Choose your own adventure: Your electrification journey begins here

Kristy Walson and Andrew Rhodes take a lighthearted approach to the challenges that face heroes tackling electrification at the portfolio level.

Electrification is widely recognized as one of the most effective solutions for building decarbonization, achievable for the most part with commercially available technologies. It can offer higher efficiencies than fossil fuel-burning equipment and can be powered by clean electricity from both on-site and off-site renewable sources.

In last year's article about electrification, many of the challenges of electrification and solutions were identified at a building level. However, scaling these strategies across a portfolio can bring another layer of unique roadblocks. Fortunately, for each of these, solutions exist for those with some bias for action and a willingness to dive a little deeper.

Image credit: Andrew Rhodes.

Setting the challenge

Here's the quest: You find yourself responsible for creating an electrification plan across your organization's building portfolio for the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) and domestic hot water (DHW) equipment that uses natural gas or other fossil fuels for heating. Your portfolio spans many domains with their own building codes and standards, as well as multiple climate zones, varying from hot/humid (ASHRAE Zone 2), through hot/dry (ASHRAE Zone 3), all the way to cold climates (ASHRAE Zone 6).

You have ownership buy-in for a portfolio-wide electrification program that supports the organization's climate goals, anticipates future regulatory changes and aligns with capital expenditure (CAPEX) goals. You can choose to go alone or gather your fellowship of engineers, architects, contractors, operations team and finance partners. Your journey begins…

Problem 1: Insufficient electrical capacity at your building

Upon completing an "on-parchment" assessment of the impact of the replacement equipment, your initial studies determine that your building has insufficient electrical capacity or lacks the electrical infrastructure to support full HVAC and heat pump electrification.

Potential solutions

1. You can combine your electrification project with energy efficiency upgrades on the other equipment in your building, reducing the demand of other systems. Projects could include computing (shifting to cloud computing) and/or increasing the efficiency of your fabrication or manufacturing equipment or other building systems like internal and exterior lighting.
   
2. Many of the jurisdictions in which you operate allow you to study actual consumption and use this to calculate available power, as opposed to as-designed connected loads. Your team hires a suitable contractor to perform these measurements, and these readings indicate that many of your sites do have the power needed for electrification.

Image credit: Andrew Rhodes.

Problem 2: Insufficient electrical capacity at the grid

After updating your calculations, several of your sites still have insufficient power.

Assuming that procuring more power from the utilities or on-site renewable sources, such as solar energy paired with battery storage, is either not possible or is prohibitively expensive, you can choose your new HVAC units from the range of dual-fuel equipment available.

These units shift much of the heating to electricity within the limits of the infrastructure, but use gas heating coils to cover the remaining required heating capacity. Although not entirely eliminating fossil fuels from your site, you are reducing their use and the associated emissions, while giving the industry time (10-15 years in a typical equipment life cycle) to develop more efficient solutions and giving the grid time to decarbonize.

Level up

Size your heat pump equipment to cover the cooling needs of your building at a minimum, so your buildings can benefit from increased efficiency during both the cooling and heating season.

Image credit: Andrew Rhodes.

Problem 3: Building connected to a dirty grid

Since electrification is a decarbonization strategy, electrifying on a dirty grid has the potential toproduce the opposite of the desired result by increasing your operational carbon emissions. You think you're doing a good thing, but it just ends up making a bigger mess in the end. Since we're focusing on portfolios with buildings spread across many climate zones, it's important to understand the grid emission factor associated with each building location.

On a dirty grid where electrification will greatly increase the building's operational carbon footprint, the path to electrification can be a bit more circuitous. Always keeping decarbonization as the North Star will keep you on the right path, even as it twists and turns.

Potential solutions

1. Prioritize electrification on the cleanest grids. Most utility providers are on the path to cleaning their grid, so start with the ones that are furthest along. On a clean utility grid, or a grid where the carbon emissions associated with electricity are not vastly greater than those associated with natural gas, a building team can safely move forward with electrifying the heating systems, as long as the efficiency of the building's envelope and electrical capacity have been vetted already.
   
2. Consider investing in energy reduction strategies, both for peak and consumption, while you wait for the electrical grid to decarbonize. This reduction-first mentality is always a great first step for electrification and will result in real energy and carbon savings. It's as if you're decarbonizing your portfolio without even thinking about it. This could also support other potential location-specific requirements for your building, like complying with building performance standards.
   
