This year, Atlas Buildings Hub published 21 original stories in our bi-weekly digests. Subject matter ranged from building codes to net metering to the electrification workforce. Here, we highlight our five post popular digests from the past year.
1. Why isn’t California’s building stock extensively electrified?
By nearly all accounts and measures, California is the most climate-forward state. California’s climate stances and policies set the tone for the rest of the country and, occasionally, for industry. Yet, California’s residential buildings are among the least electrified in the nation.
While a quarter of residential buildings across the country are all-electric, only eight percent are all-electric in California, the eighth lowest rate nationwide. Heat pump deployment nationwide in residential buildings is 14 percent; in California, it sits at just above four percent. California has the lowest rate of homes with electric-only cooktops at 28 percent. And the Golden State is also starkly more reliant on piped gas than other states; 64 percent of residential buildings are primarily heated via natural gas, compared to 51 percent nationwide. These figures are surfaced on Buildings Hub’s Residential Building Characteristics dashboard.
What is impeding California’s electrification progress? One part of the answer lies in the economics of building electrification; the other may be due to California’s historical energy policies.
2. Powering heating and cooling in prisons
According to the 2018 U.S. Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) conducted by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), correctional facilities are captured under the “public order and safety” category. A representative from the EIA noted in an email that CBECS provided a subcategory of “jail, reformatory, or penitentiary;” in the publicly available microdata and on our 2018 Commercial Building Characteristics dashboard, these buildings are encapsulated under the “other public order and safety” detailed building activity. Respondents in the public order and safety category represent only 105 buildings, 26 of which are encapsulated under “other.” The EIA clarified that correctional facilities constitute the majority of buildings in the category.
Those 26 respondents represent a small sample of the total number of American correctional facilities, blocking any statistically significant analysis of the population at large. The Prison Policy Initiative found in its 2024 report that almost 2 million people are held in 6325 correctional facilities nationwide, 1664 of which are federal and state prisons, 3196 are local and Tribal Nation jails, and 1323 are juvenile correction facilities. The 2018 Commercial Building Characteristics dashboard notes that there are about 10,900 buildings nationwide represented by the “other” category. As a result, the 26 “other public order and safety” buildings surveyed represent between 0.2 and 0.4 percent of these buildings nationwide.
This gap in reliable, macro survey data makes it harder to provide a data-centered narrative about this building landscape’s electrification progress. But discussion of their energy usage remains an important environmental and equity focal point.
3. Floods threaten to wash away coastal communities
Atlantic hurricane season kicked off at the beginning of this month, and once again the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting “above normal” activity. Specifically, NOAA forecasts that up to 25 named storms will form in the Atlantic Basin between June 1 and November 30, with four to seven having the potential to become Category 3s or higher.
This spells trouble for the about 30 percent of Americans living in counties along the Atlantic coast. Over the past year, private insurance companies have begun pulling out of these threatened markets, leaving homeowners high and dry. As a result, customers are rushing to state-backed, public insurance plans. Take Florida. A million residents recently joined Citizens Property Insurance, Florida’s state-backed insurance plan, ahead of this current Atlantic hurricane reason. This plan was set up as a last resort but now bears an unwieldy number of homes — 17 percent in 2023, up from four percent in 2019 — in the state.
4. Domestic heat pump manufacturing’s $800 million investment boom
Nationwide, the Clean Economy Tracker has mapped 27 announced heat pump manufacturing facilities. As of October 20, these 27 facilities represent over $800 million in announced investment as well as almost 5,000 jobs. The investments are roughly evenly split between Republican and Democratic Congressional districts (based on the investment amount by current member in the House of Representatives). These facilities largely manufacture air source or geothermal heat pumps, in addition to heat pump water heaters.
Almost all of these facilities are on the east coast or the Midwest. Louisiana eclipses all other states with $336 million in announced investment (due to the Honeywell facility), followed by Kentucky at $143.5 million and Pennsylvania at $89 million. AlliedSignal ($336 million), Mitsubishi ($143.5 million), and Johnson Controls ($135.7 million) are the leading parent companies in terms of private investment. For announced jobs, Kansas has seen more than 1,780 new jobs, followed by Texas at nearly 800 jobs and Pennsylvania at 650 jobs.
5. Public Utility Commission elections flew under the radar in 2024
The minority of states nationwide hold elections for their PUCs — just ten and Guam. In the other 40 states, commissioners are appointed by the state’s governor or legislature. Additionally, the minority of states have partisan PUCs — just eleven states, all of which are Republican with the exception of Illinois. Every state with elections for their PUCs are partisan with Republican majorities; Guam’s commission is nonpartisan. This election cycle, candidates in Alabama and Nebraska ran unopposed.
In examining the platforms of PUC candidates, across elections and party lines, three overarching themes emerged in 2024: energy reliability, energy affordability, and increasing efficiency of internal processes and external engagements. This general consistency speaks to how in an election cycle that heralded major changes at the federal level, state PUC elections seemed to play out in the background of American politics, despite a healthy amount of drama and novel issues to campaign around.
Policies approved by PUCs directly impact electric, gas, and water bills for households nationwide via rate changes. Additionally, PUCs approve utilities’ Integrated Resource Plans, which outline how utilities plan to manage their generation, infrastructure, and other resources over the course of multiple years. Without an engaged public to opine on issues like service areas, services, maintenance, expanding capacity, or renewable energy generation, utility customers may not see their cost, decarbonization, or electrification preferences represented in PUC policy.
