If you’re planning on building a home with a gas boiler in New York, time is running out. Starting on January 1 next year, most new buildings across the state are required to be all electric.
Or at least that’s what state law says. But the mandate has yet to trickle down to most municipalities, which are in charge of approving permits for new construction.
That’s because New York has not updated its statewide building code — which sets minimum construction standards — to reflect the all-electric buildings law passed nearly two years ago.
The State Fire Prevention and Building Code Council is tasked with updating the code every five years to comply with new laws and safety standards. (The current edition dates back to November 2019.) The council was due to meet in early December to vote on a draft of the updated rules, but members never received the new draft and the meeting was postponed, twice. It is now scheduled for this Friday, February 28.
Meanwhile, in mid-December, Governor Kathy Hochul said she shared home builders’ concerns about the costs of going all electric.
“We have a moral responsibility to do everything we can to transition to clean renewable energy,” she told Buffalo’s WGRZ news. “But I also know the pandemic disrupted so much in the supply chain and with manufacturers… so I need to be working closely with the legislature and say, ‘We are not walking back from our aspirations and our goals, but I have to do it in a way that makes sense.’”
That has some climate advocates nervous that the state might be slow-walking the transition to electric buildings, particularly after the governor’s moves to delay congestion pricing last year and, more recently, the carbon pricing program known as cap and invest.
“Based on what the Hochul administration has been doing in the last few weeks, particularly delaying cap and invest, there’s some serious concerns that this is also part of a delay of climate action that the state has already enacted,” said Michael Hernandez, New York policy director at the pro-electrification group Rewiring America.
Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of State, which houses the Code Council, blamed the meeting delay on scheduling issues. Asked why the agency has not yet released the draft code, a spokesperson said that updating the code is a complex process, and that the agency had to take into account more than 2,500 public comments responding to a preliminary draft posted last summer.
Building electrification is not the only thorny issue at stake. The Code Council is also weighing a rule requiring sprinklers in all new homes, which has faced strong pushback from builders.
Claudia Braymer, a former Warren County legislator who served on the Code Council from 2019 to 2023, acknowledged the amount of work and debate that goes into updating the code, but said it was “really odd” that the group has not met in nearly five months. The council is required by law to meet quarterly and had not missed a meeting in more than five years, including at the height of the pandemic.
Braymer said that, during her tenure, the council was slower to incorporate electrification mandates than other updates required by law. It took a year of sustained pressure from climate advocates before the Department of State released the preliminary draft code with the electrification rules last June.
“It does seem like there’s been a slow walk here,” Hernandez said. “I think everyone’s really anxious to see what they’ve done to revise the code and to ensure that we still have the strong code that we saw last summer.”
The building code has been the subject of quiet but steady lobbying over the past year, above all from groups representing the heating oil industry. The New York State Energy Coalition, a trade group for heating oil suppliers, and Clean Fuels Alliance America, a national biodiesel trade group, lobbied regulators on the issue throughout 2024, according to filings.
It’s not entirely clear what they hoped to achieve from
that lobbying. The Energy Coalition did not respond to a request for
comment; it has staunchly opposed
electrification mandates in the past. Stephen Dodge, director of state
regulatory affairs for the Clean Fuels Alliance, said his group wasn’t
opposed to electrification and is less focused on the mandate for new
construction than on policies around existing buildings, where he sees
biodiesel as a lower-polluting, “drop-in” alternative to fossil heating
oils.
The all-electric construction mandate has gotten sharper
pushback from the propane and building industries, as well as some
building trades unions, which sued the state in fall 2023 to overturn
the law. That case is still pending in federal court. A similar case in
the Ninth Circuit blocked the first-in-the-nation gas ban in Berkeley,
California, last year, on the grounds that it was preempted by federal
law, but that argument won’t necessarily hold in New York.
Michael Fazio, executive director of the New York State
Builders Association, said he is concerned that the all-electric mandate
could push up already sky-high housing costs. (His group is one of
about a dozen plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.)
“It’ll simply, in our view, make new homes more expensive
at a time when the state is in dire need of new housing,” Fazio said.
But he isn’t dead set against the requirements, either, as long as the
state can make the transition without leaving current projects in limbo.
The law bans fossil fuel appliances in new residential
buildings seven stories and under starting in January 2026, and extends
to taller apartment buildings in 2029. A large project, like a
subdivision of several dozen homes, might be built in stages over
several years, and Fazio worries that developers already working on such
projects are facing “a lot of questions and ambiguity.”
“There should be some reasonable grandfathering provision,” he said.
As for the cost, at least one study has found that new
all-electric homes are actually cheaper to build than those that require
both gas and electricity. A 2022 analysis
by the climate-oriented New Buildings Institute, using New York prices,
found that an all-electric single-family home cost about $8,000 less up
front than a mixed-fuel one.
New York City already has an all-electric requirement in
effect for buildings under eight stories. So far, it’s gone off without a
hitch, said John Mandyck, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Green Council.
“I haven’t heard any disruptions, complaints, inabilities
to comply with the world-leading law that we have,” Mandyck said. “In
fact, what I am hearing anecdotally is that any major new development is
going all electric regardless of the date,” including tall buildings
that aren’t required to do so for another two years, he said.
Going all electric should be even easier at a statewide
level, where “you’re talking about more and more single-family homes
that are the easiest thing to electrify,” Mandyck continued. While some
players are continuing to fight electrification, “the market has moved
on,” he said.
Still, the state needs to get the process to the finish
line, said Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who sponsored the
All-Electric Buildings Act in that chamber.
“New York cannot be constantly questioning and backtracking
on key goals, plans, and legislation,” Gallagher said. “We’re watching
the governor do that over and over and over again, and it doesn’t work
for her.”