NEW YORK CITY — As an unprecedented amount of federal climate funding pours into cities across the United States, local officials and community leaders face a crucial challenge: making sure that everyone can fully participate in the transition to cleaner, electrified homes and transportation systems.

On Monday, at the outset of Climate Week NYC, Canary Media and the nonprofit Rewiring America invited experts onstage to discuss how they’re working to make urban electrification more accessible. Our panelists underscored the need to remove barriers for lower-income residents and communities of color in particular — folks who tend to spend the biggest share of their income on energy expenses and who are disproportionately exposed to harmful air pollution, both indoors and outside. 

Here are some of their key takeaways from this week’s Electric Happy Hour, edited and condensed for brevity.

Heat pumps need to replace fossil-fired furnaces, boilers and water heaters at an unprecedented pace and scale to cut the carbon emissions from homes and buildings. The U.S. is still far from hitting those targets — but governors of states representing more than half the country have just pledged to push state policies to speed up that transition. 

On Thursday, members of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan group of 25 states, set a goal of installing 20 million heat pumps by 2030 — a target that will require quadrupling their current pace of installation. The announcement, made at a Climate Week NYC 2023 event in New York City, includes pledges to expand incentives to reduce the cost of switching from oil, gas and electric resistance heating systems, which are far less energy-efficient than heat pumps.

“Heat pumps are available and affordable, not to mention better for the air we breathe,” said Alliance co-chair and founding member Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington. About 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels inside buildings, and that combustion also creates air pollution harmful to human health. An additional 20 percent of U.S.-wide carbon emissions are tied to electricity use by buildings, including a significant portion used for inefficient electric resistance heating. 

Heat pumps, which use electricity to move heat in and out of buildings, are about three times more efficient than resistance heaters and fossil-gas-fueled furnaces — and twice as efficient even in the coldest climates.

These advantages, along with existing state and federal incentive programs, have helped speed the adoption of the technology in the U.S.: Heat-pump sales outpaced those of gas furnaces for the first time last year. Still, heat pumps are used in only about 16 percent of about 140 million U.S. homes today, according to nonprofit advocacy group Rewiring America. 

That’s largely due to cost and inertia. Heat pumps still cost more than the fossil-fueled and electric resistance systems they’re replacing, and their energy savings take years to pay back those upfront costs. And owners of homes and buildings typically wait for their old heating systems to fail before replacing them, setting what’s known as a ​“replacement-rate” limit on how quickly heat pumps can gain ground. 

Overcoming those obstacles requires a mix of upfront incentives and clever financing structures to pull the long-term efficiency savings into the present. The Inflation Reduction Act created new federal tax credits for heat pumps, as well as rebate and incentive programs that are in the midst of being rolled out at a state-by-state level, aimed at reducing the sticker shock of making the switch. 

But state-level incentives, efficiency standards and building codes have been the primary policy pathway for driving heat-pump adoption to date. Many of the states whose governors are members of the U.S. Climate Alliance are already leading in heat-pump adoption, including California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and New York.

Maine, which offers lucrative incentives for heat pumps, has already surpassed its 2025 goal of installing 100,000 heat pump systems, and Governor Janet Mills (D) recently set a new target of 275,000 by 2027. California has set building codes and air-quality regulations that will largely require heat pumps in place of new fossil-gas-fueled furnace and water heater installations starting in 2030, and it offers incentives for heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters. 

Other states in the alliance have also imposed regulations that limit fossil fuel use in new buildings, although this doesn’t directly tackle the need to replace fossil fuels in existing buildings. Washington state requires heat pumps in all new homes and apartments, and New York state has banned fossil-gas use in new buildings starting in 2026. More than 50 city and county governments in California have passed similar bans, although the legality of those actions is now in question after a court ruling against the first such ban created by the city of Berkeley. 

To achieve the new target, U.S. Climate Alliance members will need to double down on existing state and utility incentives — particularly those focused on lower-income households — and also quickly put forthcoming Inflation Reduction Act incentives to work, according to clean energy think tank RMI. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

Should the participating states back up their heat-pump pledge with such action, the U.S. will move faster than ever toward the goal of decarbonizing home heating. But for the U.S. to hit its net-zero target by 2050, the entire country must triple today’s heat-pump adoption rates by 2032, according to Rewiring America — not just 25 states.

