This regulation feels quite frustrating to me, and several comments in this thread illustrate why.
This change is being promoted as a critical step in the fight against climate change. (See most news articles over the past two years covering this.)
But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all.
When you point this out to advocates, you'll get an entirely different argument, this time about personal health. I don't think the personal health justification stands up to scrutiny, for two reasons:
1. If you buy a home and want it to have a gas stove, why is it the state government's place to say that you can't do so, for your own health?
2. According to research I've seen, vented fume hoods seem to mitigate any health effects; if that's true and a state government really wants to intervene, why not spread awareness or perhaps mandate that newly constructed buildings with gas lines also have venting for fume hoods? (Incidentally, requiring venting for fume hoods would be a nice baseline for New York.)
I haven't seen any well-reasoned debate on this topic, possibly because the rationale for the regulation is, in fact, incoherent.
> This change is being promoted as a critical step in the fight against climate change.
27 years from now, when we're supposedly going to be "net zero", do we really want to be supporting a bunch of natural gas infrastructure?
Or should we start making that expensive infrastructure not necessary?
1. Most homes built now will be around in 27 years, and still in good shape.
2. Building and maintaining natural gas infrastructure to homes is expensive.
3. Gas heating is easily replaced by heat pumps, even in cold climates. It should be difficult to justify any gas heat installs in new homes. (Though, more support should be provided in terms of power redundancy in very cold climates.)
4. It's just not worth it to support gas infrastructure just for gas stoves.
If you look at the big picture, and the medium to long term is just doesn't make sense to build out gas-dependent housing. And it really doesn't make sense to build out all of that infrastructure just for gas stoves.
I'm looking forward to going all electric in my small by most standards apartment buildings but I'm not going to tear out my existing mechanical to make it happen today. The upgrade is about $25K a unit for the electrical upgrade, new stove, water heater and HVAC system. I know it's coming but it's not today -everything in my building is high-efficiency and low flow and was the best you could get when I did my last remodel, there's lots of people doing a lot more damage than me and the people in my building. We also have to redo our grid as there is no way it can support an all electric society in the state it's in now we'd be in constant brown out.
Why is this downvoted? This whole thread is scratching it head as to the “real reason” behind this. Here you go. Infrastructure is way too expensive to maintain for stuff you don’t really need.
> 4. It's just not worth it to support gas infrastructure just for gas stoves.
My oven/cooktop is gas, along with my on-demand hot water heater, and fire place. I also have a connection outside that I use for my grill. I think my heatpump has gas backup for when it's really cold.
There's nowhere outside of Alaska in the US that sees consistent temps below -22. Any place that gets that cold will only see it for a few nights at most, and could use resistive heating or portable gas to cover those brief windows.
I don't why the climate change aspect is so dismissed. In germany we are currently banning new gas heating installation as a general push to phase out gas. If you want to replace gas with electricity from green sources you have to start somewhere, otherwise everyone will just cry when being forced to replace it, even if announced that general Gas will shout down in 15 or 20 or whatever years. If you really want to achieve carbon neutrality, you have to think about every energy source. We can not just continue to use gas because synthesising it is so much more expensive and otherwise we're stuck with the infrastructure we built today. Gas cooking is probably easier to replace than gas heating but it's still a headache and the public opposition to replace fully it in the future is directly correlated with the number of people using it.
If you want to achieve carbon neutrality in 20 years it's ambitious and you need a plan. Phasing out the gas-infrastructure is one of them. And housing and its infrastructure is so permanent, our gas heating is as old than I am, at least it looks this way.
What I have concerns over, honestly, is the climate science driving these thoughts.
Nobody has explained to me sufficiently in plain language how carbon dioxide is bad for the environment. I've heard plenty of good explanations for water control, but my limited biology understanding has me presuming that more carbon emissions is advantageous to plants.
Banning gas for heating has a reasonable climate change argument. In Vancouver heating systems in new buildings will have to be zero emission soon. That makes some sense at least. Banning it for cooking seems to be another case of focusing on things that don’t move the needle. Meanwhile coal power plants continue to operate. There are less than 2500 major coal power plants worldwide. Why don’t we band together, mass produce 2500 nuclear plants that are at least as large, and make an actual difference. Yeah there’s lots of details there about fuel, construction and engineering, proliferation, etc. But that is all solvable with current technology. No leap of faith required, just the will, the money, and execution.
Yet nobody seems to talk about real solutions and we’re content to focus on stupidly useless things instead. I find it frustrating. Are we really in a crises? If yes, then fucking act like it and let’s see some ambitious solutions.
In the movies and books you see something threaten the survival of the human race and the whole world comes together and engineers something impossibly amazing to save the world. I think in reality we’d argue about plastic straws, or who pays for it, or gas stoves until the apocalypse kills the species too dumb to save itself.
> Why don’t we band together, mass produce 2500 nuclear plants that are at least as large, and make an actual difference.
Because the same climate activists who keep harping on the "climate crisis" and successfully push policies like in OP, are also irrationally opposed to nuclear energy.
Since these folks are calling the shots, we're heading into an energy crisis in which:
1. More and more demand is placed on our power grid due to moves like banning natural gas for heating.
2. This same power grid is rendered less and less capable and reliable due to being increasingly based on unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.
I grabbed some stats off google: solar nuclear and battery costs
Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant.
Installing a solar farms will cost about $0.80 to $1.36 per watt. Solar farm costs can be estimated by energy output (megawatts) or size (acres). One megawatt is the power equal to 1 million watts, and one megawatt will power about 164 homes. ~$800-$1360/kw
Battery:
$152/kWh
Now, BNEF expects the volume-weighted average battery pack price to rise to $152/kWh in 2023
Nuclear would get some serious economies of scale at 2500 units, so those prices aren't a fair comparison of what could be.
I've long maintained here on HN, however, that under-investment in nuclear has made it not cost effective compared to renewables + storage (remember you don't need 100% storage.) At current market prices, nuclear doesn't make much sense. It could have really helped if we'd started earlier with it though, before renewables were in the picture.
54% of Vancouver's CO2 emissions come from natural gas home heating so yep, banning it makes tons of sense.
I couldn't find the source but I think there actually might be a carve out to continue to allow for natural gas for cooking, but in practice, no one but the foolish super rich (or perhaps some professional commissary kitchens) is going to go to the bother of doing a nat gas hookup for for a stove, so gas stoves are going to become deprecated as a side effect of the more impactful change around home heating.
Even in commercial cooking, gas is on the way out. I help run a catering business and at least in our kitchens, induction is far preferred to gas. It’s not ideal for wok cooking as understand it (without a specialist stove), but for everything else the speed and control of induction is unmatched.
I agree that banning gas for cooking is not important to control climate change. But for new buildings that do not require gas for heating, does it make sense to construct and maintain gas infrastructure just for cooking?
No it doesn't. At least it doesn't make financial sense.
I believe that Vancouver banned gas for home heating but left the door open to allow gas for cooking, but when I read articles about this at the time of the change, contractors quoted said it would be really silly to go to all the effort to create a gas hookup just for cooking. Likely would be very little uptake, and only by super wealthy enthusiast cooks who demand gas for some reason.
No, I think it probably doesn’t make sense. Also people can use the little tanks, like for your BBQ if they really want that. If the building rules allow it anyway.
I _rent_ a home, as do a full half of new york state residents. I'd love an electric stove. Every rental I've ever lived in has a gas stove and no fume hood.
The full half of new yorkers who rent - almost 20 million people - mostly get whatever theirlandlord picked. So when I read posts like this, decrying government overreach, I wonder if you've ever been poor? Have you ever lived here? Do you know what youre talking about at at all? Because the government has never been my problem. It's always a person a few rungs on the economic ladder above me. A boss, a landlord, making my life just a little worse in order to make theirs a little wealthier.
I also _rent_. I hate food cooked on electric stoves, so when I was looking to rent, anything that dint have gas stove was automatic non-starter for me.
This whole argument that “you oppose a forced choice so you must hate poor people” is just a straw-man. Just because you prefer things one way doesn’t mean govt has a business telling me how I should cook my food.
I suspect you're conflating resistance cooktops (the kind with coils that heat up) and induction cooktops (which use EM fields to transfer energy directly into the pan). Resistance cooktops are slow and weak, but induction cooktops are just plain better than gas (faster to heat across the entire temperature range, better temperature control) in pretty much every case except when needing a pan that doesn't fit the induction plate (like a round-bottom wok).
Yeah, and if you’re talking about poor people, what electric stove will their apartment have, resistance or induction? And will they have induction safe cookware?
Banning gas stoves would be a huge blow to all the immigrants who rely on cooking techniques (like woks) that don’t work well on resistance coils, and require expensive special equipment to work on induction.
People in China routinely use woks on electric stoves; they're just as common in China as they are here. There's a lot of mythology about woks and wok hei, most of which is based on people confusing restaurant cooking techniques with home cooking. This issue isn't racially coded.
This is my experience as well. I've spoken to Chinese co-workers who cook a lot of traditional food at home, and they have zero issues with electric stoves (induction or no) for cooking with a wok.
As for those who claim that gas stoves are needed for wok cooking w/ specific techniques, most people who I've actually asked about what they cook on the wok is basically "fried rice", or even worse, they don't actually have a wok at all, and are using the issue as a strawman to complain about government overreach.
For what it's worth: I have a fussy gas range and I'd be peeved to have to give it up, and I don't have an opinion about whether it's good or bad to require new construction to use induction. But the racial angle on this is risible. It's evidence of bad faith argument.
It's a recurring pattern: people not being able to tell "like in the country I/my ancestors came from" apart from "like in the decade/century I/my ancestors left the old country". In the emigrant's mind, the old country is forever locked in the old times. Can't really blame them for it, it's a natural mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless.
I've lived in Oak Park, IL for over a decade, shopping for houses several times, and have never seen an electric stove. What's your point?
What's clearly the case is that homes in China do not generally have the ultra-powered gas wok burners that restaurants do, which is what people are talking about when they talk about what's distinctive about cooking on a wok.
My point was that in my experience they are far less common in China than in the US, as you were claiming. I guess one of us could go look up stats bit given the cost of the item and the relative affluence of the countries I seriously doubt they are close. What was your point in bringing up that they were similarly ubiquitous in both places?
Not even that is true! This seems like another instance of people deriving every facet of their arguments from faulty first principles. There are bowl woks and flat-bottomed woks. We're not going to get anywhere discussing this issue if we can't even agree what a wok is.
I lived in mainland China and Hong Kong for nearly a decade and had electric induction stoves in every apartment. Anecdotal evidence is, as ever, weak evidence.
Interesting. Maybe it's a north/south thing? I was in Beijing. Or maybe it was an affluence thing? I can totally imagine an indication stove being a status symbol. But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.
I lived in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and I think it was mostly indicative of how new the building was. Anything built after ~2000 usually had the option of plumbed gas or electric, but in older buildings I saw a lot of those standalone bottled gas hobs with the purpose-built alcove in the kitchen.
In Hong Kong, it was really down to personal preference. My first apartment came with a normal resistive stove that the landlord swapped to an induction cooktop at my request, and that building (on HK island) didn't even have plumbed gas. It'd been disconnected during a renovation years before I moved in.
> But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.
I actually agree with you here, I was just making a point about the precariousness of using personal anecdata to support a position as broad as "people in China rarely have electric stoves." In a country that big, even the outliers make for an enormous group.
Indeed. I was responding to the claim that they are just as ubiquitous as in the US. Seems a bold claim given my personal experience. I would bet that they will become ever more popular in China as they push heavily toward electric infrastructure with new nuclear power plants and heavy investment in electric cars.
