By Marcelle Dibrell
Washington State has effectively expelled fossil-fuel appliances from new construction, following building code amendments adopted November 28.
While not explicitly banning fossil-fuel and gas-driven appliances, the new building code — slated to go into effect March 15, 2024 — requires that all buildings meet the same energy efficiency targets as those built with electric heat pumps for space and water heating.
Heat pumps can put out in heat energy as much as four times the energy they consume in electricity. So if builders choose to put in gas appliances, they will need to make up the efficiency losses in other areas of the construction.
Washington uses a credit system for determining the energy efficiency of construction projects. “Energy equalization credits,” or points, are awarded to energy saving measures (efficient water and space heaters, air leakage control, energy star appliances, solar panels, etc.) The state’s recent changes to the building code increase the credit value that is applied to the score needed to obtain a building permit.
This image above is an overview of states’ positions on natural gas bans according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC) data. The yellow states enacted preemption laws prohibiting local governments from issuing gas bans or electrification ordinances. Those in green and blue have adopted some form of control on the use of natural gas, from banning the use in new construction to ensuring new buildings are ready to switch to all-electric use.Image credit http://www.fixr.com. For example, instead of five required credits for a medium-sized home, the requirement has been raised to eight. A home with a heat pump is allotted three credits toward the eight needed, while one with natural gas or propane heaters are allotted zero credits. A home with a gas heater would need to make up the efficiency losses in numerous other ways to reach the eight credits, which is expensive.
Changes to the code ar e controversial.
According to the Washington State Department of Commerce, buildings represent about 25 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, the greatest portion of which comes from the combustion of fuel for space heating, water heating, and cooking. Motivated by the goal of slashing energy consumption 70 percent by 2031, environmentalists are encouraged by the state’s efforts to address climate change.
But the state really had to finesse the direction it took in framing its law.
Originally, the Washington State Building Code Council wanted to ban gas and require heat pumps in all new construction, which they voted in favor of in November 2022. But in April 2023, a federal court overturned a similar measure that had been adopted by Berkeley, California, which also sought to ban gas in all new buildings. So Washington’s building council stepped back its original mandate.
Rather than an outright ban on gas appliances, the state instead made it prohibitive to use them.
Still, many question the legality of the new regulations.
“Despite hundreds of messages urging the council to reject these restrictive new laws, the Building Code Council moved forward with a de facto ban on natural gas in new homes,” said Greg Lane, Executive Vice President of the Building Industry Association of Washington. “These new rules clearly continue to violate the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), which expressly preempts state and local regulations concerning the energy use of many natural gas appliances.”
Under EPCA, the U.S. Department of Energy sets energy conservation standards for many common building appliances such as furnaces, HVAC systems, hot water heaters, and many others. That means that state and local governments are mostly preempted from setting energy standards for those same pieces of equipment.
“By completely prohibiting the installation of natural gas piping within newly constructed buildings, the City of Berkeley has waded into a domain preempted by Congress,” wrote Judge Patrick Bumatay in his decision on the Berkeley case.
Washington’s recent amendments to its building code doesn’t expressly ban natural gas piping — they just make it a lot more expensive — which some argue comes down to the same thing.
Washington’s Building Code Council received hundreds of letters urging it to reject the new law.
“The council has merely ‘gamed’ the energy efficiency crediting tables to impose a de facto ban on heating appliances fueled by natural gas or propane,” Gregory Johnson, a senior electrical engineer for Avista Utilities, wrote to the Washington Building Code Council.
Washington State is far from alone in its gas-ban war.
Indeed, much of the country is embroiled in gas battles, with environmentalists on one side and builders, developers, plumbers, and stakeholders in the gas and propane industry — as well as a collection of unions and small businesses affected by the ban — on the other.
Currently, a lawsuit has been filed against New York, which in May 2023 became the first state to prohibit the use of fossil fuel equipment in new construction. The regulation is scheduled to go into effect in 2026 for new buildings of seven stories or less and in 2029 for larger buildings.
Represented by Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP (the law firm that argued the Berkeley case), plaintiffs make the identical argument that prohibiting the use of gas in new construction violates a federal law that gives the U.S. government the authority to set energy-efficiency standards for appliances. Further, they argue that banning gas will put a greater strain on the state’s electric grid, financially burden consumers, and put companies out of business. State officials are expected to file a response to the initial complaint by Dec. 18.
Similar gas appliance bans have taken off in cities across the country, including Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and others.
Meanwhile, about two dozen states have advanced legislation preventing municipalities from advancing gas bans. As a recent article from S& P Global puts it, “A firewall that preserves access to natural gas now stretches from Idaho to New Hampshire and Arizona to Florida, with only a few states across the interior U.S. allowing gas bans.”
The states’ bills block cities and counties from prohibiting or restricting new gas hookups.
And within those states, the preemption bills are not totally partisan, either. When it comes to prohibiting access to gas, both Republicans and Democrats in those states are opposed, evidenced by their voting records on their states’ preemption bills.
Within the pool and spa industry, trade associations are not in favor of the gas bans. Historically, the California Pool and Spa Association (CPSA) has opposed decarbonization efforts in municipalities that have proposed all-electric buildings and properties that contain all-electric equipment with no gas plumbing for any combustion equipment, as has recently been proposed and implemented in numerous areas across California.
“I think what’s going to happen in the future is there’s going to be a lot more inground pools built with people buying stand-alone spas,” said John Norwood, in an April CPSA webinar on decarbonization. “As we all kind of know, the heat pump water heaters that are out there are just not big enough to work.”
Norwood has spent hours dedicated to opposing local ordinances in California requiring all-electric construction. “Don’t let the facts get in the way of your gas bans,” he says, pointing to the hypocrisy of the push for gas bans in light of California’s wildfires and lack of alternative power resources.
“When the energy commission comes out with their statistics, they do not include carbon emissions from wildfires,” he said, noting that a recent single wildfire knocked all of the carbon emissions savings back to the year 2000.
Meanwhile, he says, the technology and capacity to support all-electric isn’t there.
Norwood says that California will need to get 20 percent of its electricity from offshore wind, and it doesn’t have the capability yet; it is going to have to take another couple million acres of public land to create commercial solar farms; and recent projects in the state have demonstrated that building transmission lines is almost impossible.
“In a lot of ways, this whole push toward all-electric is a joke, and it’s a fraud on the public,” Norwood said.
