San José, California

Population: 971,000

San José is located in Northern California and has over one million residents—the third most populated city in California—and is considered the “Capital of Silicon Valley.” In 2019, San José created a community choice energy program, San José Clean Energy, that offers 90-100% carbon-free electricity to all city residents. To take advantage of this clean electricity supply, San José is focused on opportunities to electrify both its transportation and building sector, and is committed to ensuring that the benefits of this transition are distributed equitably within the community. In 2021, recognizing the accelerating impacts of the climate crisis, San José accelerated its climate targets and committed to achieve carbon neutrality citywide by 2030.

BEI worked with San José from 2019-2023 as part of our work with cities selected for the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge. San José was selected as one of 25 leading cities for the Climate Challenge to accelerate efforts on climate change, which included a focus on building electrification. In 2020, San José passed a Natural Gas Infrastructure Prohibition Ordinance, which requires all new buildings built in San José after August 2021 to be all-electric. On a parallel track, San José worked with BEI on the opportunities and challenges of electrifying its existing buildings. BEI conducted a Building and Housing Stock Analysis for San José from 2019-2020 to identify key opportunities and needs for building electrification and assessed the regional supply chain for air source heat pumps and heat pump water heaters. As part of this work, BEI and San José identified significant housing affordability challenges and health inequities that could be addressed through more equitable building electrification programs and policies.

Building on this foundational analysis, between 2020-2022, BEI worked with San José to develop the Electrify San José Framework, which creates a framework for equitably electrifying the existing building stock and is now one of the most ambitious building electrification strategies in the country. San José hired two community-based organizations, ICAN and Veggielution, to participate in a co-creation process to better understand the critical needs of the city’s historically marginalized communities that can be addressed through building electrification. The City worked with these organizations to identify priority solutions for implementation in the near-term and guiding principles for scaling up building electrification over the longer term. San José then engaged the broader community and stakeholders to ensure the framework would reflect a diverse set of community voices and concerns, which included workshops with community-based organizations, housing advocates, and labor partners. San José released the final Framework in 2022, which the City Council passed unanimously–demonstrating that equitable engagement produces strong political results. 

Building on the Electrify San José Framework, the City is evaluating options to accelerate existing building electrification ahead of the California Air Resources Board’s proposed ban on the sale of new gas appliances throughout the state. In 2023, the City of San Jose expanded their building benchmarking ordinance by adopting building performance standards that require energy-efficiency and water-efficiency upgrades in large commercial buildings. Additionally, the City of San José adopted new requirements in 2024 to provide electric vehicle charging access to all new multifamily housing tenants, providing more equitable access to charging infrastructure citywide. By continuing to follow and build on the path laid out by the Electrify San José Framework, the City can create a holistic approach to electrification that will work for all communities and stakeholders.