The perfect match?

Two buzzwords in the electric industry these days are “decarbonization” and “electrification.” These two words are in the minds of policymakers, legislators, researchers, academics, and others. I want to start a dialogue about what they are, what their impacts are, and how utilities and individual customers should think about them, respond to them, and get ready for them.

These words are related but shouldn’t be conflated. Let’s unpack them by first defining the terms and putting some limits around them to better understand their relationship – with each other and separately – in the context of our ongoing energy transition conversation.

In an oversimplified nutshell, decarbonization is about removing fossil fuels, and electrification is about what we could use instead of those fuels, although there are other alternatives.

Decarbonization

This is about taking all carbon-based fuels out of the system. These fuels are used in a variety of ways:

1. Built environment: Residential/commercial buildings for use in cooking, heating, and so on
2. Transportation: Cars, buses, trucks, LCVs [Light Commercial Vehicles]), and others
3. Industrial/Power generation: Coal-fired, and/or Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine [CCGT] plants, or others

Different parts of society are impacted differently based on legislative and/or regulatory changes. For example, Washington State will require all-electric space and water heating in new commercial and multifamily construction, making it the first state to incorporate building electrification mandates into statewide energy codes. On April 22, 2023, The Washington State Building Code Council, or SBCC, also voted to advance proposals that would restrict fossil fuel use in residential buildings, which would go into effect in 2023 alongside the commercial code updates.

The vote is a milestone for building electrification advocates, who have worked to restrict natural gas use in buildings in towns, cities, and counties in several states since 2019.

Electrification:

Electrification is about moving the consumption of energy from “whatever-it-is-right-now” to electricity. This also has multiple dimensions similar to decarbonization.

1. Built environment: Replacing technologies or processes in residential and other buildings from fossil fuels (i.e., natural gas) to electricity-powered equivalents.
2. Transportation: Replacing gas-burning (ICE) vehicles with Electric Vehicles (EVs) across all types, such as cars, light commercial vehicles, buses (school buses, and metro buses), and trucks.
3. Industrial/Power generation: Moving electric generation from fossil fuels towards renewable sources, such as wind and/or solar.

So what?

Removing carbon and replacing it only with clean electricity sounds great, but the reality is much more complicated. Each of these segments (transportation, power generation, built environment) has its own alternatives beyond electricity, spanning everything from Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) to hydrogen.

In the next edition of this newsletter, I’ll get into the nuances of various solutions and expand on the complexity of meeting the growing demand for clean electricity.