I know absolutely nothing about the type of stoves they use in China, or in the US for that matter, but remember that experiences may go out of date quicker than you'd might expect.
Before I moved to the UK I had literally never seen an electric stove in my life, much less used one, as gas was ubiquitous in the Netherlands. I'm sure you could find it, but it was rare. In the last few years things changed rapidly though, and when I moved back last year there were a number of apartments that had electric or induction) stoves.
Please make your substantive points without crossing into flamewar or personal attack. Those things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for.
Worse, it looks like you've been using HN primarily to post this kind of thing. Please stop! We have to ban accounts that do that and I don't want to ban you.
What proportion of new housing is built for "poor people" to live? I was under the assumption that most new developments are aimed at the mid/high end of the market which makes older buildings more accessible to low income households.
Also induction stoves are quite cheap nowadays (in relation to the overall cost) so it would seem absurd for me to get a resistive one even if you could save $100-200
>> so it would seem absurd for me to get a resistive one even if you could save $100-200
But if it were 30 apartment units, then the cost difference on paper would amount to $3000-$6000 (and it would probably be judged in this way, rather than the cost difference per unit).
Induction cooktops are not expensive anymore. This would have been an argument 10 or 15 years ago but not today.
The price difference between a resistive 4 element resistive and a inductive cooktop is like 20€ maybe 30€ tops. So a cheap one will cost you between 200€ to 250€
(maybe the pricing in US is totally different but that is what you pay for the cheap stuff here in Finland)
I live in America. Builders will definitely cut corners to save $20. Hands down. Even brand new houses that sell for $500k will have "builder quality paint" that needs to be repainted in 5-7 years because it is cheap.
If they cut corners on paint, they will cut corners on your stove.
Don't have experience, but I'd guess a buyer/renter won't see a difference between grades of paint quality, but a resistive vs. induction cooktop will be very noticeable and may raise the value far beyond the price difference.
Yes it’s possible to use a transfer plate to adapt cookware that’s not induction compatible, but it’s very inefficient. One of the benefits I appreciate of induction cooking is not heating up my house while cooking - a transfer plate would negate that.
I understand not everyone wants to buy or can afford new cookware, but cast iron pans are very cheap. Also see brands such as t-fal that make affordable non-stick aluminum cookware with a small steel bottom to make them induction compatible.
We got a $75 portable induction unit and it’s all I ever use. Our wok works great on it, as do all our other pans except 1. Using the gas cooktop now feels like cooking with a Bic lighter. Admittedly it is not a high end expensive one.
Resistive is just fine. No way I'm throwing out my 20 years old stove to save 2 minutes boiling water. Once the coil is red hot there's virtually no time difference with induction.
I think the reason people usually don’t like resistive cooktops is that they change temperature slowly so it is hard to adjust things to the right temperature.
> No way I'm throwing out my 20 years old stove to save 2 minutes boiling water
A normal electric stove isn't even going to be two minutes slower to boil. Depending on the stoves in question, the resistive stove might even be faster to a boil than the gas stove, even if the gas stove is rated for more BTUs.
New Zealand is ludicrous marked up in terms of consumer goods, and I’ve just checked pricing.
The cheapest is resistive electric. Then fractionally more is gas. Induction costs approximately double for 4 hobs (for 2 hobs it’s about 50% more than resistive).
If you count installation, both electric options are going to be less expensive than gas. If the big cable needs running for induction, the cost might be similar to gas.
Not factored in, cleaning. My god is induction nice to maintain.
Gas cooktops were very popular and are still common in New Zealand. It used to be legal (within building code) to run a small 9kg gas bottle (BBQ size) under your cooktop in a kitchen cupboard, so very cheap to install. Resistive cooktops were and are pretty aweful.
Gas indoors is now considered a health hazard even with range hood, and while you can still buy gas cooktops, I haven't seen a new build with gas in a long time.
When I was in college, I bought a portable induction cooker off Amazon for $60. It was the best. I could boil a large pot of water in about the same time as the gas stove I had at home. (I never timed it, but it felt basically the same.)
I could have bought four of those induction cookers for less than $250. If I ever built a house (I currently rent an apartment and am stuck with gas), I would at least be tempted to literally do that, instead of spending the money on a "real" cooking range.
Probably marketing as portable and full range are different markets/consumers. Could also be due to volume. Full ranges might be manufactured at a smaller and less efficient scale. It's also possible that they have better components, are more durable, have more features and more power. Induction cookers can cook faster than gas.
And if the government mandates electric stoves, which of those (restive or inductive) do you think the landlords of cheaper apartments are going to pick?
Anecdotal, but in my cheap apartment (like $300/mo) there is an induction stove. This is not in New York, of course, but still it couldn’t have been that expensive to install.
> induction cooktops are just plain better than gas
I generally prefer induction to gas, but there is one disadvantage - uneven heating of large thin pans. On induction, a part of pan directly above coils can be > 50 degC hotter than its border. This can be mitigated by using pans with thick bottom with good heat conductivity, but then you get higher thermal inertia.
Resistance cooktops are fine too, you just have to learn to adjust to them. I’ve had one in all but one home I’ve ever lived in, and it’s second nature at this point. Every time I try to cook on a gas stove I burn whatever I’m making until I remember how to use them.
This is such baloney - there's so many way more relevant factors to the taste of food then which power source was used to provide heat. I bet if you did a blind tasting you'd not be able to tell the difference.
When people say they don’t like electric stoves, what they are saying is that they don’t like the PROCESS of cooking on an electric stove, and hence the results are not as good
Induction is the best of both worlds, but you do have to have induction pans. Stainless steel last a lifetime, and are not _that_ expensive, and you can also use cast iron!
What I don’t like about induction is there are no visual cues (lots of flames - low flames) and that if you tilt your pan to move things around you lose basically all your heat source
Great you’re theoretically correct - and still pretty much completely wrong. Do you really think the parent was referring to steel nonstick pans? Have you ever heard a recipe or some ask for a stainless steel pan when they really meant non-stick?
> many way more relevant factors to the taste of food then which power source was used to provide heat.
Yeah, but not many more relevant ones to the actual cooking.
> I bet if you did a blind tasting you'd not be able to tell the difference.
You can't do a blind cooking. How often do you cook food on the stove yourself? If you do cook quite often and still insist that gas and electric stoves are equivalent, I'd be very surprised.
Now I definitely don't want to say that I definitely can't do without gas stoves — if they have a negative health and environmental impact, I could be easily convinced to switch to induction stoves, for example. But electric really don't cut it in my experience.
I have to agree with you. I grew up with electric coil stoves, and learned to cook with them, and had them most of my adult life so far until a few years ago when we bought our current home it came a gas stove/oven. I love it, I cooks so much better. Turn the knob and heat is just there now across the whole cook surface, the oven heats fast enough i don't bother to preheat anymore. the wok sucked on the coil stove.
I’m gonna take your comment at it’s most charitable interpretation instead of getting hung up on your unnecessary emotional first line. There exists a lot of culinary processes outside of one’s personal bubble.
Please let me know what you’re willing to bet and we’ll take this forward.
Another poster has suggested that you try a butane torch, but I want to point out, that's not just an alternative, that's a better way to do it. It's much easier to move a small torch than the entire dish, so you can keep the flame moving and get a much more even roast. An aubergine (eggplant for this side of the pond) has enough water content to be pretty forgiving, but if you're roasting pita or something else with low water content, a stove will almost inevitably give you burnt spots which taste bad and contain carcinogens. It's maybe not bad enough to be a dealbreaker for a home cook, but you won't see a nice restaurant doing it this way.
And that's setting aside all the other possibilities a torch opens up, like flan or crusting cheese, which are best done from the top.
i dont know how labor intensive the butane torch is. normally id impale my aubergine on a fork and put it on a small open gas flame and do other things, its takes a while say at least 20-30 mins.
and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?
Well, you do have to actively use the torch, so it is a bit more labor intensive, but you definitely don't have to sit there with a torch for 20-30 minutes.
I haven't made baba ganoush this way so take it with a grain of salt, but the way I've approached fruits with similar water content (i.e. squash or apples) is to bake for an amount of time (which is going to give you a more consistent cook all the way through than roasting anyway) and then finish with the butane torch, for a crispy roasted exterior. If you're using a toaster oven without covering, that will already give you some crispiness on the exterior, so you'll likely be able to get the exterior you want with under a minute of active torching.
The sources I can find seem to indicate that butane actually burns at a lower temperature than natural gas, but you make up for this by putting the flame directly on the food, so I'd guess that the food gets hotter (I wouldn't trust sources that say this confidently, as I can't think of a good way to experimentally verify this). It seems like this gives a higher temperature contrast which gives a higher texture contrast between the interior/exterior of the food. It's subjective whether that's a good thing but I personally think it's better.
> and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?
I don't know, and I would distrust most sources that claim to know. Natural gas is used for a lot of things besides cooking, so I'm not sure how much effort is put into the purity of the natural gas mixture, and that's putting aside all the piping between source and destination which could introduce all sorts of stuff from molds to plastics. I'm not aware of anyone making claims about the safety of natural gas flames and food. In contrast, butane torch fuels are often explicitly intended for culinary use, and advertising makes lots of claims such as "Near zero impurities" and "No residual oders"[1] (the misspelling is theirs). Without any credible independent verification, I personally don't think these claims are worth anything.
That said, natural gas is a much more complicated mix of stuff than butane, and the chemical reaction of combustion is much more complicated. Butane, in a perfect combustion, should produce CO2 and water, while natural gas, in a perfect combustion, will produce CO2, CO (carbon monoxide), water, NOx and SOx compounds (the latter mostly due to additives to give it an odor). Perfect combustion is a hypothetical reaction that doesn't exist in real life, however, so I can't say how well that hypothetical reaction translates to practical reality.
Staying away from the flame war (pun intended), but regarding baba ganoush: you might get better results with an electric oven (grill/broiler) and a cheap gas torch.
yeah occasional. but id terribly miss home if i didnt eat it just the way i make it (my mum made actually). its a major reason why i didnt switch to all electric!
I think we need to ditch the gas infrastructure and completely get rid of natural gas lobby and influence. No gas burners at all, electricity for everything.
From a climate perspective and also from a safety and health perspective.
Gas should be opt-in, not opt-out.
And I'm perfectly fine with this being regulated because the free market sold us leaded gasoline 60+ years after they introduced it maliciously, themselves, for example.
I assume you make non-roasted dishes as well? I’d like to say the majority of dishes don’t need a flame - but I’m sure you would provide a list of exceptions.
My point is that you need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages. Some individuals wanting baba-ganoush in NY should not be the reason to avoid electrification for the others.
I appreciate that forced illegalisation is off-putting, but like others have said, renters don’t get a choice and landlords will avoid all expenditures. We need a way to help the majority wean off gas.
> Some individuals wanting baba-ganoush in NY should not be the reason to avoid electrification for the others.
What stops the others from having an electric stove, while natural gas infrastructure is still available? Are there living units in NY that have natural gas, but no electricity?
> renters don’t get a choice
Electric stovetops are about 30 dollars for two-plate solutions, if you decide for yourself that natural gas is not for you.
Gas is not charged by solely by consumption, so connecting an electric stovetop doesn’t solve the costs, or solve the safety of having a gas connection, or solve the space lost to the gas stove. Why have all that extra hassle for something that is probably more harmful to the environment and your own health?
