The Sacramento City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a strategy to help home and business owners replace gas appliances with electric alternatives by 2045.
City staff plan to develop ordinances to implement the strategy over the next two years, but don’t recommend any requirements for stoves in homes or restaurants.
The existing building electrification strategy instead focuses on retrofitting space and water heating appliances, which account for the most gas use in Sacramento homes, according to a 2019 California Energy Commission study. The study found an estimated 69%, 67% and 48% and 21% of Sacramento households use gas for space heating, water heating, cooking and clothes drying, respectively.
Tuesday’s vote comes about three years after the council approved exempting ground floor restaurant cooking equipment from a requirement for newly constructed buildings to run entirely on electricity. After updating the ordinance in November 2022, Sacramento began enforcing the requirement in January 2023, but stopped three months later because of a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Associate Planner Laura Tuller said. The court sided with the California Restaurant Association, which sued the City of Berkeley over its similar ban on gas hookups in new buildings.
Despite the setback on the new construction mandate, Council member Eric Guerra said the existing building strategy can help the city reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy, which city staff have worked on since June 2021, aims to help Sacramento reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
“This is an opportunity for us to be able to really provide direction for how we can better address our air quality issues here locally and be innovative about it as well,” Guerra said.
One change between the approved strategy and the draft version released last summer is the size threshold for large commercial buildings staff plan to work with to set individual emission targets by certain deadlines. Instead of buildings above 25,000 square feet, the city aims to collaborate with buildings 50,000 square feet or larger in order to maximize impact, Tuller said.
“The hope with the building standard performance standard program is to offer that technical assistance to help building owners make cost-effective upgrades when it makes sense for their business and their building,” Tuller said.
Other revisions in the final strategy include a recommendation to adopt an ordinance requiring homeowners to prove new electrical panels have capacity to power future retrofits. The initial version also didn’t list specific actions to track progress on gas to electric retrofits. Based on public input, staff added goals of sharing permit data with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and collecting information on appliances from the city’s Rental Housing Inspection Program.
The city plans to update the strategy around 2030 to reflect changes to state laws, available technology and cost effectiveness.
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