Volts podcast: Panama Bartholomy on decarbonizing America's buildings

In this episode, Panama Bartholomy, head of the Building
Decarbonization Coalition, discusses the need to decarbonize
buildings, the many challenges facing the effort, and the cities
and states that are making progress. You better believe we get
way into heat pumps and induction stoves.


Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Panama Bartholomy,
January 28, 2022


(PDF version)


David Roberts:


Fossil-fuel combustion in buildings — mostly natural gas for
space and water heating — is responsible for around 10 percent of
US greenhouse gas emissions. Getting to net-zero will require
heating, cooling, and powering all those buildings with
carbon-free energy.


It’s an enormous challenge — or rather, a huge thicket of
challenges. There are technical issues, political issues,
public-opinion issues, and policy issues, all of which decompose
into dozens of discrete issues of their own.


To help me wrap my head around all of it, I’m eager to talk to
Panama Bartholomy, who is, I promise, a real person and not a Dr.
Seuss character.


Bartholomy has been wrestling with building decarbonization for
decades, at (in reverse chronological order): the Investor
Confidence Project, the California legislature, the California
Energy Commission, the California State Architect, and the
California Conservation Corps. He’s served on a variety of
boards, collaborated with various expert organizations, worked on
climate issues in over 30 countries, and all kinds of other
stuff, but if I tried to include it all I would never get to the
conversation.


Bartholomy is currently running the Building Decarbonization
Coalition, a multi-sector alliance of companies, nonprofits, and
government agencies working on buildings, so he’s up to date on
where progress is being made (think New York and California), the
biggest political impediments (think the natural gas industry),
and whether heat pumps really work in cold climates (think yes,
they do).


Without further ado, Panama Bartholomy, welcome to Voltscast.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Thanks, Dave. Good to be here. Long-time listener, first-time
caller.


David Roberts:   


Let's talk about buildings. There's so much to get into here, but
I want to start with a few broad scene-setting questions. Just to
orient us, tell us where buildings fall on the climate policy
hierarchy of needs. What portion of the problem are our
buildings?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Maslow's hierarchy of needs for buildings and climate, I love
it. 


We — by which I mean the building sector — come in right about 25
to 30 percent of overall emissions nationally, and about the same
globally. Depending on the state you're in and the grid mix of
your electricity, it may be a little higher or lower, but we’re
right about in that sweet spot of 20 to 30 percent. 


One of the challenges is that in this sector, unlike industry or
the electricity sector or even the transportation sector, you
have millions if not billions of little machines that have a lot
of consumer choice. You can't just shut down a coal plant and all
of a sudden get a lot of benefit. You have to involve a lot of
players in this.


David Roberts:   


Yes, this seems like the decarbonization sector that involves the
most logistics and the most high-touch human interaction. You
have to think about sociology and psychology. It's a tangle.


Panama Bartholomy:  


It is, and that's why I appreciate you spending some time in our
funny little corner of the climate world. We need a lot more
attention to it. Every time somebody buys a new furnace or a gas
water heater or stove, they're locking in 20 or 25 years of
carbon emissions from there. So attention is one of the key
things that we need on this issue.


David Roberts:   


In recent years there's been something of a consensus forming in
carbon circles that electrification is the premier
decarbonization strategy. When we look at buildings, is
electrifying them the whole game? How far will electrification
get us and how big is the remainder once you're done
electrifying?


Panama Bartholomy:  


We haven't seen a lot of good alternatives at this point. When
you think about electrifying buildings, you’re talking about
space heating, water heating, cooking, and probably clothes
drying. You do have some arguments with people about their gas
fireplaces and their pool pumps, but that's a pretty small
amount, all in all. 


When you look at the alternatives, are we going to pump
incredibly expensive renewable natural gas through pipes to power
those? Are we going to replace the entire gas system with a new
hydrogen system to do that? I don't think so. These are pretty
low-level technologies, when it comes down to it, in the use of
energy, and using expensive fuels just doesn't make sense either
from an economic perspective or a climate solutions
perspective. 


So electricity is the path we need to go down on buildings.
They're making cold-weather heat pumps that can operate well down
to -15 degrees, so here in 2022, we have much if not all the
technology we're going to need for electrification of buildings.
It gets down to an issue of scale and deployment, and how are we
going to do it fast enough to meet our climate goals.


David Roberts:   


Here’s a philosophical question: If we are going to electrify all
the buildings and then we're going to supply that electricity
with zero-carbon renewables or other clean energy, then why do we
need efficiency? Why do we need to use less energy in buildings
if the energy we're using is clean?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Because even if we're using clean electricity, we don't want to
use a ton of it. I consistently look forward to a Star Trek
future when we don't have to have conversations about appliances
and energy and where it comes from. But the reality is that
electricity does cost money here in our reality, and if you're
running even a highly efficient heat pump off of a very clean
grid in a very cold climate, you just want to use less energy to
heat your house. In particular in the colder climates, it's to
save money.


David Roberts:   


So we could imagine your Star Trek future where renewable energy
has gotten so cheap that we no longer feel the need to ration it.
In that theoretical future, will efficiency just fade out, or is
there some intrinsic worth to efficiency beyond saving a scarce
resource? 


Panama Bartholomy:  


I was raised in California and then Hawaii, so I have a primal
fear of being even slightly cold. My wife did her undergraduate
work in Minnesota, so whenever I complain about being cold, she
mocks me, and I say, just because you were colder at one point in
your life doesn't invalidate my feelings and discomfort right
now. 


The benefit is going to be one of comfort moving forward. When
you talk to the leaders in the energy efficiency community that
actually sell efficiencies successfully — and there's only two —
they'll say that that's usually what sells efficiency: it’s
comfort, it’s air quality, it's a better quality of life, rather
than the marginal savings you get from it. 


In the colder and the hotter climes, efficiency is always going
to have a role to play, but increasingly people are recognizing
that it's less important in the timeframes that we're talking
about for addressing climate change than getting off of fossil
fuels. We can't just be using less fossil fuels, we need to stop
using fossil fuels.


David Roberts:   


I want to talk about the impediments to building decarbonization
in three different areas. First, putting aside politics and
regulation, what is the biggest technical barrier to building
decarbonization? Are there still practical and engineering and
technological problems to solve? Or is this all about policy and
investment?


Panama Bartholomy:  


What you have is a situation of the technology itself and then
market awareness or market familiarity with the technology. 


When you look at low-rise commercial buildings, low-rise
multifamily residential buildings, the technology is there. As I
mentioned, we have incredibly performing cold-climate heat pumps,
and a heat pump is just an air conditioner that runs in reverse,
so anybody that installs an air conditioner knows how to install
a heat pump. Heat-pump water heater — it's not crazy Vulcan
technology. The technology is there for that, and there's enough
familiarity with it that if we can put in place the right market
signals and the right policies, it'll be an easy shift for the
industry. 


