The California Homes That Are Going Electric, with Lauren Dunlap

Notable Quotes

• The build-up of building emissions: “The energy used in buildings accounts for about 37 percent of energy consumption and also 31 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the entire country. Out of all of that, more than 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from specifically burning fossil fuels like natural gas in homes for space and water heating, for cooking, drying clothes, and other uses … Only about 8 percent of homes in California were all electric in 2024, compared to a much higher 25 percent of homes across the whole United States.” (4:09)
• Decarbonization means electrification on the grid and in the home: “As more electricity is generated with renewable resources, the indirect emissions from using electricity in our homes is going down. But on the other hand, using gas in our homes will always produce emissions. Switching homes from gas to electricity unlocks these emissions reductions that are possible as the electric grid continues to cut emissions.” (5:47)
• Legislation that saves on costs and emissions: “Replacing those old gas lines is very expensive, and the money spent to replace many miles of pipeline each year ultimately leads to higher prices for gas customers. There’s all this money being spent on new gas infrastructure that might soon become stranded assets as we transition off of gas. Senate Bill 1221 essentially says, ‘Well, what if we spent that money instead on electrifying the buildings, so they don’t need gas at all?’” (8:46)

Top of the Stack

• “Understanding Neighborhood Decarbonization in California: What Do We Know About Senate Bill 1221?” by Sooji Yang, Lauren Dunlap, and Gregory Pierce
• “California Has a Neighborhood Decarbonization Law. How Does It Work?” by Sooji Yang, Lauren Dunlap, Elias van Emmerick, and Gregory Pierce
• “Streamlining Home Electrification in the Gateway Cities” by Lauren Dunlap, Sooji Yang, and Gregory Pierce
• “Impacts of Household Electrification on Energy Affordability in Los Angeles” by Lauren Dunlap, Rachel Sheinberg, Will Callan, Samantha Smithies, and Gregory Pierce
• The Los Angeles Residential Energy Transition Tool (LA RESET Tool) from the Luskin Center for Innovation
• “Avoiding Gas Distribution Pipeline Replacement Through Targeted Electrification in California” by Sean Smillie, Dan Alberga, Aryeh Gold-Parker, and Dan Aas
• California Burning by Katherine Blunt
• Hoppers movie

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I’m your host, Daniel Raimi.

Today, we’ll talk with Lauren Dunlap, project manager of energy equity research at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Luskin Center for Innovation. Along with several colleagues, Lauren has been publishing work on how California is decarbonizing its energy system and how those efforts will affect households across the state.

In today’s episode, I’ll ask Lauren about a new law designed to transition homes away from natural gas and toward other sources, like electricity or geothermal energy. We’ll talk about how the state is beginning to implement the law, what some of the challenges are, how much it might cost, and more. Stay with us.

Lauren Dunlap, welcome to Resources Radio.

Lauren Dunlap: Thanks so much, Daniel. It’s so great to be on the show. Thanks so much for having me.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, it’s really fun to talk to you. As I think folks will learn in just a moment, you’ve got an RFF history, but now you’re at UCLA and out in Los Angeles. I’m really excited to talk to you. But before we talk about neighborhood decarbonization, which is going to be our subject today, I’d love to ask you how you got interested in working on environmental and energy topics in the first place.

Lauren Dunlap: Absolutely. I’ve been interested in environmental issues, and especially climate change, since high school. I have a really concrete memory of this group coming into my school and showing us an animated documentary about the consumption of plastic and other materials, and it really stuck with me and kick-started my interest in environmental issues.

And then later in 2017, I had been working toward a career on climate change for several years, and the Tubbs Fire hit Sonoma County, which is where I grew up. That really brought climate change closer to home for me than it was before, and it just made it feel more personal.

The next year, I joined the communications team at RFF, which is where I really got a huge amount of insight from you and other RFF researchers about the role of policy and how important it is to have really well-designed, balanced policy to reduce emissions and also adapt to climate impacts. All of that motivated me to get my Master of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

I’ve always been interested in a lot of different climate policy topics. I feel like it’s a pretty broad bucket because so many human and environmental facets are intertwined with climate change, but energy has always been a through line in my interests, and in my education, and research, because it really underpins so many climate-related issues.

