A current post on the Spokane Home Builders Association website attacks the city council’s recent vote to adopt “the flawed SAP” (Sustainability Action Plan) saying that the Spokane Home Builders together with “think tank” ReThink Clean Energy recently published a study that “examines the feasibility of meeting upcoming emission reduction targets.”

This feasibility study is a product of a small team of out-of-town consultants called Really Clean Energy. Yes, this sounds confusingly similar to ReThink Clean Energy, which in turn sounds a lot like world famous clean energy think tank ReThinkX, but the whole point of smokescreens is to confuse. And any time a business lobbying group like the Spokane Home Builders is working this hard to confuse you, it’s time to pay close attention.

Really Clean Energy is coordinated by Brian Burrow, a former program manager at Inland Imaging data systems spinoff Nuvodia. During Burrow’s tenure at Nuvodia, the firm was contracted to Avista. Unsurprisingly, Really Clean Energy’s “study” is a pitch for extremely gas-friendly (hence, Avista friendly) policies such as keeping fossil gas in homes and buildings, and spending heavily to upgrade the City’s Waste to Energy Plant into a gasification and pyrolysis facility, keeping the City’s trash disposal dependent on fossil gas while also generating hydrogen and biofuel for resale—possibly to Avista. 

This would assure Avista of both long-term fossil gas sales to the City as well as a stream of hydrogen it could feed into its gas distribution system to heat homes and buildings, fending off the spread of electric heat pumps in buildings—the principal threat to Avista’s gas business. This hydrogen might also be sold to fuel city vehicles, delaying electrification in yet another sector. If all of this sounds like an assault on electrification itself, that is not accidental.

The new gasification plant would also reduce Avista’s requirement under Washington’s Clean Electricity Transformation Act to buy more than a third of its electricity from other generators, as detailed in Burrow’s study. This reduces Avista’s operating costs. Cha-ching.

The product would be hydrogen and biofuels derived from the rebuilt WTE plant, billed as green fuels but produced by massively gas-fired baking of plastics made from fossil fuels, then burning the off-gases from the baking. This is gasification. And, as with the present Waste-to-Energy Plant, the fossil gas to run the facility comes from a horribly methane-leaking upstream network, perpetuating that network and its carbon emissions. 

This is especially concerning as fossil methane is now proven to be nearly as climate-warming as coal is. With 86 times the warming effect of CO2, this fossil methane spewing from the oil and gas industry is the primary cause of the atmosphere’s alarming rise in methane over the past decade. From production through distribution, the gas network’s venting and leaking of methane has been vastly undercounted, end to end. Which is why methane reduction was one of the central priorities of this fall’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. 

(Aside: One may be excused for thinking that Avista would have no motive to promote gas over electricity as it furnishes both. However, that is not how investor-owned utilities turn a profit under utilities law; they do not sell gas or electricity, but they rather make a regulated rate of return on the infrastructure they build and manage. Having electricity and gas infrastructure means two sets of infrastructure generating revenue rather than one. Further, the more infrastructure Avista builds, the more revenue the company enjoys, making suburban sprawl very profitable as it requires more miles of pipes and wires to build and service. Hence, being in league with the Spokane Home Builders makes sense.)

Home Builders Are Exempt From Local Building Code Fiddling, So Who Are They Fighting For?

Washington law prohibits local changes to the state’s residential building code. Only commercial building codes can be changed at the city level. So home builders needn’t worry about local carbon-efficiency upgrades in building codes like those that have happened in other states. The question is, why are the Spokane Home Builders spending so much to prevent something that cannot touch them? 

Why did the Spokane Home Builders recently co-sponsor Proposition 1, a very costly attempt to change Spokane’s Charter—the city constitution—to forever ban regulation of fossil gas in the city? Why did ads for that failed ballot initiative suggest that fossil gas was to be ripped from homes when homes and existing structures were never at issue, and after the Spokane City Council refused to regulate gas in even the commercial building code?

If the Spokane Home Builders don’t benefit from their costly campaigning for fossil gas, who does? Is Avista employing SHBA as a screen? Are commercial building owners doing so? Are both?

One needn’t read the feasibility study too closely to see that it is largely a pitch for an expensive rebuild of the city’s Waste-to-Energy Plant that would primarily benefit Avista by locking in more gas contracts and infrastructure for decades.

The Spokane Home Builders’ piece make no mention of this Avista connection, nor of Burrow’s former work with a contractor for the company, nor of his study’s focus on turning the City Waste-to-Energy Facility into a future Avista moneymaker.

Stranger still, the Spokane Home Builders Association hides its sponsorship of Burrow’s study behind a front group, ReThink Clean Energy. On her LinkedIn page, Spokane Home Builders Association Membership Director Jennifer Thomas lists herself as ReThink’s founder; she writes the site in first-person; there is no evidence that ReThink is anything more than she and the Spokane Home Builders.

Meanwhile, ReThink Clean Energy’s website ownership is hidden behind a third-party proxy registrar, Domains By Proxy (slogan: “Your identity is nobody’s business but ours”).

Leaving aside the fact that ReThink Clean Energy (AKA Jennifer Thomas) is a new organization whose name is very confusingly close to world famous clean energy think tank ReThinkX, why create such a front group and then take pains to hide its website ownership at all? Why all the cloak-and-dagger sneaking?

