Last week, the Common Council of Ithaca, New York, voted to approve a first-in-the-nation decarbonization plan in which the roughly 6,000 homes and buildings located within the notably “enlightened” lakeside college town will be electrified to meet goals established by the city’s impressively aggressive Green New Deal (GND) plan. That carbon-neutral-by-2030 GND plan was adopted unanimously by the Common Council in June 2019 to “address climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice,” per the city.
This means that within the next eight years all of Ithaca’s buildings—and not just municipal buildings—will be assessed and subsequently retrofitted as needed so that they no longer rely on fossil fuel-based heat sources and appliances. As part of the sweeping decarbonization initiative, formally dubbed as the Efficiency Retrofit and Thermal Load Electrification Program, all buildings will be subject to a range of improvements including the swapping out of propane- and natural gas-powered stovetops with electric ones and the installation of solar panels and high-efficiency air-source and ground-source heat pumps. The newly approved retrofit-minded program complements legislation passed by the city in June that mandates all newly constructed or renovated buildings within Ithaca cannot rely on natural gas or propane. (Ithaca is home to a substantially large swath of older building stock, with 40 percent of its structures dating back to 1940 or earlier.)
