It's time to stop having to choose between keeping our homes warm or sacrificing our health and the climate. A well-designed Clean Heat Standard can help. Photo: Shutterstock.
If you live in a home with an oil or gas furnace or boiler, like most people in Massachusetts, turning up the heat is the end of an unseen odyssey for your heating fuel. Between drilling, refining, and transport, fuels can travel thousands of miles before they are delivered into homes and burned for heat. Clearly, there’s a lot more to protecting our buildings from the frigid cold than turning a thermostat on.
Unfortunately, almost every stage of this process favors dirty fossil fuels that damage our climate and our health. In fact, the negative health impacts of fuels like natural gas now surpass coal. And, with over half of state residents relying on gas for their home heating systems and 23% on oil and propane, fossil fuels are clearly dominating the Commonwealth’s heating systems. So how can we transition off these fuels without sacrificing affordable home heating?
You might have seen one of the government’s solutions to this problem: a “Clean Heat Standard,” now potentially slated for 2028. This isn’t one of CLF’s top strategies for cutting heating bills and climate pollution. It’s not a cure-all by any means and it could actually work backwards by incentivizing false solutions like biofuels or making electricity more expensive.
But if our government is going to implement this program, they need to do it right. And you deserve to know what a properly designed Clean Heat Standard looks like and means for you.
How Would a Massachusetts Clean Heat Standard Work?
A Clean Heat Standard would be run by environmental regulators. It would require companies that sell polluting fuels (primarily gas, oil, and propane) to change how they serve their customers or pay a fee into programs encouraging customers to adopt electric home heating systems.
What does this mean for you if you use gas or oil to heat? Under a well-designed program, fuel companies and gas utilities could transition some customers to cleaner heating options, like a geothermal network using heat pumps to capture the natural heat generated underground by the earth. They could also pay another company to help customers weatherize their homes or install heat pumps.
Would the Clean Heat Standard Program Help Everyone?
The reality is that converting to clean home heating systems technology requires financial investments, and we can’t leave anyone behind in our clean energy transition. Failing to include all families and businesses in our climate action is inequitable. It means that some communities and individuals will be exposed to more pollution than others. That’s not fair. Not only that, but families remaining on gas will face higher bills as utility companies try to compensate for their loss of customers. Leaning into market-based programs like Clean Heat Standards that have been proposed in other states, which incentivize energy utilities to find the cheapest way to comply, will reproduce inequality unless they are carefully designed not to.
Inequitable outcomes are unacceptable. That’s why we need to ensure that families historically left behind by government energy programs are at the front of the line for benefits from new programs. We also need to seek more funding from other state resources to help all families transition to clean heating systems and reap the lifelong health and climate benefits. For example, taxpayer funding could be used to expand financial rebate and loan programs under Mass Save (Massachusetts’ energy efficiency program). Those programs can help pay part of the cost of installing heat pumps, making them affordable to more people. They also focus on delivering the outcomes we really want – electrified homes – without inviting utilities to play games to avoid responsibility. Environmental regulators must carefully design a Clean Heat Standard so that customers who spend the highest proportion of their incomes on their heating homes and businesses get the most benefit.
Can a Clean Heat Standard Slash Climate-Damaging Pollution?
Potentially, especially given the fact that most Massachusetts residents depend on fossil fuels for heat. Transitioning to cleaner electric heating systems will have an immense impact in slowing climate change and protecting our health. But a program like the Clean Heat Standard will only be useful for reducing climate pollution if it has a laser focus on helping people electrify their homes. Some versions of a Clean Heat Standard would make the big mistake of allowing fuel companies to blend in other fuels to their existing product rather than directing money to electrification. Such alternative fuels, like so-called “renewable” natural gas or other biofuels, are false solutions that Big Gas and Oil use to maintain business as usual. These fuels still damage our climate and our health.
Massachusetts’ climate laws require drastically slashing pollution by 2030 on the way to net zero by 2050. Even former Governor Baker’s climate and energy team acknowledged that continuing to burn fuels, including alternative fuels, to heat homes and businesses can’t be a major part of our climate solutions. CLF believes a well-designed Clean Heat Standard should focus exclusively on heat pumps, geothermal networks, and other heating technologies that will actually make a dent in slashing carbon pollution and don’t require burning dirty fuels.
What Comes Next for the Massachusetts Clean Heat Standard?
There isn’t a clear timeline for decision makers to release a draft Standard – 2028 is only an estimation. If the Commonwealth does decide to pursue the strategy, it has to do it the right way. To work, the program must focus on electrification, clean energy, and directing funding to reach all Massachusetts families. We can’t risk increasing bills and pollution with a poorly designed plan.