And so, now that’s my primary focus, even though I still work on a few other things too as a researcher at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. And that brings me to the new FAQ-style publication that my colleagues and I wrote—that my colleagues, Sooji Yang and Greg Pierce, and I wrote—that we’re going to talk about today.

Daniel Raimi: That’s awesome. We’ll have a link to that document in the show notes so people can check it out and maybe read along as they listen. But let’s give folks a little bit of background.

Before we talk about this new legislation in California that focuses on residential decarbonization, can you help us understand the energy and climate footprint of buildings and natural gas? Of course, folks know it is used in buildings, both residential and commercial buildings—but can you help us understand how significant this energy consumption is, and what the greenhouse gas footprint might be for buildings either in California, or the United States, or whatever other context you want to give us?

Lauren Dunlap: Yeah, for sure. That’s very important groundwork for this conversation. Yeah, counting all fossil fuel use and electricity use, and then also the electricity that gets lost along the way during transmission, the energy used in buildings accounts for about 37 percent of energy consumption and also 31 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the entire country. Out of all of that, more than 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from specifically burning fossil fuels like natural gas in homes for space and water heating, for cooking, drying clothes, and other uses.

In California, more specifically, the number is a little bit higher. In 2023, it was about 7 percent, I think, of California’s greenhouse gas emissions that came from people burning specifically natural gas in their homes. And that doesn’t include other fossil fuels, like oil. It’s not the biggest source of emissions in the state by far, but it also isn’t really declining, whereas some of the emissions from other major sources, like transportation, have declined really noticeably since 2000.

For example, emissions from electricity generation have been decreasing pretty substantially, and some of that progress is driven by Senate Bill 100 (S.B. 100), which is the law committing California to achieve carbon-free electricity by 2045. But also, there are individual utilities that have set even more ambitious targets than that.

For example, the Los Angeles (LA) Department of Water and Power, which is the biggest municipal utility in the country, is aiming to reach that same target by 2035—10 years early. As more electricity is generated with renewable resources, the indirect emissions from using electricity in our homes is going down.

But on the other hand, using gas in our homes will always produce emissions. Switching homes from gas to electricity unlocks these emissions reductions that are possible as the electric grid continues to cut emissions. This is called building electrification.

So, an all-electric home powered by renewably generated electricity does not produce greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s why home electrification is important if we want to achieve our climate goals as a state and as a country. But then, according to the US Energy Information Administration’s residential energy-consumption survey, only about 8 percent of homes in California were all electric in 2024, compared to a much higher 25 percent of homes across the whole United States.

One other important benefit of transitioning from gas to electricity is actually reducing indoor air pollution (which is another form of emissions), making the air in our homes healthier to breathe. Using gas in homes produces air pollution like carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, benzene, and formaldehyde.

There’s a lot of evidence that those pollutants can cause health harms, especially when there isn’t good ventilation in the kitchen for cooking. And there’s strong links between gas-stove use and childhood asthma development, too. In addition to bringing down greenhouse gas emissions, it’s also very important to talk about those air-pollutant emissions, too.

Daniel Raimi: Totally. I remember when we discovered my son had asthma, one of the first things we did was buy a new and better fan to ventilate our natural gas stove, because this is an issue.

Let’s get into the meat of the conversation now. Tell us about this Senate bill in California—Senate Bill 1221. What is it designed to do?

Lauren Dunlap: For sure. Senate Bill 1221 (or S.B. 1221, as we’re calling it): It’s part of California’s overall portfolio of strategies to decarbonize homes, which just means to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions from fossil fuels and other sources. It was adopted in 2024 to test out a new strategy for building decarbonization. It essentially tackles two issues at once.

On the one hand, home electrification is actually very expensive and complicated, and a lot of residents either can’t or won’t electrify their homes without a lot of support, financial support, and other support.