For the high-rise, we have a few more challenges. You have the
“starchitects” and the good engineering firms that are familiar
with doing central hot water heating systems with heat pumps. But
by and large, that's one technology where — even though it
exists, it's being deployed in countries all over the world —
particularly here in America, there's less awareness and history
of designers doing central heat-pump water heaters. So that's one
area where we still have to come up to speed. 


Then the biggest barrier on the technical side right now is just
home wiring and home electrical panels.


David Roberts:   


Upgrading to prepare for electrification, that kind of
thing? 


Panama Bartholomy:  


Exactly: undersized electrical panels. If you're adding four new
appliances and maybe an electric vehicle, you're going to have to
upgrade your electrical panel. Which isn't bad in itself, and for
a lot of homes there’s a safety benefit to it as well. The
challenge is that in our world, what usually brings that about is
a failed furnace or a failed water heater, so it’s an emergency.


David Roberts:   


So these decisions are made under duress, usually.


Panama Bartholomy:


Yeah, exactly. 


David Roberts:


What about the biggest political impediment? Is it consumer
ignorance or consumer sentiment? Or is it, as I tend to suspect,
opposition from the natural gas industry? 


Panama Bartholomy:  


The biggest political barrier right now is fear. It's the fear of
politicians to set out agendas in line with their stated climate
goals. Even leadership states like California and New York that
have strong climate goals — you think of all the different
sectors that are emitting, and well, pretty soon here, we’ve got
to stop burning fossil fuels in buildings. 


Yet you see a hesitancy of leadership to set out that vision, and
that results in market confusion. You have the manufacturers, the
installers, the builders all saying, “well on one hand, it's
pretty obvious what you're going to have to do to us through
regulation if you're going to meet your climate goals, but on the
other hand, you're still allowing new buildings to hook up to the
gas system; you're still providing energy-efficiency incentives
for gas appliances; you're still putting out billions of taxpayer
dollars into affordable housing and school construction and you
have no alignment of those policies with your climate policies.”
So right now it's fear to step up and set bold policies for
buildings that is holding it back. 


You mentioned where that fear may be coming from, and largely it
is gas utilities, who don't see themselves in a low-carbon
future; in particular, the unions that work within those
companies and lay those pipes, or unions that lay pipe in
buildings. What we are seeing in both New York and California
right now is organized labor starting to come to the table. They
use the same language every time we sit down at the table with
them: they say, “we see the writing on the wall; we know where
this is going, and so we're coming to the table to begin to
negotiate what a just transition actually looks like beyond just
a slogan.”


David Roberts:   


What is the biggest financial impediment? Is it just a lack of
government money, or is there a lack of financing and funding
models?


Panama Bartholomy:  


I've spent about 20 years in energy-efficiency policy; I'm a
recovering bureaucrat, spent about 15 years in state government
in California. Part of the beauty of working in our space is that
we are working with technologies that are not a choice for
consumers. A lot of people think about building electrification,
they draw parallels with the solar industry or the electric
vehicle industry or lessons learned from energy efficiency. And
while there is stuff to learn from that, the reality is: you
don't need to have solar panels in order to stay warm in your
house. You don't need an electric vehicle in order to be able to
provide hot water for your family. 


So we're dealing with technologies that people fundamentally have
a lot of urgency around when they break. The beauty is, they
break, and absent any of our electrification goals or our climate
goals, that person was going to spend anywhere from $7,000 to
$15,000 on a new furnace and air conditioning system.


They were already going to have to spend money, think through
what financing options are available to them, etc. So what we
need to do in this space is figure out how to add just enough
money and just enough access to financing to be able to shift
that decision around to the technologies we want. We don't need
to pay for the entire water heater; what we need to do is pay a
few hundred to a thousand-and-a-half for that water heater in
order to help consumers choose a heat-pump water heater rather
than going back to another gas water heater. 


We need some incentives, particularly over the next decade, to be
able to make it so that the electric choice is the cheaper
choice. For low-income and moderate households, we need to be
focused on accessible financing models for communities that have
historically been left out of capital markets. We've done a big
report about what that could look like: how to use tariffed
on-bill financing in an effective way to both protect consumers
but allow far more people, lower-income and renters, to be able
to take advantage of financing to make these upgrades.


David Roberts:   


When I talk about building decarbonization, one of the first
questions that always comes up is about renters: unless my
landlord has good intentions and is excited about this, there's
not much I can do. Is there agency for renters? What should they
do? How do you get to landlords?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There's water heating and space heating, and then there's
cooking. Water heating and space heating, landlords are generally
looking for the cheapest option; something breaks, they need to
replace it. What I mentioned in the last answer about making the
electric choice the cheapest choice and having good financing for
high-efficiency electric appliances: that's what's going to help
landlords make the better choice, that they're able to save money
up front on these technologies. The same incentive programs and
financing that help homeowners are also going to help landlords
help renters with that. 


Now, key to that is that we also have in place policies that
protect renters so that landlords don't install this technology
and then try to raise the rent on them. It’s a key conversation
happening right now. 


But I wanted to pull apart cooking, because cooking may be an
area where there is more agency than what we've historically
expressed, because of the air-quality impacts of cooking with
gas. There's now a good 40 years of research showing that there
are potentially significant air-quality impacts of burning gas in
your home and around your family, and there are laws in this
country around habitability that landlords have to follow. They
need to provide good environments. 


So if a landlord is providing an environment that does not have
good venting over a stove and/or has a stove that you can test
and show is emitting dangerous levels of pollution, we are now
starting to work with a number of groups across the country
about, how do you then turn that into policy? How can you empower
local governments to include that in their habitability
requirements, which would compel landlords to then make the shift
to either a different kind of stove and/or venting?


David Roberts:   


Is that about passing new policies upgrading the habitability
standards? Or is there some way to interpret or use existing
habitability standards to get at stoves? Are the tools there
already?


Panama Bartholomy:  


We believe that the tools are already there, that the
habitability standards cover this, and it's a matter of somebody
stepping up and testing it. We're engaged with a number of groups
doing air-quality testing over a period of time, working with
tenant groups, and working with local governments to be able to
say, look, this is the data right here. We're potentially having
higher pollution coming from stoves in people's homes than the
highways or ports next to them; as much as we need to address
those, we also need to be addressing this. 


We haven't yet had the first city go ahead and adopt it, but
we're in conversation with a number of them and I hope in the
near future to be able to talk to you about that.


David Roberts:   


When we talk about building decarb, minds go to the operational
emissions: you're running your furnace, you're heating your
house, etc. But the other half of the equation is what's called
embodied emissions — the emissions represented by the manufacture
and transport of the materials used in the building. This seems
like something that consumers have very little control over. Who
needs to understand embodied emissions, and where's the right
lever to take action on that?


Panama Bartholomy:  


The Carbon Leadership Forum, out of your area of Washington, has
been the leading voice on the issue of embodied emissions.
They've done a ton of good work on this. It's a combination of
factors, and it gets down to individual theories of change about
how we're going to address climate change. For me, I think we
need to be doing as much as we can in the 2020s to invest and
incentivize and educate. Then we're looking at a series of
regulations in the 2030s that bring along everybody that wasn't
incentivized or didn't fall to our education. 


On embodied carbon, it's going to be the same thing. Right now, a
lot of the focus on embodied carbon is on the design and
construction community: how do we get the specifiers in all these
firms, largely on the commercial and multifamily and
institutional side, to start to specify different materials? You
have leadership systems like LEED and the Living Building
Challenge incorporating greater transparency to product design
and product development.


David Roberts:   


If you're a big builder, I'm guessing your primary sentiment
about this is that you just don't want to waste a bunch of time
on it. You don't want to have to do the research on the materials
yourself. Is there an easy way for a builder to say to suppliers,
“you must meet X standard?” Is there a standard out there yet
that they can pin their supply on?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Absolutely. LEED and the Institute for Living Futures have been
the two leading groups on this, enforcing through their rating
systems a system for manufacturers to be able to report on the
environmental impacts of their products. We're getting beyond
just recycled content or emissions, we're now getting into a
lifecycle analysis of the product. They're providing the model
right now for products to be measured against. 


The other place we're seeing it is at the local and state level,
but they haven't been able to get much beyond cement, to be
honest with you. 


David Roberts:   


Well, that's a big one.


Panama Bartholomy:  


It is. But we need to be getting into steel. There are a number
of different large systems. California a couple years ago passed
a Buy Clean California bill that required state government to
start to reduce the embodied carbon of steel, glass, and a couple
other products that they purchase for their own
buildings. At the local level, we're seeing local
governments pass embodied carbon ordinances that are mostly
focused on cement and using low-carbon cement in both public and
private buildings.


But it is nascent and we haven't seen anywhere near the attention
on embodied carbon that we've seen on operational emissions of
buildings. Folks like Ed Mazria out of Architecture 2030 make a
compelling point that the bigger carbon problem is the embodied
carbon than the operational.


David Roberts:   


Looking down the road at our imaginary future: if you reduce your
operational greenhouse gases to nothing through clean
electrification and sealing and all that, and then you secure
low-carbon materials, you can imagine buildings not just zeroing
out their emissions — you can imagine buildings becoming carbon
sinks, carbon stores, negative carbon. Is that something people
are thinking about, or is it a 2050 type of thing?


Panama Bartholomy:  


No, people are talking about it. It sounds like you are hanging
out with some of those starchitects I mentioned earlier. It's not
enough to be net-zero anymore, you need to be a carbon-positive
community. 


The science is there. You sequester carbon in certain materials
that you use in a project, and if you use enough of it, and you
zero out your operational, you should be able to do it. 


Again, we need to get it beyond the starchitect buildings to the
mainstream, and that's where I fundamentally feel that government
has to play a role. The most important thing they can do in 2022
is say to the market, where are we going? How are we going to
help create the market to allow the regulations to work when they
come into effect?


David Roberts:   


The pandemic has brought a lot of attention to the fact that air
quality and ventilation are fairly abysmal in many existing
buildings. Now this is becoming a public health issue. Are good
ventilation and filtering and air quality in tension with
efficiency? Are those necessarily going to mean more energy? How
do you see those fitting together?


Panama Bartholomy:  


They're necessary. For 40 years out here in California we've
tightened up the building envelope; I say that the folks over at
the California Energy Commission belong to the the church of the
envelope because of their dedication to it. When you do that, you
necessarily start to trap any emissions in your home: all your
aerosols, all the furniture you bring into your house, and then
microplastics — I think I'm probably one-quarter microplastic at
this point because I have two young kids. 


For our world, it's really the pollution that comes from the
stove, so potentially dangerous levels of nitrogen oxides, carbon
monoxide, and formaldehyde coming out. If you don't have venting,
and you have a tight envelope, and you're cooking in winterm and
you don't want to open the windows, you have a potentially
dangerous situation there for your lung health, and, with carbon
monoxide, for your overall life. 


So it's a critical piece of energy efficiency, and we're starting
to have a pretty brutal conversation in the energy-efficiency
community particularly around some of our low-income
weatherization programs. What is the morality behind tightening
up some of these homes and providing comfort and saving money
without addressing some of the pollutants inside those very
homes?


It's absolutely critical that we deal with ventilation and
removing sources of pollution. We know that stoves are a critical
source of pollution, and we know that we have much better
technology that just blows the doors off of gas stoves to replace
it with.


David Roberts:   


Does this just come down to building in ventilation and airflow
standards into our regulations? Is that the long and short of it?


Panama Bartholomy:  


On new construction, yes. Last year, the Energy Commission in
California adopted its new building code that'll go into effect
in two years, and it's the first time in the world we've seen a
building code that's differentiating the ventilation standard it
requires based on the type of fuel you're using to cook food.
They're saying if you have a gas stove and you’re new
construction, under this code you're going to have to have a
higher ventilation standard, and therefore a more expensive
ventilation system, than an electric one. It's the first time
we've recognized in a code the inherent health benefits of
cooking without gas. 


For existing buildings, whether you're talking about waste or
water treatment, source control is always your best bet, the most
affordable way. You just want to find a way to get the gas stove
out of the kitchen and get an electric one in there. You're still
going to have some emissions from just cooking and, depending on
how good a cook you are, from burning. So you do want some
ventilation for that, but at least you don't have what are known
criteria pollutants from the EPA being emitted into your kitchen
in that case. 


I say that because in some situations, these homes are just built
in a way that is going to make ventilation systems very hard to
retrofit in, and landlords unwilling to do something about it.


David Roberts:   


So you create an incentive for builders or retrofitters: get rid
of the gas stove and thereby save money on ventilation spending.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Exactly. The Energy Commission's done that small step; they
didn't say “no more gas stoves,” but they said “we recognize gas
stoves are dangerous, and therefore you're going to have to deal
with it.” So yes, it is a regulatory incentive.


David Roberts:   


I think we can agree that nothing like the scale of action we'd
like to see is happening, but there are places that are taking
big steps. In New York, the governor laid out some big talk; I'm
curious what she said and what authority it carries. What else
needs to happen to make it move forward?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yeah, very impressive first State of the State from Governor
Hochul on the environment. I think Politico called her a
political juggernaut. 


