.
Detractors, however, have consistently argued that requiring or even heavily encouraging all-electric construction would make housing more costly and difficult to build at a time when Massachusetts is facing an acute housing shortage. In 2022, then-Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, memorably said the idea of fossil fuel bans gave him “agita,” so worried was he that such municipal regulations would suppress housing growth.
Similar battles have played out across the country, from California to New York.
There is plenty of evidence that electrified, highly efficient homes don’t need to come with a price premium.
A 2022 study by think tank RMI found that, in Boston, all-electric homes are slightly less expensive both to build and to operate than mixed-fuel homes — and that was before Massachusetts’ investor-owned utilities adopted lower wintertime rates for homes with heat pumps. In 2023, Massachusetts-based advocacy group Built Environment Plus found that building larger multifamily and affordable housing developments “net-zero ready” — that is, highly efficient and with all-electric heating — costs about 4% less up front than the conventional approach.
After Lexington changed its zoning rules in 2023 to allow more multifamily development, its energy regulations did not, as naysayers had feared, deter developers from taking advantage. The planning board has approved nine projects, ranging from a proposal to redevelop an unused commercial space into a seven-unit building, to a complex combining 312 residential units with 2,100 square feet of retail space.
The new construction will include both rental units and condos available to purchase that will, in total, increase available housing in town by 9%. Much of the new housing will be market-rate, and Lexington — where the median condo went for $915,000 in the first quarter of 2025 — is not an inexpensive place to live.
However, most of the construction driven by the new zoning is required to make 15% of its units affordable. On top of these private projects, the town has decided to develop a municipally owned property into a 40-unit affordable housing development, bringing the total number of affordable units on the horizon to about 200.
The municipal project will include four residential buildings designed to be energy-efficient and to minimize the square footage of halls and other common areas, which will reduce the cost of heating and cooling these spaces. Solar panels on the roofs will offset the electricity consumed by the building’s heat pumps, said Dave Traggorth, principal with Causeway Development, the company chosen to develop the property.
“Ultimately, what the tenant is paying for in their electric bill is really just cooking and lights,” he said. “It really reduces the utility bills for residents.”
All of these new projects — market-rate and affordable — will be prohibited from using fossil fuels to run furnaces or other appliances because of the town’s requirement that new construction be fully electric.
The town has also adopted an optional, more rigorous version of the state building code that requires new, multifamily projects over 12,000 square feet — which applies to most of those in the pipeline in Lexington — to build to passive house standards, which require a very well-sealed building envelope and dramatically reduced energy use compared to a conventionally built structures.
“This is what you can do at the local level,” said Lisa Cunningham, cofounder of climate advocacy organization ZeroCarbonMA.
While Lexington is a particularly active town, the other nine communities that have banned fossil fuels in new construction have all reported that the rules have posed no obstacle to development, Cunningham said. Restrictive zoning and antidevelopment sentiment among residents are much more pressing problems, she said.
For the eventual residents, the benefits go beyond the knowledge that their homes are helping cut emissions. Homes designed to passive house standards use far less energy than those that are conventionally built, creating ongoing savings for homeowners and tenants, and have been found to generally have better indoor air quality. When the power goes out, these well-sealed buildings can keep interior temperatures comfortable for days.
It is no accident that residential developers were ready to jump when opportunities opened up in a town with stringent efficiency and electrification rules. Massachusetts has been laying the groundwork for years, said Lauren Baumann, director of sustainability and climate initiatives for the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that works to expand affordable housing.
“There has been this deliberate effort to develop an ecosystem to support this kind of construction,” she said.
In 2019, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center awarded $1.73 million in grants to eight affordable, multifamily projects to help accelerate the adoption of passive house standards in multifamily construction by demonstrating that the approach makes financial sense. That same year, the state’s energy-efficiency program administrator, Mass Save, launched an initiative offering money to multifamily projects for feasibility studies, energy modeling, and analyses of post-construction energy performance.
These incentives gave architects and contractors a lower-risk way to become familiar with a new approach to building. And familiarity, in this case, bred knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm.
“Those early project pilots really did give people the experience they needed in order to feel comfortable,” Baumann said. “We just saw an explosion of interest.”