NEW YORK CITY — The startup CarbonBuilt has hit a key milestone in its quest to kick a notoriously carbon-intensive ingredient out of concrete.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles–based company said it had eliminated the use of ​“ordinary Portland cement” in its concrete blocks, allowing CarbonBuilt to drastically reduce the amount of embodied carbon associated with its products. The announcement, made during Climate Week NYC, arrives as construction firms and developers are signaling greater demand for low- and zero-carbon concrete — very little of which is actually available today.

Nearly all of the world’s concrete contains Portland cement, a limestone and clay fusion that’s cheap, abundant — and extremely carbon-intensive to produce. As a result, cement and concrete production are responsible for roughly 8 percent of human-caused global CO₂ emissions every year.

CarbonBuilt’s approach involves replacing traditional Portland cement with calcium-rich, low-carbon industrial waste materials. In May, the company began commercial production of its sustainable concrete at a partner facility in the city of Childersburg, Alabama. Since then, CarbonBuilt has been working to gradually scale down the share of Portland cement in its mix and boost the percentage of alternative materials. 

“We’ve done several test runs to figure out how low we can go [with cement], and the team finally got it to zero,” JJ Steeley, head of marketing and strategic partnerships, told Canary Media this week over breakfast in Manhattan.

The achievement means ​“these blocks will now contain near-zero embodied carbon,” she added. CarbonBuilt and its local partner Blair Block said they plan to produce the Portland-cement-free blocks at ​“commercial volume” in Alabama starting in early 2024, with the goal of steadily ramping up until they reach full capacity of 6,000 blocks per day. 

At least a dozen other startups and manufacturers are working to develop their own concoctions to dramatically reduce or replace the use of carbon-intensive cement in concrete — the world’s most common building material, used in everything from buildings, bridges and roads to dams, power plants and wind-turbine foundations. 

Most recently, the startup Terra CO2 Technology announced plans to build a commercial-scale facility in Texas to make its supplementary cementing material. The Colorado-based company has devised a way to turn some of the world’s most abundant and commonly used minerals into a drop-in replacement for the additives used in cement production, as Canary Media previously reported.

Another firm, Brimstone, has developed a process to convert basalt rock into a cement alternative. In July, the California-based company received third-party certification that says its product is structurally and chemically the same as ordinary Portland cement — which makes Brimstone the first among its peers to receive such validation, according to the company.

CarbonBuilt’s own technique involves combining its ​“secret sauce” of calcium-rich binding materials with captured carbon dioxide, Steeley said.

To start, CarbonBuilt mixes the materials with water and aggregates, which are then pressed into molds and placed inside a temperature-controlled chamber. CarbonBuilt next flows CO₂ into the chamber, driving a chemical reaction that forms solid concrete. 

In Alabama, the company is sourcing its CO₂ from forestry waste that’s processed in an on-site biomass furnace. CarbonBuilt is also partnering with companies in Arizona to combine its alternative-cement process with technology that removes CO₂ directly from the sky. Production is slated to start at the Flagstaff masonry facility in 2024.

The startup claims its novel technology, which was first developed in UCLA’s engineering school, can reduce overall CO₂ emissions from concrete-making by 70 to 100 percent.

Moving beyond ​“teaspoons” of low-carbon concrete 

Yet for CarbonBuilt and its emerging crop of competitors, creating cleaner ways for making concrete is only the start when it comes to deeply reducing emissions from the heavy industrial sector.

“We have a lot of the technologies we need to decarbonize concrete now, but there’s only teaspoons of them,” Sara Neff, head of sustainability for Lendlease Americas, a major construction and real estate company, said on a Tuesday panel at Climate Week. ​“There’s a ton of money and demand we know we will have [for low-carbon concrete]. So how do we connect those to get to scale?”

Simon Brandler, Brimstone’s vice president of policy and public affairs, said during a separate panel on Tuesday that companies like his own will need ​“a tremendous amount of financing” to bring their novel approaches to industrial-scale facilities. ​“That really requires two things,” he added.

First, companies need government programs and incentives to help them navigate the so-called ​“valley of death” that exists between pilot-stage and commercial-scale projects. To that end, the Biden administration in March announced a $6 billion initiative to develop first-of-a-kind technologies or launch early-stage projects that can curb emissions from cement, chemicals, steel and other heavy industries.

Second, concrete-makers need customers that can commit in advance to buying their low-carbon supply, so that once the multimillion-dollar facility comes online, the company can immediately start selling materials and paying back its loans. Federal, state and local governments can play an important role as early adopters, given that the public sector buys about half of all the concrete that’s poured and cast in the United States. ConcreteZero, an initiative led by Climate Week’s organizer Climate Group, similarly aims to create a global market for ​“net-zero concrete” by elevating the private sector’s demand.

Ryan Roberts, head of sustainable construction at Holcim, a Swiss-based building materials company, said that government regulators and industry standard-setters also need to keep pace with the innovation that’s flooding into the space so that durable alternatives can safely and swiftly enter the market.

“As we accelerate the decarbonization of concrete, it’s important to have standards and codes move just as quickly,” he said.

Still, Roberts and other panelists noted that replacing the Portland cement in concrete isn’t the industry’s only option for slashing emissions. Reducing the actual volume of concrete used in construction projects is another fairly straightforward, if not yet entirely common, climate solution that companies can implement today.

Neff noted that, by revisiting and scrutinizing the building design, a Lendlease building in Los Angeles used about half as much concrete as it was originally designed to include — the first project in the company’s portfolio to do so. In London, Lendlease was able to slash embodied carbon emissions by 24 percent from a mixed-use development called Elephant Park. 

Such efforts are part of Lendlease’s broader goal of eliminating Scope 3 emissions from its supply chain by 2040. Scope 3 emissions are those that result not only from an organization’s activities but also from the upstream and downstream activities of its users and suppliers. In Lendlease’s case, more than 90 percent of the company’s emissions are in the Scope 3 category, Neff said. 

“We’re able to do almost all of this cost-neutrally,” she said. ​“The first 20 to 30 percent [of emissions reductions] you can do if you’re asking the right questions before you get out.”

NEW YORK CITY — Companies that use huge amounts of steel to construct buildings or clean-energy equipment are banding together to push North American steelmakers to adopt greener manufacturing methods.

On Wednesday, corporations including tech giant Microsoft, major U.S. real estate developer Trammell Crow and solar-hardware-maker Nextracker announced a plan to jointly request a total of 2 million metric tons of ​“near-zero emissions” steel from producers. The broadly defined category can include steel that’s produced using renewable electricity, clean hydrogen or potentially with carbon-capture technology.

The initiative, named the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform, was convened by the clean energy think tank RMI and unveiled at Microsoft’s Times Square office during Climate Week NYC. Representatives from global steel giant ArcelorMittal, Swedish startup H2 Green Steel and the automaker Volvo Group also attended the event. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

The platform is an attempt to close the gap between the buyers that want to purchase green steel — and are willing to pay a premium for the product — and the manufacturers that are faced with making multibillion-dollar investments to retrofit old facilities or build new ones.

“What we’re finding in the market is that the buyers are trying to initiate these [green-steel] deals, but it’s not enough to shift the investment case for a producer,” Chathu Gamage, a principal in RMI’s Climate-Aligned Industries Program, told Canary Media.

Globally, steel production is responsible for between 7 and 9 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions every year.

Existing efforts to jump-start a U.S. green-steel industry include the First Movers Coalition — organized by the U.S. State Department and the World Economic Forum — and SteelZero, an initiative led by Climate Week NYC’s organizer Climate Group. In both of these consortia, companies have pledged to buy a certain portion of green steel by 2030 and to source only green steel by 2050.

The new platform ​“is a way to aggregate this demand, because no one steel buyer can do this alone,” Gamage said. 

In a related announcement, the First Movers Coalition on Wednesday launched the Near-Zero Steel 2030 Challenge, a global initiative to identify ways for steel producers, buyers and technology providers to partner on boosting the supply of near-zero steel in the coming years. A recent example of such a collaboration is the long-term supply agreement that Volvo just signed with H2 Green Steel. The startup says it expects to start delivering the high-strength material starting in mid-2026.

“Steel is a big contributor to the footprint of our products,” Andrea Fuder, chief purchasing officer of Volvo Group, said in a statement last week. ​“Working together with both established and new players for developing decarbonized materials is key to advancing our progress in sustainable transport and infrastructure solutions.”

Kicking fossil fuels out of steel production

The 2-million-metric-ton order from the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform represents a sizable volume for steelmakers, equal to the annual production of an average-size steel plant. It’s also only a tiny fraction — about 0.1 percent — of the nearly 2 billion metric tons of high-strength material that global steelmakers produce each year to build everything from bridges, roads and buildings to cars, ships, wind turbines and solar-panel racks. 

Traditional steelmaking processes use copious amounts of fossil fuels to transform raw iron ore into gleaming coils of finished steel. About 70 percent of the world’s primary steel is made in ​“integrated mills” that use extremely hot, coal-hungry blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnaces. 

Most of the remaining 30 percent is made by melting scrap metal in electric arc furnaces — a process that can dramatically reduce the emissions associated with steelmaking but doesn’t entirely replace the industry’s need for nonrecycled steel. Automakers in particular need primary material to make a car’s chassis and body.

In the United States, the story plays out in reverse: About 70 percent of steel is made using scrap and electric arc furnaces, while roughly 30 percent is produced in the nation’s eight remaining integrated mills. 

The industry hasn’t yet adopted a concrete definition of what counts as ​“green steel.” The term can be used loosely today to describe scrap-based steel made in electric furnaces — even those powered by nonrenewable electricity — and it can sometimes include coal- or gas-using facilities that install equipment to capture carbon dioxide from the facilities’ flue streams.

For many clean-energy advocates, an ideal setup for primary steelmaking involves replacing blast furnaces with a hydrogen-fueled technology that processes iron ore into what’s known as direct reduced iron, or DRI. Ideally, the hydrogen is made only by using renewable-powered electrolyzers, which split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The DRI is then converted into steel using electric arc furnaces that are also powered entirely by renewables.

Alternately, iron can be converted directly into steel using novel methods like ​“molten oxide electrolysis,” which the startup Boston Metal is attempting to scale up and commercialize. 

The United States currently has three DRI facilities, but they all primarily use fossil gas to process iron ore. Replacing fossil fuels with clean hydrogen in such facilities will require building significantly more electrolyzers — and renewable energy to power them. In Sweden, H2 Green Steel plans to use more than 700 megawatts of hydrogen electrolyzers at its forthcoming facility, which will be capable of producing up to 5 million metric tons of green steel by 2030.

At Wednesday’s event, members of the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform said their goal is to accelerate the business case for steel producers that are considering converting or building new green-steel facilities. The buyers’ strategy will play out in two steps.

To start, participants issued a ​“request for information” to North American steelmakers to determine what is possible, in terms of how much green-steel manufacturers can realistically produce, by when, and using which alternative methods. Then, early next year, the buyers group plans to formally request proposals from manufacturers to supply the collective 2 million metric tons of steel. 

Gamage said that companies will likely make a one-time request for the steel, though it could play out over multiple bidding rounds. While buyers are looking to get their green steel on ​“accelerated timelines,” it will probably still take several years for steelmakers to ramp up production to fulfill the orders, she added.

How participating companies will define green or ​“near-zero-emissions” steel is entirely up to the participating companies, Gamage said. She noted they could follow the blueprint offered by an industry standard known as ResponsibleSteel, which maps out how producers evaluate and report emissions associated with steelmaking. 

“The hope is that we’re all running this process to either retrofit or create new facilities that can make cleaner primary steel,” she said. 

Local Law 97, New York City’s groundbreaking, multistage effort to rein in carbon emissions from its big buildings, is facing its first major test — and it’s just a preview of the much steeper challenges to come. 

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) released proposed guidelines for how owners of the worst-performing buildings can comply with the law’s mandate to curb emissions by 2024. Next year, the city will begin imposing fines on buildings that haven’t reduced their emissions below certain thresholds, with even steeper cuts and rising fines to come in 2030 and 2040. 

The response to the new compliance guidelines was swift. Real estate owners opposed to the law reiterated long-standing complaints that the mandates will force them to choose between paying steep fines or making efficiency investments that don’t make economic sense today. 

