A group of industry organizations sued Montgomery County, MD over the county’s “Comprehensive Building Decarbonization” law, also known as Bill 13-22. This law requires the County Executive to issue new building standards eliminating fuel combustion from many new buildings. The lawsuit claims that the Comprehensive Building Decarbonization law is preempted by the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), and identical in several ways to the challenges to recent laws in Denver and Washington, DC, although the laws themselves are different.
Why it Matters for Public Health
The air pollution created by fossil-fuel combustion has serious implications for public health. This is true for outdoor, “ambient” air, which is made worse by direct emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic carbons (VOCs), and particulate matter, as well as by the combination of NOx and VOCs to create ground-level ozone. When an appliance, such as a gas stove, burns fossil fuels inside the home, these pollutants can be concentrated at even greater levels.
Regulating the use of combustion appliances before a building is constructed is an important public-health strategy. It is much cheaper to build all-electric than to retrofit a building designed to use gas after it is constructed—and all-electric buildings are often cheaper to build than buildings that use fossil fuels. Requiring the use of electric appliances has substantial benefits for renters, in particular, because they aren’t able to control the appliances that their building uses, and their landlords typically do not have an incentive to electrify the buildings on their own.
Background
In 2022, Montgomery County passed its Comprehensive Building Decarbonization law. This law requires the County Executive to issue regulations requiring new buildings to be “all-electric” in many cases, starting in 2026 but phased in depending on the type of building. For a building to be “all-electric,” it must “contain[] no combustion equipment, or plumbing for combustion equipment, installed within the building or building site.” The regulations themselves have not yet been issued, but they will contain a number of exceptions as well as a “code modification process” for buildings that are “carbon-neutral or net-zero.”
The plaintiffs in this case are several trade groups—the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the Restaurant Law Center (RLC), The National Propane Gas Association (NPGA), the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Maryland Building Industry Association—as well as a local utility, Washington Gas, and two unions representing Washington Gas’s employees and its contractors’ employees.
The NAHB, RLC, and NPGA are also plaintiffs in the case challenging certain codes in Denver, and the NAHB and RLC are plaintiffs in the challenge to Washington, DC's "net-zero-energy" law. The legal arguments are virtually identical in each complaint: they allege that EPCA bars state and local regulations that prevent the use of appliances that are regulated by EPCA. This is based on the argument that these regulations effectively reduce those appliances’ use of certain types of energy to zero. That argument was adopted by a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges, although this does not make it precedential in Maryland, and the legal theory was also opposed by eleven dissenting judges at a different stage of the case.
Litigation Status (Open)
This case was filed on October 17, 2024. There was an initial round of briefing in early 2025, which included amicus briefs from the Public Health Law Center, Sierra Club, and Chesapeake Climate Action Network as well as a “statement of interest” from the U.S. government, which was subsequently withdrawn. The plaintiffs amended their complaint on January 30, 2025, leading to a new round of briefing and updated amicus briefs from the three prior amici. On March 25, 2026, the Court granted the County's motion to dismiss in its favor, concluding that the EPCA’s preemption provisions do not reach Bill 13-22: since “the Bill does not regulate ‘energy use’ at the ‘point of use,’ its ‘all electric’ mandate for new construction is not preempted.
The plaintiffs appealed the case on April 1 and their opening brief was submitted on May 26. Montgomery County’s submitted their response on June 25, and NAHB filed their reply brief on July 16.