Portable induction stoves were used in a few kitchens I've worked in, but as a supplementary tool, e.g., the pastry guy needs to make jam while the line is really busy.
The main thing that makes electric stoves hard for a professional kitchen is ultimately speed and space. You need every single burner during a rush, and you need to be reacting quick, and there is usually very limited space. If I need to stop the heat on my pan, I need to stop it now. An electric top requires you to actually move the pan off the burner to somewhere else, but good luck finding a spot without butting in on the garde manger or grill guy. A gas stove offers the flexibility of being able to leave food there until its ready to plate.
> An electric top requires you to actually move the pan off the burner to somewhere else
Is this true of induction? I've never used induction for anything more complicated than pasta, but I would have thought that since the surface (basically) doesn't get hot, turning it off would function the same way as a gas stove.
I am pro banning gas stoves but that doesn’t mean electric is great. Electric sucks ass, even ignoring some things you just cannot do without gas (like make proper rotis) their heating is slow and uneven. At the least induction is fast.
There’s definitely a level of confidently-incorrect cringe here. Please tell me how I should do this https://youtu.be/lsI08y6jwaQ with better cookware.
This whole thread is a bunch of losers who sit in front of computers trying to understand cooking through the science they learned in front of their computer.
Never seen it finished off on an open flame in Singapore or Malaysia. No one does that. Roti prata is one of my favourite late night snacks. Atleast once a week I go down at 1am to buy it.
If we talk about say poppadoms. Doing that without an open flame produces… it produces something…
Wow so I went down a rabbit hole today. When I traveled around India for around 4 months I never saw this made on gas. I did see it done on an open flame but it was never with gas. But YouTube is filled with tons of videos doing it at home on a gas stove. Which lead me down a rabbit hole of how bad it is to use gas flames for this stuff. That I actually think I will never make poppadoms on the gas stove anymore.
So then I asked my Indian co-workers who said they do sometimes use the gas stove to do some stuff but they avoid it as it’s not healthy. They said never finish things like roti on gas stove but they do things with eggplants (and some other vegetable) and peel them after. They said it’s better to use a fire and it tastes better.
Have you ever used induction? Electric induction is the best cooktop I've ever owned, and I was a staunch only gas person beforehand. Plus I can boil water on it faster than is possible in any gas stove @ 5kW (on the 'power' element). It can do a gallon of water in ~ 4 minutes from room temperature or a liter in about a minute it's pretty awesome.
The parent’s comment was also saying that gas stoves are essentially a forced choice on poor people who don’t have many options when looking for a place to rent.
Just because you theoretically have more choice in a free market doesn’t mean you actually do, depending on how desperate you are.
Well then the solution is to mandate a hood that cleans the said toxic gas/es out. And if we were being serious at all; there is always a habitability clause in the rental agreements which can be used to mandate the hoods where gas ranges exists. No new laws/regulations needed.
But those would be too good of solutions and spoil the current sneaky plan. Too many goal posts are shifting for justifying a performative-feel-good-climate fight (the point the top-level comment is trying to make).
There is no pure free-market anywhere (and it's a good thing). Let's not justify govt overreach in the garb of imperfect market-capitalism.
Where did I say that? I’m saying there is no need for restricting gas range installations via legislation.
If the goal is to fight health risks there’s way to mitigate those risks scientifically in other ways that allows people to keep their preferences. Just saying “science” in a sentence doesn’t make your point scientifically valid, we don’t need to turn science into religion.
But...replace gas range with seatbelts or smoking cigarettes indoors and you're repeating exactly the argument that was made while that legislation was happening. "We can't add legislation because I like the dangerous thing"
I don't. I still see a person advocating for their own ability to be negligent as a result of personal preference, in the face of data suggesting that preference is a problem.
If you are going to make up your own definition of "facts" and "data" to suit your argument; I dont think there is a point for me continuing to engage! Have good day
I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone.
This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose.
> you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone.
This is true and entirely misses the point.
A gas stove emits NOx. Cooking some foods at high temperature emits particulates. Different cause, different poison. Also, an air filter can easily remove particulates, but getting rid of NOx with anything other than outright replacement of the air is not so easy.
edit: NOx is for real, and calling it a “green” issue is disingenuous. As far as I know, NOx emissions from stoves are not a particular threat to neighbors or overall outdoor air quality. But they are substantial when concentrated in a house:
(Seriously, look at the last graph in the supplementary material. Admittedly it’s an oven, not a stove, but those levels are no joke and the operating time needed to hit them is low. Baking a pie or cooking a big pot of pasta with a gas oven or stove in a kitchen without proper ventilation is quite unhealthy. And those recirculating carbon filter vents won’t help.
> ADDITION / CORRECTION This article has been corrected. View the notice.
The studies on this are questionable at best regarding the health effects, and it is disingenuous to say that the science on this is anywhere near settled - plenty of refutations exist out there. If you're worried, open a window.
Yeah, I generally follow the idea that if a paper has one revealed error, it probably has a lot more errors that they didn't provide enough evidence to catch, so I didn't read what the correction was. This is a pretty dumb error to get through the writing process.
Also, if you want to see some well-cited posts on the tenuous evidence of health effects of NOx, other posts in this comments section have plenty of sources. Even the link to asthma is pretty tenuous, apparently.
On a quick search, NO may not be particularly toxic at the concentrations in question. (And your body produces it!). NO seems like it’s mostly a problem outdoors because of other stuff it reacts with.
But NO2 is certainly toxic, and it looks like stoves product about 1/4 as much NO2 as total NOx.
(I also recall reading that stoves, with no pot or pan on them, produce minimal CO, but that gas ovens produce lots of CO. Also, residential gas ovens are IMO really quite bad at cooking.)
One extra thing about both NO and NO2 that the narrative on this really discounts (but you touched on) is that they are both fairly reactive, so they tend not to linger in the air. This makes them damaging to whatever environment the end up in, but a lot less likely to build up to toxic levels than stable molecules like CO and CO2. The dose makes the poison, and these ones are hard to get in high dosages.
And yeah, the cheap residential gas ovens really suck, and likely put out a lot more of the bad stuff (both CH4 and CO, but also probably the NOx compounds too) than stovetops. Mixed fuel is now the hot thing in ranges: gas burners and electric ovens.
> I hope you don't use that stove to cook, because if you do, you are putting hundreds of times more harmful particulates into the air than the stove puts out alone.
Really depends on how you cook. If you're not frying, this isn't really a problem.
> This is the same kind of "green"-feeling hypocrisy as the plastic bag bans. After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills.
But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.
> But a big part of this was to reduce plastic litter. Plastic in landfill isn't really a problem (oil being dug from the ground being put back into the ground). But putting a (small) price on plastics makes people a little less careless with them.
Motte, meet bailey. There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans, and they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2 per bag (or reusable bags that break even on CO2 after a few hundred to a thousand uses). This should be considered a huge L for the "environmentalists" who pushed it, on all fronts.
> There is more plastic polluting the environment in Australia thanks to plastic bag bans
Do you have a source for this? Specifically, plastic litter (not in landfill)? Preferably attributable to plastic bag bans and not just following a pre-existing trend?
> they have been replaced by paper bags which emit 10x more CO2
First up, who is giving you paper bags? I haven't come across one store that has replaced plastic bags with paper. Second, this argument was never about atmospheric CO2.
I know we're supposed to, but I've not changed one bit because of these new bags. A typical shop is now 1$ more expensive with the bags, that's where I stop thinking about it.
When I'm out, and my wife calls me to ask me to pick up something at the shop, I don't have my plastic bag with me, so I buy another one. And it ends up in the bin. Now instead of a thin bit of plastic, I've got a bag that's easily 5 times thicker, and took way more to produce.
The stores in CA where plastic bags were banned now have insanely THICKER plastic bags they charge you some small amount for, and they claim are reusable.
They are really thick, almost as nice as hardware store bags, but they all get thrown away.
They should have require a standardized bag/crate with deposit that you would use instead, make it durable enough and people would bring it back or just throw it on the sidewalk and enterprising youths could collect them for the deposit.
> After Australia banned plastic bags, they found an increased amount of plastic in their landfills. Why? Because people used to re-use them as trash bags and were now buying much thicker dedicated plastic bags for the purpose.
Not GP, but single-use plastic bags have been banned in Indonesia too, and the shops/restaurants/etc now send you a new, substantially thicker, reusable plastic bag with every single delivery, with no convenient mechanism to reuse them. Classic case of excessive focus on one part of a much larger system.
Uhhh... woe is you? Plenty of non-poor people live with gas stoves, often without fume hoods, and even prefer gas. Not once have I ever felt ill or victimized because I had to cook on gas.
Love my gas stove, won't live without one, and it keeps my home warm in the winter even when the power goes out. Gas is much more cost effective than electric as well. Also lobe my gas water heater for the same reason. Hot baths during blackouts. This whole "gas is bad for the environment" is bunk when fossil fuels are required to generate al that electricity and that doesn't even get to the cost and efficiency of storing it.
Do your gas appliances actually work when the power is out? I guess you could light the stove with a match but aren’t most boilers going to be electrically controlled such that they won’t work without power.
It also seems like a bit of a weird reason to me as a big reason. But maybe you get a lot more power outages than I do. (I would imagine somewhere with a gas main, where gas heating can be economical, would not have very frequent or problematic blackouts. With no gas main, you use butane/propane which is not so economical). Plenty of people have camping stoves lying around which can be used in a pinch.
It all depends on the devices and how they're setup. If you're in an area that gets really cold AND has intermittent power (which is not uncommon, snow and ice on the lines can take down power) you can either design your setup to work without external power (think: emergency generator, etc) or you can design parts of it to be usable in an emergency (think: stove you can light with a match, fireplace; kerosene heaters, etc).
My gas furnace will not ignite without power and the power necessary to run the blower is 15 amps or so, wiring in a portable generator would be simple.
The water heater works without any power whatsoever.
The stove has electric ignition but you can light it without power. The oven needs power (I think? never tried it).
Gas water heaters usually have a thermopile for their controls. Once the pilot is lit which can be done with one of those ignition clicker buttons (purely mechanical). There's no electric hookup to my water heater, nor have I ever had an electric hookup to any gas water heater.
Gas is also often more reliable than electricity as gas is practically always buried while electricity has many overhead lines in the mix.
> Do your gas appliances actually work when the power is out?
Yes. The gas stove does not need any electricity, same for the gas water heater. It's nice to be able to cook and have hot water showers during blackouts.
The gas furnace does require electricity to run the fan, but it's not much. So running the furnace to heat the house during a blackout is easy to do with a small generator to power the fan while all the heating BTUs come from gas.
Here in PG&E land (might be the most expensive electricity in the country, but at least it's the most unreliable!) these are nice advantages.
> This whole "gas is bad for the environment" is bunk when fossil fuels are required to generate al that electricity
Practically all of the US has some renewable mix, so all the US already away from fossil fuels generating "all" the electricity (renewables + nuclear being 0%).
Over 30% of the electricity in my home is from wind and solar alone.
You also really shouldn't be using your stove to provide warmth in your home since you're probably not venting out the NOx, CO2, and CO emissions. CO poisoning kills a lot of people doing what you're claiming is a benefit.
So while I fully believe your lived experiences and preferences, a relevant question is: why are your electricity supplies so unreliable that having gas as well is even an important concern?
> So while I fully believe your lived experiences and preferences, a relevant question is: why are your electricity supplies so unreliable that having gas as well is even an important concern?
Might be different in the UK.
I have never lived anywhere where blackouts weren't fairly regular. Currently in the backwaters of silicon valley and blackouts are the norm every time it rains, or there's any wind. Or forecast of wind or fear of rain. Thanks PG&E.
