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Vermont’s natural gas company is selling heat pumps and rebranding itself a “thermal service provider.”
On a recent Friday morning, I sat down to watch a webinar about a natural gas utility and unexpectedly found myself glued to the screen.
The video featured Morgan Hood, the new product development manager at a small utility once called Vermont Gas Systems, now known simply as VGS, that serves about 55,000 customers in its titular state. For 80 minutes Hood described how the company was working to reinvent itself as a “thermal solutions provider.” As part of that mission, it had recently started selling and leasing electric heat pump water and space heaters to its customers to help them reduce their gas use.
As a reporter who has covered natural gas utilities’ expansion plans and the industry’s all-out war on electrification, I was stunned. The programs alone were unusual, but what surprised me more was the way Hood talked about them.
“If we want to continue to serve our customers, which we do, significant changes are necessary,” she said, describing a “dramatic shift” in public sentiment toward natural gas in Vermont. “We know we're not going to be expanding our customer base with natural gas customers in the future.”
It’s hard to overstate how different Hood’s tone and message were from that of the average gas utility executive, who tends to highlight their product’s popularity and make a case for its role in a low-carbon future. Consider the remarks of Kim Greene, the CEO of the much larger Southern Company Gas, at a conference I attended in November. “Natural gas is foundational to America's clean energy future," she told an audience of state regulators. Without ever once acknowledging that natural gas contributes to climate change, she went on to describe it as a “magical molecule” that was important to the company’s decarbonization strategy.
When I later probed climate advocates in Vermont about VGS, I learned that many dismiss the company’s image change as greenwashing, or are at least skeptical of its plans. They pointed to a highly contested $165 million pipeline the company recently built, and a controversial plan to replace the fuel in its pipelines with biogas and hydrogen.
But my initial impressions also weren’t unfounded. The company does in fact seem to be unique in the way it has actively started leaning into the shift that science, policy, and economics are all driving toward — a transition to all-electric buildings.
“VGS is among the most progressive gas utilities in the country, there's no question about that,” Ben Walsh, the climate and energy program director at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and a longtime critic of VGS, told me.
The company still has a lot to figure out. Hood was remarkably transparent in acknowledging that the new products VGS is offering aren’t nearly as profitable as selling natural gas. But its recent past and its uncertain future make it a revealing case study of the challenges gas companies face in trying to stay viable as they try to decarbonize.
The webinar, titled “A Gas Utility Goes Electric,” was organized by a Portland, Oregon-based advocacy group called Electrify Now. Its co-founder Brian Stewart told me he initially had some reservations about featuring a gas utility in their event series, but he and his partners were impressed with the company’s interest in engaging with an electrification group. They hoped the talk might reveal a model that other utilities could follow — particularly Northwest Natural, their local gas utility in Oregon.
“They're doing the exact opposite of what VGS is at least attempting to do,” Stewart said. “Northwest Natural is still denying the idea that electrification is even better from an emissions standpoint.”
In fact, Northwest Natural is not just denying it — it’s reportedly putting millions of dollars into opposing electrification. In February, the Oregon city of Eugene passed an ordinance banning gas hookups in new residential buildings. Northwest Natural responded by spending more than $900,000 to get a measure to overturn the gas ban on the city’s November ballot, according to campaign finance records reviewed by The Washington Post. And it’s just getting started. The Post obtained audio indicating that the gas industry plans to spend $4 million on the Eugene referendum.
The strategy has been widely adopted by the gas industry. Last year, a utility in Southern California, SoCalGas, was fined $10 million for spending ratepayer funds to fight stronger building efficiency standards that would have reduced natural gas demand. New York Focusreported last week that National Fuel, a gas utility in Western New York, is spending hundreds of thousands of ratepayer dollars to lobby against a statewide push to reduce natural gas use.
VGS, on the other hand, first signaled it was reading the writing on the wall for natural gas in 2019, when it announced a new strategy to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That was around the time state leaders were contemplating a new climate law called the Global Warming Solutions Act, which passed the following year. VGS hired a new CEO, Neale Lunderville, who reorganized the company, creating new positions focused on decarbonization, including Hood’s role. Richard Donnelly, who spent a decade working for a nonprofit utility dedicated to energy efficiency joined VGS as its Director of Energy Innovation.
“The creation of that job was a clear signal to me that they were investing in the right things,” Donnelly told me.
VGS rolled out its first electrification program in early 2022, offering customers the option to lease or buy heat pump water heaters. The company was in a fairly unique position to do this, as it already had a sales and leasing program for gas equipment and an in-house team trained to install heating equipment.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, VGS launched an electric space heating program, offering central heat pumps that utilize the same ductwork as a homeowner’s existing furnace. For now, the company is installing these as dual fuel systems, meaning recipients keep their gas furnaces as a back-up source of heat. While heat pumps designed for cold climates don’t require this, they do lose efficiency in the coldest temperatures. Customers can decide when they want the system to switch over to gas, and the company developed a calculator that shows them how much carbon they can save, and what the anticipated costs will be, depending on where they set the switchover point.
The space heating systems are only available to a portion of the company’s customers — about 40% — because most have boilers and radiators with no ductwork. Hood said they hope to offer electric options for those homes in the future.
Dylan Giambatista, director of public affairs for VGS, told me the program is already taking off. Two weeks after it launched, they had well over 100 inquiries, he said. The water heaters, on the other hand, have had a pretty slow start. Only about 6% — or 48 total — of the water heaters the company has installed since January 2022 were heat pumps. “I don't think that folks are yet aware of that technology,” he said. “We expect heat pump water heater use will increase over time as incentives and consumer awareness increase,” he added in an email later.
