New Year, New Fuel: Recommendations for the C-Ville Gas Decarbonization Study
What’s Driving Natural Gas Use? (Blog Two)
Image from Dominion Virginia Power
Welcome back to the second blog of our New Year, New Fuel series where we are unpacking municipal natural gas utility decarbonization and providing recommendations for the Charlottesville Gas Decarbonization Study.
Last week, we covered how much natural gas is consumed across the Charlottesville Gas system. Today, we’ll dive into who has been using the most gas and recommendations for how to incorporate use trends into the decarbonization study.
Who’s Using Natural Gas?
The Utility breaks down consumption into the following four categories: government, residential, commercial, multifamily, medical, and industrial. For each category, it tracks how much gas is used by Charlottesville and Albemarle. In 2022, when considering all types of customers categories, Albemarle County used roughly twice as much natural gas as the City of Charlottesville, with its largest share of gas being consumed by “government” uses. Our working assumption is that government uses are largely from the University of Virginia (UVA), which that year consumed 1.2 million MMBtu of natural gas, or 27% of all natural gas distributed by the entire Utility that year.
Given its scale and stated climate goals, the UVA is a very important player in this decarbonization conversation. The University plans to fully transition away from fossil fuels, including natural gas, by 2050 [1]. Already, the facilities team has made significant progress in reducing the natural gas required for buildings on campus by beginning to transition to newer technologies like geothermal and heat recovery chillers. As UVA continues to make progress toward its goal, Charlottesville Gas will inevitably lose revenue from its biggest customer. It is crucial for the success of this decarbonization study to have a financial plan that accounts for this impending change, without trying to substitute the loss in revenue with new sales in an expanded gas system.
The second largest user category in the system is single-family residential users. There are more residential natural gas users in Charlottesville than in Albemarle, and they tend to use more gas per customer [2]. The good news is that smart strategies to reduce residential gas use can benefit customers by lowering bills and minimizing exposure to harmful chemicals associated with combusting natural gas. Understanding which residential customers use gas most inefficiently can help target interventions to maximize impact.
Drivers of Increased Use
It’s hard to make accurate inferences about what’s driving the increase in natural gas usage from 2011 to the present day because we only have the disaggregated use data from 2020 to 2022. The limits of the data presented below speak to the need for the decarbonization study to fill in gaps before the final version is released. With that said, we analyzed the data we had access to and uncovered some clues.
The number of residential gas users in Albemarle has grown by almost 300 households from 2020 to 2022. Comparatively, the City only gained 24 residential gas customers in the same period. Therefore, during that period, the number of residential gas users in the County grew 14 times faster than new residential gas users in the City. Since residential customers in the County are farther from Charlottesville’s center, our initial hypothesis was that the Utility would need to build more gas lines to service these new customers. We found evidence in favor of that hypothesis by confirming that the increase in miles of the utility’s main gas pipelines from 2020 to 2022 almost perfectly correlates with the incorporation of new residential customers (with a correlation of 0.99, with “1.00” representing a “perfect direct correlation”). Similarly, the increase in miles of main lines across the system from 2011 to 2021 was strongly correlated with the total gas used in the system (Correlation = 0.98).
That trend is further supported by the fact that (i) as observed in the previous blog, the average natural gas consumption per customer in Charlottesville has decreased in that period and (ii) there are about twice as many households in Charlottesville as there are residential gas customers, despite almost all City residences falling within the Utility’s service area. Taken together, these two facts combined with the correlations of the previous paragraph suggest the following conclusions:
There is a reduced interest in Charlottesville households in using natural gas,
Most new gas customers are coming from Albemarle County,
The Utility is expanding the footprint of its network to connect new customers and prevent its revenue from decreasing.
Second Set of Recommendations for the Cville Gas Decarbonization Study
Exploring the data beyond what was presented as part of the decarbonization study, it is clear that Charlottesville Gas is increasing its consumption and expanding its territory. Both are antithesis to decarbonizing the utility. The next phase of the decarbonization study must consider the recommendations below. We hope that when the study incorporates more appropriate data, the action items presented by the study will be accurate, actionable, and applicable to our local community.
Given that ‘government uses’ are among the largest uses of natural gas, it is critical to make sure to include UVA’s decarbonization plans in the planning for Charlottesville Gas
Determine the most rapidly growing natural gas use categories (geographically and by type of customer), from 2011 to 2021 and develop targeted strategies to reduce that growth
Understand the drivers of the Utility’s expansion since 2011, and analyze the legality of stopping Utility expansion, especially in new County residential units
Study residential gas use patterns on a household level to determine households that are low-hanging fruit for electrification or energy efficiency upgrades, especially in lower-income households
What’s Next
Our next blog will explore natural gas leaks across the Charlottesville Gas system. We pay special attention to the equity concerns of natural gas leaks and present recommendations to the decarbonization study to focus on equity in its research.
[1] Read more about UVA’s decarbonization plans from UVA Sustainability.
[2] Residential customers in Charlottesville use an average of 47 MMBtu annually, whereas Albemarle County residential customers use an average of 41 MMBtu annually (from 2020–2022). Data is available here.