This op-ed is excerpted from BigPivots.com. You can read the full article here.
Crested Butte, that most lovely of Colorado mountain towns, now vibrant in summer flowers and always in the bold colors of Victorian storefronts, has now entered into the fractious national debate about natural gas.
The municipality decided Aug. 3 that it will no longer allow natural gas in new buildings. Major remodels will be required to be electric-ready. It’s the first jurisdiction in Colorado to take this action.
Others may soon follow, posing the question of whether Colorado will soon get more rambunctious in its debate about how to effectively achieve the reduction in emissions identified in a 2019 law. That law specified economy-wide emission reductions of 50% by 2030 and 90% by 2050.
Buildings must necessarily be part of this drawdown, and that puts the focus on natural gas, which provides space and hot-water heating for more than half of Colorado buildings. Cars last 15 years or longer, but upgrades of buildings often don’t occur for decades.
The Colorado Greenhouse Gas Pollution Roadmap adopted in January 2021 identified emissions from buildings as a relatively small but vital sector. “Even though the emissions reductions from these actions will be relatively modest in the near term,” the roadmap says, “they will grow to become very significant in the period after 2030.”
In November 2019, Berkeley became the first municipality in the United States to ban natural gas in new construction. Since then 80 other towns, cities, and other jurisdictions have followed, first in California but then in other states.
In response, 23 states — including five of the seven states bordering Colorado — have adopted laws that prohibit such local regulations. That’s a ban on bans, if you will.
An effort was underway in 2020 by oil-and-gas interests in Colorado to put a similar ballot measure, called preemption, before voters. The effort was withdrawn after negotiations with Colorado Governor Jared Polis.
Colorado legislators in 2021 instead passed several bills that collectively start squeezing natural gas from buildings without blanket bans. The most important of these bills, SB21-264, requires the four regulated utilities that sell natural gas in Colorado to submit clean-heat plans beginning in 2023.
This clean-heat requirement along with other laws adopted in 2021 nudge Colorado’s four regulated utilities that deliver natural gas toward helping their customers convert their homes and businesses from natural gas to electricity. Xcel Energy, the largest, sells both gas and electricity, so the loss of gas sales will be offset by increased electricity sales. Atmos, the supplier of natural gas to Crested Butte, does not sell electricity, so it will have to cut its emissions in other ways.
Crested Butte might seem an unlikely trailblazer. It’s smallish, with 1,334 full-time residents. The conventional wisdom holds that the big liberal bastions wade into changes first, which then get gradually introduced into the more rural outposts. But neither Denver nor Boulder, though they have started squeezing emissions from buildings in significant ways, have gone quite as far.
Denver, for example, requires heat pumps for space heating and heat-pump water heaters for existing buildings — but not homes — at the time of system replacement, starting in 2024 to 2027. That’s not an explicit ban on natural gas, although it may come close.
The most important aspect of Crested Butte’s example may be its colder climate. It sits at 8,909 feet. Other places that are actually lower in elevation lay claim to the dubious distinction of record cold, but Crested Butte knows chill, an average low of 6 below during January, its coldest month. Town officials, after examining the available technology, including air-source heat pumps, concluded that nobody will suffer in this transition to building electrification.
If it can work in Crested Butte, surely it should work in Castle Rock or Colorado Springs or any number of other places.
Mark Reaman, the editor of the Crested Butte News, called the measure “largely symbolic in the sense it will not save the world. Not even close,” he wrote in a column titled “Symbolism Matters.”
“But it could send a message and set an example to those living and visiting here. It is tangible action applicable at the local level.”
Crested Butte, he added, “is one of those towns that punches above its weight, given the people it draws and the attitude that doing something locally matters.”
He offered the metaphor of a seed now planted “that might grow beyond our little garden.”
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has now set out to create rules for evaluating these clean-heat plans. In filings beginning in December, real estate agents, home builders and even some municipalities have argued that converting from natural gas will add costs. That was the same message in recent meetings in Montrose and Grand Junction.
In this complicated story, their message was simple: Don’t change.
In Pueblo, at a meeting across the highway from a steel mill, more nuance was evident. Laborers International Union representatives worried about how this will impact their livelihoods. Electricians, they should do fine in this shift to beneficial electrification. A local resident had no quarrel with eliminating natural gas but worried about the high cost of electricity in Pueblo.
Reflecting later, Laura Getts explained the complexities of carbon reduction in buildings. She’s the business development manager for San Isabel Electric, a cooperative serving rural areas of Pueblo and two other counties in southern Colorado. They are among the poorest in the state. Converting from propane, even in existing buildings, is an easy sell, because of the cost of propane. Replacing natural gas in existing buildings is a tougher sell because it remains relatively inexpensive.
The economics of all-electric in new buildings are compelling, she says. Even so, San Isabel has struggled to persuade most builders.
Pueblo itself still has a goal of shifting to 100% renewables by 2035. The Pueblo Energy Advisory Commission, of which Getts is a member, is struggling to construct that pathway. The challenge, she says is to “reduce carbon emissions and do it rapidly and strategically without leaving people feeling powerless to make their own energy choices.”
Unless a way can be found to cost-effectively sequester carbon emissions, natural gas will slowly be phased out in coming decades. Ironically, the arrival of natural gas was one reason that coal mining ended in Crested Butte in 1952 after a seven-decade run.
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.