This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

American households are all too familiar with the pain of high electric bills, which are climbing nationwide. The same problem is quietly hindering the country’s factories from cleaning up their operations, too.

Hundreds of thousands of US manufacturing facilities burn fossil fuels to produce the heat they need to make packaged foods, bottled drinks, construction materials, and likely everything in your bathroom cabinet. It’s why the industrial sector accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.

Cleaner technologies like industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, and heat-storing batteries are already commercially available. Yet even companies that are committed to decarbonizing can find it hard to justify making the switch. The underlying problem is that in virtually every state, electricity costs more than natural gas for industrial users.

“We have to have solutions that are at the very least competitive with the existing cost of fuel,” said Neil Brown, a chemical engineer at Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, which has over a dozen manufacturing sites in the US and more abroad. ​“In some places where Eastman operates, in parts of the Southeast and Texas, it is very difficult to compete with the low cost of natural gas.”

Brown was speaking on a webinar last month held by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative and Industrial Heat Pump Alliance. The groups looked at electrifying low- to medium-temperature processes, and estimated it would add roughly 250 terawatt-hours to the industrial sector’s annual electricity demand by 2035—or nearly 25 percent more power than manufacturers currently use.

On the plus side, deploying clean industrial technologies could generate around $471 billion in total economic output over the next decade, even when accounting for the lost jobs and diminished business activities of gas utilities and equipment makers, according to the groups’ June report.

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