Dive Brief:
- A United States district court granted the village of Oak Park, Illinois, summary judgment last month against a group of gas-appliance supporters that argued a 2023 ban on gas appliances in new construction conflicts with the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
- Judge Franklin Valderrama said Oak Park’s building code bans appliances based on the type of energy they use; EPCA, by contrast, sets appliance efficiency standards. Since Oak Park isn’t setting efficiency standards, there’s no conflict with federal statute so EPCA’s preemption clause doesn’t apply, the judge ruled.
- “Because the Ordinance here regulates the types of energy or fuel that covered appliances may use in certain buildings, rather than establishing or affecting the appliances’ federally regulated energy-efficiency or energy-use performance standards, the Ordinance does not ‘concern’ energy use under EPCA,” Valderrama wrote.
Dive Insight:
Courts elsewhere have made similar rulings. A 2025 ruling in New York federal court, for example, upheld New York City’s Local Law 154, which effectively bans gas appliances in new construction by limiting how much carbon dioxide a building can emit.
Gas-appliance interests aren’t without their own wins; in a widely watched legal action, Berkeley, California, which enacted the first local gas appliance ban in the country in 2019, agreed in a 2024 settlement to rescind the ban after an appeals court said it conflicted with EPCA by preventing the use of natural gas piping. The court called the piping ban a “circuitous” end-run around EPCA.
A number of other California localities that modeled their gas appliance ban on Berkeley’s ordinance have since rescinded their bans.
With federal courts split on the bans, U.S. Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., late last year introduced a bill that would resolve the issue by prohibiting any kind of state or local gas appliance ban on the basis of the type or source of energy to be delivered.
“This legislation will prevent these one-size-fits-all mandates from wreaking further havoc on small businesses and their local economies as electricity demands continue to break peak records,” Louis Bertolotti, principal of federal government relations at the National Federation of Independent Business, said in a statement when the bill was introduced.
It’s not clear when the House will take up Langworthy’s bill, the Energy Choice Act. The bill has about 160 sponsors, most of them Republicans. Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., introduced a companion bill in the Senate in June.
Vicki Scaman, president of the Oak Park Village board, said the court win validates the locality’s approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “We must move away from reliance on petroleum,” she said in a press release from Earthjustice, which supports the ban.
The coalition that sought to have the ordinance struck down didn’t say whether it would appeal.
“Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court may have the final word on how to apply the EPCA to local natural gas appliance bans,” a Legal Newsline post said.
