Category: COLORADO_CN Electrify_Everything_CN

Gov. Jared Polis issued an executive order aimed at making Colorado greener, cleaner, and quieter. It requires the state – and state contractors – to phase out all gas-powered lawn and garden tools over the next two years and replace them with electric equipment.

Twenty-six local government leaders in California — including those from San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Jose — are calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, to urgently pursue statewide standards requiring new buildings to be all-electric rather than burn fossil fuels on site for uses such as cooking and space and water heating.

A while ago I had the opportunity to sit down for 90 minutes with Dilip Chandrasekaran, engineer, materials science PhD, and SVP of industrial heat leader Kanthal. That firm has electric heat products and experts who help industrial clients transform their processes to use them, resulting in decarbonization and profit gains.

Recently I published an assessment of whether a reasonably sized international airport, not Heathrow, Chicago, or Changi, but Edmonton YEG’s smaller one, could power all future aviation energy requirements with its 120 MW solar farm. The answer was yes, and more. Of course, that was a thought exercise which had a bunch of bounding assumptions including the viability of long-range electric passenger jets by 2060–2070, so it wasn’t assuming that the solar farm would be powering all aviation out of YEG tomorrow or even in the next 30 years.

Gas utilities and homebuilder groups in Washington state are asking a district judge to dismiss their legal challenge to the first statewide mandate for electric heat pumps in new buildings — a move that could preserve landmark rules for building decarbonization.

New Jersey regulators at a July 26 open meeting approved a framework for utilities to submit building electrification plans, setting the stage for thousands of homes and businesses to install electric heat pumps.

As the grid decarbonizes and everything electrifies over the coming decades, a key part of the end game is electricity storage. However, it’s not a prerequisite to getting started, otherwise we wouldn’t have been building as much wind, solar and, in the case of China, hydroelectric generation as we have been for the past decade or two.

Lawmakers in Oregon late last month passed legislation that adopts a goal for the state to have at least 500,000 new heat pumps in its residential and commercial buildings by 2030.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.

Gleaming solar panels, soaring wind turbines, sleek electric cars. These are the Avengers of the climate technoverse, the most widely recognized symbols of the fight to kick fossil fuels and halt global warming. But the lineup is incomplete. Clean electricity and transportation are covered, but what about heat?