Volts podcast: Panama Bartholomy on decarbonizing America's buildings

In this episode, Panama Bartholomy, head of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, discusses the need to decarbonize buildings, the many challenges facing the effort, and the cities and states that are making progress. You better believe we get way into heat pumps and induction stoves.

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Panama Bartholomy, January 28, 2022

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

Fossil-fuel combustion in buildings — mostly natural gas for space and water heating — is responsible for around 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. Getting to net-zero will require heating, cooling, and powering all those buildings with carbon-free energy.

It’s an enormous challenge — or rather, a huge thicket of challenges. There are technical issues, political issues, public-opinion issues, and policy issues, all of which decompose into dozens of discrete issues of their own.

To help me wrap my head around all of it, I’m eager to talk to Panama Bartholomy, who is, I promise, a real person and not a Dr. Seuss character.

Bartholomy has been wrestling with building decarbonization for decades, at (in reverse chronological order): the Investor Confidence Project, the California legislature, the California Energy Commission, the California State Architect, and the California Conservation Corps. He’s served on a variety of boards, collaborated with various expert organizations, worked on climate issues in over 30 countries, and all kinds of other stuff, but if I tried to include it all I would never get to the conversation.

Bartholomy is currently running the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a multi-sector alliance of companies, nonprofits, and government agencies working on buildings, so he’s up to date on where progress is being made (think New York and California), the biggest political impediments (think the natural gas industry), and whether heat pumps really work in cold climates (think yes, they do).

Without further ado, Panama Bartholomy, welcome to Voltscast.

Panama Bartholomy:

Thanks, Dave. Good to be here. Long-time listener, first-time caller.

David Roberts:

Let's talk about buildings. There's so much to get into here, but I want to start with a few broad scene-setting questions. Just to orient us, tell us where buildings fall on the climate policy hierarchy of needs. What portion of the problem are our buildings?

Panama Bartholomy:

Maslow's hierarchy of needs for buildings and climate, I love it.

We — by which I mean the building sector — come in right about 25 to 30 percent of overall emissions nationally, and about the same globally. Depending on the state you're in and the grid mix of your electricity, it may be a little higher or lower, but we’re right about in that sweet spot of 20 to 30 percent.

One of the challenges is that in this sector, unlike industry or the electricity sector or even the transportation sector, you have millions if not billions of little machines that have a lot of consumer choice. You can't just shut down a coal plant and all of a sudden get a lot of benefit. You have to involve a lot of players in this.

David Roberts:

Yes, this seems like the decarbonization sector that involves the most logistics and the most high-touch human interaction. You have to think about sociology and psychology. It's a tangle.

Panama Bartholomy:

It is, and that's why I appreciate you spending some time in our funny little corner of the climate world. We need a lot more attention to it. Every time somebody buys a new furnace or a gas water heater or stove, they're locking in 20 or 25 years of carbon emissions from there. So attention is one of the key things that we need on this issue.

David Roberts:

In recent years there's been something of a consensus forming in carbon circles that electrification is the premier decarbonization strategy. When we look at buildings, is electrifying them the whole game? How far will electrification get us and how big is the remainder once you're done electrifying?

Panama Bartholomy:

We haven't seen a lot of good alternatives at this point. When you think about electrifying buildings, you’re talking about space heating, water heating, cooking, and probably clothes drying. You do have some arguments with people about their gas fireplaces and their pool pumps, but that's a pretty small amount, all in all.

When you look at the alternatives, are we going to pump incredibly expensive renewable natural gas through pipes to power those? Are we going to replace the entire gas system with a new hydrogen system to do that? I don't think so. These are pretty low-level technologies, when it comes down to it, in the use of energy, and using expensive fuels just doesn't make sense either from an economic perspective or a climate solutions perspective.

So electricity is the path we need to go down on buildings. They're making cold-weather heat pumps that can operate well down to -15 degrees, so here in 2022, we have much if not all the technology we're going to need for electrification of buildings. It gets down to an issue of scale and deployment, and how are we going to do it fast enough to meet our climate goals.

David Roberts:

Here’s a philosophical question: If we are going to electrify all the buildings and then we're going to supply that electricity with zero-carbon renewables or other clean energy, then why do we need efficiency? Why do we need to use less energy in buildings if the energy we're using is clean?

Panama Bartholomy:

Because even if we're using clean electricity, we don't want to use a ton of it. I consistently look forward to a Star Trek future when we don't have to have conversations about appliances and energy and where it comes from. But the reality is that electricity does cost money here in our reality, and if you're running even a highly efficient heat pump off of a very clean grid in a very cold climate, you just want to use less energy to heat your house. In particular in the colder climates, it's to save money.

David Roberts:

So we could imagine your Star Trek future where renewable energy has gotten so cheap that we no longer feel the need to ration it. In that theoretical future, will efficiency just fade out, or is there some intrinsic worth to efficiency beyond saving a scarce resource?

Panama Bartholomy:

I was raised in California and then Hawaii, so I have a primal fear of being even slightly cold. My wife did her undergraduate work in Minnesota, so whenever I complain about being cold, she mocks me, and I say, just because you were colder at one point in your life doesn't invalidate my feelings and discomfort right now.

The benefit is going to be one of comfort moving forward. When you talk to the leaders in the energy efficiency community that actually sell efficiencies successfully — and there's only two — they'll say that that's usually what sells efficiency: it’s comfort, it’s air quality, it's a better quality of life, rather than the marginal savings you get from it.

In the colder and the hotter climes, efficiency is always going to have a role to play, but increasingly people are recognizing that it's less important in the timeframes that we're talking about for addressing climate change than getting off of fossil fuels. We can't just be using less fossil fuels, we need to stop using