New York City Makes Net-Zero Statement Banning Natural Gas Hookups for New Construction

On December 15, 2021, the city of New York adopted a climate-change policy that will not approve future construction project plans where fossil fuels would be used for heating, electricity and cooking. This new policy will be enforced for all new construction except for hospitals and commercial kitchens starting in 2027. Why the ban? The city calculated that 40% of its carbon and greenhouse gas  (GHG) emissions come from heating and hot water demand throughout the city.

New York City isn’t the first to propose such a ban. Since June of this year, a dozen American cities have enacted similar new building construction bans. Most of these cities are on the west coast including San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Seattle. But a movement to ban natural gas and oil hookups in the east is also on the rise in Massachusetts with Brookline, Cambridge and Newton, suburban centres near Boston also instituting a future ban.

What makes New York’s decision unique?

• It is the largest city by population in the United States and its immense size will have a disproportionate influence on jobs in the construction industry and trades.
• It is considered a cold location city where heating is needed almost half the year, a far different environment than the adopters of the ban in California.
• It means utilities have to up their electric power generation capacity or buildings need to develop local and distributed alternatives to grid energy to make up the deficit when natural gas and oil heating are no longer options.
• It means architects and engineers designing new construction will have to develop innovative electrical heating and cooling technologies to work efficiently in multi-storey construction.

Of course, this change in policy doesn’t impact legacy buildings that will still use natural gas and oil.

Ben Furnas is the city’s Director of Climate Change and Sustainability, in a New York Times interview stated, “We’re making it clear that the next generation of buildings will be electric…that if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere…This is a very big deal. The places that have done this already don’t have four seasons, and they don’t build this big.”

The State of New York has a bill before its legislature that would require all new building construction in the state to adopt electric power from 2024 on. There is also a new governor-mandated initiative to create a network of developers, builders, and trades with decarbonized home skillsets including the provision of training and technical support to enable the transition.

In the last week, an industry-wide $263 million competition was announced by The New York City Housing Authority, New York Power Authority, and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to develop new electrification products for multi-storey and multi-family buildings.

And finally, the Biden administration signed on to cutting GHGs in federal legacy buildings by 50% by 2030 and set a target of 2045 to be carbon neutral. Any new federal construction, under these new Biden regulations, will be mandated to be constructed using materials that produce low emissions, and will be required to use clean energy technologies for heating, lighting, hot water, and cooling.

One of the interesting aspects to this switch to electricity can be best described in the adage, “what goes around, comes around.” Natural gas was always seen as the clean alternative for heating and hot water when compared to electricity produced by thermal coal powerplants. Natural gas appliances were touted as being more energy efficient and better at heating, cooling and cooking. That was only a few decades ago. Now natural gas is seen through the lens of climate change and because of methane emissions is no longer deemed viable to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In a CBS News interview recently, Bruce Nilles, Managing Director of Building Electrification at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean-energy think tank, states, “we pushed people to go off electric to go to gas for 30 years, and we’re now pushing them in the other direction.”