Chart: The policy push to electrify lawn equipment, visualized

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. Canary thanks Clean Energy Counsel for its support of the column.

In the lawn-care aisle at Home Depot, alongside traditional gas mowers and leaf blowers, you’ll also find battery-powered versions — for roughly the same price, or even less.

An increasing number of states and municipalities are encouraging their residents to go for these emissions-free, electric options and leave the gas tools behind, as a new map from PIRG shows. 

A total of 26 states, plus Washington, D.C, have implemented policies restricting the use of gas lawn equipment. Gas leaf blowers are now banned in 72 municipalities spanning California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. Several cities in California have completely banned all gas lawn equipment.

Gas mowers and blowers are not only noisy, they’re extremely polluting. In just one hour of use, a commercial lawn mower generates as much smog-forming pollution as a car driving for four hours. Unlike gas cars, these machines don’t contain catalytic converters, which are essential for filtering out pollutants and toxins that have been linked to respiratory diseases or ones that cause cancer, like benzene and formaldehyde.

Price has been a key barrier to adopting cleaner alternatives in the past, but the cost of batteries continues to fall — and there is now an array of state and federal incentives that make electric equipment more affordable.

Many municipalities, states, utilities, and electric co-ops across the country offer rebates to customers who make the switch. Washington, D.C.’s Sustainable Energy Utility, for example, provides $75 off residential electric push lawn mowers. In Texas, Dallas and Austin have both created incentive programs for electric equipment, while in Colorado, residents can receive a 30 percent discount on all electric mowers, leaf blowers, trimmers, and snow blowers. The Inflation Reduction Act’s electric-vehicle tax credit covers 30 percent of the cost of some commercial electric mowers.

Using just one piece of electric lawn equipment has been shown to make it more likely that people will choose to go electric in other parts of their lives, from cooking to home heating, according to a recent national survey.

But as more locations are incentivizing these battery-powered devices, some are also taking steps to protect gas lawn equipment. Texas and Georgia passed laws in 2023 prohibiting gas lawn equipment from being banned or restricted; Florida followed suit this year.

The move to heat homes with electric heat pumps and drive electric cars is growing across the country and the world, with the potential to massively cut global greenhouse gas emissions. Now gas lawn equipment is a growing trend, too — but it remains to be seen how far that could spread. 

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