Unfortunately, her hometown bills couldn't quite get over the
hump last weekend. But she put out some big goals for buildings,
and it matches well with what's happening in the state right now,
which is the beginning of a public process for their big climate
scoping plan that's been under development for years, about how
they're going to meet their climate leadership legislation. 


What the governor announced is a laundry list; I could take up
the rest of the podcast to go through it, so I'll just be brief.
She released a comprehensive package of proposals in the State of
the State: some that can be carried out through her Public
Service Commission, some that will need legislation, and some
that will be addressed in the budget.


David Roberts:   


And she has a supportive legislature?


Panama Bartholomy:  


She does. She hasn't really had to test it yet. But what we've
seen from the last governor, whose name shall not be spoken, is
that he was able to “work well” or bully legislature into
carrying out the agenda. We'll see if this governor has a similar
success rate with the legislature. But it seems like it. There's
been three great pieces of legislation immediately introduced
around building electrification, so I think there's a lot of
action on it. 


But to your original question, the governor proposed how to bring
about 2 million climate-friendly homes by 2030, with at least 1
million of those being all-electric and 1 million being
electric-ready, pre-wired so next time any of your gas appliances
break, you're ready to go with electric appliances.


David Roberts:   


Does “climate-friendly” have a concrete definition?


Panama Bartholomy:  


I've never seen “climate-friendly” in law yet. I think it was a
turn of phrase that her media folks developed for this one.


David Roberts:   


It can mean a lot of different things in practice. 


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yes, indeed. I'm sure the gas companies have a lot to say about
“climate-friendly.” 


She called for all new construction in the state to be zero
emission no later than 2027, which is in line with what New York
City just adopted for all buildings being built in New York City
at the end of last year.


David Roberts:   


That's operational, not embodied, emissions?


Panama Bartholomy:


Correct, that's operational emissions. 


David Roberts:


So does that mean the resulting building will not produce carbon
on an ongoing basis, or the construction process itself is
somehow zero carbon?


Panama Bartholomy:  


The resulting building. We'll see how it all gets played out.
It's a lot of platitudes and speeches for the State of the State
address. There's a piece of legislation currently working through
the legislature that actually sets 2024 as a zero-emission date
for construction. If that one passes, there's a series of
definitions in there, but that is from operational emissions
rather than embodied or construction emissions. 


She also put up a green electrification fund to electrify
low-income homes, about $25 billion for a five-year plan, which
is far more visionary than we've seen from anybody else. 


There's a certain law called “obligation to serve”: utilities
that provide gas, usually monopolies, are obliged to provide that
gas or electricity to ratepayers if requested. If you're far out
in the country, you may need to pay for some of that
infrastructure, but the utility is obliged to provide it to you.
It's a real barrier when you're looking about starting to trim
the gas network. So the governor in her address actually proposed
to end the “obligation to serve” for existing customers.


David Roberts:   


Just to be clear about this, say you are trying to eliminate part
of your gas network and electrify everything in that area; all it
would take is one citizen to say to the natural gas company, “I
would like to be served by gas” and then basically you can't get
rid of it? Is that the legal situation right now?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yeah. We're seeing it out here in California. Pacific Gas &
Electric, largest utility in the country, fourth-largest
distributor of natural gas, they are trying to go through
figuring out how you can operationalize electrification. They've
been doing some pilot programs around going to whole
neighborhoods where they have old pipe that's coming up for
replacement. It’s going to be millions of dollars in replacement,
they've done the analysis, and they said, “okay, if instead we
just electrify all the homes on this pipe extension, it's going
to be cheaper for us and for ratepayers.” So they go to every
single one of those homes and they ask each homeowner, “hey,
would you like a free all-electric home?”


We've seen two case studies they've done on this. One of them, it
worked. They saved $400,000 on the project compared to the gas
pipeline replacement, and it was great. On the other one, out of
150 homes, two people didn't want to give up their gas stoves.
PG&E had to go ahead and spend millions to replace pipes that
are going to have a 60- to 80-year lifespan, that if we're going
to meet our climate goals, we're going to have to early retire,
and who's going to pay for that? It's going to be ratepayers
paying for that early retirement.


David Roberts:   


So this would be a law to get rid of that obligation.


Panama Bartholomy:  


This would be a law. A piece of legislation has now been
introduced in New York legislature to remove that obligation to
serve. 


She also has called on the PSC to take a look at the whole
approach to pipeline maintenance in New York: how we grade it,
how we decide whether or not to replace pipe or look for non-pipe
alternatives to it, such as electrification — completely changing
our approach to just assuming that we're going to replace old
pipe with new pipe. 


I could go on and on. She has a bunch of stuff for training
programs for New Yorkers to get a lot more people in. One of the
two exciting areas I'll bring up is, she's talked about needing
to convene private capital markets. No better place than New York
to be doing some of that convening, to be able to bring them in
to figure out how they can support this. 


Lastly, she's proposed 1,000 clean, green schools. This is an
opportunity to clearly be able to get organized labor more to the
table, to be supporting building electrification as well as
providing better ventilation and air quality in schools.


David Roberts:   


I always thought that was political gold, just waiting for
someone to pick it up. The respiratory health of kids, what's
more on people's minds right now?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Exactly. I live in fire country out here in California — we used
to call it wine country — and increasingly, our schools and our
public facilities are being used as resilience centers in heat
waves and firestorms. Getting these schools with solar,
batteries, all electric, with great ventilation systems, is
unfortunately going to be a critical need as we deal with and
potentially adapt to climate change.


David Roberts:   


We could stay on New York forever; it's amazing what's going on
there. But what about California? That's the other big state
that's come up recently. California is going to just spend a
bunch of money on it?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yep, that's the proposal at this point. Sadly, probably nowhere
near as much as we need to, but it's a good start. 


What I would say about the difference between what we're seeing
in New York and in California is that in New York, you're seeing
some high-level leadership coming directly out of the governor's
office. In California, the leadership is bottom-up. 


We have 54 cities across the state that have adopted local gas
bans or local building codes that discourage gas. We have
agencies like the Air Board and the Energy Commission and the
Public Utilities Commission adopting piecemeal policies that are
all building toward the direction of requiring electrification
and incentivizing it and building the market. But until January
10 of this year, we didn't see anything coming from the
governor's office about, “we need to start electrifying, we need
to start getting off of fossil fuels.”


On January 10, the governor released his proposed budget for the
year and he proposed just over a billion dollars for building
electrification, with two-thirds of that going toward existing
building low-income housing retrofits. We're starting to see some
significant investment, more so than we've seen in the past.


But at this point, I’ve got to say, I think if you put a UFC
championship belt on any governor right now, it's Governor
Hochul. 


