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A new law in Seattle marks the latest in a wave of local efforts to electrify homes and other buildings. Under the city’s Building Emissions Performance Standard, signed into law last week, all existing commercial and multifamily residential buildings over 20,000 square feet will need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Meeting that target will powerfully require towers owners to replace oil and gas-powered furnaces, water heaters, gas stoves, and other appliances with electric alternatives like heat pumps and induction stoves. Buildings in Seattle generate 37 percent of the city’s total emissions, and the new law is expected to slash that number by increasingly than a quarter.
Seattle’s ordinance reflects a growing push to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in buildings, which would reduce indoor air pollution and cut stat emissions. But some other local electrification policies have hit a wall. In April, the 9th U.S. Circuit Magistrate of Appeals struck lanugo Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation ban on natural gas in new buildings. The ruling caused several cities wideness the 9th Circuit region, which spans 11 western states and territories including California, Oregon, and Washington, to suspend similar policies. Yet despite the setback, wipe energy experts told Grist that governments still have plenty of options to electrify buildings. Cities and states like Seattle; Ashland, Oregon; and Washington state are sidestepping Berkeley’s legal challenges by finding creative alternatives to banning gas outright — including by setting emissions targets, updating towers codes, and restricting indoor air pollution.
“Elected officials’ and regulators’ resolve to write this issue has not gone away,” said Dylan Plummer, a senior field organizing strategist with the Sierra Club. “They just need to work through new avenues that are legally defensible.”
In 2019, Berkeley became the first municipality in the country to ban new buildings from connecting to natural gas lines. The California Restaurant Association quickly mobilized to file a lawsuit versus the municipality for its policy. In 2021, a federal district magistrate ruled versus the restaurant industry, but in April 2023, a panel of three judges on the 9th Circuit Magistrate of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision, shooting lanugo Berkeley’s ordinance. The judges ruled that considering national efficiency standards for appliances under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act prevent cities and states from setting their own standards, local governments can’t ban infrastructure to prevent the use of fossil fuel-powered appliances.
“The visualization does not make a lot of sense legally,” Jan Hasselman, a senior shyster at Earthjustice, wrote at the time. Since the ruling, other cities in California, including Encinitas, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo, have pulled when their own natural gas bans. Eugene, which was the first municipality in Oregon to prefer a natural gas ban modeling Berkeley’s, moreover suspended its ordinance in June. The Berkeley municipality attorney’s office has requested a rehearing of the case surpassing 11 judges on the 9th Circuit, which could result in a new decision.
In the meantime, Hasselman told Grist that towers emissions standards like the one passed in Seattle are one way for cities to dodge legal hurdles by lamister an explicit ban on gas. The Seattle policy sets benchmarks that ramp up every five years for large buildings to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and lets towers owners decide how they want to reach those standards. Theoretically, they could hold onto their oil and gas appliances, though Plummer pointed out that lamister electrification will likely wilt increasingly and increasingly difficult over time. Commercial buildings covered under Seattle’s new law must reach net-zero emissions by 2045, and multi-family buildings by 2050 — a requirement that would powerfully require swapping out fossil fuel appliances with heat pumps and other electric options. (Carbon offsets purchased by utilities would be unliable to count toward buildings’ net-zero calculations.) A handful of other cities have moreover passed towers performance standards to cut emissions, including Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Updating towers energy codes is flipside viable way for cities to pursue electrification without running afoul of the 9th Circuit ruling, Hasselman said. Recent changes to Washington state’s towers energy codes, which set minimum efficiency standards for buildings, will soon require new buildings to achieve the same energy performance as buildings that use electric heat pumps. Much like Seattle’s new towers standards, the update does not explicitly require builders to install heat pumps, although “it moreover urgently makes gas pretty impractical,” said Hasselman. The legal somersault was intentional: Washington state policymakers delayed and revised the new codes in response to the 9th Circuit’s ruling, since a previous typhoon would have mandated heat pump installation.
Creating stricter indoor air quality standards is flipside option to phase out fossil fuel appliances without explicitly banning them, Hasselman said. Ashland, Oregon, is currently considering setting maximum thresholds for indoor air pollutants like stat dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and methane emissions that would powerfully eliminate the urgent of fossil fuels in buildings. In March, California’s Bay Zone Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution in nine counties in the San Francisco metropolitan area, unexplored rules to phase out sales of gas furnaces and water heaters that produce nitrogen oxide emissions, citing health impacts including coughing, wheezing, and a higher risk of asthma attacks.
Meanwhile, opposition from the gas industry continues to loom over the movement to “electrify everything.” In the past few years, at least 24 states have passed laws to prevent local governments from banning gas in buildings, galvanized by support from trade groups like the American Gas Association and gas utilities like Dominion Energy. In Eugene, Oregon, the gas utility NW Natural funded a highly coordinated campaign to oppose the city’s natural gas ban. But plane with ongoing legal challenges and industry pushback, Hasselman said that Seattle’s new law “reflects how unstoppable the shift is towards electrification.”
“Momentum was slowed for a bit, but it’s picking when up as cities and local governments lead into the future, yonder from urgent gas in homes,” he said. “And that is the future. It’s just a matter of how fast it’s going to happen.”
*Correction, December 21: This vendible incorrectly identified SoCalGas as funding the California Restaurant Association’s litigation versus the municipality of Berkeley.