You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
A firestorm over stoves couldn't stop these states from reining in gas.
One of the biggest climate stories of the year — the first, and perhaps only, to go viral — didn’t so much draw attention to the warming planet as it did to the dangers of using fossil fuels.
During the second week of January, Bloomberg reported that a federal safety agency would “consider a ban on gas stoves amid health fears.” Though the headline was somewhat misleading — the commission was investigating the risks of cooking with gas, but a ban was not immediately forthcoming — the article invited swift backlash.
The next day, the Wall Street Journal editorial board published an op-ed warning readers that “Biden is coming for your gas stove.” Conservative politicians expressed their undying loyalty to the appliance. “If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!,” Ronny Jackson, a Republican congressman from Texas, posted on Twitter. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida designed aprons bearing an illustration of a gas stove that said “Don’t Tread on Florida.” Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia also piled on, tweeting, “I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.” House Republicans eventually passed a bill called the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act.
Meanwhile, everyday Americans were trying to make sense of the news that their gas stoves could be harming them. Every major media outlet ran stories on the risks of cooking with gas and how to minimize them. “How bad is it actually?,” friends started asking me over drinks.
It’s not good. Burning natural gas releases nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that contributes to respiratory illnesses like asthma. Concentrations from cooking can often exceed government standards for outdoor air quality. Proper ventilation with a range hood can reduce your exposure. But it won’t do anything about the effects gas has on the climate.
About 13% of U.S. emissions come from the fuels burned in buildings. Stoves may be a small part of that, but officials in some of the most climate-forward cities and states have been grappling with reducing the use of all fossil fuel-burning appliances in buildings for a number of years now. In February, the Building Decarbonization Coalition reported that 98 municipalities and four states — California, Washington, Maryland, and Colorado — had adopted policies promoting a switch to electric appliances. When the gas stove hysteria erupted, one in five Americans was already living under laws that encouraged or required landlords and developers to eschew gas.
A lot has happened in the months since, and not every state is swimming in the same direction on the issue. But in 2023, policymakers took big leaps toward a future without gas in buildings in three key ways:
There’s no blueprint for how to decommission thousands of miles of gas pipelines and retrofit millions of homes with electric appliances in a systematic, let alone equitable way. As a start, policymakers have generally followed the Law of Holes, as in, the first step is to stop digging — or in this case, stop growing demand for gas.
In 2019, the city of Berkeley, California, led the way, passing the first ordinance in the country to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings, and dozens of other cities followed. This year, New York became the first state to enact such a policy. The law requires all new buildings that are smaller than seven stories to be fully electric beginning in 2026, and applies to taller buildings in 2029.
“I think it’s huge that a state is doing it, not only because New York is a big-impact state,” Sarah Fox, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University School of Law, told CNN at the time. It’s no longer “fringe cities passing these policies,” she said. “This is becoming a mainstream policy that a state like New York is taking on.”
However, this year also saw a continuation of Republican-led states taking the opposite tack. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho joined a list of 24 states that have passed laws prohibiting municipalities from setting these kinds of restrictions on gas in buildings. By my estimation, using 2022 population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, that means two in five Americans live in states with such preemption laws.
Berkeley’s gas ban was also struck down by a federal appeals court, and the city is now fighting for a rehearing. That decision led to some uncertainty, but no loss of momentum. In Washington, where regulators created a de facto ban on gas in new construction through the building code last year, officials recently amended the code to safeguard it against legal challenges.
Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year maintaining, replacing, and building new pipes — funds they expect to recover from ratepayers over the course of decades.
This year, in a few states with strong emission reduction laws that imply heating will have to be electrified in the next few decades, regulators started to scrutinize these investments more. In Illinois, for example, the Commerce Commission ordered People’s Gas, which serves the Chicago area, to pause its pipe replacement program, rejecting the company’s request to hike rates to fund it.
“This program was deeply flawed,” Abe Scarr, state director of the Public Interest Research Group in Illinois, told me. It was supposed to address the real problem of risky iron pipes, but it had been mismanaged and over-budget for years, he said. At the current rate, the company won’t be done until 2049, “right around the time that a lot of us think we should be stopping to use the gas system.”
