In a few short years, policymakers and building designers have gone from pushing energy-efficient design and products—which saved folks money—to targeting carbon emission reductions, even if it costs more in the long run. This paradigm shift is rapidly changing expectations for the development and operation of affordable housing. — Shelterforce
New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are three of America’s largest cities to have recently adopted some version of law or code changes mandating the design of new buildings (with the occasional exception for certain, typically smaller multifamily developments) be made all-electric.
The challenge for practitioners, according to authors Kimberly Vermeer and Walker Wells, is doing so equitably with a mind to costs, as the price per unit of electricity is typically much higher for consumers than traditional fossil fuels. The implementation of pricier but more energy-efficient heat pumps is also discussed as a huge technical and design obstacle for architects, along with the necessity of learning new vocabularies and more complex building performance metrics in the hopes of girding against the effects of climate change and preparing for the inevitability of electrification at a broad scale.
2 Comments
Interesting, and hopefully does help with emissions! Somewhat skeptical on overall impact though, considering how much of the U.S.'s electricity is from coal...
Add into the issues of electrification, the fact that most of these cities are not currently equipped for the amount of electrical demand required for full large-scale building electrification. This is a great example of nice goals having dicey consequences. Part of this is that there needs to be an understanding that electrical infrastructure is a citywide issue with specific external sources and capacities that are driven by urban level decisions. Some, but not all of this, can be offset at a building level by incorporating energy generating systems....but this disjunct is the primary issue that will impact the feasibility of these larger level goals especially in established developed urban cores. Otherwise we will continue to push these issues down to the type of issues (automobile, sprawl, heat island effect, species endangerment, etc) engendered by the types of greenfield suburban or ex-urban development that allows for new infrastructure that is fully scaled to this amount of electrification.
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