It is clear today that fossil fuel-fired equipment has a limited future in buildings due to technology advancements, policy, ESG requirements and other conditions. As asset managers, sustainability managers, and their consultants pursue decarbonization plans, they can often encounter misconceptions about decarbonization that delay action and progress. Below is a list of the misconceptions that came out of the Empire Building Challenge, and our solutions for how to overcome these challenges.
Perhaps because the electrification movement was born in mild-climate California, the cold-climate, tall-building narrative has been incomplete. Decarbonization skeptics suggest that if it doesn't make sense to electrify everything in one simple move, then it doesn't make sense to electrify anything. Air source heat pumps have tremendously improved and may be a key component of electrification in cold climates, but they are likely only one part of the complete solution set for large and tall buildings. Such buildings must overcome space constraints and distribution challenges to provide comfort at peak load conditions without straining the electric grid or requiring oversized, sticker-shock-inducing equipment capacity.
A more suitable chant for Northeast electrification cheerleaders should be Electrify Everything . . . Efficiently. Engineers should model building energy consumption data across granular temperature bins (see Figure below) and plan for electrification with “easy” loads like domestic hot water, then mild temperature loads (typically representing 80%+ of total loads), and finally for the extremes. This is the cascade approach. Until a viable solution emerges, a building owner might even keep a small gas-fired boiler and their steam radiators around as a reserve as they learn to grapple with resilient functionality at heating design conditions. Despite global average temperatures increasing, cold snaps may even become more extreme thanks to a collapsing winter Polar Vortex.
Yes, but not for too long. If the electricity is driving heat pumps, particularly during mild annual part-load conditions, emissions are likely to decrease even today. States are legislating 100% carbon-free electric grids like New York did in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). Modeling total emissions over time using declining electric grid carbon emissions coefficients across multiple decarbonization scenarios is an important task. Phasing in electrification over time and in a strategic way is the only pathway to eliminating on-site emissions.
if this is true today, building owners should not abandon all attempts to decarbonize or plan for ongoing work to achieve carbon neutrality. Phased, incremental implementation of low-carbon retrofits across a continuum is critical to reaching building operations carbon neutrality in cold climates. Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of phasing and maintaining technology optionality and the risk mitigation benefits these efforts might deliver. Decarbonization efforts fall on a decision-making tree, which evolves as time elapses and technology, policy, or other conditions change; each branch of the decision-making tree is a new decision point. Sustainability and asset managers can plan these intervention points over the decarbonization period.