Traggorth has seen this evolution in his work. Five years ago, he said, if he approached a contractor to discuss building to passive house standards, he was often greeted with confusion. Now, “every contractor that’s building multifamily has a couple of projects that have been passive house certified,” he said. “They have learned their lessons.”
San Francisco already requires most new buildings to eschew gas and run solely on electricity. Now, the metropolis is moving to ensure that substantial renovations in existing buildings are also all-electric.
Last week, the city and county’s Board of Supervisors completed the first of two votes to pass the All-Electric Major Renovations Ordinance, a climate-forward building standard that will apply to commercial and residential structures. The initial 11–0 vote was a resounding sign of approval; the final hearing is likely to occur Sept. 2, according to the San Francisco Environment Department, the agency that developed the rules.
“We can’t build the San Francisco of the future with fuel from the past,” Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman said in a statement. “This legislation picks up where we left off with the All-Electric New Construction ordinance and affords us the opportunity to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in our existing buildings, improve indoor and outdoor air quality, and make San Francisco a safer, healthier, and more resilient place to live and work.”
The proposed ordinance was years in the making, but the city is now fast-tracking its approval before a new statewide pause on updates to building codes kicks in. Under the law, signed in June, San Francisco and other jurisdictions in the Golden State have only until Oct. 1 to adopt stronger building codes unless they claim an exception.
San Francisco can’t meet its climate goals unless it moves buildings away from fossil fuels. The city has vowed to slash carbon pollution by 61% from 1990 levels by 2030 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 — five years faster than California as a whole. Buildings in San Francisco account for 44% of the city’s planet-warming pollution, the largest emitter after transportation, at 45%.
If enacted, the new ordinance will affect projects that are similar in scope to new construction, including additions as well as renovations that rip out mechanical systems. It won’t bear on single equipment replacements, however, like replacing a gas furnace.
The ordinance essentially “closes a loophole” in the new construction requirement, Cyndy Comerford, climate program manager at the SF Environment Department, told Canary Media. For example, on the same downtown parcel of a five-story brick building, a whopping 46-story glass edifice was recently added, she said. “That addition was allowed to have gas in it when it was a totally separate building.” The new ordinance would put a stop to similar cases in the future.
Lawmakers are leaving room for exceptions to the all-electric standard, including restaurants that use gas for cooking, buildings composed of 100% affordable housing units (with gradual compliance after July 2027), and projects that can’t get enough power from the utility in time. Building owners would seek exemptions from the SF Environment Department.
In many cases, the cost of all-electric construction is actually lower than that of mixed-fuel buildings, according to the department. Summarizing several analyses, it estimates that newly built or majorly renovated all-electric single-family homes are cheaper than conventional construction by more than $2 per square foot, on average.
Contrast that to the higher estimated costs to switch to all-electric appliances after construction. The department estimates such retrofits would cost San Francisco homeowners an added $2 to $4 per square foot.
And all-electric retrofits are coming.
In 2023, San Francisco Bay Area air regulators passed landmark rules to phase out the sale of gas-burning water heaters by 2027 and furnaces by 2029 for single-family homes. When old combustion appliances conk out after those dates, homeowners will need to foot the bill to replace them with zero-emissions units. The same will hold for multifamily building owners by 2031.
“Developers aren’t always incentivized to think [about] who’s going to be living in this property 10 or 15 years from now,” said Tyrone Jue, director of the SF Environment Department. “And that’s where government has to step in to say … ‘Yes, we want you to build housing, but we want you to do it smartly so that we don’t end up having to carry the financial burden down the road.’”
Fossil gas also carries heavy social costs. In addition to contributing to an increasing drumbeat of climate disasters, burning fossil fuels in home appliances releases a slew of pollutants, from carbon monoxide to nitrogen oxides, that concentrate indoors and spill outdoors. These by-products can lead to respiratory disorders, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. One in eight childhood asthma cases are linked to gas stoves. All-electric equipment doesn’t emit these compounds.
“As a city, we’re responsible for the well-being of our citizens,” Comerford said.
Gas lines are also a particular liability in the earthquake-prone region. Liquefaction of the earth can sever underground pipelines, which are more prone to damage than the city’s electrical system, Jue said. In a 2020 report, utility Pacific Gas & Electric estimated that after a 7.9 earthquake, it would take up to six months to restore gas services citywide; electricity could be brought back on line in two weeks.
