How much South San Francisco residents will need to pay to fully electrify their homes is of concern for the City Council as it continues to iron out details for new energy policies seeking to reduce emissions.
At a meeting late last month, the council discussed options to fully electrify all new residential and commercial buildings and require charging stations for electric vehicles. Options for new construction building appliance electrification ranged from meeting the minimum energy code to all-electric with high energy performance.
But when it came to electrifying current residences, the council focused on the potential cost to homeowners. Councilmember Mark Addiego raised concerns about how the policies will affect low-income residents.
“This could be a great burden to bring electric power into a house that is primarily operating on gas,” said Addiego. “I just need to understand the dollars and cents a lot more than I do.”
In 2021, City Council adopted a local building electrification reach code requiring appliances for single-family and multi-family buildings to be all-electric for new construction. For the nonresidential reach code development, city staff spoke with property owners, contractors, manufacturers, architects, and commercial tenants in an effort to find what reach code paths would work best for the community, according to the staff report.
In October, the council passed an update to its climate action plan setting a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its two main approaches to reduce emissions in buildings is by electrification and improving energy efficiency.
While the city’s goal is total electrification throughout the city, the council is exploring ways to minimize the financial impact for residential homeowners.
Mayor Mark Nagales said that on average it costs around $6,000 for a new electric pump water heater, opposed to a natural-gas water heater. However, there are incentives and rebates that can help minimize the financial burden. Peninsula Clean Energy offers $3,500 rebate, along with an additional $1,500 rebate and $1,000 for low income customer financing, he added.
Councilmember Eddie Flores shared similar concerns for the residents adding that rebates and reimbursements programs are not always easily accessible and should be explored in greater detail.
Yet Councilmember James Coleman argued working expeditiously toward the goal will ultimately save residents money because the cost of natural gas will eventually rise as more people go toward electrification.
“I definitely don’t want some of our households and community members to be the last ones having to be the ones that pay that cost,” said Coleman.
The city plans on studying rebates and reimbursements for existing residential homeowners and figure out what makes the most sense without inducing too much extra cost for residents, Coleman said after the meeting.
To come up with the new codes, the city has been working with Peninsula Clean Energy, a local joint powers authority providing energy for San Mateo County and the city of Los Banos, founded in 2016 to offer lower and more sustainable energy. While PCE provides the electricity, Pacific Gas and Electric does the billing and also maintains the infrastructure.
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Options for existing buildings
For existing building electrification, the city is looking at four approaches to pursue including ending all flow of natural gas in the city by a certain year in the future; requiring home sellers to disclose what appliances still use natural gas at the time of sale for a property; a burnout ordinance that would allow current gas or propane appliances to continue to be used until the end of their useful life and replaced; or in-lieu fees, which means that a building owner either electrify their building’s end uses or incur a fee to keep the gas appliances, according to the staff report.
New construction
For new building construction, PCE recommends full electrification, limiting exemptions to commercial kitchens because of lack of technology and to avoid financial burdens. A local business survey showed that the majority of businesses rely on natural gas for ovens, stovetops and water heaters, according to a staff report.
The other considered exemption would be for buildings that can’t comply with total electrification, such as research and development buildings that use natural gas in their labs.
Reach codes are to be updated and sent into the state every three years. The 2022 California Energy Code differs from the current 2019 Energy Code regarding new residential and non-residential buildings. For new construction, the 2022 Energy Code encourages electric heat pump technology, establishes electric-ready requirements when natural gas end uses are installed and expands on solar powered systems, according to the staff report.
Grid reliability
Councilmember Flor Nicolas worried about the reliability of the electric grid if the city was to transition to total electrification.
However, results of a study showed that if all of PCE’s service territories adopted new construction electrification, the added load would be less than 1% than the current load, said Rafael Reyes, Peninsula Clean Energy director of Energy Programs.
Next steps, the council plans to meet again for a vote for a policy adoption in January, then it will be submitted to the state agency for approval.
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(1) comment
Ho-hum, another day, another article about electrification without telling us where this magic electricity will come from… Let me summarize what all this electrification will accomplish in the little, and big, scheme of things… nothing. Absolutely nothing in terms of emissions, as emissions is still happily generated by fossil-fuel generating plants to provide electricity. Unfortunately, this electricity virtue signaling does nothing except increase the costs of residential and commercial building. It is quite telling that SSF and other city councils irresponsibly pass these non-effective reach codes before determining how folks will pay for them and yes, folks will again be stuck with the tab, not the irresponsible folks virtue signaling.
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