David Roberts:   


New York and California are the leaders on so much carbon and
climate stuff. Are they the leaders in this respect too, on
buildings? Or is there anyone else that's taking comparable
action?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There are. I mentioned local governments, and that's a theme
we've seen in addressing climate change for decades now: the
locals are the ones that are the most exposed to voters, and yet
across the world they have been taking the biggest swings on
climate change. They see both the benefits and the risks of
climate change more directly than state or federal levels. 


Other states, I would say that Massachusetts, Illinois, and
Colorado are stepping up. I'll throw Washington in there as well.
Massachusetts is just about to vote on the next three years of
their energy-efficiency program, and they have nearly completely
shifted the focus of the energy-efficiency program to make it
much more electrification-focused.


David Roberts:   


This is a big thing, right? Because efficiency conventionally
conceived is not necessarily aligned with electrification or
cleaning up sources. Often in tension. I feel like this is
something not a lot of people are aware of outside the space.


Panama Bartholomy:  


It very much is, and I think a lot of it is because the
energy-efficiency mindset came out of the oil crisis of the 70s —
it's just about saving more energy, it's not about ending
emissions. The shift to climate-is-existential, I think it's been
hard for folks that have been working in this space for 30 years
or so. So that'll be great in Massachusetts. 


Colorado and Illinois both passed overall climate legislation
last year that had buildings as a specific part of it, and in
implementation they're going to be developing comprehensive
roadmaps for how to deal with buildings. In Washington they're
actually adopting a new building code, and for commercial and
multifamily buildings they're proposing electrification mandates
within that building code. So your home state up there is one of
the leaders. The odd thing is, they're backing off on
single-family homes, where it's the easiest to do it, and it's
largely because of stoves.


David Roberts:   


It's easier to electrify residential. Big buildings and
commercial buildings, industrial buildings, that's doable, it's
just more expensive? Or the incentives are wrong? What's the
status of bigger buildings? Is this something we know how to do?


Panama Bartholomy:  


It's very much doable, it's being done. I can point you to
buildings in Seattle that are all-electric tall towers. One of
the leading consulting firms, Ecotope, is out of the Seattle
area. It is very possible and being done all over the
world. 


The key thing there, though, is awareness. We haven't asked our
bread-and-butter design and construction community to care this
deeply about climate change before, so they've been focused on
efficiency and not on these central heat-pump water heating
systems. The HVAC systems — again, heat pumps are basically air
conditioners that can run in reverse, so it's not complicated to
design that, but there are some differences in a boiler-based
water heating system versus a central heat-pump water heating
system. It's nothing crazy; it's not Star Wars technology. It's
just familiarity with it and being able to design around it.
Unfortunately, I think we're going to do a ton of education and
incentivizing in the 2020s and then have to require it in the
2030s. 


It's very doable. It's being done. For the folks that know how to
do this, we're not seeing a price premium for building
all-electric versus building with gas. In fact, Point Energy out
of San Francisco did a big study for the University of California
system, which has adopted a carbon neutrality by 2025 target,
about what it costs to build and operate a building with gas and
electric versus just electric. They looked at residential towers,
office buildings, and labs, and found that the electric buildings
cost the same or cheaper to build and operate than the gas
buildings across all three of those building types.


David Roberts:   


Is this one of those things where it's more capital-intensive up
front but then you save on operations over the long term? I used
to be very taken by that story, but then I realized that, as nice
as that thought is, it’s not really what motivates a lot of
behavior in markets. People overweight those upfront capital
costs. Is that still the situation?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Not in this space. You never want to make generalizations about
construction. Every project is different; every time you interact
with a supply chain is different than another time interacting
with the supply chain. But by and large, our members, who are
design and construction folks in this space, that know how to do
this, say they don't see a cost premium for the construction of
these projects for large, commercial, institutional.


David Roberts:   


There are a lot of states now that are, let's say, pushing the
other direction. One of the ways they're doing that is by passing
laws that preempt cities from passing gas bans; it's popped up in
a lot of red states. Is there anything to say about that other
than, “they should stop doing that, that's bad, we should elect
somebody who won't do that”? If you're a city who's in one of
those states, are there ways around it? Are there other things
you can do? How should they deal with that?


Panama Bartholomy:  


That's a great question. What it fundamentally comes down to is
taking away local governments’ choice about how to address
climate change.


David Roberts:   


By the party that champions local government. Weird.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yes, weird times, almost like it's disingenuous. 


When you look at what cities can do on climate change, usually
transportation and buildings are the largest emissions; it just
depends how much infrastructure or industry they have in their
boundaries. Transportation emissions are tough; a lot of it is
consumer choice. Your land-use choices take a long time to have a
big impact. Public transportation is tough and expensive. 


So buildings are one of the key areas where local governments can
actually do anything. When you take that tool away, you're really
crippling local government's ability to do anything on climate
change. 


What we're seeing right now is some creative ways to look around
it. Some of the states that have adopted this have focused in on
building codes, so you have some cities looking at planning law,
health and safety law, instead of our building code law, which
has now been preempted by state government. You are seeing some
cities trying to look for creative ways around this. 


Ultimately, you know, I love all of our 50 states equally. But
when you look at the top 10 states by gas demand, only Texas and
Ohio have adopted these bans. The other eight states are climate
leaders. They all have climate laws, they have climate targets,
and they collectively represent over half the gas demand in the
United States in buildings. I think what you're going to see is a
coalition of those states changing the marketplace. Smaller
states with smaller gas demand are just going to have to deal
with the implications of those market changes.


David Roberts:   


A little bit like fuel economy, right? You get enough big states
going in the right direction, they end up dragging the market
with them. 


Panama Bartholomy:


Very much so.


David Roberts:


I know Biden has done an executive order on federal buildings,
and I know there's some money in the infrastructure bill. Are you
excited by what's happened so far federally on buildings? Are
there particular pieces we should be aware of?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There's more than we've ever seen. And that's great.


David Roberts:   


That's always such a low bar in these conversations.


Panama Bartholomy:  


When you work in climate, you have to be an optimist. Maybe not
if you report on climate, but if you work in climate, you have to
be an optimist. The numbers are just too stark. 


The fact that we appointed somebody in the White House, Mark
Chambers, formerly from New York City, to be the lead on building
emissions for the Council on Environmental Quality is amazing.
The fact that you have Secretary Granholm going around giving big
press events around cold-climate heat pumps and people yelling
from behind her, “heat pump nation!” is absolutely incredible.
DOE is moving forward on regulations that manufacturers of
heating equipment say are going to be pushing the market to
electrification. We're seeing a lot of what we need to see. 


It's our fundamental belief that you don't see significant
federal action until you see a lot of state action. Federal is
the bank, and then the caboose on regulations. We need
significant investment from the federal government, and then that
investment will help locals and states be able to adopt
regulations that will transform the market enough that actors of
all colors will come back to Washington and say, “listen, this is
too haphazard and patchwork, we need some level of consistency
across the country.”