On the other hand, even as California is working to phase out natural gas over the next X number of years, gas utilities still have to maintain the infrastructure of the gas system. The pipelines that carry gas to homes and businesses need to be maintained, and then sometimes they need to be fully replaced every so often.

Replacing those old gas lines is very expensive, and the money spent to replace many miles of pipeline each year ultimately leads to higher prices for gas customers. There’s all this money being spent on new gas infrastructure that might soon become stranded assets as we transition off of gas.

S.B. 1221 essentially says, “Well, what if we spent that money instead on electrifying the buildings, so they don’t need gas at all?”, which is fitting with California’s climate goals. It creates an opportunity for the gas utilities to identify where gas lines that are due for replacement could instead be removed, and then transition all of those homes that the pipeline serves from gas to electricity or other alternative energy sources, and then shut down or decommission that pipeline.

The law is being implemented in several stages. It started by requiring all the gas utilities to submit maps of the planned pipeline-replacement projects to the agency that’s responsible for implementing S.B. 1221, which is the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC. And then, the CPUC designated what’s called “priority neighborhood decarbonization zones,” which are areas where there are many pipelines in line to be replaced and also where there’s local support for the effort.

In some cases, they also prioritized zones with lower-income or disadvantaged communities, particularly when those communities might not have sufficient heating or cooling access, especially relative to their local climate. That’s based on the idea that electrification can particularly benefit those communities by providing more affordable heating and cooling. Altogether, the CPUC designated 151 census tracts across the state as priority zones.

Last but not least … Well, it’s actually not last because there’s a whole other step of evaluating, but right now the CPUC is working on the next step, which is developing a pilot neighborhood decarbonization program. The new program is going to have up to 30 pilot projects, where each project facilitates decarbonization of all of the homes served by a specific portion of a gas pipeline that is due to be replaced soon. And then, those homes will either be electrified or transitioned to another alternative energy source.

Once the CPUC determines that all those homes have adequate non-gas energy systems in place, the pipeline can be decommissioned, and the utility can stop providing gas service to those homes.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Perfect. One of the really important things about this effort is that the decommissioning and the electrification of the homes is happening not just in a piecemeal way—it’s not like one home here, one home there—it’s like entire neighborhoods, or maybe blocks, or something like that, happening all at the same time. Why is it important to do this in a coordinated fashion?

Lauren Dunlap: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s part of what makes this such an interesting law to me. Part of the idea is just that when we target these small geographic areas, like you said—they could be neighborhoods, or maybe a block or two blocks, we don’t know exactly what size it’ll look like yet, or at least I don’t know—it makes it possible to actually remove the gas lines.

Because, if you imagine a city where all-electric homes are scattered among a lot of homes that still do use gas, then the gas service is still needed throughout the whole city. But if every home on, say, a cul-de-sac is all electric, that cul-de-sac won’t need any gas pipelines at all. That’s what enables the gas utilities to avoid spending so much money on new pipelines.

And this idea—it’s not brand new. I think it’s definitely a bit novel still, but it’s not brand new. It’s been out there for a little while. There’s a few projects where people are trying to implement this on local scales, including a few in the Bay Area, for example.

But I first heard about the idea from this really cool publication from Energy and Environmental Economics, or E3, which estimated that targeted electrification like this could enable utilities to avoid spending somewhere between $15 billion and $26 billion on pipeline replacements by 2045. But they identified a problem, which is it’s not straightforward to see how the savings can actually be used to pay for home electrification. Avoiding pipeline investments would save gas ratepayers money, but that savings doesn’t just transfer to the households that need to buy and install new electric appliances. That’s where S.B. 1221 comes in.

It’s not totally clear yet how the home electrification will be paid for, but the statutory language and some of the materials published by the CPUC definitely imply that the gas utilities will use the savings from not replacing a pipeline to electrify all of the affected homes.

