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For more than a decade, Americans have been sold inferior furnaces to heat their homes that raise their energy bills and dump carbon into the atmosphere when much more efficient options were available. That’s finally going to change … five years from now.
On Friday, the Department of Energy finalized new, long-awaited standards for gas furnaces that have not meaningfully changed since they were first enacted in 1987. So long as the rule does not get held up in court, or by a future administration, it will require that by 2029, all gas furnaces on the market are 95% efficient. When it was first enacted, the standard was 78%. The current standard, which went into effect in 2015, is 80%.
It’s a bit of an awkward win for the climate movement. On the one hand, it’s a rule that assumes that fossil fuel-fired furnaces will still be on the market through at least 2058, far past the 2050 date by which the U.S. has committed to reduce its emissions to net-zero. Every new gas furnace installed could lock in carbon emissions and local pollution for the 15 to 20 years it operates.
On the other, clean energy and environmental advocates have been pushing for this kind of update to the standards since at least 2007, only to be stymied by lobbying and lawsuits from the gas industry, equipment manufacturers, and other industry groups. Though some states, like New York and California, are starting to phase out the sale of gas furnaces, there’s not yet any plan to do so on the national level. As long as people keep buying them, this rule will go a long way to make sure they emit as little as possible.
“Furnace technology advanced a long time ago, but the standards didn’t keep up,” said Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, in a press release. “This is going to guarantee that all new models use proven energy-saving technologies. We won’t keep wasting so much heat for decades more.”
The DOE estimates the updated standard will cumulatively save consumers $24.8 billion on their energy bills between 2029 and 2058. Individual households could save $350 over the lifetime of the equipment, and those living in mobile homes could save more than $600. The agency also says the rule will cut carbon emissions by 332 million metric tons over that period, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions from a third of American homes. It will also cut methane emissions by 4.3 million tons, which is slightly more than all U.S. municipal landfills emit in a year.
Jumping from 80% to 95% might sound like a big leap, but the technology to achieve it has been on the market for decades. A number of states and efficiency advocacy groups tried to sue the DOE when it last changed the standard in 2007 because they claimed that 80% was already too low back then. The vast majority of the products for sale were performing at that level or higher, so the change wasn’t going to do anything to reduce energy consumption or save households and businesses money.
The DOE made several attempts to update the standard under the Obama administration. The big sticking point was a technological quirk. Systems that achieve efficiency higher than 80% use something called a condenser to capture waste heat from the exhaust stream and send it into the building instead. Switching from a non-condensing furnace to a condensing furnace may come with some additional expenses, like the need to move the furnace to a different part of the building and install an exhaust pipe. Opponents argued that any rule that effectively banned non-condensing furnaces was unfair to consumers who couldn’t afford those changes. Under the Trump administration, they argued that condensing furnaces should be regulated as an entirely different product class.
But advocates counter that consumers will save money in the long run with a more efficient system. The updated standard could especially benefit renters, who won’t necessarily be burdened with any potential increase in upfront costs to install a condensing boiler, but will see lower heating bills. The DOE also estimates that when the standard kicks in, about 4.2% of building owners will forgo a new gas furnace altogether and get an electric heat pump, with the help of tax credits and rebates in the Inflation Reduction Act that incentivize this shift. That estimate does not even take into account the fact that furnaces may soon no longer qualify for Energy Star certification, which could push even more consumers to heat pumps.
Though on paper, the standard is expected to make a significant dent in emissions, the fact that it won’t go into effect for five more years — nearly 40 years after the last significant change — will have lasting consequences. Millions of gas-guzzling furnaces have been installed that didn’t have to be, and millions more could be before the standard kicks in. All the carbon emitted as a result will warm the planet for thousands of years.
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …