This week in decarbonization news for buildings, land use and industry, John Cropley has the details on a coalition of nine states working together to accelerate heat pump installations. California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island signed an agreement which calls for heat pumps to make up 65% of the market by 2030 and 90% by 2040 — compared to roughly 25% in those states today. 

California’s participation comes even as state regulators rejected a $744 million building electrification plan by Southern California Edison that would have helped install 250,000 heat pumps across SCE’s territory. California has some of the highest rates in the country and that has caused regulators to reject and pare back some programs recently. 

Also in California, Elaine Goodman reports that the state Energy Commission reduced the state’s demand forecast due to sluggish population growth. The CEC forecast is a key input to the PUC’s resource adequacy system and CAISO’s transmission planning. The slow-growing population has the regulator reducing its demand forecasts through 2033, but after that, the push for electrification should drive quicker demand growth. 

The New York Times has a rundown on recent protests by farmers who blocked highways to Berlin, Brussels and Paris in anger over Europe’s climate policies, including efforts to curtail diesel subsidies and move away from nitrogen fertilizer, which is produced with natural gas.  

Energy News Network has a story on the reception to the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities’ December order that calls for a move away from natural gas. The story dives into how utilities, regulators and legislators will have to work together to try to meet the order’s long-term policy goal of shutting down the gas utility industry in the commonwealth. 

Finally, Huffington Postreports on how the International Code Council, which writes model building codes, allegedly violated its own rules to let the natural gas industry make its case for scrapping electrification provisions in the latest iteration of the ICC’s codebook. ICC codes, which are used in all but a handful of states, are updated every three years. 

Read those and other stories in this week’s Intelligence Report: