A Cost-Effective, Fast, and Sustainable Fire Recovery in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025 resulted in significant infrastructure losses, highlighting the need for an urgent, cost-effective, and sustainable recovery effort in the fire-impacted communities of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Both commercial and residential buildings in Los Angeles have historically been built to a dual-fuel standard, with both electricity and natural gas used to support building appliances, water heating, and cooking functions. As the state of California moves toward a clean energy transition, this report provides an initial scoping exercise into the potential costs, speed, safety, and sustainability issues associated with rebuilding the fire-impacted communities in Los Angeles to an all-electric standard vs. a dual-fuel approach. 

 Across cost, speed, safety, and sustainability considerations, our initial findings are the following:

• The overall investment landscape favors all-electric construction.
• The recovery investment landscape differs widely between the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
• There are comparable supply chain constraints associated with both a dual-fuel and an all-electric approach.
• Electric new construction is far more cost-effective than a dual-fuel new build, but the Los Angeles case may not bring about the full extent of these cost savings.
• While some concerns have been raised about workforce constraints in all-electric construction, workforce limitations are unlikely to pose barriers to electric recovery.
• The life cycle costs of both a dual-fuel and an all-electric rebuild may be comparable and depend on uncertain future electricity and gas rates.
• Safety and sustainability considerations favor an all-electric recovery approach.
• Due to the supply chain challenges for both dual-fuel and electric rebuilding, a dual-fuel rebuild is not expected to be faster than an all-electric rebuild.

In light of these findings, our initial conclusion supports an all-electric rebuild and the exploration of the following recommendations for policymakers to support it accordingly.

• Pursue and resource policies supporting all-electric recovery, including streamlining all-electric construction and facilitating electricity affordability.
• Provide incentives and public funds to support lower costs and higher speed of all-electric construction.
• Work with key utility stakeholders on transition planning to support financial certainty.
• Provide capacity building and technical assistance to support communities in sustainable and resilient construction projects.
• Manage a just workforce transition toward sustainable construction opportunities and training.
• Work proactively to address potential supply chain delays through strategies such as streamlining mass rebuilding and pooling purchasing.
• Provide consumer education resources about the cost-effectiveness, speed, safety, and sustainability of all-electric infrastructure.
• Conduct further research to differentiate economic barriers to electrification from other barriers.

This work was made possible with support from the Ziegler Fund for CLEE.

Additional Author: Diya Grover Kandhra