David Roberts:   


If any of us need to feel additional anxiety about Build Back
Better, is there anything big on buildings in Build Back Better
that you are hoping makes it through this twisted process?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There is, much of it thanks to former guests on this podcast who
have done great work in this area, particularly Saul and the
folks over at Rewiring America. 


There's $17 billion in there for federal buildings, which I have
a hard time getting too excited about when I think about
taxpayers looking at it. “Great, so you're going to do a bunch of
stuff that you should have been doing the whole time, and now
we're supposed to get excited about this? What about the $17
billion to help me with my water heater?”


But there's $12 billion for residential electrification, and
that'll be split: about $6 billion coming out of the Department
of Energy to provide direct rebates for the whole suite of
electrification technologies (water heating, space heating,
cooking, and clothes drying); then there's $6 billion that'll be
implemented through state energy offices. That'll be focused on
what is one of the biggest movements in energy efficiency right
now: performance-based energy-efficiency measures.


David Roberts:   


Can you give the capsule summary of what that means?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Historically, we've had widget-based or “deemed” savings for
energy efficiency.


David Roberts:   


You just incentivize them to buy the equipment. 


Panama Bartholomy:  


Exactly. And even worse, we give installers money just because
they installed the equipment — not necessarily the quality of the
installation, the performance of it. How does it perform on the
grid when we have grids that have very different greenhouse gas
profiles depending on the time of day that the power is being
drawn? 


A performance-based energy-efficiency program gives some money up
front for an incentive, but the majority of the incentive is paid
out based on the actual operations and performance of those
systems. How efficient? How much energy did it save? How much
carbon did it displace? How many emissions did it avoid? 


There's $6 billion currently in the Build Back Better bill that
would go toward supporting states to set up those programs, and
that would be run out of the state energy offices in each of the
states.


David Roberts:   


And technologically we have what we need to be able to track
performance in a way that you can bank on it?


Panama Bartholomy:  


We do. It's amazing some of the technologies out there. Leading
firms like Recurve are providing fantastic tools for utilities to
be able to pull apart the dynamics around a kilowatt hour saved,
and why that kilowatt hour, normalizing for weather, normalizing
for occupancy. It's incredible what computers can do
nowadays. 


David Roberts:   


I want to take a minute just to talk about heat pumps. They have
gone from nowhere to people chanting, “heat pump nation!” It's a
thrill. But when I bring them up and talk about them, immediately
I hear, “I installed one 10 years ago and my house is always
cold,” or “I can't afford to install one because I'd have to get
fossil-fuel backup with it.” 


This actually happened to me. Seven or eight years ago, we were
going to replace our original oil furnace in our house, which had
been there since 1954: big, giant, peach-colored. We wanted to
get rid of it. I would have loved to get a heat pump, but the
contractors were baffled and resistant, and assured us, if you
get a heat pump, you have to get a natural gas furnace to back up
the heat pump, and all told it would have been an additional
$8,000. So I ended up, to my great and ongoing regret, installing
a natural gas furnace. 


I feel like that's a pretty representative experience in terms of
a) people not knowing b) contractors not knowing what the hell
they're doing, and c) this question of whether heat pumps can do
the job, and in what climates. Can we get some clarity on that?
How good are heat pumps these days?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Heat pumps are great these days! We have, through the leadership
of the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership, or NEEP, a whole
database of cold-climate heat pumps. They pioneered a
cold-climate heat pump specification years ago and have been
working with manufacturers since then to make sure there's a
suite of different cold-climate heat pumps available.


These are heat pumps where the heat pump part of the heat pump
can operate down to 14 degrees below zero before electric
resistance kicks in, or if you have a gas backup, before that gas
backup kicks in. 


The technology is there. What you're talking about is your
interaction with the contractor, and that's going to be one of
the hardest things about this transition. Try to call up a
plumber or an HVAC installer right now: people are just flat
busy. They were flat busy before the pandemic, and now we're in
the pandemic, everybody wants to renovate their home, which is
now their home office, and they're busier than ever. There's no
reason contractors should change what they're doing if they're
selling and they're booked months out in advance. 


It's going to be up to us who are concerned about climate to give
them a reason. It's not going to work to require it right now,
because of the shock to the system that'll create for this
workforce. It's going to have to be incentives, and then
regulation.


David Roberts:   


Let me pause on the shock. Are there just not enough people
trained to do it? Or is it about heat-pump manufacturers not
being ready to ramp up quickly? Or logistics? What would be the
shock if you tried to push it too fast right now?


Panama Bartholomy:  


It's a great question, because there's this fallacy out there
that we don't have enough trained workers. The reality is, again,
we're not installing crazy alien technology here. A heat pump is
an air conditioner that can run in reverse. A heat-pump water
heater is a tank of water with a heat pump on top. This is not
complicated stuff. Electricians know how to electrician; they
know how to run wires. 


It's not an issue of a lack of workforce, it's an issue of
incentivizing the workforce in the right way. Right now, the
major thing that installers want to avoid is callbacks. They want
to be able to go in, put in something, and then not be called
back out, which will prevent them from doing another job. If you
historically have not cared about the performance of the HVAC
system or water heating system that you're installing, it can be
a change to all of a sudden now have to care about that
performance. 


What we're seeing is a gradual transition of this workforce over
to electric installations, but until we send some clear market
signals, there's no reason for them to make that shift. You have
all the myths that you ran into, like “they can't operate in even
Seattle's mildly cold climate; you need gas backup; these things
just don't work.” 


One of the other things is, we're just going to have to accept
the difficulty of living in the first wave of addressing climate
change, and that things are going to be better next decade.
Things are going to have a lot of friction and be pretty hard
this decade as we help to transition this industry.


David Roberts:   


When I hear pushback against electrification, this is the main
thing I hear in terms of substantive objections: If you go to
cold climates like the Upper Midwest, and you replace all their
oil and natural gas furnaces with electric heat pumps, then in
the winter you’re going to get enormous electricity demand that's
brand new. You have these electricity systems built for summer
peaks suddenly having enormous winter peaks, three times bigger
than their historic peaks. 


Some people argue we're simply not going to be able to radically
upgrade the entire electricity infrastructure in all these places
fast enough; we're going to need, in some places, some
alternative to electrification, which usually amounts to some
zero-carbon liquid fuel, some hydrogen variant or biomethane,
whatever it is.


Basically, we are going to need to keep combustion in some areas
because we just don't have the capacity to handle that much
winter electricity demand. What do you make of that?


Panama Bartholomy:  


God, I wish that was a real problem. If we were installing so
many electric appliances that we were actually causing grid
disruption anywhere in the next decade — man, I could go home,
that's it, retire, done, we succeeded. 


