Why Gas Has to Go––And How Cities Can Show It The Door (Episode 82)

But the thing that the council member, Kate Harrison mentioned too was that, the stuff, you know, when we burn gas to make electricity for example, it’s in a big power plant that’s generally very well maintained. There’s probably a union workforce. So we burn it very cleanly. That’s probably the cleanest way we burn gas. But all these little gas appliances, gas stoves, gas furnaces, whatever, are often not quite tuned up as well as they could be, and that exacerbates the problem. So it’s not just one of the technology that we use, but the fact of the matter we have all these different appliances and it’s kind of up to the customer to maintain them appropriately and presents a much bigger threat as a result.

So I think we’re going to see this spread a lot. I think the health issue is really going to be a hook for people. And I’m just really excited to share this episode with folks, not just because of it’s an interesting way that it talks about this health and safety issue people might not consider, but the fact that it’s really being driven by local action. That it’s the city council and city councils across the country that can take this action about whether or not homes should be able to connect up to the gas network. So, very exciting exercise of local power and local authority and how it impacts a really big part of our lives.

We actually had a former staff person of mine almost died almost about a month ago now. He was down in the Bay Area and there was an oven that was badly leaking carbon monoxide. He said that his whole body, he had like four sensors on, and they went off like Christmas trees, all of his lights. And he had to go to the hospital. He had to be put on oxygen, and he was dying. It’s just testing affordable housing itself that reveals that this is a very dangerous technology. And it’s been forced. So giving people the option of not having it is a way of preventing asthma. It’s worth talking about.

A lot of unpleasant surprises when you’re putting in gas infrastructure or on existing equipment or you can’t vent next to windows with it. So you end up having to redesign the whole building around getting rid of gas. And so I’ve been fighting for code for years that was trying to make sure that we had enough electricity, when we obviously did, which we have now huge surpluses in the grid every day of 20% more than we’re actually using of electricity. So in this situation, we’re really taking care of electricity supply and the crooks who got us into that situation. Now we have the capacity to stop burning gas in homes and it’s just self-evidently expensive and dangerous.

We have fires in our affordable housing developments that was consulted on back when we were still helping out people with gas, which we no longer do. But I’ve seen apartment buildings go up. In The New York times today, there’s a huge apartment complex that blew up because people had install gas in an unsafe way and it’s like 20 households are now homeless. It’s really dangerous in apartment buildings. You know, something that goes wrong affects everybody in the community that’s living there. So it’s really expensive. It’s dangerous. But the first thing to say is that my clients mostly just acknowledge it’s expensive. So we just support that. It works across all political stripes.

The other thing I wanted to say is I believe that our work here will help prime the pump for an entire industry. One of the biggest impediments to doing this have been lack of knowledge among developers and people in the construction trades. If you try to get a heat pump in your house, it can be a little challenging to find someone who can do it. Us pushing this will allow the development of an industry just like pushing solar lead to the development of an industry with reducing costs, so we’re going to see an improvement in the cost picture, but even as of now, it is cheaper to go with electricity instead of natural gas.

So in that context, my clients were big developers have been able to put in their own solar, and they make money. They make significant amounts of money off of lowering the costs compared to their grid electricity. It’s a just a financial strategy, it pays for more apartments.

I also just really appreciate what you said too Kate. This notion about, you know, cost is one piece of the cost isn’t just in the money. It’s in this like sense of expertise and even understanding, that a lot of people who build homes, you know won’t, are contractors that do HVAC might be reluctant to talk to you about electric things because they’re just not familiar with doing them, and that you’ve got a chance now to build that experience by requiring them to do that work and it’s going to make it cheaper and more accessible to everybody as a result.

California has had it as a policy, specifically in response to an energy crisis, quote unquote, which was the crisis of governance. And now we are trying to catch up by adopting policies or other people just said, “Oh it’s way cheaper to get a building permit if I go all electric, people are going to buy this home because they’re going to make it wonderful, and that’s how they build in this house”. It’s not for political reasons of any type, and it’s unfortunately not for climate change, it’s just because it’s a better way of building. And so it’s the majority way of doing it. Berkeley needs to catch up, but it’s like we’re pushing against headwinds in California.

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Is that what makes this Kate such an attractive issue for local action? I mean we’ll often talk about energy policy, people talking about climate. We hear about a Green New Deal, a federal policy, or we see states enacting renewable energy standards. Is that what makes this thing around gas such an attractive local issue? Is that there’s this way that the cities have the power to do something about it?

