A view of the Eaton wildfire from Koreatown in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jessica Christian / Unsplash)
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
The wildfires that ravaged parts of Los Angeles County in January were the most catastrophic in its history. Made worse by climate change, the disaster caused as much as $131 billion worth of damage and destroyed more than 16,000 homes and other properties.
In the name of a speedy recovery, LA Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, issued a broad executive order that same month, exempting replacement structures from a city ordinance that requires new buildings to be all-electric. (The waived code only applies to communities within the city boundaries, not to the entirety of LA County.)
The order effectively swept aside one of the city’s most important tools for eliminating its reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels, the continued use of which makes such climate-related disasters more likely in the future. Buildings accounted for more than 40% of LA’s carbon pollution in 2022 — more than any other sector — and are estimated to contribute a quarter of California’s total emissions.
The mayor’s move reflects a tacit assumption that has been echoed even in the State Assembly: that rebuilding with gas, which many of the affected buildings had used, must be the easiest path for recovering communities.
But a new report flips that premise on its head. Citing available research and expert interviews, a team at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment argues that all-electric construction is likely to be the fastest and most cost-effective way to rebuild after the LA fires.
A key reason is that two systems are more complicated to rebuild than one. “We’re going to install electricity infrastructure in all buildings regardless,” said Kasia Kosmala-Dahlbeck, climate research fellow at the UC Berkeley center. “So it’s really about whether you also install a second system” that delivers fracked gas, also commonly known as natural gas.
Such dual-fuel construction has historically been the norm in California, but all-electric construction avoids the added time and cost of hooking up gas infrastructure. That often requires property owners to submit a separate service request to the gas utility; install gas meters, pipes, and ductwork; and coordinate gas safety checks, according to the authors.
The team expects all-electric rebuilds to not only deliver better indoor air quality for occupants but to be easier on people’s wallets. Their report cites a 2019 study that estimates building a new all-electric home in most parts of California costs about $3,000 to $10,000 less than building a home that’s also equipped with gas. The UC Berkeley team notes, though, that potential savings for LA County’s wildfire-hit neighborhoods are likely lower since existing gas infrastructure, much of it underground, was largely unscathed.
All-electric new homes in California that skip gas-burning appliances for much more efficient electric heat-pump heaters and ACs, water heaters, and clothes dryers, as well as induction stoves, are also likely to slash energy bills, per the report. An April analysis by climate think tank RMI provides support, finding that single-family households switching from gas furnaces and conventional air conditioners to heat pumps would save about $300 per year on average in LA County.
Kosmala-Dahlbeck points out that people going the all-electric route now will be able to avoid costly and complex retrofits in the future.
“We’ve seen repeatedly that retrofitting later down the line is more expensive than constructing all-electric to begin with,” she said. Upgrading a home’s electrical service alone can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000 and take two months to two years, according to California-based all-electric home developer Redwood Energy.
In the near future, installing a new gas appliance when the old one conks out could be less of an option. Air regulators for the state are developing standards that could bar the sale of new gas furnaces and water heaters starting in 2030. Regulators covering LA County are poised to adopt rules that would discourage new installations of these polluting appliances as soon as 2027.
The report authors recommend that policymakers — including city council members, county supervisors, the mayor’s office, and state legislators and agencies — support an all-electric recovery.
Mayor Bass has already moved in that direction. While her office confirmed that the first executive order waiving all-electric standards remains in effect, she issued another directive on March 21: By later this month, LA departments must develop suggestions to streamline permitting for owners who rebuild with all-electric equipment.
Construction has begun in LA’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, one of the areas hit hardest by the wildfires. According to the mayor’s office, 20 addresses in the Palisades have been issued permits for rebuilding efforts. Staff noted that the permits don’t have to specify whether a project is all-electric. But some affected residents do plan to rebuild without gas appliances, NPR recently reported.
All-electric new buildings are on the rise across California, according to the California Energy Commission. In 2023, 80% of line extension requests by builders to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric were electric-only.
In general, outside of the fire recovery process, the financial case for building all-electric homes in the state is getting stronger. “We’ve heard from California builders that recent updates to infrastructure rules — combined with a statewide energy code that strongly encourages heat pumps — have shifted the economics of building all-electric new construction,” said Will Vicent, deputy director of the Energy Commission’s building standards efficiency division.
The UC Berkeley team is also encouraging policymakers to bolster incentives and resources that make all-electric rebuilding more affordable. That could look like expanding the Rebuilding Incentives for Sustainable Electric Homes program and the electrification resource and rebate hub The Switch is On. Such investments would line up with LA County and the state’s climate goals to become carbon neutral by 2045.
Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of LA-based nonprofit Climate Resolve and an appointed member of a county commission focused on rebuilding sustainably after the fires, said the report’s findings are important for policymakers to consider as they help people who lost their homes navigate the potentially yearslong process of recovery.
“It’s an enormously traumatic experience, and the first impulse that you have after that terrible loss is a return to normalcy” by trying to rebuild what you once had, said Parfrey, who reviewed the UC Berkeley report before it was publicly released. But “it’s impossible to recapture that home once it’s gone.”
Instead, “there’s the possibility for creating something even superior to what you had before.”