Tag Archives: net zero

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A charm offensive from the gas industry that’s mostly just offensive

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iamNigelMorris, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons


The ad couldn’t help but catch my eye. “Building for Zero. Washington Gas’ Net Zero Energy Homes Initiative.“

This was a head-scratcher. Gas as part of a net-zero energy home? Do we need to define our terms? 

Natural gas is a product that Washington Gas sells to customers in Northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland. I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same stuff: fossil fuel, mostly the potent greenhouse gas methane but also small amounts of propane, ethane and butane, extracted by fracking using hazardous chemicals and then transported by pipeline to be burned in homes and businesses. The process emits carbon monoxide and other unpleasant pollutants as well as the planet’s number one greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

So far, so good – or bad, depending on how you feel about fossil fuel pollution. 

Now, a net-zero energy home is one that produces more energy than it consumes, usually from electricity generated by solar panels. Heating and appliances are typically electric to take full advantage of the solar. A home that’s heated by gas, and maybe also has a gas stove and water heater, can’t run on electricity from solar. Making the home net-zero means installing a whole lot of solar that the home can’t use to “offset” the very polluting fuel that it does use, with all the extra electricity going out on the grid. 

But at least in Virginia, you won’t get approval from your electric utility to install a solar facility that produces significantly more electricity than the house consumes. Waving the Washington Gas ad in the face of your electric company will not change the result. 

The ad, in other words, is offering Virginians the impossible. 

That sums up the problem facing the gas industry in this era of rapid technological change and climate crisis. How does it remain relevant? 

Washington Gas chose to do what any business does when faced with a superior competitor: call in the marketing team. Sure, it’s not likely that any of their customers will actually try to make their home net-zero energy while using fossil fuel-burning appliances, and thereby face a rude awakening from their electric utility, not to mention the bless-your-hearts of their more knowledgeable friends. But it allows the company to pretend it’s part of the solution. (Since they’re stretching anyway, they can also pretend that corporations are our friends, and unicorns are real.) 

Washington Gas is not alone in attempting a charm offensive. Just this year, the gas industry formed a new advocacy group, the Natural Gas Coalition of Virginia. Its press release states that its aim is “to provide decision-makers with trusted resources and insights, highlighting natural gas’s contribution to grid stability, economic development, and daily life.” It doesn’t say anything about contributing to net-zero energy homes, but then, it also doesn’t mention its contribution to global warming.

Quite the contrary. The press release claims that burning gas has helped lower CO2 emissions in Virginia. Let’s be clear, though: our utilities haven’t lowered CO2 emissions by burning more gas, but by burning less coal. Fossil gas is still one of the top emitters of carbon in its own right. Our utilities could have lowered emissions much further by replacing coal with zero-carbon renewable energy. 

The focus on carbon emissions also conveniently leaves out methane’s direct role in global warming. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 80 times more potent than CO2 across a 20-year time period, and its leakage from fracking wells, pipelines, storage and other infrastructure makes “natural” gas at least as great a contributor to global warming as coal. 

But hey, every dirty industry needs a brand refresh now and then. It wasn’t long ago that the gas guys saw themselves as part of the fight against global warming. They called their product a “bridge fuel,” with the implication that they would go away quietly once carbon-free alternatives were ready to take over. 

Soon, though, the addition of horizontal drilling to fracking operations made fossil gas cheaper, more plentiful and more lucrative. Suddenly industry executives began to speculate that their product was no longer a bridge, but a destination. 

(The first time I heard that line tried out at a conference, I guffawed. ‘What’s the destination?’ I asked, ‘Cleveland?’ I have since come to regret that slur on Cleveland, which I understand has become a very nice city in the decades since I lived in Ohio. Fracking, on the other hand, is still the same dirty industry.) 

Maybe the most disconcerting thing about the Natural Gas Coalition of Virginia is that its members include not just gas companies, pipeline operators and the American Petroleum Institute, but also Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power. As public utilities, shouldn’t our electric companies at least pretend to be fuel-agnostic, if not full partners with Virginia in its quest to decarbonize?  

Dominion, however, has seized the moment to build a lucrative gas-fired peaker plant in Chesterfield, jiggering the numbers and pretending it had secured an independent review when it had not. It is even funding its own astroturf group, the Virginia Energy Reliability Alliance, in an effort to make it appear the project has loads of supporters in the face of strong, sustained opposition from loads of detractors.  

In their defense, sort of, Dominion and APCo show themselves highly sensitive to shifts in political winds, so their current enthusiasm for gas may be partly a sop to Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Our Republican governor talks about “all of the above” and “increasingly clean” energy but acts like a brand ambassador for methane. You would not know from his advocacy that fossil gas already makes up 70% of the state’s electricity supply and is responsible for a lot of the increase in our electric bills. At a time when even Trump’s Department of Energy says diversifying energy sources is critical to reliability and resilience, Virginia hardly needs more fossil gas. 

Indeed, the wisdom of diversifying our generating sources was proved recently when APCo told the SCC it wants to lower residential rates by $10 per month due to lower fuel costs. APCo specifically cited its investments in renewable energy, which use no fuel.

