Utilities can’t keep spending on pipelines, and alternative fuels can’t scale. But electric heat and thermal networks could save utility business models and jobs.
By Jeff St. John, Canary Media
If New York wants to meet its climate goals, the state’s gas utilities can’t stick to business as usual. Nor can they keep investing billions of dollars in maintaining and expanding the nearly 50,000 miles of gas pipeline they’ve laid over the course of the past half-century.
Instead, state regulators have to start acting now to force the nearly 150-year-old industry to undergo a “managed, phased transition” to a new carbon-free path — or the consequences could be catastrophic.
That’s the key takeaway of the Future of Gas in New York State report released last week by the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. It concludes that New York must not only halt existing plans to expand and maintain gas pipelines crisscrossing the state but also replace them with alternatives such as underground “thermal energy networks” and electric heat pumps and appliances.
Without a state-guided shift, New York won’t just fail to meet the decarbonization goals it passed into law in 2019, said Lisa Dix, the coalition’s New York director. “If we continue business as usual — which is what we’ve been doing since the climate law passed — we’re going to see ballooning costs, and a potential energy crisis, for New York gas customers,” she said.
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