Preemption: How The Gas Industry Fights For Its Life

So far, more than fifty U.S. cities have passed requirements for electric heat pumps in new construction, preventing gas companies from expanding their high-polluting infrastructure, and generally saving homeowners energy costs over time. Beginning in California, these heat pump mandates have spread to numerous cities nationwide. 

To fight this clean heating push by cities, the gas industry has turned to state legislatures, which are usually more conservative (although most Americans lean left, most states lean right). The tactic is called preemption. Pioneered by the tobacco industry’s preemption of bans on smoking in public buildings, preemption has since been used by conservative industry groups to head off city-level regulation of firearms, minimum wages, paid sick leave, and more. 

Now the gas biz is working statehouses to preempt city heat pump mandates. As of July this year, 19 states had passed such preemption laws and 5 others were considering them. Spokane may have been the first city where such a preemption of gas regulation was attempted, suggesting that the gas industry is ramping up its efforts, using Spokane as a test market.

If Avista and building owners are indeed trying to fight building electrification and lock in new gas infrastructure, this would closely fit with these gas industry tactics around the US. 

The push for a gasification incinerator also fits conveniently into this as a means to keep fossil gas flowing, as well as an entry into a hydrogen market that could slow building electrification. 

This all flies in the face of evidence that gasification/pyrolysis trash incinerators are merely money-burning climate killers, and that producing hydrogen for heating buildings and powering cars is a carbon emitting dead end. 

Trouble When the Plastic Runs out

What happens to the gasification/pyrolysis plant when the waste stream is reduced, as it almost certainly will be? “Extended producer responsibility “ laws in other states and countries already require plastic packaging producers to pay for recycling waste materials rather than burning or burying them. A bill for such a law here made good progress in the 2021 Washington legislature, and will almost certainly return. An enormous share of waste going to incinerators is recyclable.

This, along with the state’s new plastic bag ban and bag charge, plus growing worldwide pressure to cut plastic waste, make it likely that an expensively upgraded trash incinerator would eventually run short of stuff to burn. A growing body of law and public opinion is also beginning to address our flood of wasteful, throwaway consumer goods altogether. All this means city taxpayers could at some point have to buy waste to fuel the plant’s electricity generation.

Further, studies like this detail the mechanical failures of other such trouble-prone gasification plants. This plant would be nothing but a hustle to keep Avista’s gas flowing—and to keep undercounting its carbon emissions.

For Spokane residents, the true cost of longer Avista gas contracts could well be a massive, carbon-intensive white elephant that taxpayers could be on the hook to support for decades.

The Home Builders Are Blowing Gas

The Spokane Home Builders’ primary plausible rationale for keeping gas is that Avista now pays builders to do so. A builder installing a gas furnace and water heater in a new home gets up to $950 from Avista. By installing gas appliances, a suburban developer throwing up 100 homes can clear $95,000 in Avista subsidies alone. 

Then when those 100 homes are built, Avista gains decades of ongoing gas revenue from another 100 addicts, all while it lays more pipes that it can use to justify its rates to the state Utility and Transportation Commission.

So, when the Spokane Home Builders claim that installing heat pumps adds to the cost of a home, they not only omit the fact that the heat pump saves money over time; they also ignore the high future gas rates that come in the bargain. 

The Home Builders’ study features a number of outright howlers as well. Among them, claiming threats to gas hookups in homes and then wildly inflating the cost of electrified heating, for example suggesting that it even requires solar panels and batteries (it does not).

Avista Is In Crisis, And That’s Bad News For Everyone

Behind all this drama, Avista is in a terrible pinch. As a small, regional, investor-owned utility it simply cannot compete in big energy markets with consolidating national and international giants, which is why Avista has eagerly sought to sell itself in recent years. 

Adding to the pain, Washington’s new cap and trade system for pricing carbon emissions tacks a steadily rising surcharge onto gas to help pay for its climate harms, while the tightening state building code shrinks the future gas ratepayer base, cutting into utility profits. 

At the same time, our state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act hits Avista and the state’s two other investor-owned utilities on their electric sides, requiring them to end coal-fired electricity by 2025 and gas-fired electricity by 2030. Because these investor-owned companies have spent decades turning away from clean hydropower to make huge bets on fossil fueled power plants despite longstanding evidence that these cook the climate, they now face costs to abandon many of those ill-advised, immoral investments. 

The future is electric, yet Avista clings to its gas business. Instead, we need Avista to jettison gas, to drop pipe dreams of hydrogen-heated buildings and hydrogen-powered cars, and to focus on where the company is truly needed: in helping us electrify everything. 

We also need Avista’s—and Uncle Sam’s—help to build a more robust, smarter electricity grid that can power our electric future, transacting electricity and data in all directions, integrating wind, rooftop solar, smart buildings, vehicle-to-grid charging, grid batteries and pumped storage, all while carrying intermittent power thousands of miles via HVDC lines to where it is needed. It’ll be complicated, so let’s keep Avista focused on the important task at hand. 

A Study in Incompetence

We need home builders as well, to build denser city housing, new homes in old neighborhoods, public housing for the homeless, and the more emissions-efficient homes we all need.

However, the Spokane Home Builders Association’s bumbling feasibility study is a poor start. Even more shameful is the panicked response to the faintest hint of required future changes in building practices that help prevent the world from burning. Unable to make any headway in Olympia, the Home Builders reflexively lashed out at a city Sustainability Action Plan that poses no risk to them, and with a sham study hidden behind a phony front group they created, whose only real beneficiary is Avista.

Spokane business won’t get where it needs to go in a clown car like this. 

Let’s do better.