NPR
Summary
European officials are debating whether they can stop buying natural gas imports from Russia. Many say it can't be done. But the biggest city in Switzerland — Zurich — is already taking ambitious steps to wean itself off gas. It's shutting down the flow of gas to whole parts of the city.
Zurich started down this path a decade ago to save money and fight climate change. The plan provoked controversy at first. Today, as the city's residents install alternatives to gas heating, there appears to be broad support for the switch — in part, because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. About half of Switzerland's natural gas supply comes from Russia.
"Attitudes have changed once again, dramatically," says Rainer Schöne, a spokesman for Energie 360°, Zurich's city-owned gas utility. "Today, it's clear. People want to, and have to, move away from fossil gas."
Zurich's experience may offer lessons to other cities around the world that are encouraging residents to switch away from natural gas appliances but are not, so far, shutting down the infrastructure that delivers it.
Zurich's move to abandon gas was driven in part by economics. The city wanted to expand a "district heating" system that uses excess heat from a waste incinerator on the edge of the city, a modern plant outfitted with the latest pollution control technology. The incinerator — supplemented by other facilities that burn wood or gas — heats water, and that hot water or steam circulates through underground pipes to homes and businesses that tap it as a heat source.
It made little sense for the city to maintain both hot water and gas pipelines side by side, says Zurich's energy commissioner, Silvia Banfi Frost. "It's quite clear that we don't want to have parallel networks for supplying heat," she says.
In 2011, city officials announced that they would start shutting down gas service within five years in one part of the city that's well-served by district heating. This area, historically dominated by industry and apartment buildings, is home to 93,000 people. But protests erupted. The plan "was indeed a shock" to many people who relied on gas, says Schöne.
Residents argued that they'd received too little notice and that they were being forced to buy costly replacements for their gas appliances. So officials backed off, promising to compensate people who had to replace gas furnaces that were less than 20 years old. Zurich also delayed the start of the gas shutdown to 2021. Now, however, it's underway.
Some residents of Zurich, especially those in single-family homes, can't easily connect to the district heating system and have to find alternatives. Ernst Danner is a member of Zurich's City Parliament from the centrist Evangelical People's Party. He lives in a single-family home, and he installed an electric heat pump that draws warmth from water circulating through pipes that go deep underground. It cost him just over $40,000 after tax breaks and city subsidies, but it also cut his heating bill in half. Over the lifetime of the system, he says, "I pay a bit more, but it's not that much more, and it's more ecological."
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