The commission ordered an investigation into the program. It also initiated a new “Future of Gas” proceeding for all utilities in the state to determine how to align the sector with Illinois’ clean energy goals. “As the State embarks on a journey toward a 100 percent clean energy economy, the gas system’s operations will not continue to exist in its current form,” said Illinois Commerce Commission Chairman Doug Scott in a press release.
Meanwhile, regulators in Massachusetts were wrapping up their own “Future of Gas” proceeding that had kicked off in 2020. In early December, the state’s Department of Public Utilities issued a final order declaring, among many other things, that it will no longer allow companies to recover costs for gas infrastructure without showing that alternatives, like helping customers electrify, were considered. Regulators also rejected the utilities’ preferred path to reducing emissions — switching to lower-carbon fuels like renewable natural gas and hydrogen — as not yet proven. Unless and until the evidence changes, any money the companies spend investigating these solutions will have to be covered by shareholders, not ratepayers.
Also this year, Massachusetts began testing one potentially more systematic pathway to transition off gas. Eversource, a utility there, broke ground on a first-of-its-kind project to switch an entire neighborhood to “networked geothermal,” a form of electric heating that draws on the steady temperature of the ground beneath the earth’s surface to heat and cool buildings.
In many states, it’s standard practice for utilities to bake the cost of political activities like lobbying, advertising, and trade association memberships into customers’ gas and electric rates. These activities often amount to efforts to slow down the clean energy transition — for example, an investigation published this year found that the American Gas Association has fought to stifle warnings about the risks of gas stoves for decades.
“[Utilities] are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy,” David Pomerantz, executive director of the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute, wrote in The New York Times earlier this year.
But now Maine, Colorado, and Connecticut, have all outlawed the practice; if utilities in those states want to spend money on lobbying or trade groups, they’ll have to pay for it out of their own profits. Massachusetts regulators took a similar step, banning gas companies from charging customers for any marketing related to the promotion of natural gas.
I asked Mike Henchen, a principal at the clean energy think tank RMI who follows gas utility regulation around the country, what the next wave of action on the issue might look like.
He said he expects progress to continue next year, with states rolling out rebates for heat pumps with money from the Inflation Reduction Act. Some, like New Jersey and Maryland may follow the playbooks written by first movers like New York and Massachusetts, and those leading states could continue to break new ground. One of the next fronts, he said, is removing the gas industry’s “obligation to serve,” a rule written into most state laws that gives customers the right to demand gas service. That means that even if there’s a strong economic argument to electrify a city block rather than replace a risky pipeline, one resident’s refusal could sink the whole project.
On the bright side, some utilities are starting to talk more openly about needing to reduce the amount of natural gas they sell to customers, Henchen told me. But midway through sharing this thought, he stopped to laugh. “I laugh, because it seems like it should be more obvious that that is the case.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.
And more on the week’s conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Carbon County, Wyoming – I have learned that the Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project.
2. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – Anti-offshore wind advocates are pushing the Trump administration to rescind air permits issued to Avangrid for New England Wind 1 and 2, the same approval that was ripped away from Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm last Friday.
3. Campbell County, Virginia – The HEP Solar utility-scale project in rural Virginia is being accused of creating a damaging amount of runoff, turning a nearby lake into a “mud pit.” (To see the story making the rounds on anti-renewables social media, watch this TV news segment.)
4. Marrow County, Ohio – A solar farm in Ohio got approvals for once! Congratulations to ESA Solar on this rare 23-acre conquest.
5. Madison County, Indiana – The Indiana Supreme Court has rejected an effort by Invenergy to void a restrictive county ordinance.
6. Davidson County, North Carolina – A fraught conflict is playing out over a Cypress Creek Renewables solar project in the town of Denton, which passed a solar moratorium that contradicts approval for the project issued by county officials in 2022.
7. Knox County, Nebraska – A federal judge has dismissed key aspects of a legal challenge North Fork Wind, a subsidiary of National Grid Renewables, filed against the county for enacting a restrictive wind ordinance that hinders development of their project.
8. Livingston Parish, Louisiana – This parish is extending a moratorium on new solar farm approvals for at least another year, claiming such action is necessary to comply with a request from the state.
9. Jefferson County, Texas – The city council in the heavily industrial city of Port Arthur, Texas, has approved a lease for constructing wind turbines in a lake.
