This week in buildings, industry and land decarbonization news, NetZero Insider’s John Cropley has a story on the declining use of fossil fuel for winter heating in Vermont. Between 2018 and 2023, winter heating fuel use dropped 12% while the state’s housing stock grew 2.7%. Increasing adoption of heat pumps and warmer weather were both credited for the drop in fossil fuel use.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, our Hugh Morley has the details on legislation that would require utilities to offer home electrification funding to consumers. The bill was in committee and already stirred some healthy opposition. It would require the Board of Public Utilities to set up programs for utilities to help consumers electrify space and water heating, industrial processes, and transportation. 

The Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley has a blog post about which income brackets have been using federal tax credits for home electrification, and so far wealthier people have used them more frequently. U.C. professor Severin Borenstein (who sits on CAISO’s board) crunched the data, which run from 2006 to 2021, so it does not yet cover the Inflation Reduction Act. For a set of residential tax credits in place over those 15 years, the bottom three quintiles in income distribution received 10% of all the credits, while the top quintile got 60% of them. 

Having lost some municipal efforts to ban natural gas service from new customers, environmental groups are switching tactics and introducing legislation in several states that would warn consumers about the health impacts of gas stoves, as POLITICO reported. Appliance manufacturers have been pushing back and at least trying to weaken some of the required warnings. 

New York City is pushing building decarbonization hard with Local Law 97 taking effect this year, which requires buildings of 25,000 square feet or more adopt emissions limits that ratchet down at the end of the decade. Canary Media has details on 345 Hudson Street’s efforts to replace fossil fuel boilers with heat pumps, which are backed by a $5 million state grant. Owners of the Art Deco building in Lower Manhattan expect that once the work is done, the site will use 25% less energy than a conventional design while cutting greenhouse gases by 70% relative to 2019 levels. 

Daily Energy Insider has the details on a study Xcel Energy conducted with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on how heat pumps perform in Colorado’s high and chilly altitudes. NREL is based in Golden at an altitude of 5,600 feet, which found heat pumps worked slightly more efficiently than electric resistance heaters at 20 degrees below zero, but for areas with temperatures regularly dipping below that might need some kind of backup. 

Read all that and more in this week’s Intelligence Report: