New Year, New Fuel: Recommendations for the Cville Gas Decarbonization Study
Is Charlottesville Gas On Track to Decarbonize?
Photo of Charlottesville, Va from Experience Charlottesville
It’s the new year, and our resolution at the Community Climate Collaborative (C3) is to make zero carbon emissions communities a reality. Building off our zero-emissions public transportation campaign, we want to spend 2024 focusing on another source of emissions reductions often controlled by municipalities: natural gas utilities.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we will unpack the Charlottesville Gas decarbonization study, share preliminary findings of our study on the topic, and provide recommendations for the process. Our initial three blogs of this series will include:
An overview of decarbonization and Charlottesville Gas use (✅),
Drivers of increased gas use and areas for further research, and
Trends in natural gas leaks in the Charlottesville Area
Decarbonizing a Natural Gas Utility
For hundreds of U.S. municipalities that own and operate their natural gas utility, determining how to equitably decarbonize operations will be a major part of meeting local climate goals. You may be wondering what it means to decarbonize a natural gas utility and why it’s important. Well, despite its serene name, natural gas is not a clean energy source. Like other fossil fuels, it’s traditionally extracted from the ground, often using fracking, and then burned to generate electricity or to directly power home appliances. Fracking and natural gas power plants both present extreme climate justice concerns. Natural gas infrastructure is often distributed along racial lines such that black and brown communities bear the brunt of pollution and the associated health problems. C3’s recent report on climate justice and health explores the connection between race, climate, and health further.
It’s not just power plants that use natural gas. Many home appliances run on natural gas, too. This gas is transported through a local distribution system of pipes that runs underneath most U.S. cities. You may be most familiar with that “tick tick tick woosh” sound a gas stove makes when it turns on or the little blue pilot light in natural gas furnaces and water heaters. These are often evidence of a natural gas utility, and that’s the kind of gas infrastructure we are talking about here.
Natural gas utilities are major contributors to carbon emission in two main ways:
(1) the gas that is burned for heating and cooking releases carbon dioxide, and
(2) the natural gas released through leaks contains methane, which has a warming potential 20–30 times higher than carbon dioxide.
Electric appliances, alternatively, are as clean as the grid they draw power from. In much of the U.S., and certainly in Virginia, that grid is increasingly powered by clean energy, which means they are a climate-conscious alternative to natural gas.
What’s Happening in Charlottesville?
Charlottesville Gas, one of three municipal natural gas utilities in Virginia, commissioned its own decarbonization study to align its utility with its climate goals. That’s exactly the first step we need to make informed decisions about what is best for our community.
C3 believes that a robust and locally relevant study is integral to developing a successful and equitable decarbonization plan. The equity of a decarbonization plan relies on the diversity of voices that created it. In this blog series, we hope to share our high-level findings so that community members can be informed and make their voices heard.
At this stage, C3 will focus on commenting on the study itself and in which ways it may be enhanced to deliver the best possible outcome. In mid-October 2023, the consultants commissioned by Charlottesville Gas presented their intermediate findings to the City Council. After reviewing the results of the consultants’ work and the data used to inform their assumptions and interpretations, we have identified multiple areas for improvement. We hope our recommendations will be incorporated into future drafts.
Natural Gas Use
According to the consultants' presentation: Charlottesville has decreased its natural gas use since 2011 by 35% (the baseline year) while increasing the number of customers by roughly 2%.
According to Charlottesville Gas documents: natural Gas use across the entire Charlottesville Gas system has actually increased by 21% from 2011 to 2021, and the number of customers has increased by 14% in the same period. [1]
Why is there this seeming contradiction in data? It’s important to remember that the study is for the decarbonization of the gas utility in its entirety. The City of Charlottesville is not the only jurisdiction served by the Utility. As a whole community, Albemarle County is a much larger user of Charlottesville Gas than the City itself. So, while if we just look at Charlottesville, natural gas use is decreasing, but when we include Albemarle, the picture changes.
In 2011, all the customers in Albemarle and Charlottesville used a combined total of 2.5 million MMBtu of natural gas. By 2021, that amount had increased to 3 million MMBtu. That means that even though the consultants presented that the Utility is now using 35% less gas, the Utility is actually using 20% more gas. As such, the October presentation by the consultants underrepresents natural gas use in 2021 by more than half. New gas customers largely drove the increase in gas use across the system (a 13% increase), but there has also been an increase in gas used per customer from 2011 to 2021 (a 7% increase), mostly led by greater consumption by customers in Albemarle. See the graphs below.
The top graphs are from the consultant's October 2023 presentation, displaying data solely from the City of Charlottesville. The bottom graphs (gray background), created by C3, depict the same analysis using data from the entire utility. Note how the trends flip when using City data versus total Utility data.
TLDR (too long didn’t read): Charlottesville Gas has expanded its customer base and increased the total gas sold from the baseline year to 2021.
An essential part of planning for decarbonization is understanding the current landscape of gas use throughout the Utility territory. The Charlottesville Gas territory covers the City of Charlottesville as well as parts of the surrounding Albemarle County. When planning to decarbonize the entirety of the Utility’s operations, it is important to consider data from all jurisdictions that it serves. For one, climate change does not respect jurisdictional boundaries, and for another, both Charlottesville and Albemarle have goals to transition away from natural gas. To effectively plan for the future, we need to look at the system as a whole.
Lastly, in the October presentation to the Charlottesville City Council, the consultants presented the graph below to show that emissions in Charlottesville are already decreasing at a steady pace. You’ll notice, however, that this is a graph of the total energy emissions of the City.
This graph shows Energy Emissions in Charlottesville, and the graph was pulled directly from the consultant’s presentation to the Charlottesville City Council in October 2023.
That’s problematic for two reasons: (1) it doesn’t include data from Albemarle County, and (2) the total energy emissions are mostly composed of electricity. The latter is particularly problematic when considering that electricity emissions per kWh have decreased by approximately 45% during that period due to ongoing efforts to decarbonize the grid. [2] Therefore, since this study is about natural gas only, including the improved electricity emissions is misleading. It inaccurately makes Charlottesville seem like it is on a good trajectory - obscuring the reality that we are actually using more gas in the system than we were 10+ years ago.
Excitingly, that’s what the consultants’ draft presentation process is for. It’s to present data to the community, receive feedback, and then iterate the research process until the study matches local needs. Sharing ideas and new ways to look at data is all a part of what makes community engagement so special. When the consultants incorporate updated data, this study will continue to be stronger and its recommendations more accurate.
One thing is clear: you can’t decarbonize if you continue to use more gas. Understanding the drivers of the increased gas use is important. Unfortunately, with the data we have, we don’t know what category of customers has grown the most (industrial, residential, commercial, etc.) or who is historically using the most gas. However, we do have that data for 2020, 2021, and 2022. We’ll focus on all that in our next blog of the series. For now, we have the following recommendations for the Decarbonization Study.
First Set of Recommendations for the Cville Gas Decarbonization Study
In all calculations and projections include natural gas consumption data from the entire service area, not just the City of Charlottesville
Include all locally impacted jurisdictions in Natural Gas Decarbonization planning
Check back next week for Blog Two on the drivers of increased use!
[1] All data analysis for this blog series can be found in this Excel workbook.
[2] Please note that C3 first commented on this dynamic relationship between natural gas use, electricity consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions in our 2020 Climate Policy Advocacy Highlights (see pages 5 and 6 here). For recent grid emissions data, see here.