Why some cities are targeting gas stoves to fight climate change

Why building electrification, and removing gas from new and retrofitted homes, has become a movement

By Patrick Sisson  Feb 4, 2020

Ever since the Green New Deal became a key talking point and policy goal of progressive politicians last year, there’s been a renewed push to make American homes and buildings better for the environment. For a growing number of municipalities and local leaders, part of the answer lies in shifting homes toward relying solely on electricity, instead of gas, for cooking, heating, and running appliances.

The current movement for U.S. municipalities to eliminate natural gas from homes first gained momentum in California. In 2018, the state’s then-governor, Jerry Brown, signed a pair of laws that funded research into reducing building emissions and developing clean heating technology.

“This is about what kind of technology can support the cities and homes that we want and need,” says Sage Welch, a spokesperson for the Building Decarbonization Coalition.

Already a trend overseas, especially in Europe—Amsterdam plans to completely eliminate domestic natural gas use by 2050—building electrification appears to be catching on in the U.S. The trend comes right as a series of new building codes, such as those introduced by New York’s Climate Mobilization Act, seek to cut emissions. But the switch also faces some significant headwinds, especially in the form of pushback from the natural gas industry, which is worried about future profits.

What’s the environmental impact of building electrification?

Mandating that new buildings, and any large building retrofits, avoid or replace gas infrastructure and install all-electric appliances won’t completely eliminate the use of natural gas in homes anytime soon. But electrification is a great tool for those seeking to start cutting carbon emissions.

Buildings account for 40 percent of the energy used in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and 39 percent of energy-related carbon emissions globally, according to the United Nations. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates 70 million American households and businesses burn natural gas, oil, or propane for heating alone, generating 560 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, or a tenth of the nation’s total emissions.

“Gas use in buildings presents a significant roadblock to cutting emissions,” according to Rachel Golden, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s building electrification initiative.

A man in work clothes stands amid a curving mass of pipes at a natural gas plant.
Eighty-five percent of the natural gas industry’s revenues comes from residential and commercial buildings. Building electrification hits the industry’s bottom line. 

According to energy consulting firm E3, which receives part of its funding from utilities, if California as a whole adopted the standard of making all new and rebuilt buildings gas-free, emissions from these buildings could be cut 90 percent by 2050.

It’s important to note that building electrification won’t clean up the emissions and other environmental impacts of generating electricity. Advocates note that it’s as much about building the infrastructure for a zero-emission, renewable power system of the future as it is cutting out sources of carbon emissions now. The Sierra Club estimates that a third of the buildings in California that will exist in 2045 will be built between now and then; electrifying now will both cut emissions and help bolster the market for electric appliances.

Others say the building electrification push in California can also be a jobs creator. A UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation study, “California Building Decarbonization Workforce Needs and Recommendations,” found that retrofitting all of California’s buildings to be fully electric by 2045 could create more than 100,000 new jobs in construction, manufacturing, and energy, even after accounting for jobs lost in the gas industry. (It doesn’t, however, note the carbon emissions generated by the retrofitting work itself.)

What’s the consumer reaction?

Research from E3 has also shown that converting to all-electric will provide cost savings for most California homeowners, and the Rocky Mountain Institute’s study of building decarbonization in different climates shows that customers who have all-electric new homes will save money over the lifetime of their electric space and water heaters and air-conditioning systems, as will many homeowners in retrofit scenarios.

Electrification has also become a bigger issue as increases in renewable power generation lead to conversations about converting and updating our energy infrastructure and power grid. To make the large leap to creating an economy more dependent on wind and solar requires investments in modern power lines to bring electricity from where wind and solar power farms are located to where it’s needed. The California Energy Commission also found that, as gas demand decreases and gas infrastructure costs increase, gas prices will rise. (It predicts SoCalGas, the main utility in Southern California, could institute a 30 percent price increase between 2018 and 2022 alone.) There’s already significant gas infrastructure in the ground; how will maintenance and upkeep be paid for if gas use, and gas industry profits, decline?

For Golden and others, swapping out gas for electricity in homes has a benefit even if residents aren’t yet able to plug into a 100 percent clean energy grid. Grid updates and a wind-down of natural gas need to happen at the same time; Golden says there’s less greenhouse gas emissions from powering a heater with electricity generated by a natural gas plant than heating your house with natural gas pumped to your home, due to both the increased efficiency of electric heaters and the leakage of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, throughout gas storage and transmission infrastructure.

Building new homes with all-electric infrastructure also provides benefits to builders, according to CR Herro, vice president of innovation for Meritage Homes, an Arizona-based homebuilder that has built numerous all-electric developments. Home electrification saves on upkeep and maintenance costs—it’s easier to maintain infrastructure for one fuel source instead of two—and ends up being cheaper to install. Meritage often takes some of the savings from not having to install gas pipes and uses it to upgrade its electric infrastructure, for example by picking more upscale convection ranges.

While electrification offers a double benefit of cheaper installation costs as well as cheaper energy costs over time, Herro cautions that consumers may still be unsure about losing their gas ranges when going all-electric. Electrifying home heating and appliances doesn’t bother homebuyers, but the loss of that familiar flame for cooking can cause consumer pushback, even though induction stoves are twice as energy efficient, and studies link gas stoves to poor indoor air quality and health issues, including higher risks of childhood asthma.

“Eventually, consumers see the advantages,” he says. “An electric heat pump can run more smoothly and efficiently than a gas heater—it operates more evenly, with less high temperature peaks—but people have preconceptions. They think in terms of a 1975 house, not a new house, and those two things shouldn’t be compared.”