Us doing this work has prompted the state to start looking at removing those barriers. And in fact they are now modeling the allowance of these buildings for three stories are lower for all residential, and they’re working on models right now for a hot water heating for all building types. So us changing our building codes in a sense forced them to do more work on their end. We can’t say to a developer, “We think it’s great to get rid of natural gas, now go get your toilet- Title 24 approval from the state”. If the state doesn’t work with us to make that feasible. And are doing this has sped them up in terms of making that feasible. So we’ve had a big impact on a statewide basis, more than just what the local effort might look like.

And I also just to say that in general, these sort of efforts start locally. We started locally in Berkeley with the writing off solar on your property tax. That was, that came out of Berkeley. We started, we had the first recycling in the United States, curbside recycling. So these things often start at a local level.

It’s very democratic at the local level, tons of participation from actual people. Like in Berkeley we had a unanimous vote, you had unanimous support from it. PG&E and was able to show up in person and say “We support this too”. I mean it was, this is the right way to do it. It’s a very participatory and effective and, like it’s the way to build policy at the federal level in the real world. Yeah, it’s awesome.

So, you know, we know the factories are many more times, 84 times more efficient, than natural gas factories at sequestering pollution, than the pipelines and the lines into our homes. So even if we start with natural gas, because that’s what’s available to a state as the starting point for producing energy, they produce electricity, we’re much better off than if they use it just as natural gas.

This is a real issue in winter time when people close up their homes. My grandma was from Minnesota, my, sorry, my married in grandma, my extra grandma, she is from Minnesota. She was raised to keep her windows open all winter long for clean air. This is how people are supposed to be able to stay healthy in the Midwest when we have so much particulate in our homes frequently from woodstove, like I was raised in woodstove.

You want leaky homes just so you don’t suffocate yourself literally, but now we tighten up homes and we still have all these dirty gas burning appliances in our houses, particularly the gas stoves, but also wall furnaces. Just a whole bunch of different ways you can get gas combustion that backs those from water heaters too. It’s a problem over and over and over and people get hurt. I look at the Midwest, which is some of the best wind resources in the country. Then you look at the wind belt, which is all governed by Republican majority legislatures and governors, as being the places where you see the highest adoption of wind power in the country. 33%, 35% of their grids will be wind power. And I said, “These are places that have got really cheap energy they should electrify,” and they are. I mean, I’ll say it again, California is leading in policy, but in practice it’s elsewhere in the country that’s been leading for more than 20 years now because it just makes financial sense.

So if a building owner wanted to invest in heat pumps for example, he could purchase them and with these savings in his bills, pay those off over time with our local community agency. So those are some of the things that we’ve been looking at doing. And also just in a more technical sense, but something I feel very passionately about. I’ve sponsored legislation requiring that all kitchens have oven hoods. That’s not something we require right now. And it is a dangerous health issue for us. So we’re looking at that. As well as legislation requiring that all buildings have automatic shutoff valves. So in the case of an earthquake, when the ground shakes, the gas goes off. Also something we’ve not required traditionally. So there are several things we’re doing to sort of tackle this issue of multifamily homes and also people of lower income.

So you see in Sacramento where they have their municipal utility, which is also one of the nation’s largest utilities at its own scale, still big, they have a $13,000 incentive for electrifying existing homes, which they’ve told me pays off in about 14 years for them. And they have a 40 year bond to get that. So there’s the next, all the years after you’re 14 they’re making money compared to what would have happened if they hadn’t gone out and aggressively electrified existing gas loads. So doing it just on pure financial self-interest, assertively electrifying homes and taking away someone else’s opportunity to make money selling gas. And that’s PG&E. So PG&E is seeing this really big tension in Sacramento and I think that it’s already happening nationwide. Calling attention to it is what this podcast is also about. What this is for is to say, “Hey, it’s a national trend.”

The electrification’s been happening in single family homes since 1993. Utilities should start putting their eggs in the basket of electrification, since that’s already happening. They should acknowledge it and start being more strategic and not let people saddle us all with gas infrastructure costs, but we have to pay off one way or another societally, even if that means bankrupting utilities, that everyone, somehow it gets paid and it costs money and it hurts to make bad decisions now. So I see utilities, the smart ones have an opportunity to make an electric move going that way, and including So Cal Gas, which is installing solar fields now. They’re an all gas utility, but they’re installing solar electric fields, like out in Arizona and such.

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