Essay: Will Our Future Be All-Electric?

At the end of 2020, my wife and I bought a two-story brick house on a tiny block in South Philadelphia, near where we’d been renting for close to a decade. We liked the wood floors and the big front window, and it was basically move-in ready with no major repairs.

But for the first two months we lived here, we kept smelling gas. Three or four times the utility people came out, found a leak around one of the pipe fittings, which we’d get fixed, and then a day later, we’d smell gas again. We knew it probably wasn’t a big deal, but row house explosions in the neighborhood were not unheard of. The smell began to haunt our dreams. We replaced the pipes around the boiler and eventually the service line to the stove. Now we smell gas only when we light the range, briefly transporting ourselves back to the anxious ordeal.

I’ve begun thinking about taking the house off the gas grid, which would eliminate leaks and, as more electricity is generated by renewable energy, ultimately reduce the amount of daily greenhouse gases we emit. I don’t want my house to blow up, and I don’t want global average temperatures to continue pushing to ever-deadlier heights: two good reasons to go all-electric.

I’m not the only one thinking this way. More and more property owners are switching off their gas, aided by technological improvements and, in some places, new public policies that address the fact that the buildings we live and work in can sometimes be the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

More than 70 percent of New York City’s greenhouse gas output, for instance, comes from its buildings. In December, the city approved a law that will phase out natural gas hookups from most new construction. New York is just one of the latest, and largest, cities to move away from natural gas in a trend that started in 2019 in Berkeley, California, and has since spread across the country. The movement is still relatively small, but it’s sparked a backlash from the natural gas industry and skeptical lawmakers. More than a dozen state legislatures—in Arizona, New Hampshire, Ohio, and elsewhere—have passed bills to prevent cities from instituting new bans.

Burning natural gas in any setting is bad for the climate and bad for human health. In the home, stoves tend to get the most attention, partly because many people have an attachment to cooking with gas. But a Stanford study published in early 2022 estimated that the methane leaking from gas stoves in the U.S. has a climate impact comparable to that from the exhaust from half a million cars every year. And a growing catalog of research suggests that using gas stoves, particularly without proper ventilation, causes potentially unsafe buildup of nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants that can exacerbate respiratory health problems.

But it’s using fossil fuels to heat the whole building, not just dinner, where the most damage is done. Burning natural gas is responsible for the majority of the climate-warming emissions that buildings produce, through the carbon dioxide released by combustion and the methane leaking from gas systems, according to RMI, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focused on clean energy. Even the best gas boilers are only about 95 percent efficient, meaning that around 5 percent of the energy going into a gas boiler is leaked or lost during combustion and heat delivery, says Colin Schless, a vice president at the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, which helped the City of Boston write its new guidelines for carbon-neutral buildings.

To heat a structure without a gas boiler, most builders use either air-source or geothermal heat pumps—electrical devices that redistribute heat without burning fuel, similarly to the way air conditioners work. Unlike boilers, a heat pump can provide a home with around three times as much energy in heat as it consumes, making it about 300 percent efficient, Schless says. Switching from gas to electric for water heaters and clothes dryers reduces carbon emissions as well, assuming there’s a clean source of electricity.

Even before New York adopted its gas ban, some builders there were opting to go all-electric. In 2019, Alloy Development began working on 100 Flatbush, an all-electric, 44-story residential tower in downtown Brooklyn. Alloy started to consider going electric during a time when the National Grid utility company, in a dispute with New York State regarding a new pipeline, was discussing a potential moratorium on new gas service in the area, says AJ Pires, Alloy’s president. The price of switching to electric was much smaller than Pires’s team expected: an overall cost increase of about 1 percent, he estimates. There are also monthly savings with electric utilities that could grow over time if renewable energy gets cheaper and gas becomes more expensive, as some researchers expect. Plus, with gas infrastructure like pipelines becoming more costly to build, Pires believes the writing is on the wall.

"If we’re looking to solve the problem of climate change, we have to stop using carbon-based fuel sources and stop making things that plug into those sources," he says, though his company hasn’t ruled out producing homes with gas hookups where allowed in the future.

If building without gas is relatively simple, electrifying existing structures is a bigger challenge. But some cities are helping homeowners do just that. Last year, Ithaca, a college town of 30,000 in upstate New York, announced plans to decarbonize its entire building stock by 2030. That means making efficiency improvements and replacing appliances like cooktops, heating systems, water heaters, and dryers in every home.

To get there, the city has launched a pilot program to electrify 1,000 residential buildings and 600 commercial buildings in the next three years. Costs for retrofitting existing homes can vary drastically, based on the age and condition of a building, says Luis Aguirre-Torres, the sustainability director for the city. Ithaca has raised $100 million from private investors for the pilot phase, which is relying on utility savings and state and federal incentives to make money back.

Carrying out the work is BlocPower, a Brooklyn-based company that performs green building retrofits. Donnel Baird, BlocPower’s founder and CEO, says the company is creating a digital model of every building in Ithaca and making recommendations for efficiency improvements alongside electrifying systems. It’s important that the improvements are not just affordable but profitable, Baird says, meaning that after they’re complete, individual homeowners should see both lower monthly utility costs and higher home values. The program will help pay the up-front costs of retrofitting, and homeowners will repay those costs only if there are any energy-related savings, Aguirre-Torres says.

I haven’t gotten anywhere with electrification on my own house yet, partly because my wife and I were cashed out after buying it. But I can’t imagine I’ll ever replace a gas appliance with another gas appliance. And future policy changes could help homeowners everywhere make the switch. Ithaca could be the way of the future. Yes, it is a small and progressive city, and other places will face greater resistance to decarbonization, but as more cities shift to rely on sources of clean electricity, more contractors will get comfortable with electrification, and the cheaper retrofitting will become. And the air will be cleaner—indoors and out.