Electrification isn’t the company’s only strategy to meet Vermont’s emissions goals.
It’s trying to reduce customers’ total energy usage through weatherization and other home efficiency improvements.
It’s also investing in alternative fuels, like renewable natural gas and hydrogen, to pump through its pipelines to any remaining gas customers. Nearly two-thirds of the gas that VGS sells is delivered to commercial and industrial customers, not all of whom may be able to fully electrify their operations. But local climate advocates have a lot of concerns about that aspect of the plan. Renewable natural gas, which typically comes from decomposing waste or dairy manure, is a lot more expensive than fossil gas. There’s also research indicating that it doesn’t necessarily have the climate benefits that proponents claim.
While Walsh, of the Public Interest Research Group, acknowledged how unique VGS’ electrification programs were, he said it's way too early to give the company the benefit of the doubt.
“There are some strategies that a gas utility could implement, that on the surface look good, but ultimately don't serve Vermont,” he said. “I think it's incumbent on all of us that are focused on cutting carbon pollution and cutting energy costs for Vermonters to watchdog their efforts very closely as they unfold.”
Others discount VGS’ heat pump programs because the company also continues to market and sell gas equipment and hook up new gas customers. Annette Smith, who runs a group called Vermonters for a Clean Environment sent me a screenshot of a VGS Facebook ad from May 8 offering people $500 to switch to natural gas.
Jim Dumont, a lawyer who has represented opponents of VGS in regulatory cases and lawsuits for years, said the first thing the company has to do to win public trust is come clean. “They have to tell the public that burning gas to heat your homes is helping push us over the climate cliff,” he told me. “They can sell heat pumps, but it's a competing message.”
VGS doesn’t deny that natural gas contributes to climate change. Lunderville, the CEO, told Vermont officials in a 2021 letter that the company recognizes “that its principal product today — fossil gas — has significant climate impacts.”
But the message stings with irony to Dumont, who has spent the last decade fighting a 41-mile gas pipeline the company built prior to its come-to-Jesus moment. Back in 2013, when VGS was first seeking approval for the pipeline from regulators, it argued that the project would cut energy costs and carbon emissions in the state. Most Vermonters did, and still do, heat their homes with fuel oil, propane, or wood — and gas can be a cleaner and often cheaper option. But opponents argued that cold climate heat pumps that were coming on to the market would be more affordable and effective.
Cold climate heat pumps were still pretty new at the time, and certainly weren’t being adopted in Vermont yet. The idea was sidelined, and while the scale of the pipeline was ultimately reduced, its cost ballooned from $86 million to $165 million. And now that it's completed, VGS is marketing heat pumps.
To Dumont, that’s not only ironic, it’s worrisome. The way gas utilities like VGS pay for big pipeline projects is to recover the costs over decades through customer bills. But if VGS helps people go electric, the residual costs of the pipeline are going to fall on fewer and fewer customers. As VGS leans into electrification, it could also be barreling toward a scenario referred to as the utility death spiral: the cost of gas will increase, driving more people to get off it.
“Is the public going to be asked to bail out the company, or will the company be responsible for its own bad judgment and will its sole shareholder have to swallow the loss?” Dumont asked. “If there are no consequences for making a bad investment, then effectively it's not a regulated utility, it's effectively a taxpayer-funded business.”
This is a problem that all gas utilities are facing or will likely face, whether or not they embrace a transition to electric buildings. Mike Henchen, a principle in the carbon-free buildings program at RMI, a national nonprofit, said this was “the elephant in the room” around the country.
“How to deal with all the customers hooked up to this fossil fuel system looms large on the horizon,” he said. “There's not going to be an easy way to tackle that.”
I reached out to Énergir, the Canadian company that owns VGS, to find out whether it had any concerns about VGS’ financial future. “Énergir has always believed in the complementarity of different energy solutions and in accelerating electrification where it makes sense,” Éric Lachance, president and CEO of Énergir said by email, adding that “Énergir strongly supports VGS’s approach.”
Though heat pumps aren’t as profitable as natural gas, the company does see opportunities for growth. It can sell and lease the water heaters to residents outside its existing customer base. It’s also exploring the potential to build and manage geothermal heating networks, where entire neighborhoods could be heated by underground pipes carrying nothing but water.
“The market opportunity is huge,” said Donnelly, the Director of Energy Innovation. For now, the company is primarily limited by staffing, and is being careful not to create more demand than it can fulfill. He estimated VGS was looking at “hundreds of installs over the next couple of years and growing that part of our business quite rapidly, hopefully, within the next five years.”
VGS also sees potential for these programs to become more profitable thanks to a law passed by the state legislature earlier this month called the Affordable Heat Act that directs the state’s utility regulators to design a clean heat standard. The company could eventually earn credits for its electrification programs and sell them to other fuel providers in the state that need to comply with the standard.
As policy and technology continue to evolve, it makes sense that VGS doesn’t know exactly what the future holds. But faced with similar uncertainty, most gas utilities have responded by putting their heads in the sand or fighting tooth and nail against change.
What makes VGS remarkable is that it’s at least trying to find its place in a post-gas world.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article understated the length of a VGS pipeline. It is 41 miles, not 27 miles. The article has been corrected. We regret the error.
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Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
“No one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes about the challenges facing climate cinema, and why 2024 might be the year the climate movie grew up.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.