What is very clear is that these projects have to be cost-effective, and what we know about what that means so far is that any money that a gas utility spends to electrify the homes, or otherwise on the decommissioning, has to be less than what would have been spent to replace the pipelines. It’s an important facet, because spending more money would cause gas rates to go up more than they normally would, and that’s something they’re trying to avoid. That’s part of the novelty of S.B. 1221.

Another really cool piece of the law that is really important and central is about the legal barriers to decommissioning pipelines. Usually, if a neighborhood or a group of households or something wanted to all disconnect from the gas system and remove those pipelines, 100 percent of the property owners who are affected would have to opt out of gas service, and that’s because gas utilities have what’s called a legal obligation to serve the customers in their territory.

That was put in place to ensure that everyone would have access to gas service, but it’s now an obstacle for neighborhoods that want to benefit from going electric and decommissioning pipelines. But S.B. 1221 lowers that threshold to 67 percent for the pilot program, so up to 30 projects can proceed with just two-thirds of the affected customers consenting. And it is still a little bit of a higher proportion as opposed to a simple majority, but it does mean that one-third of the affected customers could theoretically have to go electric even if they don’t want to.

Daniel Raimi: That’s interesting. That reminds me of this concept in the oil and gas world called forced pooling, where if there are a certain proportion of landowners in a certain area that want to do oil and gas development, they can actually compel the other residents who live in that area to have oil and gas extracted from underneath their lid, even if they don’t want to. And of course, not everybody likes that, unsurprisingly.

One other factoid that I love to throw in whenever we’re thinking about natural gas pipelines, and distribution lines in particular, is that there are a little over three million miles of natural gas pipeline in the United States. Most of that is distribution lines that go to homes and businesses. That can get you to the moon and back 10 times—more than 10 times.

Lauren Dunlap: Wow.

Daniel Raimi: If we’re thinking about doing this at a large scale, the scale is extremely large.

Lauren Dunlap: Wow. That’s quite a number.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. It’s important to watch this program, and see how it works, and see if it might be scaled elsewhere.

Just a technical question: When natural gas pipelines are decommissioned and disconnected from homes, what happens to them? Do they stay down there? Do the utilities pull them out? Do they fill them with cement? Do you know what happens to the pipelines themselves?

Lauren Dunlap: Yeah, that’s an important question. It’s definitely very important for this program to make sure that that happens in a way that makes sense for the households, and for the utilities, and the environment. I’m not really an expert on the hard-infrastructure side of things, but I think there’s definitely a few different ways it could go, as you alluded to, like leaving the pipes capped in place, or potentially fully removing them.

As far as I know, S.B. 1221 doesn’t dictate how this will happen, so I think it probably will depend on the circumstances of each pipeline, or maybe each utility’s decisions. I’ve even heard ideas that gas pipelines could be repurposed for transporting green hydrogen, but they would need to be retrofitted, and I’m a little skeptical about that.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, there are definitely challenges of converting natural gas pipelines to hydrogen, but that’s a topic for another podcast.

Can you help us understand how these homes will be transitioned to new types of energy? Are they all going to go electric, or are some of them going to have geothermal systems installed? What’s the process going to look like to install that new infrastructure? And maybe most importantly, how much is it going to cost?

Lauren Dunlap: Yeah, great questions. I’ve mostly talked about electrification so far in terms of being the alternative to gas, and I think that’s because it’s the most known and the most talked about, but S.B. 1221 doesn’t specifically say that electricity will be the replacement.

There are other alternatives, like you said; geothermal is one. S.B. 1221 requires the CPUC to evaluate the potential of thermal energy networks, which are these neighborhood-scale systems. It’s really cool. They basically move heat between buildings based on their different energy needs, or, also, they could move the heat between the buildings, and natural heat sources, and sinks like lakes or rivers or the Earth. Some of them do incorporate geothermal.

And so, that idea of thermal energy networks is incorporated into the bill, but I would imagine, by and large, a lot of this will be electrification. In terms of the process of electrification, that is still being determined through the CPUC’s program design. Like I said, that’s the stage that they’re in right now, which is due at the end of June, or beginning of July.

