Why electrify?
Welcome to The Accelerator+. This month Senior Researcher?Jon Koliner?writes about the role of electrification in cutting carbon from our buildings.
When it comes to warming our spaces, heating our water, and cooking our food, fire is an obvious choice.
If you supply a continuous stream of combustible fuel, fire can efficiently convert that fuel into heat to meet our needs. Although some buildings still use wood as fuel, buildings today have access to combustible fuel through extensive natural gas pipelines, propane, diesel, and fuel oil delivery trucks, and onsite storage tanks. The massive network comprising extraction and processing infrastructure, markets, and the people who service and maintain them were built over many decades in service of providing that fuel as a daily convenience.
Unfortunately, the fuels we burn in our homes and businesses today are ancient hydrocarbons, buried for hundreds of thousands of millennia under the earth. When we burn them, they react with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide molecules, which waft up into the atmosphere and abet the Earth in trapping heat from the sun’s rays. These molecules will remain in the atmosphere for more hundreds of years, driving global climate change.
Using fire for heat is dependent on unearthing hydrocarbons — it’s unavoidable. Fire converts fuel into heat, but that process also heats up the Earth.
If we want to stop emitting carbon dioxide from our buildings, we must stop burning unearthed hydrocarbons. Luckily, we already have replacements to meet our heating needs: heat pumps to replace furnaces and boilers, electric or heat-pump water heaters for water heating, and induction cooktops to replace gas stoves.
All these heat sources are powered by electricity, a utility already supplied to nearly all the homes in the United States. The process of converting other forms of energy to electricity from other fuels, particularly hydrocarbons, is what we call Electrification.
A fully electrified building produces no carbon dioxide onsite, and as electric generation sources transition away from hydrocarbons, electrified buildings will produce no carbon emissions elsewhere just to use energy. By removing indoor combustion entirely, electrified buildings eliminate or drastically reduce indoor NOx, methane, and carbon monoxide concentrations — known risk factors for asthma and related health issues. And without indoor combustion, the risk of building fires and explosions also drops dramatically.
There is more to electrification than heat, of course. Solar panels turn buildings into electricity producers, while batteries bolster their resilience and can potentially benefit the grid. Electric vehicles and chargers remove the need to burn oil — another unearthed hydrocarbon — and improve the overall efficiency in the process of converting a fuel source into motion. These technologies are also considered core elements of electrification.
Buildings are electrifying today! Still, the national effort to electrify buildings faces challenges.
We must cultivate a robust installer network through workforce development and training efforts.
Our electric transmission and distribution systems will need to be upgraded to support both the increase in demand and the intermittency of renewable energy sources, although the buildings themselves can assist through load flexibility and storage.
The existing hydrocarbon infrastructure will need to be repurposed or phased out.
All these efforts are necessary to electrify and decarbonize our buildings completely. At Slipstream, we are engaged on multiple fronts to research technologies, deploy solutions, and educate the workforce on electrification, with the goal of accelerating decarbonization for everyone.
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Contact Jon here on LinkedIn or at his Slipstream email.
Highlights from this month's Accelerator
Watch a recording of our webinar for Net Zero Buildings Week (and find more resources at our Decarbonize For Good page):
Tour an all-electric home in Chicago:
Read about our study of market barriers to electrifying commercial RTUs:
Take a crash course on decarb technologies from more Slipstream researchers:
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Principal at Green Building Resources LLC
1 年I appreciate the research you cited. Over the past few years, I have certified over 200 multifamily buildings across the United States and less than 5% of them have air source heat pumps including new facilities in the deep south! HVAC designers clearly don't share your optimism. Electrification needs to follow a greater use of renewable energy on the grid. We need to promote PV on new, fully electric buildings or we risk digging a much bigger hole when it comes to getting in front of global warming. Thank you for your response.
Principal at Green Building Resources LLC
1 年It takes 3 times as much natural gas to make electric heat when compared to using natural gas to make heat directly at the site. Air source heat pumps have a COP of 2 or less when trying to heat at air temperatures under 40F and the required defrost cycle makes them no better than strip heaters at below freezing temperatures which is why all heat pump manufacturers recommend supplemental electric heat with their heat pumps. We have to differentiate between theory and reality here.