3. Look at hourly grid emissions to see if there's an opportunity to shift when we use our energy. Peak load shaving via your building's own controls system and demand-response programs with your utility will reduce your electrical demand at the grid's most carbon-intensive time of day. Batteries may also allow you to store energy on-site at a less carbon-intensive time of day and then use the stored energy when the grid is at its peak carbon output.
   
4. Begin looking at on-site or off-site renewable energy, if electrification in the current condition still won't meet the ultimate goal of decarbonizing your portfolio. After you've completed steps 1 and 2 above, the next step is to offset your increased carbon emissions with additional on-site renewable energy, off-site renewable energy via a community solar program from the utility, or, as a last resort, by investing in verified renewable energy credits.

Waiting on the grid to decarbonize can be a long and lonely journey. At a certain point, you have to decide that you've done everything you can, and it's time to make the leap to electrify and trust that a cleaner grid is close behind you.

Image credit: Andrew Rhodes.

Problem 4: Utility bill becoming higher after electrifying

In many municipalities, the cost of electricity exceeds the cost of natural gas by a considerable amount. Let's not confuse this statement with "electricity is expensive," because it's relatively inexpensive in the U.S. compared to some other countries. It's just that electricity in the U.S. is more expensive than natural gas, and North America requires a considerable amount of heating, especially in the northern cold climates.

It isn't until we try to electrify our heating systems and calculate our new electric bill that we realize just how inefficient our existing buildings really are. Buildings have largely been able to get away with this because natural gas is so cheap. Enter our first cold-feet moment (pun intended) with electrification. We haven't even gotten past "go," and we're already thinking about bailing.

1. Reduction, yet again, is your best friend here. It's such a versatile tool. In the case of combating high utility costs, reduction is the best tool we have for minimizing our building's energy consumption for heating. Since we're focused on minimizing the cost impact of moving our heating energy consumption to electricity, we need to start with the envelope.

1. The colder the climate, the more critical it is to evaluate your envelope, especially when incorporating these solutions across a portfolio. One possible way to scale this effort would be to start with the buildings in your portfolio that 1) are located in the coldest climates, 2) are on the most expensive electrical utility rate, and 3) that have the highest heating usage. For these buildings, hire a professional to do an envelope evaluation of your walls, windows, roof and infiltration rate (the leakiness of your building envelope).

1. Heat pumps are your go-to for electrifying the heating system after envelope upgrades are complete. Heat pumps offer increased efficiency over both electric resistance heat and your current natural gas heating systems, further reducing the amount of energy you'll be transferring over to that expensive electric utility rate. If the utility bill is still too high, you have yet to pull other levers, like reductions at those energy-using building systems and on-site renewable energy.

Problem 5: A cold climate

Fully electrifying in a cold climate is the one circumstance where you will be limited on what levers you can pull as you decarbonize your portfolio. You could have a fully optimized envelope and fantastically efficient building systems, and still not be able to change the fact that current heat pump technology is only efficient down to a certain ambient temperature, typically around 20° F.

This technology is getting better every day, but in the meantime, you could consider a dual-fuel system, because some electrification is better than no electrification at all. Cold climates, true to their name, have a certain number of days in the year that dip below a heat pump's limitations. However, there are many other days of the year where heat pumps can operate efficiently during the shoulder seasons, even for several days at a time during winter.

Potential solutions

1. Dual-fuel heat pumps can be an alternative to full electrification in cold climates. Sizing these heat pumps to either meet your cooling load or to cover a certain percentage of your peak heating need are both good methodologies when deciding "how much" to electrify. Again, some electrification is better than none at all. So even though you'll be using a fossil fuel-like natural gas as backup heat on those really cold days, you'll still be using less on-site combustion in the long run.
   
2. Have a good relationship with your equipment manufacturer. This will lead to a solid understanding of cold climate heat pump availability and will allow you to accurately plan capital investments for electrification across your portfolio. A solution for cold climate heat pumps is coming soon, given the state of the industry and the progress that HVAC manufacturers have been making in recent years. Consider electrifying in climates that are more heat pump-friendly first, then working your way into colder climates across your portfolio and employing dual-fuel options as needed.

No matter how deep or dark your electrification quest appears to be, it's a valiant adventure that you don't have to tackle alone. Many resources exist to help, such as guidance and case studies, industry experts who have navigated this challenge before, and funding support from various stakeholders like local authorities and utilities. In the end, with the potential reward of close to zero operational emissions, thanks to a combination of reduction (energy efficiency), transition (electrification) and clean generation (renewable power), this is one quest that is worth the effort. And there's nary a dragon in sight.

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