But in general, it can be a really complex process for households to navigate, especially if they don’t have good support. There’s decisions about which appliances should they choose, or how they can find a trusted and knowledgeable contractor who knows all about electrification. They have to open their home up to the disruption of a retrofit, which, as I think lots of people know, can be quite disruptive. They have to figure out the rebates or the incentives, so it’s a really daunting process for a lot of people, especially for lower-income households, but there are programs that provide support.

We actually just finished an evaluation of a program in the Gateway Cities area of LA County, which is, generally speaking, a bit of a lower-income … a lot of disadvantaged communities in the area. We basically found that this program provides a case-management service, when residents have someone that they can sit down with, and they trust, and they talk through the process and the choices, that really helps, and they can help out with the paperwork and everything. That helps a lot, and then also getting some substantial financial support also helps a lot.

That brings me to the, as you said, very important question of cost.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. The million-dollar question, or maybe a billion-dollar question.

Lauren Dunlap: Exactly. Yeah, the cost of electrifying—like many things, varies very widely. It depends on what appliances are selected, and the repairs or upgrades that are needed to get the home ready.

For example, a lot of homes might need an electrical-panel upgrade for the increased electricity use. That’s also especially true in lower-income areas, especially where homes are a bit older, and maybe were built without the idea of quite as high of electricity use in mind. That electrical-panel upgrade could reasonably cost somewhere in the range of $2,000 to $6,000.

A heat pump heating and cooling system for an apartment could cost maybe $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the size of the apartment. And then, a whole-home system for a larger single-family home could be more like $20,000 or more, including the cost of installing it.

For a stove, a standard electric stove might be about $600, but then more modern induction stoves are more likely to cost over $1,000.

Those estimates are mostly from Rewiring America, which is a really cool organization that has a ton of helpful information on electrification.

Daniel Raimi: Do they talk about—in the Rewiring America work, or elsewhere that you may have seen—the maintenance costs associated with these things? I’m mostly asking because geothermal networks—I imagine if you have problems with them, could be quite expensive to maintain, given all of the underground infrastructure.

I’m partly asking because I have a neighbor who actually retrofitted their home with a whole-home geothermal system, and they got off natural gas. It actually cost them $70,000 to do it. It also tore up their front yard, so they had to totally redo their front yard, because there were all these construction vehicles there. He was telling me that he was concerned about the long-term maintenance costs. Is that something you’ve looked into?

Lauren Dunlap: That’s a great question. Honestly, I haven’t looked into it much. I’m really interested in learning a bit more about geothermal as an option, because that’s something that I haven’t done quite as much research on.

In terms of electrification, which is what I tend to know a little more about, I think the main thing I would have to offer on that is I know that in some instances, some of the electric appliances can actually have longer lifetimes than some of the gas ones. For example, heat pump water heaters, I think, can sometimes have a bit of a longer lifespan, but I don’t know a whole lot about the maintenance costs.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Something to look into for both of us in the future, maybe.

Lauren Dunlap: Sorry, I realized I didn’t quite get to part of my answer about the cost—which it’s really important—which is about who’s actually paying for the cost. We’ve talked about how part of the idea of this is for the money that would’ve gone to the pipeline replacements to go to the electrification. It’s not quite clear yet exactly who will be responsible for paying for this in the case of S.B. 1221, but it is heavily implied that it will be the gas companies.

But the gas companies—if they invest in these alternative energy sources for homes—are going to be able to recover those costs through gas rates, just like other capital investments. But one thing about that is that the CPUC is still determining what the rate of return will be on those investments, and whether it’ll be the same as a pipeline, or whether it might be different. That’s another thing we expect from the program guidelines when they come out.

Daniel Raimi: That’s really interesting. Lauren, you’ve been describing I think mostly up-front costs. I asked about maintenance costs. But you’ve also done work that looks at more life cycles, how these types of projects might affect electricity bills. I think you’ve been focused on the Los Angeles area.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve found on that topic and what the implications are, particularly for the low-income households that you’ve already mentioned?