Your electricity is unreliable because most people rent?
I don't understand the claimed causal relationship.
FWIW, I'm paying rent for my current apartment, we don't have a gas supply, and I've never had a power cut.
Indeed, while I am rich and do own an apartment back in the UK, roughly three quarters of the 16.5 years since I've last experienced a power cut was in property I pay rent for, and only about 4 years were in the flat I own and began collecting rent on when I left the country. Which, ah, also doesn't have a gas supply.
In any case, not sure what this is suppressed to have to do with reliably of the electricity supply — it's not like landlords get free shares in local power grid companies (or if we do, I missed the memo).
> This whole "gas is bad for the environment" is bunk when fossil fuels are required to generate al that electricity and that doesn't even get to the cost and efficiency of storing it.
Probably depends where you are, as this is very much not the case for everyone.
I have a nominally expensive home with a gas stove with one of those terrible recirculating hoods, and at absolute best I feel a kind of lingering regret and annoyance about it. It pumps out so much waste heat that I'd be opening the windows while cooking even if I wasn't also mildly concerned about the whole combustion thing.
> Not once have I ever felt ill or victimized because I had to cook on gas.
Your comment reads like someone swearing smoking has no health impact because they never felt ill or victimized for smoking.
Meanwhile, even the World Health Organization produces reports on health risks of household air pollution, where stoves are the primary pollution source.
You’ve either misunderstood or deliberately linked an article that doesn’t support your claim about using natural gas cooking.
“Around 2.4 billion people worldwide (around a third of the global population) cook using open fires or inefficient stoves fuelled by kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal, which generates harmful household air pollution.”
Open fire/stove cooking is the primary cause of COPD in the developing world, in the developed world its smoking. The WHO is not worried about US homes with gas stoves. This article is not about natural gas stoves. The article is about open fire/stove cooking.
The above is correct. Additionally, they even mention natural gas as a viable alternative in the abstract:
"It is essential to expand use of clean fuels and technologies to reduce household air pollution and protect health. These include solar, electricity, biogas, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), natural gas, alcohol fuels, as well as biomass stoves that meet the emission targets in the WHO Guidelines."
> The above is correct. Additionally, they even mention natural gas as a viable alternative in the abstract:
It isn't, and you clearly failed to read the paper because you're oblivious to its context. The "alternative" was open-flame coal and wood stoves, as well as querosene stoves, which cause extreme levels of indoor pollution and health hazard and are in widespread use in underdeveloped nations.
Natural gas stoves pollute less than open-flame coal and wood stoves, yes, and are therefore a preferable alternative. However, unlike your clueless claim, this does not mean that gas stoves do not lose a health hazard, or that electrical stoves are not far preferable. The WHO report refutes the bullshit claim that gas stoves don't present a health hazard due to the type and levels of indoor air pollution they create.
This article discusses people in developing nations cooking indoors with indoors burning wood and dung. It isn't clear that this also applies to the amateur chef using natural gas in a mini-mansion.
If it's really that important to you, you could buy an electric burner or use other types of electric cooking devices.
Also, the poster is correct that it's not the function of government to tell people what type of kitchen appliances they can use in their own home. We would typically consider that governmental overreach. It's telling that society is becoming so accepting of being told by the government what they can and cannot do in so many areas of life.
This stuff happens all over the world and in places with solid democracies. Turns out safety and efficiency need to be mandated because the free market will kill people with 0 remorse and the average person has ~0 market power.
Progress is many people working together, through ever more complex communal initiatives such as corporations, NGOs and yes, government.
> Turns out safety and efficiency need to be mandated
In a solid democracy making real progress, the onus is on the one introducing the regulation to prove that safety and efficiency will in fact be advanced via said regulation. I don't think that bar is passed here.
They said New York State, not City. Pick a random town w/ 20k-30k people and you'll see rents as low as $1000. Newburgh is a random example I chose. So there's no reason to think their comments requires them to be more or less wealthy, poor or not poor.
Or maybe they've been poor, and now they're not, so they're speaking from prior experience. Or they have friends or family or acquaintances that are poor. It's not like a wealthy person can't have contact with folks less wealthy.
Average rental prices can be as low as $1,000 for four bedrooms depending on the county. I don't think it takes an income higher than most home owners to afford.
> I grew up in Canada with electric stoves (in multiple rentals). Never once did I have an issue cooking.
This is very much the same as Mac vs. PC debate.
It's 100% preference. The average Mac user will go insane if made to switch to windows, and vice versa. The reasons why are almost entirely personal preference, and a quite strong preference at that.
How does a gas stove make your landlord wealthier? What you are really saying is you want the entire world to adjust to your personal preferences, that is childish.
LL here, my guess is that gas stoves are a little cheaper and I don't have to drag 100/200amp service to every apartment instead of the usual 60amp service they likely have. Add to that getting permits could take years in NYC. I looked into going all electric but the numbers were horrible, it was ~$25,000 per unit with no noticeable difference. There's no greed involved it's just math.
This sentiment is often on display here and alway out of touch with reality. Plenty of people will never have the right opportunities, no matter their effort, to make any choice they want to put themselves in any social/wealth class of their choice.
This sentiment is the modern equivalent of "let them eat cake".
Thanks for speaking out, not in NYC but I feel just the same.
People love to think freedom is whatever an industry is telling them it is in ads.
Health and environmental issues, and social issues for us plebs, only advance with hard won legislation.
I don’t buy the climate argument. However, banning gas appliances comes from the same place as banning lead paint. Gas appliances are a major source of indoor pollution. Gas heating leaks pollution inside the home, especially as furnaces age.
Plus, many residents don’t own their own property. This helps protect renters.
Yes, but this regulation targets everyone in the state of New York, not just renters, and the research I've read seems to indicate that fume hoods protect against this indoor pollution.
I have never seen an actual fume hood in any residential home in my life (close to 800 homes across the South and New England. I have seen plenty of faux hoods that do absolutely nothing.
Maybe it's something they only add in luxury homes.
ah that makes more sense, like those 15+ story buildings? I should have clarified my comment was in regards to SFH or triple deckers. I would honestly think it would be easier to implement in SFH but I'm guessing it's mostly due to developers cutting costs and that there is no regulation to actually make a viable one.
I find this very shocking NY allows that. I'm in CA and I've never seen a gas stove that didn't have a fume hood. In fact a lot of electric stoves here have fume hoods. I would assume we have a regulation about it here but I've never looked it up.
That's odd, I mean my apartment has a "vent hood" but it just feeds into a sponge into a wall with no ventilation leading outside. These are the types of hoods I've only seen in my life, only in professional kitchens have I seen true ventilation and even then some kitchens are moving to induction sense it's a much safer work environment and speeds up cooking but even then you still need ventilation.
I went ahead and looked it up. It seems like it is required in CA. It also seems NY is similar but also allows ductless. I didn't read up on it that much though.
Live in New England. Home I grew up in (built in the late 70s) had one. All but one apartment I've lived in had one -- including this one, which was built in the late 1920s.
I remember seeing a stufy fairly recent that discovered that they actually weren’t very effective, especially if you use the front burners. My intuition about it is that if you can smell the food, you’re probably also getting air pollution.
On top of that I’m not sure if anyone has studied what percentage of people actually turn their fume hoods on, because I bet that is low too.
> In 1960, New York City prohibited the sale of paint with high levels of lead for residential use, New York state imposed a state-wide ban in 1970, and the federal government banned lead in paint in 1978.
You seem to think the danger from lead was obvious to all yet NYC was decades ahead of other places where the paint industry prevented or repealed actions to even label lead paint as poisonous.
The dangers of lead were known before leaded gas was even invented much less popularized. But immediate profits and convenience are much stronger human motivators than long term health consequences ever are.
See also PFOA and similar. Health impacts were known for 20+ years but it was too profitable so those reports were buried and lobbied against. And consumers weren't eager to acknowledge their amazingly convenient non-stick pans were directly poisoning hundreds of people and causing long-term issues in thousands more.
Now gas stoves are a little bit more unique in that the proponents aren't profit hungry corporations doing shadowy bribery but instead countless chefs who prefer it and will demand it, consequences to themselves be damned.
It's arguably less dangerous than lead paint. If don't let lead paint deteriorate and clean regularly then the health risk is minimal.
There's no comparable mitigation option for gas stoves. Installing a fune hood involves cutting a hole in the wall, no chance your landlord will ok they in a cheap place.
im from a part of the country where we get hurricanes
the power will go out and usually we also have a boil water notice
for those days it is extremely helpful to have a gas stove, we can still cook and get clean water rather than just eating cold cans and hoping we have enough bottles
What does that even mean? Did you not get the whole, burning hydrocarbons is bad for the climate memo? We have to stop all net carbon emmissions in the next fifteen years or were screwed (propably already are) and twats like you keep going online spouting your 'i don't buy the climate argument' bullshit. We're literally talking about burning hydrocarbons to heat stuff, how the hell can you say that you don't buy the climate argument?!?
You can believe climate change is real and an imminent threat and still hold the position that banning gas stoves is a meaningless, misguided policy that will have no effect on climate change. There is no mutual exclusivity.
A typical natural gas stove burner uses around 7,000 to 10,000 BTUs per hour, which translates to about 0.8 to 1.2 pounds of CO2 emissions per hour of use. This doesn't even qualify as a blip on the radar of the global emissions problem. It's completely irrelevant to the problem you claim is prompting your antisocial outbursts.
At some point, you'll have to decide whether it's more about the climate or more about you. Hopefully you'll choose the climate eventually.
It really depends how much of the methane in the entire chain is combusted. Uncombusted methane has a short term radiative forcing 100x as much as C02.
And it turns out there are a lot of leaks and incomplete combustion in the overall methane supply chain. Residential hookups are a significant source of slow leaks.
So completely avoiding a hookup in the first place may have a larger climate impact than your napkin math suggests.
giving per person emission numbers isn't meaningful. multiply by a couple billion people and it's a lot more. you're also missing part of the reasoning which is that if you want to also ban gas heating (which produces a lot more CO2) and get rid of the gas pipes, you also want to minimize the number of gas stoves that need to be thrown out.
We’ll muddle through. At any rate, the point is to focus on low hanging fruit —- target high emitters, an electric stove powered by a coal plant is worse than a natural gas stove.
NY does get some amount of power from out of state while it having any coal plants in the state but - edit - it seems to be less than 1%. Now I actually wonder why NJ has so much coal power compared to ny.
Climate change is one. Induction stove powered by the latest generation of gas plants are actually more efficient than gas stoves. Of course, they can run off renewable or nuclear energy too.
For health, it is not great, and not all building are equipped with proper ventilation. And yes, it matters to the government, because even the US government will spend money to keep you alive if you are sick, and in the case of gas stoves, it is not just you, it will impact everyone who lives with you, possibly including your children.
And the last one is safety. I don't know the relative fire hazard of electric devices over open flames, but I'd go with the open flame. And sometimes entire buildings blow up because of (sometimes voluntary) gas leaks.
All these may be small effects, but they are real. And electric stoves are good now, especially induction. Gas stoves still have a few advantages, but not as much as they once had. I've even seen clever battery powered stoves, the batteries allowing them to have greater burst power than what the electrical installation can supply, they can even be used as a backup power supply.
Note that I have a gas stove, and I like it very much. But the reason I have it is that we already had gas. If they banned gas for the entire building, I would have no problem switching to something else (induction).