The all-electric renovations ordinance comes as the federal government is rolling back environmental regulations and pushing for more fossil fuel use, not less. “This is a moment for cities like San Francisco to step up,” Jue said. “And this is San Francisco drawing a clear line, not waiting for permission from Washington to protect our people, our health, and the planet.”
Southern California can keep a landmark rule that’s meant to spur the electrification of certain boilers and water heaters across the smog-choked region.
Late last week, a federal court upheld the first-in-the-nation regulation, which will gradually eliminate emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from more than 1 million fossil-gas appliances in the South Coast Air Quality Management District that covers greater Los Angeles. It applies to light-industrial and commercial boilers, steam generators, and process heaters, as well as residential pool heaters and tankless water heaters.
Opponents of the rule, led by gas-appliance makers and building trade groups, had sued in December to invalidate the standards.
“This decision recognizes our air regulators’ long-established authority to adopt life-saving protections — and sends an undeniable signal to manufacturers and businesses that the future of California’s industrial sector is electric,” Candice Youngblood, an attorney for Earthjustice, which intervened to defend the rule in court, said in a July 21 statement.
The measure is ultimately expected to reduce pollution by 5.6 tons of NOx per day — the same as halving smog-forming emissions from cars in the region.
Advocates say the ruling could help to reenergize efforts around the country to replace fossil-fuel-burning equipment with electric heat pumps and other clean technologies in homes and commercial operations.
Such initiatives have stalled since April 2023, when a different federal court struck down Berkeley, California’s pioneering ban on gas hookups in new buildings. The court said the city’s gas ban was preempted by the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act and thus wasn’t valid. The groups suing to stop Southern California’s zero-emission boiler rules pointed to Berkeley to claim that the measure also conflicted with the federal energy-efficiency law.
On July 18, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found otherwise. The court clarified that the Berkeley ruling is “very narrow” in scope and applies to building codes that concern energy use. The measure in Southern California regulates only appliances’ emissions. Put another way, “It’s about what comes out of the appliance — not what goes in,” explained Nihal Shrinath, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club, which also intervened in the case.
Last week’s court ruling “is a really big deal,” both because it enables significant emissions reductions and it affirms that air-quality measures can withstand such legal challenges, he told Canary Media.
“We think there’s probably been less activity by air districts and local municipalities, in terms of advancing [zero-emission rules], because of the fear of litigation,” he said. The South Coast Air Quality Management District itself recently rejected a plan to curtail pollution from certain residential space and water heaters following an opposition campaign led by utility giant SoCalGas.
The California air district spans large portions of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties. More than 17 million people live in the region, where high levels of NOx contribute to some of the worst health-harming smog pollution in the country.
In June 2024, regulators adopted the zero-emission rule for small boilers and large water heaters in homes and businesses as part of its decadeslong mission to meet federal air-quality standards.
Gas-burning appliances covered by the rule account for about 9% of all NOx emissions from stationary sources in the area. They include an estimated 710,000 residential pool heaters and 300,000 tankless water heaters, as well as 60,000 light-industrial and commercial boilers and water heaters at places such as dry cleaners, restaurants, warehouses, and hospitals.
While the measure doesn’t explicitly ban or require any specific technology, the most realistic way for anyone to comply is by replacing their gas-fired appliances with alternatives like ultra-efficient heat pumps or modern electric-resistance boilers.
The limits on NOx emissions are designed to ramp up over time, starting in 2026 for new small units installed in new buildings and extending to new high-temperature units installed in existing facilities in 2033. The drawn-out timeline is meant to allow small businesses and homeowners some flexibility as they phase out their current equipment. It also gives manufacturers of zero-emission technologies enough time to develop and scale up production to meet the new demand.
Critics of the measure, including dry cleaner associations and building contractors, have argued that switching out gas-burning equipment and upgrading buildings’ electrical systems would impose a “significant financial burden.” The air district has estimated that the transitioning to zero-emission equipment will cost companies and households about $49 million to $97 million per year — though the air district will provide rebates to help defray some of those expenses. Industrial heat pumps can also deliver lower operating costs than gas boilers because the electric tech is much more energy-efficient.
Regulators and environmental groups maintain that such rules are necessary both to improve public health within the district and to accelerate the market nationwide for emissions-free industrial equipment. Last week’s court ruling ensures such efforts can continue.
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