This is a competitive contract solicitation to support the California Air Resources Board (CARB or Board) Sustainable Transportation and Communities Division. CARB encourages proposers to form multidisciplinary teams to fulfill contract requirements. Principal Investigators (PIs) must be affiliated with University of California and California State Universities; however, CARB encourages PIs to recruit non-academic and diverse partners when appropriate. About one-quarter of California’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are associated with energy use in residential and commercial buildings from direct and indirect sources. Indoor combustion produces carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter, and formaldehyde. Exposure to these pollutants may increase the risk of respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Natural gas in buildings emits 65 tons per day of NOx, three times as much as California power plants and almost as much as light-duty vehicles. Reducing emissions from buildings is essential for achieving California’s climate and air quality goals. Building electrification, or the replacement of fossil-fuel end uses and equipment with electric ones, is one of the most viable strategies for reducing building emissions. Codes and standards regulating new construction alone will be insufficient for addressing emissions reductions in this sector. While electrification in new construction will facilitate market innovations and lower costs for all buildings, California Energy Commission and CARB analyses show that reducing building emissions in alignment with state policy will require dramatic action in existing buildings as well, including all-electric appliance replacements upon burnout and even some early retirement. Coordinated policy and program implementation is essential to ensure that these goals are achieved rapidly and equitably. This project will characterize the range of costs and other barriers to equitable building electrification and examine policy and program strategies necessary to accelerate building electrification to meet the state’s long-term climate goals. The project will collect new data on non-hardware costs associated with enabling electrification in existing buildings and extend learnings from current state pilot programs and initiatives aimed at facilitating building decarbonization. It will provide recommendations to inform policy and program design and implementation to improve access to electrification and to accelerate the pace of electrified end use uptake. This research will provide empirical grounding for developing an aligned set of standards, incentives, and regulations across policy scales to support rapid and equitable building decarbonization.
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