You gotta start somewhere mate, might as well start with a rule that says, if you're gonna build something new and put a new stove in, might as well make sure it's electric. Really don't see you're point here. So because the impact of a single measure is not that big it means we shouldn't do it? You could apply that reasoning that a shit load of individual measures, what you fail to point out is that all those individual measures add up to a Significant reduction, even if any single one doesn't by itself.
The real world isn't basic chemistry and we shouldn't flippantly pretend it is. Stove gas also contains nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. In a study of (approximately) all children in asthma, researchers found that stove gas explains 14% of all asthma cases.
Yes, but natural gas isn't pure methane and CO2 isn't good for the brain. Burning something without a vented hood in a closed space can be incredibly dangerous. Especially if you're talking about high rise apartment buildings where... well... hot gas rises.
I mean your argument is sound enough in that a household's CO2 emissions are trivial compared to big industry or global ecosystem collapse, but that's not the only argument.
Europe found itself in a huge conundrum last year when Russia cut off the gas supply, highlighting our dependency on cheap Russian gas. It meant households went cold and lost their primary means of hot water and cooking - not so much because there was no gas, but because it was unaffordable.
But in my neck of the woods, removing dependency on gas had been ongoing for a while already for various motivations. One reason to do more with electricity, for example, is because people have cheap solar panels on their roofs now, using that to heat their house is (seems?) more self-reliant, cheaper, and less environmentally impactful in the long run.
And sure, one house won't make a difference, neither will a thousand. But it'll start to make an impact at scale.
There is no one fix for climate change, it will take tens of thousands of small changes and legislation over the span of decades.
It is not only particulate matter but gaseous combustion products that are the problem, and gas stoves are used for a LOT more than only searing protein, starting with heating tea water.
Also, just because searing protein produces bad indoor pollution, doesn't mean that any other pollution should therefore be automatically ignored. It is purely optional whether you want to use your stove to sear protein (e.g., you won't find any vegans using it for that purpose), but you don't really have an option if the only thing installed is a gas stove to heat your tea water or saute your onions...
Sure, if you are into buying extra appliances when you already paid for one.
And what about when you want to bake or broil something?
& yes, fume hoods do help, with "help" doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. They also need to be turned on to work (not likely every time you heat a pot of tea), and are noisy, and waste even more heat, blowing out cubic meters of already heated/cooled air to exhaust milligrams of pollutants. Always better to never generate the pollutants in the first place.
And for the societal-level goals of reducing climate change and improving public health, it is best to do it at a societal scale, not making every individual go and spend resources to redo and workaround the work that has already been done. Far better to just not install the polluting infrastructure in the first place.
It’s a lot easier to just ban stuff than to regulate things so they’re done properly. I’m sure if building inspectors did an unannounced tour of 100 random apartment buildings in New York they’d find a list of code violations a mile long.
Banning turns enforcement from a "is this gas stove properly vented, when inspected before either are installed" to a "is that a gas hookup for this building? wtf"
I hooked up my house with indoor air quality monitoring during covid to keep track of CO2 levels as a representation of ventilation levels.
There have been many unintended consequences to what this experience taught me including dehumidifiers, indoor plants, air filters, ventilation schedules, and yes, eliminating natural gas.
NO2, CO2, CO, PM2.5, and VOC would go up to unhealthy levels even with a hood vent and windows open. It would persist for hours even if I opened 5-6 windows, and would permeate the entire house even though I use a Japanese door hanger to keep air in the kitchen isolated. There was simply no choice other than to go electric.
As an aside, i switched from a high end $3k American gas stove to a $80 Japanese induction unit and $500 Toshiba steam/convection oven with automatic recipes and infrared sensors and my control over cooking and cooking speed have both been so much better.
Induction stoves use less energy, have no emissions, are safer, and cook Better than gas.
The gas lobby has been working for decades to trick Americans into thinking gas is somehow better. Idk how these people sleep at night knowing they are unnecessarily subjecting people to greater expense, greater pollution, and an inferior cooking experience.
But maybe most gas company employees drank the koolaide
1. Gas stoves emit CO2 and likely Methane due to leaks. In fact, methane (natural gas is just methane) is a very potent greenhouse gas and the methane industry leaks a significant percent every year. So having lots of gas infrastructure basically guarantees a bunch of methane will leak into the atmosphere. I doubt the stove-only emissions are an appreciable percent of global emissions, but I'll take a 2% reduction. However, there is a follow on effect. Each utility we transition off of direct fossil fuels results in economiesof scale moving away from fossil fuel to electricity (and hopefully clean power generation). So in the medium-term the effect could be multiplied.
2. Burning methane in your house is going to cause some pollution. Methane isn't pure, so other stuff is likely getting burned too. I mean, just logically lighting a fire in your house is probably not going to be good for your health in general.
As for "should we regulate this". It depends on perspective. The gas lobby has worked hard and spent a lot of money to trick people like you into to thinking gas stoves can compete with induction ranges. They cannot. Induction ranges are cheaper, more energy efficient, safer, and healthier than gas stoves. Installing a gas stove in 2023 is using an inferior technology either because of ignorance or Nostalgia.
Now, you could argue that it's the right of each citizen to choose to make bad decisions. In this case, however, that bad decision perpetuates an unsustainable energy apparatus. So I would argue the public good outweighs the homeowner's (or more likely, corporate landlord's) ability to make bad decisions.
1. Because destroying the planet affects everyone and injuring yourself costs everyone else in state spending. We also don’t allow asbestos or releasing poison gas in your garden.
2. Would you consider spreading awareness a suitable solution to knife crime? No? I wonder why.
1. Do you believe in banning other bad things people do to themselves like smoking or eating too much? Obesity is by far the largest public health problem in the United States.
2. There is a relevant difference between doing something bad for you (like smoking - legal but the government tries hard to let you know it's bad) and murdering others with a knife.
i also dont understand why we can't have legislation that says "you can only have a stove cooktop if its properly vented"..
In the winter, when i lose electricity, i can run my house on a small amount of power because i have natural gas heat, cooktop, clothes dryer, and two natural gas fireplaces. I'm not particularly interested in giving up that safety or luxury.
Good thing you won’t have to. No one is talking about forcing you to rip out your gas fireplace. You simply won’t be able to replace it when it breaks down 30 years from now.
I'm not sure why you think that makes me feel any better? The problem still exists, you've just kicked the can down the road. I'm also not excited about ripping out walls in a fairly large house just to run 10/3 so i can get a 240v connection to an electric cooktop at some point in the future.
> But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all.
When Vancouver banned natural gas hookups in new buildings in 2022 the justification was that they pointed to the fact that 54% of CO2 emissions in the city came from home heating. The next biggest source was transportation, I think 39%ish.
It's a clear reasonable move, as just like when you're trying to improve performance of a computer program, you start with the biggest numbers and see if you can make it smaller.
Presumably other cities in areas that use natural gas for home heating as much as Vancouver are also seeing home heating be a very large percentage of their CO2 emissions.
If we can trivially, simply through some minor regulations cut over time the emissions of every city in NA by 50% that's clearly a massive improvement and well worth doing?
If this is not worth doing in an effort to tackle the climate change problem I do not know what is.
To me this feels like one of the easiest low hanging fruit things we can do there is.
I'm one of those people who weirdly likes resistive electric cooktops - but yeah, I 100% agree with you.
I'd rather people install heat pumps in new construction, and I'd agree that you should discourage use of natural gas for heating, I think there are ways to do that with market incentives, not by bans.
> If you buy a home and want it to have a gas stove, why is it the state government's place to say that you can't do so, for your own health?
This is the wrong question to be made. You should ask what should be the safety standards you need to adhere to ensure health risks are mitigated.
The reason why this sort of thing must at all times be regulated, without any exception, is that the personal interest of a corporation investing in real estate by selling it off right away are not aligned with the interests of those who actually have to be exposed to the health risks created by said corporation.
To put it more broadly, just because you are ok with your home causing health problems to its occupants, that doesn't grant you the right to subject everyone around you to them, or even whoever will live in that house after you live.
To make it clear, let's consider doors. You might feel you have no use for a wide corridor and you're ok with custom narrow, submarine like doorways. Except that a wheelchair or a stretcher can't go through. Therefore thanks to your shortsighted and ignorant "why should the government tell me how to be safe" point of view, you needlessly screw over your future self and/or everyone that may possibly live there.
Regulation is not a conspiracy. Regulation reflects hard lessons learned with pain and suffering, and ensures that easily avoidable problems can be avoided easily. We learned lessons from fires and mobility constraints, and thus we have regulation ensuring each and every utility in your home is safe. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel each time anyone needs to build something, we only need to check what's the regulation and what are the constraints.
Air quality is starting to be noticed as a major health problem, specially with higher occupation densities, and thus we have safety lessons that need to be learned to avoid these issues. And no clueless naive spur of the moment bootstrappy individual has a clue about them. Hence the need to impose regulation, because these arrogant morons think they know best when they know nothing. I mean, does it make sense to risk our health just because an amateur didn't even wanted to bother doing his homework?
> that doesn't grant you the right to subject everyone around you to them
It seems to me you are switching to a third argument, which is societal (rather than personal) health risks, along the lines of second-hand smoke. I haven't seen this argument made in a serious journal, but maybe I've missed it. Can you point me to a rigorous analysis of this?
I will also point out that, as I mentioned above, it seems fine to me to require vented fume hoods in new buildings with gas stove lines. I'm hoping that addresses at least some of your argument.
First, obviously regulation is a conspiracy. It will is a coordinated activity by multiple individuals.
Second, none of this is an argument to ban natural gas appliances. what is the harm? Is the harm acceptable? Should a person be allowed to except the harm? Can the harm be mitigated by education or change in behavior? And who has the jurisdiction to implement these regulations even if natural gas stoves are in unreasonably dangerous to the occupants who are you to tell me that I can’t do that to myself?
> First, obviously regulation is a conspiracy. It will is a coordinated activity by multiple individuals.
Your comment goes way beyond being wrong. You clearly do not know a) what a conspiracy is, b) how standards and regulations are specified and adopted. You clearly are trying to comment on subjects you're entirely oblivious about.
> Second, none of this is an argument to ban natural gas appliances.
Except it does. Again, you seem completely oblivious to what regulations and standards accomplish. You're trying to reject well established concepts and mechanisms that you know nothing about, and filling in your ignorance with conspiratorial make-believe.
For your information, builders are also forced to comply with regulation on thermal insulation in particular and climate confort in general. Why? For the very same reason NY banned natural gas in new buildings: mitigate the environmental and economic impact of climatizing ineficcient, sub-standard homes.
> what is the harm? Is the harm acceptable?
I invite you to read the regulation. You are clearly commenting on stuff out of ignorance.
It's not just your own health though. Kids can develop asthma partially due to gas stoves and the toxic fumes that stay in the apartment for hours/days after. Some studies estimate 1/8 of all asthma cases for kids is due to gas stoves in USA.
I don't see this policy as having much of an effect against climate change but it is another step in making people aware of climate issues. Congress does not have the ability - right now - to ban cow meat or eating fish, but this would be a much better policy to aim for.
About the argument over climate change :
The thing is that although stoves don't represent much not in proportion to total consumption of gas, it acts as foot in the door for the gas industry.
That's a fine strategy, but practically speaking, if you're looking for a foot in the door, I'd start with something that doesn't anger more than half of your constituency.
> When you point this out to advocates, you'll get an entirely different argument
This is a very common argumentation tactic, and it usually exposes that the first argument(s) are just a front for our actual axiomatic belief (which hasn't been disclosed). The core principle is often something that we know is much more controversial.