The reality is, we're not going to stop maintaining the
distribution and transmission grids. We're not going to stop
building generation in any part of this country. We're not going
to have mass-scale electrification at the speed we need in the
near-term. We're going to have some time to adjust. 


The people who think electrification is going to happen in a silo
have not seen how electricity systems have worked for the whole
history of electricity systems. It is an integrated planning
effort, and demand is forecasted and then supplied. Now, at some
point we can talk about rolling blackouts and weather events, but
on the normal, this should be something that grid managers can
absolutely handle with the rate of electrification that we could
see, even if we had significantly more electrification.


David Roberts:   


Do you think it's fair to say, though, that if you're in one of
those cold-weather climates and you see electrification on the
horizon, you need to start bulking up your electricity system
now? Those things are not fast to accomplish.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yeah, if you are committing to electrification, you should be
incorporating that into your demand models and looking at
generation. And, getting back to the beginning of our
conversation, you should be thinking about how to incorporate
energy efficiency into those projects as well, to limit some of
that new demand and ease building electrification into this high
winter peak. 


To be honest with you, I think our bigger challenge is going to
be electric vehicles — the doubling and tripling.


David Roberts:   


They're additive, right? You get a bunch of electric vehicles in
a cold-weather climate alongside a bunch of electrification of
heat and cooling, then you're talking about a lot of electricity.


Panama Bartholomy:  


It is. But with cars, average car ownership is about seven years,
water heaters about 15 years, furnaces about 20 years. We're
going to have quicker turnover of the vehicle fleet than we are
of the water heater and furnace fleet.


David Roberts:   


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.


David Roberts:   


So you wouldn't even be into some blending or mixing as an
interim measure, to reduce emissions while we wait for
electrification?


Panama Bartholomy:  


The challenge there is the expense to ratepayers. You're
maintaining two infrastructure systems moving forward, and
ratepayers are paying for it. Instead of making some of these
decisions and clipping off the branches of the gas system and
relieving ratepayers of that, you are just paying and upgrading
it — and these upgrades to gas systems, as I said, 60- to 80-year
lives for the materials that are used. These are long-term
investments, and even if the whole neighborhood is only using gas
for cooking, you still have to maintain that gas system to a high
level of safety. 


David Roberts:   


It’s interesting to think about the gas system as binary: you
either have it or you don't. And if you have a single gas
appliance, you have the whole gas infrastructure. It's a sticky
dilemma. 


Speaking of that, let's talk for a minute about stoves. Where are
we on education? I'm seeing it talked about more. I'm seeing a
lot of concerted pushback — natural gas utilities and natural gas
businesses out propagandizing all over the place, hiring
advertising agencies and Instagram influencers to cook on gas
stoves. Where do you see the battle for hearts and minds on
stoves?


Panama Bartholomy:  


It's no accident that the gas company is choosing stoves. What's
interesting is, it's probably their area of greatest
vulnerability.


David Roberts:   


In the grand scheme of things, stoves are not a huge source of
demand for natural gas, are they?


Panama Bartholomy:  


Nope — 3 to 5 percent of the average home’s natural gas demand.
It's not big, but every mixed-fuel utility that provides both
electricity and gas will tell us that their nightmare is that
they have to run a gas system just because people aren't willing
to give up their gas stove, and charge everybody $180 a month
just to cook with gas. 


It's no accident that they're focusing on this. We've been part
of a number of studies that have looked at people's attachment to
different appliances, and unsurprisingly, those appliances that
you interact with the most are the ones you have the greatest
attachment to. Water heaters: pretty low level of emotional
response. Stoves: really high. And people have had some bad
experiences with electric resistance, the coil stoves of the
past.


Generally, the two things home or professional cooks care about
the most are power and control, which are usually at the heart of
all bad relationships. The good news is that we have an
alternative that beats gas on both of those things. But we have
this impression that gas is better, and you have these things
coming from consumers, saying things like, “I deserve a gas
stove. I finally saved up enough money, I can finally get a gas
stove.”


David Roberts:   


It's definitely seen as a luxury, as an achievement, still.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Very much so. Part of this movement is going to have to be
exposing some of the inherent dangers of gas stoves: the
air-quality dangers, the safety dangers, whether you have a small
child or older relatives in the house, and then just the dangers
of piping gas around all of our communities. 


Like electric vehicles, the good news is that we have the
high-powered electric vehicles of the kitchen as an alternative.
It'd be a bummer if we were like, “no, come back to this coil
stove.” That's not going to work. I can’t wait to see the
marketing campaign around that.


But gas stoves, because of the air-quality impacts, are also one
of the gas company's greatest vulnerabilities. As you start to
see more and more attention paid to that, more groups speak out
about it, governments begin to address it, their last gasp from a
marketing perspective could turn into the final dagger. 


With induction stoves, it's fantastic that we have a product
that, once you test drive it, people's hair gets blown back. It's
incredible. It's three times as powerful as the best-in-class gas
stove, twice as good a control on it, incredibly easy to clean.


David Roberts:   


When I talk to people, that's the first thing I mention. I'm
lazy, and I’m the person who cleans the kitchen. We were in a
rental for a few months recently and it had a gas stove — god it
was a pain in the ass. I was like, how do people live with this?
There's so many nooks and crannies; it gets gross so quickly.
Induction is this perfectly smooth surface. It really made me
appreciate my stove.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yeah, you just wipe it. We have all these pictures of my
two-year-old cooking on the induction stove, putting his hand
right next to the pan and cooking eggs. It's fantastic
technology.


So the good news is that we have a technology that's better. It's
a matter of getting people out there to test drive these things,
and getting it in the Home Depots and appliance stores, getting
little pop-ups at farmers markets to begin this transition.


David Roberts:   


It doesn't quite carry the air of fanciness of a gas stove,
though. We bought a commodity-level, relatively cheap induction
stove; there's no fanciness to it. I don't know what you can do
about that. You can't really make a high-end one, either, because
magnets are magnets; they're all doing the same thing. Even the
lowest-end induction stove basically has exactly the power and
control. There's a lot of consumer psychology at work here that's
difficult to puzzle through.


Panama Bartholomy:  


We need the Ford F-150 commercials for induction stoves. Big man
turning big dials! Big power, lightning bolts shooting into the
pan!


David Roberts:   


But you don't get any flame. Flame is so darn manly, magnets
don't quite do it. 


Where's the industry on this? Do they have a preference what kind
of stoves they make?


Panama Bartholomy:  


At this point, they don't. At this point, they have been happy to
sell whatever stove a consumer wants to get. They are standing up
and taking notice when you have 54 cities in California, most of
the Bay Area, basically say, “you're not allowed to build with
gas anymore.” Denver, Seattle, for certain building types in New
York City now. That's making them take notice. 


