Look, if the government wants to migrate utilities away from gas for heating and replace that with something else, the way you to do that is to have the government build, or contract out to build, the something else that is just as reliable and just as affordable, and then when that is in place, you work with the utility to switch over to the new thing and then retire the old thing. This is called a migration.

Shocking, I know.

The way you don't do it is to adopt some neoliberal obsession with turning everything into a market where end users trying to heat their homes are facing higher prices, and the hope is that these higher prices just cause the utility to transition to something else through the magic of markets.

That's not what markets are good at. Funding big infrastructure projects and coordinating the replacement of one infrastructure with another is the responsibility of government, not markets.

We didn't build our hydro and nuclear capacity by relying on the magic of the free market. We had a planned decision to build this infrastructure as a result of public need, and so we built it, and then the utilities hooked up to it, and the end user got power. We didn't build the interstate highway system by relying on free markets either. When people want to deploy subways, the solution is to build subways, not just tax gas and hope subways just spring up out of the market.

Telling individual homeowners "Well, there is wind power technology out there" is eco-sadism.

It is taking things offline or penalizing them instead of having replacements provided, and we just hope that the penalties will cause replacements to spring up.

This is faith-based energy policy. It is not effective governance, and it is not politically sustainable.