This week in buildings, land and industry decarbonization news, the Appliance Standard Awareness Project (ASAP) and PIRG put out a report quantifying savings from the Biden Administration’s efficiency standards, which James Downing covered for NetZero Insider. The standards for lightbulbs, water heaters and other appliances are projected to save consumers $107 every year on their utility bills. The numbers change by state, which the report broke out.

NetZero Insider’s K Kaufmann wrote about another round of funding from the Department of Energy, which last week offered $240 million in grants to promote the adoption of building performance standards. The funding from the Inflation Reduction Act will help 19 different jurisdictions — states and municipalities — develop building codes with higher energy efficiency standards. 

University of California, Berkeley professor Severin Borenstein wrote a blog post on the city of Berkeley’s efforts to move away from natural gas after losing a court case last year. Writing for the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business (which posts interesting pieces on the economics of energy weekly), Borenstein detailed the Bay Area municipality’s plan for a “massive” tax hike on natural gas. The tax would be $2.96/therm, while consumers pay $2.33/therm. Voters will get a chance to weigh in on the proposed tax on election day. 

Helsinki, Finland, is taking the idea of clean heating to a new level with plans to install the world’s largest heat pump that will warm around 30,000 homes, as Euro News reports. The new technology is helping to decarbonize an existing district heating network. It will be powered by renewable energy and capable of heating homes in temperatures down to 20 degrees Celsius. 

Like European capitals, big tech is also looking to hit net zero, and last week Meta announced loose plans to develop geothermal to meet its power demand, with The New York Times reporting the details. The Facebook owner is working with Sage Geosystems to develop a 150-MW geothermal system using technology pioneered by the oil and gas fracking firms. Instead of getting new supplies of fossil fuel, the drilling techniques will be used to inject water to natural heat pockets below the surface, where it will get hot enough to run a turbine. 

Oil is used for more than just energy, as it was key to producing the hot industry of the 1960s, plastics. That is an issue for the best toy developed in the middle of last century, Legos, so its maker announced plans to move toward “renewable plastics,” as CBS News reported. Lego plans to start making its bricks entirely from cleaner plastics by 2032, and in the first half of this year, 22% of its products were made using renewable plastics. 

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