I talk to the head of the Building Decarbonization Coalition about the many technical, political, and financial challenges involved in decarbonizing tens of millions of American homes -- including, yes, ^$*! gas stoves.
Offer a guarantee with the induction stove. Offer 90-day test drives. Free stoves. My wife/cook and I adapted to induction over a few days of use. Wouldn't go back.
Our local Sierra Club chapter has been offering a free trial of the single-burner induction cooktops to get people to try it out. Not a ton of customers so far, but several of the people who tried it have gotten the confidence to go all-in on replacing their stoves.
A friendly critique of Panama's comment about renewable and green hydrogen. here is the exchange I am referring to:
Do you feel confident saying that, in the end, nowhere in the United States will need liquid fuels for heat? You think electrification is going to do it everywhere?
Panama Bartholomy:
I'd say that for buildings, not necessarily for industrial, or transport. That is a hard decision that we need to make immediately: if you look at trash gas, or cow-crap gas, the rainbow of hydrogens — these are all precious, and they're all expensive. Is the highest and best use of that gas in my moderately efficient water heater in my basement? Or should we be spending it in those areas where it is going to be hard to electrify for the foreseeable future, such as industrial purposes, freight, aviation? That's just a better use for it.
I wish he would have added something to the effect of: Biomass, trash, sewage processing (anerobic digestion) are technologies that can concentrate the energy value of the bulky source. Their use to for industrial, freight and aviation fuels will be important and higher value that for his water heater, but the transition is going to take 10-15 years and we have to build the capacity to produce renewable gas and use it nearby before the larger plant to produce those other fuels matures. We are also going to need a portion of the natural gas pipeline system to ship it to the central plant where the higher value products will be made, as it is far too expensive to transport the raw biomass.
Here is an important example of what I am talking about. Some people get all worked up about wood pellets being burned for electricity in the UK at an extremely inefficient effort. What is missing in the conversation is this is a transitional step. First to stop burning coal and replace it with a renewable, sustainable fuel. However it is crucial to acknowledge once the old coal plants are amortized for their remaining useful life (10-15 years) they will be replaced with cheaper more efficient electricity production systems, like on and off-shore wind, solar, etc. The second transition is taking the wood pellets, in their energy densified form and transporting it to the new manufacturer of aviation and large equipment (mining, logging, trucking equipment) fuels.
The use of green gas from manure, sewage treatment, etc in people's furnace, water heater, etc. for 5-15 years until their current device is at the end of its serviceable life can help with the transition of developing those green gas production systems and immediately have a market for it. As the transition to electrifying comes to fruition the green gas can be sent to the aviation fuel manufacturing plant.
We need intermediate product uses to reward the investments in the production capacity. I worked extensively in the biomass to energy world. It is an important valuable resource that can jump start the Biomass Energy Carbon Capture and Storage industry without the expensive air capture technology by producing biochar along with energy from gasification.
Does anyone have references to articles or research regarding the problem with natural gas space heating and stoves? I’ve looked a little bit I don’t know what the authoritative sources are and I run into a lot of people saying natural gas is “clean and safe.”
Great episode. One issue I was hoping to hear more about is global warming impact of the refrigerants used in heat pumps. The problem of HFC refrigerants seems to come up a lot in general discussions of major sources of global warming, but not much in discussions of heat pumps, at least not that I've seen. A few non-HFC fridges are now available, but so far we haven't been able to find any heat pumps using non-HFC refrigerants, at least not here in Minnesota. I would love to know more about the trade-offs in switching to an HFC (R410a) heat pump vs. continuing to heat with a relatively efficient gas boiler (relatively efficient for gas, that is) and whether it makes sense to postpone the switch until heat pumps with non-HFC refrigerants are available. Would greatly appreciate any tips on resources on this issue.
I’m not an expert on this, but have looked into this a bit because I had similar concerns. My understanding is that as a system there isn’t a problem, only if it leaks. And then I guess proper (whatever that means, I don’t know) disposal when the unit is done.
"The typical heat pump system will leak 12 pounds of HFC-410a over the course of its lifetime, according to a recent assessment by the California Public Utilities Commission. Those emissions, the majority of which come when the device is destroyed at the end of its useful life, equal the near-term climate impact of 23 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of burning 54 barrels of oil, or driving a car for five years, according to the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalency calculator."
With non-HFC refrigerants apparently only a couple of years off (on the U.S. market), that really begs the question of why not wait for the non-HFCs, and why so little discussion of this issue?
Yes agreed. It’s good to know that it largely occurs when destroyed so that perhaps efffective disposal is the appropriate course of action, or non-hfcs as you say. I couldn’t find any when replacing my water heater though, all had hfc. So in that case I didn’t want to invest in a gas powered water heater knowing it’d be around for awhile.
I was curious that "passivhaus" never got mentioned in the whole conversation. I wonder if that's something that Bartholomy would call a starchitect thing?
If you live in a typical smaller suburban city like I do, you’re probably located within a mile or 2 of a neighborhood shopping center anchored by a grocery store and/ or pharmacy & a gas station. These commercial buildings are generally leased to tenants, not owner occupied. With significant refrigeration & AC+ heating loads, they must consume the most electrical & gas power in the neighborhood, except a possible hospital. If you were planning a neighborhood micro-grid they’d be your storage battery hub. Today, some of them have backup generators, but none of them have rooftop or parking lot solar canopies, backup batteries, V2G charging stations, or heat pump HVAC & refrigeration systems. How do you incentivize that transition? Maybe when enough suburbanites are driving EVs & have solar roofs, commercial real estate will eventually start to catch up?
The incentives for energy efficient upgrades are pretty obvious in owner occupied buildings of any use category: residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, etc. But owners of rental / leased property have no such incentive, because they don’t pay the utility bills. Building codes can mandate higher standards for new construction, but what can be done to further incentivize improvements to the vast numbers of old, leased buildings? Disability improvements have been added to building code requirements for renovation permits, triggered by & scaled to the value of the project. Are states & local jurisdictions contemplating any similar triggers for additional energy efficiency mandates for building renovation permits? Shouldn’t the commercial real estate industry & lenders be required to step up their participation on this issue?
The answer is MEETS ("metered energy efficiency transaction structure")! I had hoped they'd talk more about this on the podcast, it's a super-cool financing arrangement that solves the exact "split incentive" problem you described; i.e., the landlord doesn't care what the utility bill is because the tenant pays it through a CAM charge.
My understanding from talking to people who do these deals is the way MEETS usually works is this: an "energy efficiency tenant" approaches the owner of an old, creaky building and says, "Hi there, I would like to spend my own money to make your building more energy efficient. No no, you don't have to pay me, I'll pay you rent for the privilege of getting to make your building more efficient." Which seems kind of bonkers, until you realize what the efficiency tenant is doing is selling the avoided electricity to an electric utility, just like any other power purchase agreement.
The reason this works as a business model now is that software has gotten sophisticated enough that it can calculate very accurately and precisely not just how much electricity consumption has been avoided, but when it was avoided, because its looking at stuff like historical weather patterns and current weather patterns and whatnot.
One thing for green energy boosters to know is that tax law can sometimes hold back this kind of investment by not letting the efficiency tenant accelerate depreciation on the tenant improvements. So, that's something policymakers could do to help push more of these investments forward.
I like this, but it’s likely that only a long-term anchor tenant could or would do this. What about all the smaller transient tenants in a typical shopping center or business park? I’m beginning to think that we’ll have to reach at least 30% new vehicle EV sales before this starts to flip. At that point a lot more homes (less than 5% now in CA) will have solar +EV chargers and there’ll be more incentive for employers to install V2G chargers for fleet vehicles & employees at their commercial sites. The utility companies will not help with this at all as long as they remain stuck in their zero-sum mindset, relentlessly trying to extract more grid fees from solar equipped customers. It will be interesting to see the impact of Ford’s Lightning pickup & EV vans with V2G capability on accelerating EV adoption; I think it’s going to be a big deal in CA.
It wouldn’t be the anchor tenant working with the efficiency tenant, it would be the landlord. From the perspective of the anchor tenant, or any other tenant renting physical space in the building, they’ll be paying the exact same CAM charge to cover the exact same size utility bill they always have, but they’ll likely be in a more comfortable building.
My understanding is that the way Seattle City Light does it is they’ll have part of the bill be for electricity provided and part of the bill be an “energy efficiency service charge” that’s exactly what the rest of the building’s electricity bill would have been had the efficiency improvement not been made. That’s a big part of why the utilities are happy to participate in this structure: no lost revenue. I believe the efficiency service fee is due from the building owner for up to 20 years, however long SCL’s “power purchase agreement” with the efficiency tenant lasts, and it’s transferrable to the next owner if the current owner sells the building (though check with an attorney to be sure).
What I’ve heard from people who do this is that the main limiting factors getting the numbers to pencil out is the size of the building—the property probably needs to be at least 50K square feet to have enough scale to be worth it—and how fast depreciation can be accelerated—tougher to do with residential than commercial properties.
Great episode! Special appreciation from me, as this topic is one I asked for, so thanks! Surprised to see it’s only 10% of emissions, as I have always heard it was 20-30, so thanks for that clarification.
Offer a guarantee with the induction stove. Offer 90-day test drives. Free stoves. My wife/cook and I adapted to induction over a few days of use. Wouldn't go back.
Our local Sierra Club chapter has been offering a free trial of the single-burner induction cooktops to get people to try it out. Not a ton of customers so far, but several of the people who tried it have gotten the confidence to go all-in on replacing their stoves.
Great discussion, thanks.
A friendly critique of Panama's comment about renewable and green hydrogen. here is the exchange I am referring to:
Do you feel confident saying that, in the end, nowhere in the United States will need liquid fuels for heat? You think electrification is going to do it everywhere?
Panama Bartholomy:
I'd say that for buildings, not necessarily for industrial, or transport. That is a hard decision that we need to make immediately: if you look at trash gas, or cow-crap gas, the rainbow of hydrogens — these are all precious, and they're all expensive. Is the highest and best use of that gas in my moderately efficient water heater in my basement? Or should we be spending it in those areas where it is going to be hard to electrify for the foreseeable future, such as industrial purposes, freight, aviation? That's just a better use for it.
I wish he would have added something to the effect of: Biomass, trash, sewage processing (anerobic digestion) are technologies that can concentrate the energy value of the bulky source. Their use to for industrial, freight and aviation fuels will be important and higher value that for his water heater, but the transition is going to take 10-15 years and we have to build the capacity to produce renewable gas and use it nearby before the larger plant to produce those other fuels matures. We are also going to need a portion of the natural gas pipeline system to ship it to the central plant where the higher value products will be made, as it is far too expensive to transport the raw biomass.
Here is an important example of what I am talking about. Some people get all worked up about wood pellets being burned for electricity in the UK at an extremely inefficient effort. What is missing in the conversation is this is a transitional step. First to stop burning coal and replace it with a renewable, sustainable fuel. However it is crucial to acknowledge once the old coal plants are amortized for their remaining useful life (10-15 years) they will be replaced with cheaper more efficient electricity production systems, like on and off-shore wind, solar, etc. The second transition is taking the wood pellets, in their energy densified form and transporting it to the new manufacturer of aviation and large equipment (mining, logging, trucking equipment) fuels.
The use of green gas from manure, sewage treatment, etc in people's furnace, water heater, etc. for 5-15 years until their current device is at the end of its serviceable life can help with the transition of developing those green gas production systems and immediately have a market for it. As the transition to electrifying comes to fruition the green gas can be sent to the aviation fuel manufacturing plant.
We need intermediate product uses to reward the investments in the production capacity. I worked extensively in the biomass to energy world. It is an important valuable resource that can jump start the Biomass Energy Carbon Capture and Storage industry without the expensive air capture technology by producing biochar along with energy from gasification.
Does anyone have references to articles or research regarding the problem with natural gas space heating and stoves? I’ve looked a little bit I don’t know what the authoritative sources are and I run into a lot of people saying natural gas is “clean and safe.”
Great episode. One issue I was hoping to hear more about is global warming impact of the refrigerants used in heat pumps. The problem of HFC refrigerants seems to come up a lot in general discussions of major sources of global warming, but not much in discussions of heat pumps, at least not that I've seen. A few non-HFC fridges are now available, but so far we haven't been able to find any heat pumps using non-HFC refrigerants, at least not here in Minnesota. I would love to know more about the trade-offs in switching to an HFC (R410a) heat pump vs. continuing to heat with a relatively efficient gas boiler (relatively efficient for gas, that is) and whether it makes sense to postpone the switch until heat pumps with non-HFC refrigerants are available. Would greatly appreciate any tips on resources on this issue.
I’m not an expert on this, but have looked into this a bit because I had similar concerns. My understanding is that as a system there isn’t a problem, only if it leaks. And then I guess proper (whatever that means, I don’t know) disposal when the unit is done.
I haven't traced it back to the cited source, but an article in Inside Climate News (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12072021/heat-pumps-climate-efficiency-hfcs/) indicates leaks are unavoidable and significant:
"The typical heat pump system will leak 12 pounds of HFC-410a over the course of its lifetime, according to a recent assessment by the California Public Utilities Commission. Those emissions, the majority of which come when the device is destroyed at the end of its useful life, equal the near-term climate impact of 23 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of burning 54 barrels of oil, or driving a car for five years, according to the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalency calculator."
With non-HFC refrigerants apparently only a couple of years off (on the U.S. market), that really begs the question of why not wait for the non-HFCs, and why so little discussion of this issue?
Yes agreed. It’s good to know that it largely occurs when destroyed so that perhaps efffective disposal is the appropriate course of action, or non-hfcs as you say. I couldn’t find any when replacing my water heater though, all had hfc. So in that case I didn’t want to invest in a gas powered water heater knowing it’d be around for awhile.
I was curious that "passivhaus" never got mentioned in the whole conversation. I wonder if that's something that Bartholomy would call a starchitect thing?