It's been interesting to watch, because this is an appliance area
that hasn't had to deal with efficiency and energy and
environmental regulations a lot. The HVAC and water heater folks,
this has been bread and butter for them for 40 years. But the
stove folks, they're just like, “whoa, we're a target? Where did
this come from?” Just out of nowhere.


David Roberts:   


One of the most outrageous things about this — and I don't know
if a lot of people appreciate this — is that in a lot of cases,
it is natural gas utilities running these propaganda campaigns,
and they are paying for those propaganda campaigns with ratepayer
money. In a lot of cases, if you have natural gas, you're paying
for that anti-electrification propaganda. Are there legal
remedies for that, or what's the right way to deal with that?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There are if your local PUC, PSC, BPU has a spine. The area where
we've seen that be expressed the farthest is out here in
California, where you've had groups like Earthjustice bring
forward motions against companies like Southern California Gas
Company around using ratepayer dollars to both lobby against
electrification as well as run consumer campaigns against
electrification. And you've had, after months and months of
delay, mealy-mouthed responses from the Public Utilities
Commission that at worst, slap them with a small “don't do it
again” penalty, or at best say, “well, technically, under current
law, there's nothing that we can do about this.” 


The good news is that you're starting to see a change in
leadership at the gas companies. In October, Southern California
Gas Company, the largest distributor of gas in the country,
released a new report called their Clean Fuels report, and it
said that widespread electrification of buildings is the future
of California. It's the first time we've seen a gas utility
anywhere make these sorts of statements. They think that by 2040,
up to 90 percent of all of the space and water heating will be
electric in California. 


Then, at the end of the year, they joined PG&E in a filing to
the Public Utilities Commission that is on a proceeding that
would take away incentives to extend gas lines from gas mains to
buildings. They’re called line extension allowances; basically,
we use ratepayer dollars to give money to builders to pay for
some of the costs of extending gas from the gas main in the
middle of the street to a house or a new commercial building.
It's a perverse incentive from a climate perspective; we're using
ratepayer dollars to put into place infrastructure that’ll make
it harder for us to meet our climate goals. 


So the PUC in California has opened up a proceeding to recommend
doing away with those, and PG&E and Southern California Gas
Company came in and said, for residential buildings, we agree
that we should stop incentivizing this. First time in the
country.


David Roberts:   


I can understand how an electric and gas utility could come
around to the light on this. But if you're a natural gas utility,
it's pretty much existential, isn't it? If there's no natural
gas, there's no reason for you to exist. Is there a big political
difference on those kinds of utilities?


Panama Bartholomy:  


What is the answer to every question in energy right now, before
it's asked? Hydrogen! 


If you read through the Clean Fuels report, and you read through
most any clean fuels report from a gas company in America right
now, they're betting big on hydrogen. It's very much a “don't
look behind the curtain” type of scenario, because you don't want
to talk about the fact that you're going to have to replace the
entire gas system to be able to pipe hydrogen, or how expensive
the hydrogen is going to be to produce and use. But what Southern
California Gas Company has said is, we need to start refocusing
on supplying industrial and commercial clients with cleaner
gaseous fuels. 


David Roberts:  


Interesting. That's not crazy.  


Panama Bartholomy:  


Not crazy. Residential makes up 30 percent of their revenue, so
it'll be a big cut.


David Roberts:


They're inevitably going to be smaller, if they survive at all.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Yeah, but hydrogen is the hope. It’s the hopium of our time.


David Roberts:   


The most common question I hear about all this is: I'm a
homeowner, I'm confused and overwhelmed, what's my priority list?
If I'm making an electrification checklist, what do I do
first? 


Panama Bartholomy:  


It's going to depend on the age of your appliances. You're
looking at your four major appliances: water heater, furnace,
stove, and dryer. If you use gas, you want to look at how old
those systems are, and you want to replace the oldest one first,
if you're looking at it purely from a climate perspective. 


If you're looking at it from a health and safety perspective, you
probably want to go with your stove first, because your stove is
likely emitting levels of nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, and
carbon monoxide that would be considered illegal if they were
found outdoors.


David Roberts:   


What if I'm weighing appliance replacement against efficiency
upgrades on my envelope, or solar panels on my roof? Are the
appliances job one?


Panama Bartholomy:  


It's going to depend a lot on your climate zone. If you're living
up in Upper Minnesota, I highly recommend you do some envelope
work along with your heat pump. But it's just going to depend on
the life expectancy, how much longer you think that furnace or
water heater is going to be kicking.


This stuff can be confusing for people. The good news is that
we've recognized that consumer education is a critical part of
this, and with about 15 other sponsors, we’ve partnered on a
campaign. It’s called The Switch Is On campaign. It's just in
California as of now. It provides all the basic information you
as a consumer need, like, what is a heat pump? What would it cost
to put it in? It has all of the rebates available to you based on
your zip code, utility, government, etc. We pre-screened hundreds
of contractors that know what they're doing on electrification
and won't talk the Daves of the world out of putting in a heat
pump.


There's about seven other states that are standing up campaigns
like this. We also are talking to folks in British Columbia and
Australia with similar campaigns. It's a recognized need, and
we're trying to provide some of the early resources that
consumers need. So yeah, visit the website if you want to see
what version one of the electrification consumer education looks
like.


David Roberts:   


If you're a city policymaker, mayor or town council, same thing.
What's your priority list? What are you going after first? What's
the big fish?


Panama Bartholomy:  


There's three things, and in order, but they're
interrelated. 


Number one, we need to stop digging the hole. We should not be
building any new buildings with gas connections. Every new one
you're building is just creating a problem for your community
down the road.


We need to deal with existing buildings. So the second thing is,
you need to set a date for when you're no longer going to allow
gas appliances to be sold in your jurisdiction or in your state.


David Roberts:   


You're going after the supply side.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Exactly. And there are lots of arguments: is it building
performance standards, is it time-of-sale requirement. We believe
that with a set of complementary policies around it, to build the
market and protect people, that appliance bans are the solution
we need across the board. 


The key thing is the third thing: we need to build the market so
that you can support a ban. We've built up enough of an educated
workforce, we've switched electricity rates around, and we’ve
brought the cost down so it's comparable or cheaper than gas,
etc., to be able to make a mandate work when it goes into
effect. 


Those are the three for us: stopping new construction with gas,
setting a date for the phaseout of sales of appliances that use
gas, and then building the marketplace for electrification.
They're all interrelated to each other.


David Roberts:   


Awesome. Well, this is fascinating, I'm sure we could go on for
another hour, but I don't want to test my listeners’ already
legendary patience. Thanks so much for coming on, and thanks for
all your work on this.


Panama Bartholomy:  


Absolutely. Thanks for coming to our funny little corner of the
clean energy world, Dave.


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