10. Linn County, Oregon – What is supposed to be this county’s first large-scale solar farm is starting to face pushback over impacts to a wetlands area.Today’s sit-down is with Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab and an expert in battery storage safety and regulation. Kumar’s folks reached out to me after learning I was writing about Moss Landing and wanted to give his honest and open perspective on how the disaster is impacting the future of storage development in the U.S. Let’s dive in!
The following is an abridged and edited version of our conversation.
So okay – walk me through your perspective on what happened with Moss Landing.
When this incident occurred, I’d already been to Moss Landing plenty of times. It caught me by surprise in the sense that it had reoccurred – the site had issues in the past.
A bit of context about my background – I joined GridLab relatively recently, but before that I spent 20 years in this industry, often working on the integrity and quality assurance of energy assets, anything from a natural gas power plant to nuclear to battery to a solar plant. I’m very familiar with safety regulation and standards for the energy industry, writ large.
Help me understand how things have improved since Moss Landing. Why is this facility considered by some to be an exception to the rule?
It’s definitely an outlier. Batteries are very modular by nature, you don’t need a lot of overall facility to put battery storage on the ground. From a construction standpoint, a wind or solar farm or even a gas plant is more complex to put together. But battery storage, that simplicity is a good thing.
That’s not the case with Moss Landing. If you look at the overall design of these sites, having battery packs in a building with a big hall is rare.
Pretty much every battery that’s been installed in the last two or three years, industry has already known about this [risk]. When the first [battery] fire occurred, they basically containerized everything – you want to containerize everything so you don’t have these thermal runaway events, where the entire battery batch catches fire. If you look at the record, in the last two or three years, I do not believe a single such design was implemented by anybody. People have learned from that experience already.
Are we seeing industry have to reckon with this anyway? I can’t help but wonder if you’ve witnessed these community fears. It does seem like when a fire happens, it creates problems for developers in other parts of the country. Are developers reckoning with a conflation from this event itself?
I think so. Developers that we’ve talked to are very well aware of reputational risk. They do not want people to have general concern with this technology because, if you look at how much battery is waiting to be connected to the grid, that’s pretty much it. There’s 12 times more capacity of batteries waiting to be connected to the grid than gas. That’s 12X.
We should wait for the city and I would really expect [Vistra] to release the root cause investigation of this fire. Experts have raised a number of these potential root causes. But we don’t know – was it the fire suppression system that failed? Was it something with the batteries?
We don’t know. I would hope that the details come out in a transparent way, so industry can make those changes, in terms of designs.
Is there anything in terms of national regulation governing this sector’s performance standards and safety standards, and do you think something like that should exist?
It should exist and it is happening. The NFPA [National Fire Prevention Association] is putting stuff out there. There might be some leaders in the way California’s introduced some new regulation to make sure there’s better documentation, safety preparedness.
There should be better regulation. There should be better rules. I don’t think developers are even against that.
OK, so NFPA. But what about the Trump administration? Should they get involved here?
I don’t think so. The OSHA standards apply to people who work on site — the regulatory frameworks are already there. I don’t think they need some special safety standard that’s new that applies to all these sites. The ingredients are already there.
It’s like coal power plants. There’s regulation on greenhouse gas emissions, but not all aspects of coal plants. I’m not sure if the Trump administration needs to get involved.
It sounds like you're saying the existing regulations are suitable in your view and what’s needed is for states and industry to step up?
I would think so. Just to give you an example, from an interconnection standpoint, there’s IEEE standards. From the battery level, there are UL standards. From the battery management system that also manages a lot of the ins and outs of how the battery operates —- a lot of those already have standards. To get insurance on a large battery site, they have to meet a lot of these guidelines already — nobody would insure a site otherwise. There’s a lot of financial risk. You don’t want batteries exploding because you didn’t meet any of these hundreds of guidelines that already exist and in many cases standards that exist.
So, I don’t know if something at the federal level changes anything.
My last question is, if you were giving advice to a developer, what would you say to them about making communities best aware of these tech advancements?
Before that, I am really hoping Vistra and all the agencies involved [with Moss Landing] have a transparent and accountable process of revealing what actually happened at this site. I think that’s really important.