Great comment but a point you missed is that the cooking itself produces the vast majority of the indoor air pollution. It would be reasonable to start using building code to push for real venting of ranges gas AND electric, ... of course once you've done that then the gas indoor air quality issue is moot.
> venting for fume hoods would be a nice baseline for New York.
Yes! This would probably raise the air quality in buildings in general. I've seen studies showing that air quality has a direct correlation to test scores in school buildings. Imagine the benefits across a large city like NYC...
It's only about personal health from the emissions in your house, anyone that tells you otherwise is a liar. Natural gas has been billed as a cleanen alternative for decades.
Those two reasons fall victim to the fact that a lot of homes are owned by landlords, who have a very long history of creating setups that are unsafe for their tenants, whether immediately or over time through failure to maintain the property.
Regulating ventilation is far less effective than simply making ventilation no longer an issue (by disallowing gas stoves in the first place).
How things are discussed and reported in media may not have a direct correlation to how that thing is.
If people want the natural gas debate to be about climate change but it’s really about personal health and a city’s right to govern risk in that place, that itself doesn’t change because other people are saying, or blogging, “climate change” for this given thing.
So using your "evidence" which is another citationless Hacker News post:
> Agreed that 1% of the United States' 28% of global CO2 emissions is negligible in the grand global scheme.
This is incredibly ignorant of the "death by 1000 cuts" issue of climate change. 1% or 28% of global CO2 emissions, if this statistic is even true, is huge. Very few climate change interventions are this effective.
The more effective climate change interventions include strict supersets of this, like "banning all new fossil fuel construction", which, if implemented in the US, still only gets you a few percentage points on the larger problem, and would get much greater pushback from people who don't care about climate change and will always cite government overreach for any regulation.
What do you think would be a non-negligible difference? Do you even believe in human-caused climate change? I'll be happy to provide more, real citations, but it's hard to tell what level of burden of proof I should be taking on if I don't know what you think I need to prove.
> 1% or 28% of global CO2 emissions, if this statistic is even true, is huge.
1% of 28%. If we trust that number, that means that the best we can hope for from this change is 0.0028 (0.3%, rounding up) of global emissions. That number is a ceiling: it assumes that not only do new buildings not have gas stoves, but that all old gas stoves in the United States are removed as well.
This negligible (IMO) improvement comes at the cost of 1) being vulnerable during power outages, 2) having a far worse cooking experience on a daily basis, according to many, and 3) generating significant political backlash that will hinder changes that will actually make a difference.
One of my favorite climate change books is How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates, in which he outlines where the biggest opportunities lie. His approach seems far more practical and likely to make a dent in the problem.
> One of my favorite climate change books is How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by Bill Gates, in which he outlines where the biggest opportunities lie. His approach seems far more practical and likely to make a dent in the problem.
This is one of your favorite books, and it literally, explicitly disagrees with what you're saying?
One of the core points of that book is that reducing emissions is not enough--we have to eliminate emissions, not reduce them, and investing in reduction solutions may in fact prevent eliminating emissions. Natural gas is literally the example he gives of this. He notes that natural gas is a minor carbon emitter compared to other fossil fuels, but continued investment in natural gas means that we'll still be emitting carbon in 2050, which is his target date for eliminating carbon emissions. That reduction won't be enough--elimination is the only solution.
I mean, dude, it's in the Wikipedia summary. Why would you cite this without at least putting in 30 seconds to investigate whether it supports what you're saying?
One of the core points of the book, if I recall correctly, is that regulations should be made in practical, data-driven ways and "bring everyone along for the ride". Without this approach, we will fail.
This means starting with high-impact changes that people will buy into, and prove to them that the change is worth it. Removing gas stoves is a terrible move at this stage.
Climate change is unmitigatable at this point. It's an irreversible exponential function with many positive feedback loops. Even IPCC is lobbied by governments to make it seem less severe than it is [1]. Human population has overshot [2] in 1971, now we'll see the consequences. Brace for the biggest famine history has ever seen, it is coming fast (most definitely before 2030).
Did you know that almost 40% of NYC's electricity grid is powered by natural gas? Another 30% from nuclear and ~20% from hydroelectric. Since nuclear and hydroelectric can't be immediately stepped up, what do you think is going to be increased to generate power for all these new electrical appliances that will be drawing power from the grid?
The heat transfer and energy loss of electrical appliances generally makes them less efficient than natural gas appliances, thus actually increasing the amount of natural gas that will need to be burned to accommodate this policy. This is literally going to increase the amount of natural gas that needs to be burned to maintain existing cooking patterns.
This policy and ones like it are why people can't take environmentalists seriously.
> What can be stepped up fast is wind and solar energy.
I don't know who told you this. Can you point to any large city that is running on purely wind & solar right now? As far as I'm aware, there's not even a large regional city that has demonstrated this can work with current battery technology. I would be really happy to be wrong on this, but as of right now, it's not an option and we need to be realistic about that.
"The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) says nuclear power plants had a capacity factor of 92.6% in the US during 2022. This compares to 36.1% for wind energy and just 24.8% for solar photovoltaic technology. To a rough approximation, it takes three times as much wind capacity and four times as much solar to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power plant over a given period. This is complicated by seasonality. Solar, for example, is particularly ineffective during the winter months when energy needs in the northern portion of the country are highest."
> Can you point to any large city that is running on purely wind & solar right now?
That wasn’t their claim at all, so it seems questionable to demand they prove this.
It’s like if someone said “cheerios are good for the heart”, and you asked someone to demonstrate that nobody ever had a heart attack while eating cheerios. You’re challenging an exaggerated version of the claim that was made, not the actual claim.
To make the climate argument, while it’s true that methane is being used to generate electricity, and there are losses that come from transmitting electricity, switching to electricity overall reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere. Because methane is 80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, even small leaks of methane have an outsized impact. When methane leak rates exceed 2.7% of the amount burned [1], it has worse warming impacts than burning coal. Having a network of pipes going to individual residences will introduce many joints and fittings, all of which leak. Even behind the meter residences leak up to 1.3 % of what they burn [2]. Even if you were to burn methane to generate electricity, even if there are efficiency losses to generation and transmission, it’s better to send that methane to one destination to be burned, than to thousands just to prevent the potential for it to leak out into the atmosphere.
So because nuclear or other solutions can’t “immediately” be stepped up (debatable, but it doesn’t matter), we should not bother to create the circumstances in which they would become beneficial?
This go-nowhere attitude and is why people can’t take fossil fuel apologists seriously.
You mis-characterized me. I actually identify as a nuclear energy apologist. Nothing would make me more happy than to see nuclear energy sources being fast tracked.
I don’t think I’ve mischaracterized anything, unless you’re telling me that you didn’t mean to paint this effort as meaningless posturing by ineffective environmentalists that would only have negative results.
If nothing would make you happier, make that point in your comment. “Maybe this will make a difference in 20 years” or “nuclear advancement is what we need” would completely change the tone.
For the average American, 4 devices in their home - water heaters, furnaces, stoves and gas powered clothes driers - account 95% of residential emissions [1]. Residential energy use accounts for ~20% of US annual carbon emissions [2].
The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.
You could potentially make an argument that stoves are not the lions share of those emissions - but even if they only represent 10% of residential building emissions, that’s still 1% of US carbon emissions annually (which is a huge number when expressed in tons of CO2)
I appreciate you digging up this information, this is exactly what's been lacking in press coverage of the issue.
If you're telling me that fully eliminating gas stoves in the U.S. (something that will not happen in our lifetimes and will come at great political and personal cost) is going to reduce U.S.-specific emissions by just 1%, I think I'm even more convinced that this regulation should not have been passed.
Not sure where you’re coming up with this - the average modern gas stove is expected to last 13-15 years [1]. Obviously there are exceptions but we can expect 95%+ of this infra to be replaced in 20 years just due to equipment failure. Seems reasonable to expect that effectively all gas stoves in the US will be replaced at least once in the next 50 years.
> great political and personal cost
This assumes that installing new gas infra has no cost. It also ignores the long term health impacts (and costs) of burning natural gas indoors. Additionally, IRA subsidies partially cover the cost of stove replacement in the US. Upfront cost may be higher with induction today, but lifetime cost is lower due to the lower cost of electricity.
This frame also ignores the climate impacts, which I would argue have both significantly greater political and economic costs than not allowing gas infra in new buildings.
> What am I missing?
I agree that it is not viable to say “we must replace all gas infra today.” However, by allowing it to be built in new buildings, we’re locking ourselves into at least 15 years of additional CO2 production from this hardware at a time when we need to be reducing CO2 emissions as much as possible. CO2 not produced today is CO2 that we won’t have to draw down from the atmosphere in the future - something that also costs money. Not installing infra that produces CO2 is the easiest way to ensure we stop producing CO2
Beyond that - I’m not quite sure what your argument is. Is it just that 1% is too small to make a difference (or be regulated) - I’d ask you what is the cutoff at which it is viable for you? And what is the strategy for addressing emissions that don’t meet your cutoff?
It’s a balancing test. Cooking on electric stoves is a far worse experience than cooking on gas. Induction stovetops are somewhat better than the classical electric tops that generate heat through resistance, but only somewhat.
I am stuck using an electric stovetop, and will replace it with an induction one soon, but I would switch to gas in a heartbeat if it were available.
We can get rid of a whole percent in emissions by giving up nothing important, and you think it's not a regulation that the government should pass?! What should the threshold for a regulation to pass, in your opinion? Should it cut single-handedly emissions by 2% on its own? 5%? 10%? 50%?
Based on the information you've provided, I don't think we can get rid of a whole percent, since that would require the entire country to completely get rid of gas stoves and also for their new electric stoves to be powered by something that does not produce emissions.
I know you'll disagree, but my take is that the upside (<1% savings over the course of, say, 30 years) is outweighed by the downside (lack of ability to cook or boil water during a power outage, far worse cooking experience).
Agreed that 1% of the United States' 28% of global CO2 emissions is negligible in the grand global scheme.
Additionally, the energy cost of creating new stoves with significantly more complex internals (both due to the constant march of technology and the relative complexity of electric or induction cooktops versus gas) can't be overnighted.
I find a flaw with your argument. The question is not "are the major gas appliances the primary drivers for household emissions". That seems true and obvious. It is "does replacing them with electrical versions lower total emissions"?
Meanwhile, you seem to be using different definitions of household emissions. Your first source about 95% seems to be talking about direct emissions, ignoring the impact of electricity generation. Your second source about the size of the problem (20%) seems to include electric production.
> The 2nd figure accounts for carbon footprint of electricity generation used in the home as well as gas combusted in the home. The 4th chart from [1] suggests this is about a 50/50 split (if we bring grid emissions to 0 but don’t exchange these natural gas devices, carbon intensity remains at half of what it is today). Therefore, we can conclude that these 4 appliances in residential properties account for 10% of US carbon footprint.
To your first question - the answer is yes; replacing gas appliances with modern electric appliances is less carbon intensive, even if the electricity is produced by fossil fuel combustion. This will become increasingly true as the grid gets greener over time and the carbon intensity of electricity production continues to drop
The biggest effect would be the negative one from manufacturing and replacing all those stoves. Gas stoves are a molecule in a drop in a bucket of climate change.
How about we go after the coal power plants first? Or allow nuclear reactors on shipping vessels? Both of those will have 1000x more benefit than paper straws and electric stoves, whose benefits are questionable at best. There's plenty of lower-hanging fruit to go after.
I'm not sure how you can credibly claim your goal is to minimize "headache and inconvenience" and then suggest replacing large parts of infrastructure as opposed to just adding new building codes for future developments that require no work.
Meanwhile, the obvious consequences for nuclear reactors on shipping vessels will be radioactive debris spreading terrorist attacks.
Let's just change shipbuilding emissions codes to require future ships to be 0 emissions by 2027. By your logic, that requires no work.
Also, you may need to learn more about modern nuclear technology. Shipboard nuclear reactors these days are very safe, and there are plenty of available reactor technologies out there that are impossible to turn into bombs.
If there were already ship engines produced at scale that were the same cost drop in replacements and could be used with zero-extra training by existing personnel, and were just as efficient, safe, etc. then I would of course want future ships to be 0 emissions.
Meanwhile, shipboard nuclear reactors have radioactive material. They can be cut open, so the radioactive material can be taken out. It can then be distributed throughout NYC by a terrorist with conventional explosives, killing millions.
Because we're not doing the things that are truly impactful and have no cost to individuals, and instead focusing on changes that are annoying and useless. Plastic bags, plastic straws, gas stoves, the list goes on and on. All the while, the Germans have turned the coal power plants back on.
That does not suggest that anyone is taking the environmental effects of their choices very seriously, and that they just want to lower peoples' standard of living and intrude on our lives. If that's what this is really about, then how about none of it?
I'm sure you understand that if people continue getting inconvenienced in the name of climate change while governments and big corporations go on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at industrial scale, that's what's going to happen: instead of everyone making the changes they need to make, the vast majority of people will do nothing. The hypocrisy is not lost on anyone.
You are free to participate politically if you think there are things needed to be done that aren't done. This is the way to stop governments (directly) and the industry (indirectly) reduce emissions.
This can include elections, demonstrations, petitions, civil disobedience and more.
Just keep in mind, things aren't always always that simple. E.g. Russia stopped shipping Germany gas, because they helped defending Ukraine which Russia started a war on. At the same time Germany relied on that Gas, and hat to quickly move to alternatives to keep the country running.
Thank you, and I do participate plenty. Part of that participation is calling out eco-hypocrisy, which seems to be the only thing that mainstream climate activists are good at.
As to Germany, why did they rely on gas? Oh right, because they shut down their nuclear plants. So in the span of 3 years, Germany has gone from getting its base load from nuclear to gas to coal. If you really believe that atmospheric CO2 is an imminent threat to civilization, the tradeoffs are obvious and clearly biased in favor of ramping your nuclear industry significantly rather than hoping for a future breakthrough in battery technology that can allow you to run your base load off solar and wind.
Like solar panels before they reached scale, this will start off as an incredibly expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper with scale. France seems to get it - they are building 50 new plants - but nobody else does.
Instead of lobbying for impactful changes at this scale, we have plenty of activists going after ersatz plastic items, gas stoves, and gas-powered cars (all of which emit less CO2 than the top 20 biggest shipping vessels). It's not clear to me that these stupid little inconveniences actually take less political capital than anything else, but they certainly do wear down public tolerance for the program, which is fatal in the long run.
Germany relied on 1) gas from Russia because it was naive on geopolitical issues.
2) fossil gas in general, because it was a cheap method to compensate clean energy storage (such as gas from renewable energy, classic batteries are by far not the only option to store energy) and grid improvement to compensate geographic fluctuations without storage.
Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.
Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
France is building new plants, planning close to 50, however the long term trend will be a reduced share of nuclear power in the grid, because old reactors will have to shut down as well, and renewable energy build out will shadow everything else.
This is in terms with the estimates in the IPCC report that cover cost and potential avoidance in CO2 emissions.
Personally, I see activists mainly going after the government's to implement a strategy to reduce emissions, but surely almost everyone doing this will call out plastic items and fossil fuel usage where avoidable.
Rightly so, if this reduces tolerance for whatever program (doing what? Reduce emissions?), I don't see the problem there, but rather at NIMBYism, mis information and green washing.
There's nothing wrong with going after these things.
I feel like you are more interested in preventing actions from being taken than shedding light on things that are missed - I hope I am wrong though and calling out hypocrisy of climate activists isn't the primary part.
> Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.
That kind of personifies the eco-hypocrisy I have mentioned: The Germans want what they want, but they want other people to bear the cost and the risks of it. If they aren't willing to pay the costs for cutting carbon emissions, do they really want to do it? I think they have revealed that the answer is "no."
> Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
The people who say this have no clue whether it is actually true. Since Chernobyl, there hasn't been a serious effort to build out nuclear power plants at scale. Previously, the Soviets did a pretty good job demonstrating the scaling laws here, but they also cut too many corners.
As to the whole idea that renewable energy will overshadow other sources of power, renewables are not dispatchabale on-demand without several significant advances in power storage technology (which will come from batteries before anything else - nothing else scales well enough right now).
1. Numerous regulations dictate safe home building. You can't legally build a home with faulty wiring. We accept these rules as part of a society, unless you are libertarian / sob citizen bent, which it sounds like you are.
2. Gas stoves leak when turned off. These leaks equaled 76% of their total methane gas emissions. These are pollutants that are harmful to humans and the atmosphere. Many fume hoods just recirculate air into the living space.
> But when you dig into the details, it seems like the regulation may not have much effect on climate change at all.
When you say "dig into the details", do you mean read some libertarian propaganda funded by fossil fuel interests that can barely acknowledge the existence of climate change and hate every single policy ever proposed to deal with it?
We are phasing out fossil fuels.
Some, like airplane fuel are hard to phase out, and we're still going to do it.
Phasing out gas for cooking and heating is a no brainer.
When I say "dig into the details", I mean "look for evidence". I looked for evidence that this would have a substantial effect on the climate and was unable to find any.
In fact, the most anyone has come up with in this thread is the number 0.0028 (or about 0.3%):
Government picked fossil fuels and the winner for decades. The subsidies, infrastructure and regulations favorable to selling fossil gas and fossil auto fuels (and heating oil) was structurally important to government earlier.
Now it’s less important than saving money and improving the electric grid.
I don't often like to take a "both sides" approach when assessing specific issues, but this one just seems to highlight the stupidity, or at the very least shortsightedness, of both sides.
On one hand, for those pushing for a ban, this seems largely performative, a la banning plastic straws. Gas is used for 2 main reasons: for cooking, where it represents a miniscule amount of overall energy use, and for heating, where, if what all the heat pump folks say is true, gas should fall out of favor vs. heat pumps eventually anyway. On the other side, I'm tired of the constant cries of "Muh Freedom!!!" in the face of any regulation that ignores the collective impact of not having any regulations.
Still, even for those who are gravely concerned about global warming, this feels like it will lead to a pyrrhic victory at best by making your average Joe more skeptical of government overreach. It seems like there could have been umpteen different types of government responses (e.g. support for heat pumps) that would have been better received by most folks compared to "we're banning something that a lot of people find useful and convenient".
One reason to specifically forbid new installations is to avoid stranding people when you later legislate provision out of existence altogether.
Sooner or later this is going away. If you announce you're not doing new installations, that starts a timer on the existing users. In 2028 everything in use is at least 5 years old. In summer 2035 everything in use is at least 12 years old. Politically that makes it a lot easier to sell an actual prohibition on supply than it will be for places where that's a sudden overnight change from "Sure, you can use gas" to "No, we're ripping that out".
My country has begun gradually getting rid of POTS copper wire telephone provision. You can still have it, for a little while at least, but we know it has limited lifespan, if you're an outfit who somehow didn't spot the signs and were shipping devices that expect a physical copper line to work, you've had your notice, in a couple of years stuff like that will drop dead. When it's gone, with it goes a bunch of expenses that most people don't benefit from at all. And yes, also some relatively modest benefits are gone too, but mostly it's a burden, we have better things to spend resources on. But you need to give people a heads up first, and that's what this legislation seems to do.
As I understand it, it’s a ban on piping gas lines in new construction, not installing gas equipment in existing buildings.
In summer 2035, you won’t have any buildings than less than 12 years old with gas available,
But, as I understand it from the article, someone could replace their stove or heating system in a building that has pre-ban gas, no problem at any point in the intervening 12 years. Even the winter of 2035.
Yeah if anything this will exacerbate the challenge of building new construction because existing buildings will have this valuable utility that new buildings cannot have.
Gas alliances are significantly cheaper to run. Also perform better. Gas dryers are awesome compared to electric for example. Plus electric goes out often. Gas doesn’t.
Most gas appliances also require electricity to run, and in addition the broader gas infrastructure itself requires electricity to compress the gas so that it reaches the consumer. There's no getting around the need for reliable electric infrastructure; centralized gas infrastructure won't save you from unreliable electricity.
> centralized gas infrastructure won't save you from unreliable electricity
It absolutely will and the gas infrastructure is far more reliable than the electricity one.
My gas fired boiler can heat my house for days running off my Yeti battery pack.
That same Yeti couldn't put a dent in the cold weather we had this year.
Running my generator (on LP or NG or Gasoline) would allow me to keep my boiler running effectively indefinitely. Heating my home directly would be way more dangerous.
While you're correct that it's possible that NG supply can be disrupted, it's far less vulnerable to disruption than electricity. The natural gas supply is entirely underground and the natural gas infrastructure you're talking about that requires compression to pump to consumers has a built-in supply of fuel for running generators to generate electricity to run those compressors in an emergency.
There were innumerable electricity disruptions where I live in the almost 40 years I've lived here. Mostly short ones (under one hour) but several much longer ones (12+ hours). Without NG heat in my home I would have been forced to evacuate on a number of occasions. I've had one, single, disruption to my NG supply in 40 years. PSE&G found a leak in the gas lines in our street, this didn't cause a supply disruption however but put us (and a lot of our town somehow) on an expedited list to have all of our NG lines replaced. PSE&G came around and trenched in new high-pressure gas lines along the streets (still not disrupting our supply) and then a few weeks later they individually came and swapped each home to utilize the new high-pressure gas by fishing a smaller HP PEX pipe down the old gas pipe from our old service. No new trench from street-house, just a pit in the street and a pit alongside our foundation and a new exterior meter and pressure regulator. Exceedingly well done process and incredibly smooth. They even had a cool soft-tracked excavator so it didn't damage our lawn! Total outage was about 2 hours. How many nines of reliability is two hours of outage in 40 years?
Even in extreme cold environments, assuming your home is properly insulated, a 12 hour power outage means you might have to put on a sweater. Yes, multi-day outages are a problem but I think I’ve experienced two of them in my 50 years of life. Not worth worrying about.
My in-laws use their gas stove whenever the power goes out. I don’t use my electric stove when that happens. It happens maybe once a year, so I don’t really care. But if you’re in a place where outages are more frequent, it’s definitely a point in gas’ favor. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to use gas without my hood fan properly working, so… I’m not sure what my point is anymore.
Stoves aren’t particularly expensive to run, but gas stoves are hilariously inefficient and induction is nearly 100% efficient. And gas stoves plus the heat loss due to required ventilation in a cold climate are even worse.
Gas heat and hot water may be cheaper or more expensive than heat pumps depending on utility rates and climate. Too bad residential gas-fires cogeneration isn’t really a thing.
I found the excess heat from gas stoves really hard on my hands while cooking. I thought I’d hate switching to an electric resistive one, but not having all that extra heat in the kitchen has been really nice during summer months.
That's because when gas lines fail, which they obviously do, they leak instead. And leaking natural gas into the air of densely populated areas is of course a bad idea.