Environmental activists countered with evidence that near-term compliance is not nearly as costly as opponents say it will be. They also worry that two parts of the proposed regulations, which would allow laggard buildings to postpone compliance for two years and use clean-energy purchases to offset continued building emissions after that date, amount to a surrender by the Adams administration to real estate interests at the expense of fighting climate change. 

“Mayor Adams is proposing a gigantic giveaway to his real estate buddies that’s going to increase pollution and crush jobs,” said Pete Sikora, climate and inequality campaigns director of New York Communities for Change and a former member of the Local Law 97 advisory board. 

That’s why Sikora’s group and a host of environmental and community activists are protesting what they describe as loopholes in the new proposed guidance. The conflict over these proposals underscores a key tension around the broad goal of decarbonizing buildings: how to balance the carrots with the sticks. If the cost of meeting the law’s emissions-reduction mandates is too high, building owners may simply choose to pay the fines instead, an outcome that does little to help the climate. 

But building-efficiency experts agree that meeting the law’s 2024 targets should be relatively simple for the vast majority of commercial and multifamily residential buildings in New York City. As evidence, they point to the fact that 89 percent of buildings covered by the law are already in compliance with its requirements, including many older buildings that are harder to retrofit to become more energy-efficient. They also note that alternative compliance options have been established for more challenging buildings such as low-income housing. 

“I do not believe there is a serious building professional in this city who would say that a building making a good-faith effort, absent very unusual circumstances, would not be able to get under the 2024 limit,” said Sikora. ​“In some buildings, they could do it almost immediately if they wanted by making some very basic changes — putting in LEDs [and] aerated shower heads, insulating exposed heating pipes, tuning the boiler correctly” and other such remedial actions. 

What will be harder, he said, is meeting Local Law 97’s longer-term goals. Roughly 70 percent of the city’s buildings do not yet comply with the law’s tougher targets of cutting carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2019 levels by 2030.

Canary Media is a media partner for Climate Week NYC, which takes place September 17–24, 2023.

Climate Week NYC is back for its 15^th year of solutions-based events and conversations. If you’re in town, you might run into the Canary Media team (be sure to say hi!). If you’re not, watch for our coverage of highlights from the happenings on the ground in New York City and the discussions being streamed online.

The week officially kicked off on Sunday, September 17, with leaders including Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, and Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, gathering in midtown to discuss the closing window of opportunity to address the climate crisis and how to move at the scale needed. 

On Monday and Tuesday, New York–based Canaries will be at Climate Group’s Hub Live to catch discussions on everything from electrifying heavy-duty road transport to unlocking energy efficiency and building retrofits.

If you were lucky enough to score a ticket to our invite-only event with Rewiring America on Monday evening, we look forward to seeing you for a lightning-round discussion of equitable electrification in cities with policymakers, community leaders and companies doing this critical work across the U.S.

On Tuesday evening, Canary news editor Dan McCarthy is joining a panel on climate media convened by Antenna Group. 

As the week goes on, we’ll migrate to the Nest Summit at the Javits Center — which, as Canary has reported, is now blanketed with solar panels. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Canary reporter Maria Gallucci is moderating a panel on infrastructure investing in climatetech at the Climate Capital Summit hosted by Equal Ventures. We’re also looking forward to a walking tour in the Bronx with South Bronx Unite to learn about the future of air-quality monitoring and what it means for public health — one of a limited number of Climate Week NYC events on the ground in communities that could be transformed by a just energy transition.

Then on Thursday, you’ll find us at Newlab’s New Climate Futures event in Brooklyn.

Canary Media will also be reporting this week on a green steel announcement being made at Climate Week and on climate action underway in New York City, including progress on building the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a transmission project that will bring clean power to NYC, and implementation of Local Law 97, which requires large buildings to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate action is not moving fast enough across the globe, and those in positions of power have a responsibility to act without delay,” says Climate Group, which organizes Climate Week NYC. ​“Where must investment be channeled, and what vested interests need to be held accountable?” Those questions won’t be fully answered this week, but they should kick off some good conversations. 

Check out our Climate Week NYC page to see all our coverage.