Direct Use Matters: Why Millions of Northwest Homes and Businesses Still Choose the Pipe

Nobody wakes up on a cold morning thinking, "I need energy." They think about a warm house, a hot shower, and breakfast on the table before the school and work rush begins.

That's the detail the energy debate keeps skipping. Households and businesses don't think about kilowatt-hours or dekatherms — they rely on outcomes: heat, hot water, a working oven, a running production line. The fuel category is a detail. The outcome is the point. And for millions of people across the Pacific Northwest, that outcome already arrives directly, through a pipe, not a wire.

A System Already Built at Scale

Direct use isn't a hypothetical. Natural gas already delivers heat, hot water and process energy directly to nearly 10 million people — about 3.7 million households and almost 350,000 businesses — across British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Altogether, direct use supplies roughly half of the region's non-transportation energy needs. And on the coldest hour of the coldest day, it delivers over 70% of the region’s energy needs.

That's not a niche slice of the energy system. It's a parallel network, built over decades, already carrying an enormous share of the region's heating and process load every single day.

Converting That Load Isn't a Simple Swap

At the level of a single building, trading a gas furnace or water heater for an electric one can look like a straightforward appliance swap. But, nothing is as simple as we want to make it. When we multiply that decision across millions of homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses, the picture changes.

Every unit of direct-use energy that shifts to electricity becomes new electric demand — demand that must be generated, transmitted and distributed by infrastructure that doesn't yet exist in that quantity. It isn’t just the cost of the customers new appliance and upgrades to their home.  Its new generation, new transmission lines, new substations and new distribution capacity all take years to permit and build, and all of it is ultimately paid for by customers. Direct use isn't just a fuel choice; it's existing infrastructure already doing the job, at a scale that would be neither quick nor cheap to replace.

Every Conversion Has a Cost

There's also a simpler, physical reason direct use holds its value: energy density and directness.

Natural gas carries a large amount of usable energy per unit, and direct use delivers that energy along a short, efficient path — from the pipe straight to the furnace, water heater, range or boiler. There's no need to first convert that energy into electricity, then move it across transmission lines, substations and transformers before it reaches the appliance. Every conversion step loses some energy along the way. Direct use skips those steps.

Some Direct Use is Irreplaceable

For some businesses and industrial facilities, electricity cannot yet replace natural gas without compromising operations or requiring prohibitively expensive infrastructure. Processes such as metalworking, glass and cement production, food processing, drying, steam generation and commercial cooking may require intense, precisely controlled heat, rapid temperature changes, or continuous operation that available electric equipment simply cannot always provide. Conversion may also require rebuilding production lines, expanding electrical service, installing new substations, or waiting years for additional grid capacity. Industrial energy policy must recognize that businesses differ substantially. For difficult-to-electrify operations, efficient direct use of natural gas is essential to maintaining product quality, reliability, competitiveness and local employment.

Powering Economic Output, Not Just Comfort

Direct use isn't only about household comfort — it's economic infrastructure. Hospitals rely on direct gas service for hot water and sterilization. Restaurants and commercial kitchens depend on it for cooking. Manufacturers, food processors and other industrial users rely on the high-temperature process heat that direct use delivers efficiently and reliably. Laundries, greenhouses and drying operations across the region depend on that same direct connection.

Take that energy away, and it isn't just a home that gets colder — it's a hospital, a restaurant kitchen or a production line that has to find another way to get the same job done, often at a higher cost.

The Bottom Line

People don't need electricity. They need energy — delivered in whatever form gets the job done, reliably and affordably. For millions of Northwest households and businesses, and for the critical industries that keep the regional economy running, that form is still, a pipe.