Nevertheless, the Youngkin administration recently announced a partnership with gas pipeline operators and infrastructure companies “to increase natural gas power generation to meet unprecedented growth.” The press release cites a need for “more baseload power generation” (that is, gas) due to Virginia’s “economic momentum – driven by record job creation, population growth, advanced manufacturing, EV adoption, and more.” 

“And more”: that would be the data center industry, the one driver that’s actually responsible for the growth of electricity demand. The press release was crafted to avoid mentioning the industry that’s fast achieving pariah status in Virginia. While residents bemoan the impact of data centers on communities, drinking water supplies, and their utility bills, Youngkin celebrates “unprecedented growth.” 

And then there’s the kicker. To meet that growth, the press release says, the new partnership plans a study that “will identify locations between Roanoke and Bristol where new natural gas pipeline infrastructure can support new power generation facilities.”

I can only imagine how enthusiastic folks “between Roanoke and Bristol” will be to be singled out for yet another gas pipeline slashing through rural Virginia, this one solely in the service of Big Tech. 

No wonder Youngkin avoids connecting the dots for us. Maybe he should hire Washington Gas’ marketing team, and start pretending we can use the gas in net-zero homes.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on November 4, 2025.

Update: On November 12, the Virginia Mercury reported that former governor Terry McAuliffe joined a pro-natural gas group as its national co-chair. This helps explain why nobody in Virginia misses the guy.

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With a federal windfall incoming, Virginia should require school districts to build to green standards

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The solar panels powering Arlington, Virginia’s Discovery Elementary School, seen through the windows of a science classroom. Photo by Ivy Main

More than $4.3 billion in federal stimulus dollars will be flowing to Virginia this year as part of the American Rescue Plan, with cities and counties in line for another $2.7 billion. In a joint statement in May, Governor Northam and Democratic leaders laid out spending priorities that included rehabilitating and upgrading the infrastructure in public schools. The General Assembly plans to meet for a special legislative session in August to allocate the funds. In addition to the federal money, Virginia also finds itself in the happy position of having surplus funds of its own to spend.

As it stands now, the federal funds cannot be used for new school construction, a restriction that upsets school officials in areas with aging schools and no budget to replace them. But whether some money is spent on new schools or not, the General Assembly should not just throw dollars out the door and hope for the best. Virginia has an enormous opportunity to improve student health and learning, correct historic injustices, and meet the demands of the climate crisis, but only if the right standards are in place from the outset.

First, funding should be prioritized to Title 1 schools, which are those with at least 40 percent of children from low-income families. Given Virginia’s history of segregation and racism, a high number of Title 1 schools are in Black communities, while others are in parts of rural Virginia that have been left behind economically.  Title 1 schools on average are older and in worse condition than schools in more affluent areas, and the students are more likely to suffer from asthma and other health problems that are exacerbated by mold and poor indoor air quality. Improving indoor air quality and student well-being should be the primary goals for all new or renovated facilities, and it makes sense to start with the students most in need.

Second, while many localities are attracted to the idea of shiny new schools, in most cases it takes less time and costs less to retrofit an old school that is structurally sound than to tear it down and build new. It’s also better for the environment, even if the new school would be built to a “green” standard. Children don’t need new buildings; they need healthy, high-performing buildings. A beautiful remodel of the historic school their parents and grandparents attended could be just what the doctor ordered.

Third, new or renovated schools should be required to meet the highest standards for energy efficiency, including windows, insulation and HVAC. New construction should also be all-electric, as should most renovated buildings. This maximizes taxpayer savings on energy costs over the lifetime of the building, supports the goal of healthy indoor air, and is consistent with Virginia’s commitment to phase out fossil fuels.

Fourth, if the roof will be new or upgraded, it should be made solar-ready, allowing the school to take advantage of third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) or solar services agreements to install solar panels. Leveraging private capital to pay for the school’s primary energy source stretches construction dollars. These agreements provide financing for solar facilities at no upfront cost and typically save money for schools from the outset. Once the solar panels are paid off, energy bills plummet and savings pile up.

New schools and deep retrofits can even achieve net-zero status affordably, and ought to be required to do so in most cases. Net-zero schools become a source of community pride and offer educational benefits as students learn about energy and how solar panels work. According to a study conducted for Fairfax County Public Schools, the additional upfront cost of building a net-zero-ready school (one that will produce as much energy as it uses once solar panels are added) is only about 5 percent more than standard construction, and the additional cost is recovered through energy savings in under 10 years. Renovating older schools to net-zero costs 11 percent more, but still pays off in 15 years.

Even if we weren’t worried about climate, these standards would make sense for student health and taxpayer savings. Yet today, school districts are not required to build high performance schools, and most don’t. The result is higher operating costs, and in some cases school boards being told that their brand-new schools won’t support solar. Solar companies say it’s probable that solar would be just fine, but this shouldn’t even be an issue. Yet it will continue to be cited as an obstacle if solar-readiness is not made standard.

Our children deserve better. Virginia should seize this year’s historic opportunity to invest in healthy, high-performing schools that are free of fossil fuels and will deliver long-term benefits for taxpayers and the climate.