The Future of Buildings in Illinois Is Electric

The Illinois Commerce Commission authorized a study of the most affordable way for the state to meet its building decarbonization goals. The report has fundamental flaws but critical insights.

📌 The Core Development

Illinois’s landmark Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) sets the goal of 100 percent clean energy across the state by 2050. For nonelectric sources of emissions and transportation—such as the 17 percent of emissions that occur when we burn gas to heat our homes and other buildings where we live, work, and play—CEJA provides little direction on how these sectors are expected to align with the state’s climate goals.

The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), which regulates the state’s electric and gas utilities, showed real leadership in 2023 when it found that “if the decarbonization goals of CEJA are to be met, the gas distribution system as currently operated will need to change.” To chart that change, the ICC launched a Future of Gas (FOG) open stakeholder process to identify the most efficient, cost-effective path to a gas system that fits the state’s climate goals.

🔍 Background & Sector Context

As part of this FOG process, the ICC authorized a consultant to model five pathways to that CEJA-compliant system by 2050. In its recently released Gas Decarbonization Pathways Study, the consultant modeled a range of scenarios, from one where the state invests heavily in energy efficiency and helps customers replace outdated gas appliances with high-efficiency electric alternatives to others that rely on unproven biofuels with no clear evidence that they can be produced at anything close to the scale needed. For each scenario, the consultant was expected to assess technical feasibility, up-front and operating costs, impacts on the gas and electric systems, emissions reductions, and effects on environmental justice communities, all to help Illinois meet its gas decarbonization goals at the lowest cost and with the most benefits to residents.

Unfortunately, the consultant’s final report is biased by faulty (and at times, plainly unrealistic) assumptions that do not allow for accurate comparison across scenarios. Despite this, the study yields a clear finding: Gas use in Illinois’s buildings and industrial facilities must decline by at least 50 percent in order to reach the state’s climate target of net-zero emissions by 2050. Together with the state’s recently released Comprehensive Climate Action Plan , the study offers Illinois policymakers a clear agenda for initiating the transition to an affordable, equitable, and clean energy future.

📊 Industry & Real-World Impact

The study offers some useful insights, but treating all of its findings as a road map for Illinois’s gas transition would be a mistake. Before getting into the no-regrets steps that Illinois can take now, we need to unpack the biggest problems with the report, including the flawed assumptions behind some of its conclusions.

🔮 Strategic Outlook & What Lies Ahead

Despite the study’s shortcomings detailed above, several key findings should influence the recommendations in the final FOG report:

The remaining technologies are incredibly early-stage, and to the extent that they are available at all over the next several decades, they are likely to be extremely expensive. The study’s assumptions around e-methane are particularly troubling. Modeling initially showed that the Continued Gas Use and Hybrid Gas cases could not meet the net-zero-by-2050 emissions requirement using only available technologies, like biomethane. As a result, in the final report, the model selected e-methane to backfill any resource gap—despite the fact that e-methane derived from green hydrogen and direct air carbon capture is still in “prototype and demonstration stage” today.