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To comply with a court ruling, Mountain View suspended its all-electric building requirements last week, opening the door for developers to install gas appliances in new homes and commercial buildings. But not without a split vote and some deep reservations about dropping the sustainability measures.
In a 4-2 vote, the City Council suspended its all-electric “reach codes” on April 9, with a request for the city to develop alternative building requirements quickly. Council members Margaret Abe-Koga and Alison Hicks voted against the suspension, while Council member Ellen Kamei was absent from the proceedings.
Mountain View adopted its all-electric reach codes five years ago, as part of an ambitious plan to be a carbon neutral city by 2045. The reach codes prohibited natural gas hookups in new and heavily renovated buildings, specifically targeting cooking appliances, clothes dryers, water heaters, space conditioners (heating and cooling), fire pits and fireplaces. To fend off legal challenges, the city also carved out an exemption for restaurants that needed to use gas stoves. But it turns out it was not enough.
Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an ordinance that prohibited gas infrastructure in the city of Berkeley. The court denied a request for a new hearing in January, upholding its position that the ban was in conflict with a federal statute, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which has broad powers over energy standards.
At the meeting on Tuesday, April 9, council members recognized the need to comply with the court ruling. But for some, the proposal to suspend the all-electric requirements was premature without having a backup plan in place.
“My concern is that we have the suspension, but there hasn’t been an exploration I believe, of what else we could be doing,” said Abe-Koga, who pulled the consent item for discussion. “I understand we probably need to suspend it. But we should have had a plan B, and I think we can still do that. I don’t see the need to do this exactly today,” she said.
Public commenters urged the council to delay the suspension as well, at least until the Council Sustainability Committee could make recommendations at its April 16 meeting. They also suggested alternatives to the reach codes, like introducing stricter air quality emission standards for appliances and offering more incentives for builders.
“I’ve electrified two houses in Mountain View. It’s still a very long and painful process, getting the permits, all the paperwork, it’s very expensive,” said Hala Alshahwany, encouraging the city to make the process easier for residents too. “People like to save money, and doing the right thing and saving money is a great combination,” she added.
But city officials doubled down on the recommendation to suspend the reach codes immediately. The city could not delay issuing building permits any longer, according to Dawn Cameron, acting assistant city manager and community development director. “We’re at the point where we’ve stalled so many applicants that basically we would have to take that as direction that you want us to enforce the reach code,” she said.
City Manager Kimbra McCarthy cautioned that continued enforcement could lead to lawsuits. Applicants were asking for permits on a weekly basis and wanted the city to follow the appellate court ruling, she said. “They’re saying to our staff, ‘You cannot require me to only have all-electric. I know about this court case.’ And they’re basically saying this is not right,” she said.
The council report did not provide other options to the reach codes, but staff discussed some possibilities that supported the public comments and included ideas like expanding requirements to prewire buildings for electrification, exploring energy performance standards and advocating for stronger state and federal legislation.
Hicks also asked staff to better inform the public about the benefits of all-electric appliances and to let them know gas was eventually going away. “I just think the bottom line for me is that we’re kind of doing a disservice to the applicants because I don’t think we’re going to be supporting gas over the long term,” she said.
While the majority of council members supported the suspension, they also requested that staff return with recommendations quickly so they could adopt a new ordinance before the summer recess. This likely would not be possible however, given staff’s workload and the timeline to confer with the Council Sustainability Committee, according to McCarthy.
Undeterred, Showalter said that she would be willing to hold a special meeting over the summer to pass a new ordinance.
But for Abe-Koga, not having a clear plan or timeline for alternative requirements was still a strong reason to not support the reach code suspension at this time. “I just really feel this is so important that above all of our other priorities, we should be working on this first. And frankly, it’s going to make it hard for me to approve more and more housing projects if I know they’re all going to be gas, and it’s going to be detrimental to our environment,” she said.
City staff will discuss potential options for establishing new building code regulations at the next Council Sustainability Committee meeting, which is being held virtually and in-person at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 16.
Create a carrot and stick system. Maybe assess a $100-500 inspection fee for all gas appliances, and let all electric stoves/heat pumps/EV charging/solar be free.
@ML Unfortunately that’s not really uniformly applying a fee. It’s gas discrimination. I would recommend, instead, that the Council focus on issues that impact everyone in the city: crime, housing prices, road quality, bureaucracy, etc.
Good decision.
There needs to be a backup plan.
There is enough skepticism regarding the technology around the reach plans each plans to justify suspension.
It seems like a lot of these reach plans are really “Hail Mary” passes.
The problem is that we really can’t afford for the receiver to miss the catch.
My closest (but imperfect) analogy are 1) Capacity Planning and 2) Change Management Processes used for decades to cutover Major IT Systems. You know, like cutting over a major International Bank or major Integrated Manufacturing Processes to new IT systems. The problem is I don’t hear anything from serious planning people (you know, engineers, product managers, project managers with Critical Path Planning, field systems engineers, Accountants, Operations people). I do hear a lot of rhetoric how great this stuff is and utopia is on the horizon. These people sound like the a vendor sales team (with out the field systems engineers backed up by the design engineers) who are promising great technology. A lot of issues are omitted to make sales pitch sound beautiful. But at the end of the day, you have to make it work, or else it is a disaster and $Millions (or in the case of green energy ($ B and $T) spent with little or no gain. Example: SAP R/3 was the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread; but at the end of the day, many projects were never fully implemented despite all the rhetoric and money spent. Too complicated to implement and they could not get them to deliver promised results. Or the results get fudged to make everybody look good
Finally! Ok, make builders pre-wire for all electric. Doing that during construction is cheap(er) than trying to do a retrofit later. It also gives the buyer (the consumer) the ability to “choose”.
Buyers can then choose what type of appliance they want to install where. They can choose to go with a high efficiency gas appliance (where available) now, and switch later when the electrical appliances catch up. Or the can choose the type of appliance based on their usage, or even based on their personal beliefs.
Those who prefer cooking with gas can continue, and those who want to show support for going electrical can do so.
In the short term, when the majority of electricity is still generated by burning something, it’s more efficient to just burn gas at the point of use (less overall carbon burned), rather than incur transmissions losses (and a bunch of PG&E fees). Also during the transition, electrical transmission capacity should be reserved for where it is needed like charging cars. The current grid is not very robust and the transition plan (if there is one) is pretty nebulous, so burning relatively clean gas isn’t so bad, especially if combined with prewiring, as CA_Native suggests. At some point we will be able to go all electric but it isn’t as soon as some people hope and we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.