HB 2131, to allow thermal energy networks, unanimously passed in the 2024 legislative session. It's a win for consumers, the climate, pipeline workers, and electric grids.

The possibility of connecting your home or business to a clean heating and cooling network could be coming to your neighborhood soon.

Washington lawmakers have opened up a new realm of climate-friendly business opportunities for the state's energy utilities. With the unanimous passage of House Bill 2131, introduced by Representative Alex Ramel (D-40), electric and gas utilities may now sell thermal energy, delivered via a thermal energy network (TEN); gas utilities can win grants for the first TENs pilots; and neighborhood-wide decarbonization with TENs can take off. (Note: this policy is not to be confused with geothermal energy, which the state will also be exploring thanks to Senate Bill 6039.)

"The innovation proposed in this bill is to work with gas utilities - companies that already install pipe, manage rights of way, distribute energy to buildings, and work under the regulatory authority of the UTC,"

said Rep. Ramel.

"The skill sets and talents of those trained workforces can have an important role to play in decarbonizing our building energy system."

In line with Washington's 2023 Biennial Energy Report, which recommended that natural gas utilities plan for the long-term transition to clean heat, this new law will smooth the way for transitioning buildings across the state off of fossil fuels and onto highly efficient, zero-carbon, thermal energy networks. Washington is now the fifth state to pass legislation to allow or mandate that utilities pilot thermal energy networks, and it's the first to remove legal barriers for neighborhood-wide decarbonization.

Thermal energy networks use a network of water pipes and ground-source heat pumps to transfer heat in and out of buildings to provide heating, cooling, and often, domestic hot water. Buildings on the network can exchange heat with a number of hyper-local, non-combusting, non-emitting energy sources - whatever is available nearby. Sources could include lakes and rivers, energy-intensive buildings like data centers, wastewater systems, or the stable temperature of the ground just a few yards down. And these networks can be designed for any size and can scale up over time, starting as small as two buildings sharing thermal energy and growing to full community-sized or regional-sized systems.

THERMAL ENERGY NETWORKS ARE A WIN FOR THE CLIMATE, ELECTRIC GRIDS, PIPELINE WORKERS, AND WASHINGTON FAMILIES

Thermal energy networks can solve some thorny challenges of the clean energy transition: electric grid expansion, gas pipeline workforce redeployment, and equitable access to clean energy. Which helps explain why some unusual bedfellows - building and construction unions, environmental nonprofits, gas utilities, and grassroots activists - all advocated for advancing this policy in Olympia this year.

One of the most striking benefits of TENs is their modest impact on the electric grid due to their ultra-high efficiency. Washington already faces a formidable challenge in trying to build enough electric transmission and generation to power its clean energy transition.

A recent US Department of Energy study examined the electric grid impacts of various decarbonization approaches and found that decarbonizing with ground-source heat pumps was the best electric grid cost reduction strategy, reducing transmission line expansion requirements by over a third and generation requirements by 13 percent. An earlier study examined the impact to electricity demand of various building electrification scenarios for space conditioning and found that TENs using ground-source heat pumps were the best option for minimizing demand on the electric grid.

Gas workers and their labor unions have been worried about how electrification efforts could eliminate their high-quality, living-wage jobs. Yet TENs offer a pathway for these wo...