The gas industry fights back

The recent push to gradually eliminate residential gas usage hasn’t gone unnoticed by the gas industry. A third of natural gas in the U.S. is used by residential and commercial buildings (the rest goes to power plants and industry), but these buildings generate 85 percent of the industry’s gross revenues. Building electrification hits the industry’s bottom line.

In the fall of 2018, right as then-Gov. Brown signed bills to support building decarbonization, SoCal Gas, a large California utility, was forming a group called Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions meant to battle the new legislative momentum. According to reporting in The Guardian and the LA Times, the company hired public relations firms to create this campaign to fight building electrification, arguing that the switch would lead to higher costs. Representatives of the energy industry front group have made presentations at local government meetings and pushed communities to back resolutions supporting “balanced energy solutions,” and rejecting the move away from gas.

“The gas industry is extremely alarmed at the progress we’ve made in the last year,” says Golden. Gas industry reps aren’t the only ones suggesting that legislators slow down. Herro says that some of the proposed legislation that mandates retrofitting old homes with all-electric systems wastes perfectly good existing infrastructure and over the long term may not be as effective at reducing carbon emissions as hoped.

“There have been billions of dollars invested in gas infrastructure that goes to commercial and residential properties,” he says. “Environmentalists who want to scrap that and spend the resources to build new infrastructure are being really inefficient from a sustainability perspective. It’s become such a buzzword. Retrofits can be rushed, and sometimes older neighborhoods don’t have the electrical capacity to swap out all the gas-powered devices with electricity.”

Environmentalists would argue there’s no time to wait, considering the key role electrification can play in meeting emissions reductions targets. For California to meet its goal of being carbon neutral by 2045, the Sierra Club says local and state leaders need to start scaling up now, since appliances have a multi-decade lifespan, and new policies need to be put in place to help everyone, including low-income homeowners and renters. “Gas use in homes and building is going to be a roadblock to stabilizing the climate if we don’t start switching soon,” says Golden.

** Oregon State University, 2014 research

Childhood asthma linked to lack of ventilation for gas stoves, OSU study shows

September 29, 2014

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Parents with children at home should use ventilation when cooking with a gas stove, researchers from Oregon State University are recommending, after a new study showed an association between gas kitchen stove ventilation and asthma, asthma symptoms and chronic bronchitis.

“In homes where a gas stove was used without venting, the prevalence of asthma and wheezing is higher than in homes where a gas stove was used with ventilation,” said Ellen Smit, an associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU and one of the study’s authors. “Parents of all children should use ventilation while using a gas stove.”

Researchers can’t say that gas stove use without ventilation causes respiratory issues, but the new study clearly shows an association between having asthma and use of ventilation, Smit said. More study is needed to understand that relationship, including whether emissions from gas stoves could cause or exacerbate asthma in children, the researchers said.

Asthma is a common chronic childhood disease and an estimated 48 percent of American homes have a gas stove that is used. Gas stoves are known to affect indoor air pollution levels and researchers wanted to better understand the links between air pollution from gas stoves, parents’ behavior when operating gas stoves and respiratory issues, said Eric Coker, a doctoral student in public health and a co-author of the study.

The study showed that children who lived in homes where ventilation such as an exhaust fan was used when cooking with gas stoves were 32 percent less likely to have asthma than children who lived in homes where ventilation was not used. Children in homes where ventilation was used while cooking with a gas stove were 38 percent less likely to have bronchitis and 39 percent less likely to have wheezing. The study also showed that lung function, an important biological marker of asthma, was significantly better among girls from homes that used ventilation when operating their gas stove.

Many people in the study also reported using their gas stoves for heating, researchers found. That was also related to poorer respiratory health in children, particularly when ventilation was not used. In homes where the gas kitchen stove was used for heating, children were 44 percent less likely to have asthma and 43 percent less likely to have bronchitis if ventilation was used. The results did not change even when asthma risk factors such as pets or cigarette smoking inside the home were taken into account, Coker said.

“Asthma is one of the most common diseases in children living in the United States,” said Molly Kile, the study’s lead author. Kile is an environmental epidemiologist and assistant professor at OSU. “Reducing exposure to environmental factors that can exacerbate asthma can help improve the quality of life for people with this condition.”

The findings were published recently in the journal “Environmental Health.” Co-authors included John Molitor and Anna Harding of the College of Public Health and Human Sciences and Daniel Sudakin of the College of Agricultural Sciences. The research was supported by OSU.

Researchers used data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics from 1988-1994. Data collected for NHANES is a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population.

The third edition of the survey is the only one in which questions about use of gas stoves were asked, Coker said. Participants were interviewed in their homes and also underwent physical exams and lab tests.

Researchers examined data from about 7,300 children ages 2-16 who has asthma, wheezing or bronchitis and whose parents reported using a gas stove in the home. Of those who reported using no ventilation, 90 percent indicated they did not have an exhaust system or other ventilation in their homes, Coker said.

Even though the study relies on older data, the findings remain relevant because many people still use gas stoves for cooking, and in some cases, for heat in the winter, the researchers said.

“Lots of older homes lack exhaust or other ventilation,” Coker said. “We know this is still a problem. We don’t know if it is as prevalent as it was when the data was collected.”

Researchers suggest that future health surveys include questions about gas stove and ventilation use. That would allow them to see if there have been any changes in ventilation use since the original data was collected.

“More research is definitely needed,” Coker said. “But we know using an effective ventilation system will reduce air pollution levels in a home, so we can definitely recommend that.”