Decarbonization poses challenges for any state, city, business, or individual, but Washington’s task is uniquely difficult due to two factors: its ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets and the fact that its grid is already so exceptionally clean [1].
Washington has committed to reducing emissions 45% below 1990 levels by 2030. Many states (including its neighbor Oregon to the south) can get fairly close to a stringent emissions reduction target by replacing coal and natural gas and with renewable energy to power their grids. Cleaning the grid is by no means easy, but the solutions are known and have grown increasingly more cost-effective.
The catch is that electricity sector carbon emissions make up only 18% of Washington’s overall emissions, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology’s 2019 greenhouse gas inventory, so even if the Evergreen State rids its grid of the fossil fuels that create those emissions, it must attack other energy sector emissions to meet its targets, namely those produced by transportation, buildings, and industry.
With transportation emissions comprising 39% of Washington’s total emissions, the state is rightly focused on developing clean fuels (see Green Electrolytic Hydrogen, Net-Zero Northwest-Clean Fuels, and Washington Stands to Gain Jobs with Clean Energy Transition, page 3). But at approximately one quarter of the state’s emissions, the building sector also offers significant opportunity for decarbonization in Washington.
CETI worked with 2050 Institute to develop the technical and economic analysis that underpins the building sector chapter of the Washington 2021 State Energy Strategy (SES), which offers a set of high-level actions to lower building emissions by 2050.
In the year following the January 2021 SES release, CETI and 2050 Institute went a layer deeper to analyze the state’s existing and expected new residential and commercial buildings to figure out what had to happen by 2030 to set Washington on the path to accelerating deep building decarbonization between 2030 to 2050.
The analysis found that by 2030, building sector emissions would need to be 60% lower than they were in 2020, a tall order. We developed a timetable in five-year increments of decarbonization targets to show clearly how Washington’s overall decarbonization target translated into decarbonizing Washington’s building stock (Fig. 1). This work was presented in Operation 2030: Scaling Building Decarbonization in Washington State in January 2022.
Figure 1. Proposed Targets for Decarbonizing Washington’s Building Stock
Once we understood the targets and timeline the Washington building sector had to hit, we set about examining the systemic barriers that stand in the way of being ready to start decarbonizing buildings at scale by 2030:
To address these barriers, Washington needs a high-functioning ecosystem in place by 2030 that is capable of executing large-scale, equitable building decarbonization. By ecosystem, we mean building owners, tenants, developers, financiers, real estate, workers, utilities, and policymakers.
To date, this ecosystem has focused on incremental energy efficiency improvements—which have delivered considerable savings—but we now require a different approach that prioritizes carbon emissions reduction at the required speed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.
Washington’s building sector must ramp up zero-emissions space and water heating equipment to a 100% replacement rate by 2030 to ensure the building stock produces no emissions by 2050. This requires radically shifting the way we build and retrofit buildings and account for emissions.
Installing zero-emission appliances in most buildings to replace existing fossil fuel appliances at the end of their useful service is the most strategic and lowest cost path to accomplish this radical change.
So, we need to get both the appliances developed and the workforce trained in the next six years to be ready to deliver high-efficiency, electric equipment rapidly to new buildings as they are constructed and in place of old appliances in existing structures as they reach the end of their use.
Critical to the entire endeavor is new funding models to ensure that low- and moderate-income people are protected from the costs of the transition and can take advantage of the benefits of clean, highly efficient, electric systems.
To help Washington state tackle its building decarbonization challenges, CETI and 2050 Institute designed SCALE 2030. We aim to produce an analytical roadmap with policy and investment recommendations for how to drive systemic change in the building sector ecosystem and deliver a rapid ramp-up of electrification by 2030.
Working with key building sector actors and subject matter experts, SCALE 2030 will prioritize and weigh the relative merits of various decarbonization options, providing critical analysis to support policy and investment decisions related, but not limited, to the 2024 Washington State Energy Code development cycle, the 2025 Washington state legislative session, and the development of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Ninth Northwest Power Plan.
The climate crisis requires a radical shift in how the building market behaves to achieve the required level of emission reduction. While challenging, there are also huge opportunities for job creation as CETI’s Net-Zero Northwest Workforce-Buildings analysis reveals.
Washington has many of the policies in place to bring about this transformation; we just need a laser-focused commitment to decarbonization and better alignment across the ecosystem. This is precisely what the SCALE 2030 project aims to enable.
[1] According to the Energy Information Agency, the resource mix for Washington’s grid is 73% hydroelectricity and wind, and 83% hydroelectricity, wind, and nuclear. See the Northwest Clean Energy Atlas for interactive visualization that show this resource mix: https://www.nwceatlas.org/visualization/northwest-energy-resources-used-to-produce-electricity
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