Are electric buildings the key to a healthier future?

One of the emerging strategies for climate mitigation has been to electrify everything. This means using electricity, particularly from renewable energy, instead of fossil fuels in buildings for things like heating, cooling or for appliances.

A lot of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change come from burning fossil fuels. That’s why one of the best ways to reduce emissions is to eliminate fossil fuel combustion.

We already know how to do this for electrical grids and for transportation. And we’re seeing that there are health benefits to transitioning to renewable energy and electric transportation, such as improved air quality.

My research is looking at how we can do the same for buildings – how we can support electrification policies, and what the health benefits of that might be.

Buildings are a major consumer of fossil fuels and natural gas for heating. They're commonly in big cities and are the places people frequent or live in. If electrifying buildings can improve air quality in cities, a lot of people are going to feel the health benefits.

To understand the air pollution related health benefits of building electrification in the US, we will analyse air pollution and how it impacts people. And many of these pollutants are harmful to both climate and health. So, we need to identify what air pollution is removed in the process of electrification, where that air pollution goes and who gets exposed to it.

And to do that, we need to use air pollution modelling.

The model we are using is essentially an hourly weather model that includes air pollution physics and chemistry. This requires high performance computing. It slices up the US atmosphere into a grid of 12 by 12 kilometres with over a dozen layers. Then, it simulates all the atmospheric physics and chemistry that affect pollution concentrations to figure out what’s happening to the air pollution in each box in the grid every hour.

We will use this model to understand how any changes, such as the implementation of an electrification policy, affects air pollution over the course of a year.

By understanding the health benefits of reduced pollution, we can help design more effective policies for electrifying buildings in a way that ensures equitable access for vulnerable US communities.

Designing and implementing effective policies is crucial to ensure that solutions are adopted effectively, equitably and at the scale necessary to mitigate climate change. For example, some gas-free home appliances are already available on the market, but without a policy mandate only people that want and can afford to will get them.

This means there will still be people using fossil fuels in their homes, contributing to, and being affected by, climate change and the air pollution that can impact health.

That’s why my project will go a step further by putting our research in front of policymakers through briefings on the study results.

We will also work with people whose voices should be involved in policymaking in each state, such as environmental justice and advocacy groups. By working with them, we'll be able to get their valuable input into designing policies correctly.

The idea of using health benefits as evidence to support policy design has been done before in the US, such as for policies in the transportation sector. So, I’m hoping we'll be able to replicate that for buildings.

This is one of the better levers we can pull in the short- to medium-term to address climate change – and some of its health impacts – for the next one or two decades.

This article was first published in 'Behind the Research', our LinkedIn newsletter sharing insights and stories from experts in global health research.