The electrify-everything movement is coming for your gas heat, stove, and clothes dryer.  

The New York legislature is currently considering a ban on gas hookups in new construction after 2023, which would force all new homes built after that to be all-electric. Because of higher costs of electric appliances, this could drive up housing costs for prospective homeowners. 

In addition, the state’s Climate Action Council, tasked with implementing the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), proposes to ban the sale of gas furnaces and hot water heaters after 2030 and gas stoves and clothes dryers after 2035.  

Given the 15-20 year lifetime of these appliances, this means even existing homes would have to go all-electric by around 2050, the CLCPA’s target date for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the higher operating costs of electric appliances, this will impose large costs on those who own older homes. 

But going all-electric can cost tens of thousands of dollars, an amount far beyond the means of many New Yorkers. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off because electric appliances can have higher operating costs. When it does pay off through lower electric bills – achieved through extensive housing shell retrofitting and use of heat pumps – cost-recovery can take many decades, even beyond the life of the owner. 

Over 4 million New York households use natural gas heat. To fully electrify them all by 2050 would require electrifying nearly 150,000 homes per year, a massive and very expensive challenge.   

And there is no clear path toward funding it. The Climate Action Council has refused to consider how the electrification transition will be paid for. And the recent, record-breaking $220 billion state budget makes only a token attempt to pay down the huge cost of CLCPA compliance.

Eventually someone’s going to have to face up to the tough decisions about how New York’s supposed all-electric transition will be funded. Hopefully it’s not on the backs of struggling homeowners who suddenly find their furnaces going out in mid-winter. 

CLCPA supporters seem to imagine everyone will simply switch to high-efficiency heat pumps. But without extensive subsidies the upfront cost of them will be too much for many homeowners to bear. That will force many to buy resistance electric heaters, which are cheaper to buy but more expensive to operate. This will increase the number of New Yorkers struggling with energy poverty. 

And, perversely, the state only offers rebates on geothermal heat pumps, the most expensive type. It’s a pure giveaway to the well-off that leaves poorer homeowners out in the cold. 

A better approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to use hybrid heating systems. These use cost-effective air-source heat pumps for the milder temperatures of fall and spring, with gas heat for the colder depths of winter. Many homeowners would still need assistance in buying the heat pumps, but state subsidies would stretch further, and gas utilities will also help their customers out. 

But this requires the continued use of gas, which climate activists oppose. Fortunately, there may be a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while keeping gas heat and taking advantage of the existing gas pipeline infrastructure. This approach would replace fossil natural gas with renewable natural gas blended with hydrogen. National Grid, for example, has proposed such a plan. 

Renewable natural gas (RNG) captures methane from rotting vegetable matter, landfills, and animal and human waste. Traditionally it just wafted into the atmosphere, where it has more global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Turned into RNG it replaces fossil-sourced natural gas. 

Green hydrogen can be produced by using greenhouse gas-free renewables to turn water into hydrogen. When burned it produces no greenhouse gases. 

The hydrogen and RNG can be blended and piped through the existing natural gas infrastructure to provide gas for heating and appliances, with no disruption to customers. 

While nobody yet knows for sure about the economic and technological feasibility of this at utility scale, it’s the way the market is leaning, based on utilities’ promotion of it.  

We’re likely to be using a hydrogen-RNG blend for electricity production anyway. Even the Climate Action Council has recognized that we can’t get to 100 percent renewable electricity generation by 2040. So why not use this gas for heating and appliances as well as electricity? 

Perhaps most importantly, allowing the continuation of clean gas for heating and appliances is a plan that empowers individual customers to choose their own heating solutions. 

We’ve built a great country on the idea of free markets and letting people run their own lives free from excessive government interference. And the market has demonstrated that people are increasingly interested in considering the environmental effects of their own choices.

You may also like

Despite Lingering Shortages, New York’s Health-Care Workforce Is Bigger Than Ever

The state's health-care workforce is recovering unevenly from the pandemic, with persistently lower employment levels in some areas and robust growth in others. This mixed pattern c Read More

High Taxes Aren’t a Problem, Supporters of High Taxes Say

A declaring "no statistically significant evidence of tax migration in New York" and finding "high earners’ migration rates returned to pre-Covid levels" during 2022 has a glaring problem: It relies heavily on an almost microscopic sample size of self- Read More

The Wacky Math of New York’s Essential Plan

Thanks to an absurdly wasteful federal law, New York's Essential Plan is expected to continue running billion-dollar surpluses even as state officials more than double its spending over the next several years. Read More

NY 2nd in the Nation for Homeschooling Growth

A Washington Post analysis of homeschooling trends revealed that families in New York have flocked to home education at rates Read More

Don’t Tell The Grownups: NY Still Hiding State Test Scores

State education officials are refusing to release the results of federally required assessments in grades 3 through 8, deliberately keeping parents and taxpayers in the dark—not only about how New York’s public schools performed, but also about how that performance was measured. Read More

In a Tight Budget Year, New York’s Hospital Lobby Shoots for the Moon

As Governor Hochul calls for spending restraint next year, influential hospital lobbyists are pushing what could be the costliest budget request ever floated in Albany. In a , the G Read More

What You Should Know: NY’s changing graduation requirements

Months after lowering the scores to pass state assessment exams, New York education officials are considering eliminating the Regents diploma. Read More

Putting the Mission in Hochul’s Health Commission

Last week Governor Hochul answered one big question about her Commission on the Future of Health Care – the names of its members – but left a fundamental mystery unresolved:  W Read More

Empire Center Logo Enjoying our work? Sign up for email alerts on our latest news and research.
Together, we can make New York a better place to live and work!