If you live in a typical smaller suburban city like I do, you’re probably located within a mile or 2 of a neighborhood shopping center anchored by a grocery store and/ or pharmacy & a gas station. These commercial buildings are generally leased to tenants, not owner occupied. With significant refrigeration & AC+ heating loads, they must consume the most electrical & gas power in the neighborhood, except a possible hospital. If you were planning a neighborhood micro-grid they’d be your storage battery hub. Today, some of them have backup generators, but none of them have rooftop or parking lot solar canopies, backup batteries, V2G charging stations, or heat pump HVAC & refrigeration systems. How do you incentivize that transition? Maybe when enough suburbanites are driving EVs & have solar roofs, commercial real estate will eventually start to catch up?
The incentives for energy efficient upgrades are pretty obvious in owner occupied buildings of any use category: residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, etc. But owners of rental / leased property have no such incentive, because they don’t pay the utility bills. Building codes can mandate higher standards for new construction, but what can be done to further incentivize improvements to the vast numbers of old, leased buildings? Disability improvements have been added to building code requirements for renovation permits, triggered by & scaled to the value of the project. Are states & local jurisdictions contemplating any similar triggers for additional energy efficiency mandates for building renovation permits? Shouldn’t the commercial real estate industry & lenders be required to step up their participation on this issue?
The answer is MEETS ("metered energy efficiency transaction structure")! I had hoped they'd talk more about this on the podcast, it's a super-cool financing arrangement that solves the exact "split incentive" problem you described; i.e., the landlord doesn't care what the utility bill is because the tenant pays it through a CAM charge.
https://www.meetscoalition.org/how-meets-works/
My understanding from talking to people who do these deals is the way MEETS usually works is this: an "energy efficiency tenant" approaches the owner of an old, creaky building and says, "Hi there, I would like to spend my own money to make your building more energy efficient. No no, you don't have to pay me, I'll pay you rent for the privilege of getting to make your building more efficient." Which seems kind of bonkers, until you realize what the efficiency tenant is doing is selling the avoided electricity to an electric utility, just like any other power purchase agreement.
The reason this works as a business model now is that software has gotten sophisticated enough that it can calculate very accurately and precisely not just how much electricity consumption has been avoided, but when it was avoided, because its looking at stuff like historical weather patterns and current weather patterns and whatnot.
One thing for green energy boosters to know is that tax law can sometimes hold back this kind of investment by not letting the efficiency tenant accelerate depreciation on the tenant improvements. So, that's something policymakers could do to help push more of these investments forward.
I like this, but it’s likely that only a long-term anchor tenant could or would do this. What about all the smaller transient tenants in a typical shopping center or business park? I’m beginning to think that we’ll have to reach at least 30% new vehicle EV sales before this starts to flip. At that point a lot more homes (less than 5% now in CA) will have solar +EV chargers and there’ll be more incentive for employers to install V2G chargers for fleet vehicles & employees at their commercial sites. The utility companies will not help with this at all as long as they remain stuck in their zero-sum mindset, relentlessly trying to extract more grid fees from solar equipped customers. It will be interesting to see the impact of Ford’s Lightning pickup & EV vans with V2G capability on accelerating EV adoption; I think it’s going to be a big deal in CA.
It wouldn’t be the anchor tenant working with the efficiency tenant, it would be the landlord. From the perspective of the anchor tenant, or any other tenant renting physical space in the building, they’ll be paying the exact same CAM charge to cover the exact same size utility bill they always have, but they’ll likely be in a more comfortable building.
My understanding is that the way Seattle City Light does it is they’ll have part of the bill be for electricity provided and part of the bill be an “energy efficiency service charge” that’s exactly what the rest of the building’s electricity bill would have been had the efficiency improvement not been made. That’s a big part of why the utilities are happy to participate in this structure: no lost revenue. I believe the efficiency service fee is due from the building owner for up to 20 years, however long SCL’s “power purchase agreement” with the efficiency tenant lasts, and it’s transferrable to the next owner if the current owner sells the building (though check with an attorney to be sure).
https://www.bdlaw.com/publications/seattles-energy-efficiency-as-a-service-pilot-program-promises-major-benefits-for-building-owners-utilities-and-conservation/
What I’ve heard from people who do this is that the main limiting factors getting the numbers to pencil out is the size of the building—the property probably needs to be at least 50K square feet to have enough scale to be worth it—and how fast depreciation can be accelerated—tougher to do with residential than commercial properties.
You're to be forgiven for that direct/indirect emissions confusion. We're all swimming in the same sea of superimposed and fractal analysis. I'm adding a link to this great chat from my new piece on the policy, community and personal paths to household energy and CO2 impact! https://revkin.bulletin.com/the-household-infrastructure-challenge-retrofitting-millions-of-american-homes
Great episode! Special appreciation from me, as this topic is one I asked for, so thanks! Surprised to see it’s only 10% of emissions, as I have always heard it was 20-30, so thanks for that clarification.