Lauren Dunlap: Yeah, for sure. That’s also a great question. A lot of people are concerned that electrifying their homes will lead to such high electricity bills that they actually end up spending more overall on energy, even though they no longer have a gas bill. That is a really fair concern, because it’s hard to predict what will happen when you put in these new appliances. That’s also not even thinking about the up-front cost of those appliances. Also, we know that gas and electricity prices change over time, and we don’t know exactly what prices we’re going to see in the future.

But we did some work on this in LA, like you said, in partnership with the city’s utility—the LA Department of Water and Power, or LADWP. The utility provides both water and electricity to the city of LA. UCLA researchers from my center and several others have been working with LADWP for years on how to make their very ambitious clean energy transition as equitable as possible.

Again, they’re aiming for carbon-free electricity by 2035, which is likely to have a significant cost. Part of our work with them is to assess how efforts like building electrification will affect customers, and particularly those with low incomes and high pollution burdens, and especially if electricity rates increase because of the investments in clean energy.

The utility commissioned UCLA to develop a model to estimate how rising electric rates in home electrification will affect people’s energy bills, and my colleague, Rachel Sheinberg, led the development of the LA Residential Energy Transition tool, which we call the LA RESET tool. The tool combines real electricity- and natural gas–consumption data—which is fairly unusual—with models of how the usage will change if appliances are electrified.

Along with price projections, this allows us to estimate the future spending under different scenarios. LADWP is actually using this tool internally for their long-term resource planning, and we’re also planning on launching a public version to share with community members in late May.

Anyway, with all of that background established, based on the tool’s estimates, what we found is that it seems that most electrification upgrades will lead to ongoing energy savings for LADWP’s customers—cutting some households’ combined gas and electric bills in half. Or, some have more modest savings, but most have some savings.

It does depend on which appliances you pick and how many things you electrify, but it’s especially the case if people select higher-efficiency appliances because they lead to much more savings, both energy and financially, than comparable lower-efficiency options, even if they’re electric. It also helps to weatherize homes to make heating and cooling more energy efficient. That is often paired with electrification, and can help save more energy and more money.

Another interesting thing we found was also just that residents who live in different types of housing will probably see quite different energy-bill impacts from electrification. As you can imagine, people living in your typical single-family home tend to use more energy to begin with than, say, somebody living in an apartment in a large, multifamily building. They might have more potential to save energy and money through electrification—those single-family home residents.

Daniel Raimi: That is great. Super interesting.

Lauren, I would love to talk more about this topic, there are so many more questions that would be fascinating to explore. But we’re coming up near the end of our time, so I want to ask you now to recommend something that you think is really great. It could be related to our topic today, or not at all. We’re not very picky. It could be pretty much any form of media that you want to share with us. What’s at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Lauren Dunlap: Thanks so much for asking, Daniel. As an avid Resources Radio listener from the very beginning, my husband was very excited that I get to share my top of the stack on the show.

I’m going to recommend California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid. It’s a book. It was a recommendation from my colleague, Greg Pierce, who has also been on the show. It’s all about the role of [Pacific Gas & Electric] in recent California wildfires. It blends two of my main climate policy interests: energy and wildfires. And it has a really great narrative. I saw a review that said it reads like an energy thriller, and I found that to be true. On top of that, the audiobook was excellent.

And then, just for a bonus that’s just for fun, I also can’t help but recommend Pixar’s latest movie, Hoppers. It’s so cute. I saw it in theaters, and it really exceeded my expectations. It just has great environmental themes and is really an adorable movie.

Daniel Raimi: That’s awesome. Is it appropriate for kids? Can I take my kids to it?

Lauren Dunlap: Please do. Absolutely. I was going to say, it’s great for adults and children alike.

Daniel Raimi: Fantastic. Well, I know what I’m doing this weekend, and we’ll be at the movies. Cool.

Well, one more time, Lauren Dunlap, it was so great working with you at RFF. We’re so happy that you are doing such great work now at UCLA. Thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing it with us.

Lauren Dunlap: Thanks so much, Daniel. It was really great to talk to you.

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