And since those leaks are just small pressure drops and everything keeps "working" there's much less urgency or incentive to fix it. Unlike circuit breakers & other protective circuits that cut power which prompts immediate action to correct.
This is not something that should happen in urban/sub-urban environment often in a first world country. In rural areas building up the infrastructure to that point can be too expensive but not in built up areas.
In the last ~15 years of living in cities/suburbs in Finland I have not had a single power outage that lasted more then 5 minutes. And even those have been super rare.
If that really is a problem in a first world country (and you are not riving in a really remote area) talk to your politicians as your system is seriously broken and needs fixing.
Also, most rural homes don't have piped gas? You have a big old propane tank instead.
It's not clear to me that this legislation would do anything to stop you from throwing a 250gallon tank on your house to run a generator in upstate NY.
I live in the us east coast and we lose power every year just about. Last summer it was 3 days in a row during a heat wave. It’s not large blackouts that would make the news but rather local outages. They happen all the time.
>and the price of electricity is plummeting thanks to renewables.
Not according to sources I can find. EIA forecasts for the long term project continued increases through 2050 [1] Maybe in locations elsewhere in the world? Or specific states in the US? Certainly not where I live, which is aggressively pursuing renewables and despite this prices continue to increase, and were doing so before the spike in natural gas prices.
Good point, I missed that. But that is still very far from plummeting. It’s a very gradual decline that assumes inflation stays above 2% (though that is probably a reasonable assumption)
I hope they will plummet, I just don’t see much pointing in that direction right now.
I live in NYC, and my UPS has been on battery for a total of 520 seconds since 2020 - that includes its regular self-testing. I don't think it's actually had a real drop-out since installation.
There are more reasons to ban gas in buildings than just global warming.
There's the fact that you are actually burning fuel, which released noxious fumes into the home [1]. There's mounting evidence that this sort of exposure has pretty negative health implications [2]
Gas is also inherently dangerous, more-so than electricity. There's been more than a few examples of exploded homes/buildings due to gas leaks [3]. All it takes is for someone to accidentally leave a burner on unstarted (or for a kid to do it while playing around the home).
But as for cooking, heat pumps won't work there. What you're more likely to see is either homes coming standard with thick enough lines to power everything or stoves with batteries (think about it, a stove is off 90% of the time, so why not slowly charge a battery during that time for the times when you need to cook fast?)
I wasn't able to find specifically fires caused by electric stoves. Most are caused by faulty wiring, lights, and space heaters.
My assumption, stoves are not often involved in electric fires. They have isolated, grounded circuits that you aren't frequently plugging and unplugging into. The thinker cables usually have thicker insulation on top of that.
Also, contemporary induction stoves don't actually get "hot", at least for a stove top. They do have quite a lot of electricity flowing, however, so shorts etc. could potentially be bad. They seem rather unlikely, however.
My Bosch stove does this. It runs the igniter continuously when it doesn't detect a flame and if you do something to preclude the ignitor from working (I was testing something, don't ask), the gas flow stops after about 15 seconds!
I’ve never seen one in the US. In general, gas stoves here are low quality, poorly made, and often very expensive. Fancy ones are shinier but no better.
This might be the problem with this discussion on HN, there are people here who earnestly believe we will need batteries in them to power simple electric induction cooktops.
If those batteries are too old/weak to effectively power a car how useful are they going to be at powering a household stove?
Especially when why would you need such a thing anyway when you have 220v+ just itching to get the job done directly from the grid? The grid needs power storage, yes, but there's all sorts of solutions to that beyond lithium ion batteries including water & stone gravity storage systems. Or just centralized batteries.
That really isn’t how it works. They hold less charge, but you can have more of them and weight isn’t really an issue. They can also charge more gradually, making the dynamics really different.
A battery bank at home can be a good solution to grid balancing, eg if power is cheaper during the day or night, or if you have solar. Water storage systems aren’t very efficient and need lots of space, but there are people who do it. You can also compress air into a cave. Batteries are just something that are cheaper and more space efficient than other solutions.
Centralized batteries work as well, though they don’t do anything if you have lots of grid failures.
A battery bank at your house and that same battery bank at the power station are effectively equivalent. There's no benefit to distributing batteries here since transmission costs are relatively small.
So while yes water storage systems need lots of space, that's really only a problem if you're trying to distribute it. But you don't need to, you can centralize power storage to alleviate time of day spikes. Which many power grids already do.
These products do exist, and while the price is still high I do like the idea. Then you can do high power cooking with a more modest electrical draw, because the stove draws high power from its local batteries and charges them more slowly via a wall outlet. This allows installation even when high power wiring is not available.
Why can’t people make safety decisions for themselves? Many people will choose electric/induction stoves, or not rent an apartment with a gas stove. But many people do prefer it, and I don’t think it should be up to you or the government whether something is “good” for them or not.
Most people in NYC rent, and there are many other considerations to make when picking an apartment to move into besides what kind of stove it has. You're often taking what you can get. This law will mean that, going forward, there will be more apartments available that don't have air-quality-destroying gas stoves, meaning there'll be more suitable places for people to pick from.
Also, as the other commenter said, these are apartment buildings. If you burn your apartment down it's gonna affect your neighbors. If you mess up your indoor air quality it's gonna affect your neighbors.
How do you effectively mandate that those building owners are maintaining their gas lines and ensuring they aren't leaking?
This is where it stops being "personal responsibility"
Also you personally can still have gas anyway, you just don't get government subsidized gas infrastructure anymore. Go get your own propane tank or whatever. Go be "personally independent"
The briefest of search finds a page claiming that landlords opposed fire escape regulation when it was introduced, as it was costly and supposedly unattractive. I would not be surprised if some of them argued for freedom of choice in the matter.
Because in an apartment building your neighbor's apartment being on fire has a high degree of correlation to if your apartment catches on fire (or gets smoke/water damage).
For one reason, your decision to use a gas stove affects all the people who live within proximity of you. Everyone’s air quality could be affected, and everyone’s risk of carbon monoxide poisoning increases, and everyone’s risk of fire increases.
All kinds of reasons. Besides widespread societal misinformation going back to the tobacco lobbyist days, a five-year-old cannot express a preference not to inhale toxic fumes.
+1 regarding cooking gas being a minuscule amount of gas usage overall. And not to mention, gas is still the first choice for most serious cooks, so the small benefit comes at relatively large cost to lifestyle.
Regarding heat pumps phasing out gas heat, in NY it isn’t feasible. It gets too cold. In more temperate climates, sure, but in the northern US and further, there will be a need for on-demand heat for a long time to come. The heat pump is being oversold as the answer to everything, but there are use cases it doesn’t account for.
The path forward to carbon neutrality is electrification. Electrify new construction, use steam to heat them, etc. Something which addresses heat will dwarf any of the benefits from coming after people’s stovetops, at a fraction of the lifestyle cost.
It almost feels like this is something designed to turn heads; a political act focused on banning something quite popular, that everyone knows about, for very marginal benefit. It’s almost certainly not to help with “climate change”; if it were, the legislation would target non-negligible emissions sources.
> Regarding heat pumps phasing out gas heat, in NY it isn’t feasible. It gets too cold.
Not true, heat pumps are widely used as primary heat sources in environments as cold or colder than NY, like in Montreal and other parts of Canada. The take that heat pump tech only works in very moderate temperatures is stale at this point.
1. Ground source heat pump -- which can work pretty much anywhere people live, but costs a lot more and people don't necessarily know about them.
2. Failover to resistive heating when it gets too cold outside. It's fine to do this in Montreal, because electricity is relatively inexpensive there. It's fine to do this in New York City, or even somewhere a little cooler like Boston, because you're doing it for max like 2 days a year even in an outlier year. Not sure if it's fine to do this in Buffalo.
> Not true, heat pumps are widely used as primary heat sources in environments as cold or colder than NY, like in Montreal and other parts of Canada.
As the owner of a 5 year old heat pump in a milder climate in Indiana, I can tell you this:
* When it is under 10°F, my heat pump switches to emergency heat... forced air electric and is very expensive to run.
* Often the temperature swings are pretty wild... 40-50 degrees and that also can force emergency heat.
Oh, and since the electric company is usually using gas to generate the electricity, isn't the environmental impact somewhat of a wash?
I bought the best product available at the time. Since Iceland is the only nation on earth that has successfully kicked the fossil fuel habit (11% of energy is produced by burning fossil fuels), I suppose you are suggesting I move there to blunt my aching conscience. I'm sure Iceland is nice, but I think I'd squander any environmental benefit flying to see my friends, relatives and immediate family.
I've noticed often the response to criticism is "you should have spent $10k more". And the people who spent the extra who enquire about excessive costs then get met with "why did you over-spec your system?" lol
What state doesn't produce electricity using fossil fuels? At midnight last night, which wasn't atypical, California was 50% natural gas and the total CO2 emitting is even greater due to imports and CO2 emitting renewables.
When your heat pump is using emergency heat yes it'd be "better" to burn natural gas to do so directly that to burn gas to make electricity to do resistive heating.
However you need to look more at the average scenario to draw a complete picture. When your heat pump isn't in emergency heating then it's more efficient to burn the gas for electricity to power that heat pump than it is to burn the gas for heat (moving heat is substantially cheaper than making heat). So how often is your heat pump in regular heating vs. emergency heat? And then is it in emergency heating often enough to justify having a secondary piece of infrastructure to get gas to your house where you then also need a gas furnace which is more expensive than some resistive heat strips are?
Yep if you live in Indiana your electricity comes from gas or coal, there's a tiny bit of generation from a wind farm in the northwest corner of the state and some scattered token solar farms.
> And not to mention, gas is still the first choice for most serious cooks, so the small benefit comes at relatively large cost to lifestyle.
Induction is fantastic and even superior to gas in some ways (even faster for boiling water, for example). While some may still prefer gas, given that induction gives instant power and is more powerful, I have a hard time believing that it results in a "large cost to lifestyle".
(I will admit that I have a gas stove in my basement to handle power outages, a gas stove, and a gas grill. I will also admit that I really, really regret installing a gas stove and will switch to an induction stove when it's time to replace the stove.)
It is not too cold in New York for heat pumps. With 20 year old technology yes, it would have required supplemental heat. Not anymore though, not until you get down around -25/-30f, at that point a resistive heater kicks in to assist.
We live in Denver and saw -10, -15 this winter. Our heat pump is 100% efficient down to -10, and still reasonably efficient at -25. Our whole house is on it. No gas.
I live in upstate NY - plenty of people rely on heat pumps as a primary source. You need backup systems for natural gas and oil in this climate too, for what it's worth. They won't run when the power goes out.
Most new buildings in NYC are already heat pump based.
For the obvious reason that it’s much cheaper.
Ban cooking gas as well, and they save a ton of money running gas pipes, and utility companies having to maintain that gas pipe.
Also, “serious cooks” can still use their gas stoves. They just need to hook it up to a cylinder like most of the world manages just fine, but apparently the people in the richest country in the world can’t figure out.
Arguably propane may be better for serious cooking, too. Chefs like to cook things a lot hotter than the average person, and LPG burns hotter than natural gas.
I can't afford to eat out every meal, not with 3 kids at home. Unless the meal is $20/person I can do better myself at home, and even many of the expensive ones are disappointing compared to what I can do for a fraction of the cost. Good tools help me cook better.
If I look to Europe I see induction stoves competitive in price and features to regular electric stoves. In the us they are only on a few high end stoves and not competitively prices. There are a lot of options you might look for in a stove that you cannot get if you also want induction.
By stove I mean the cooktop and oven in one package. That is what my house needs so I haven't looked at the other options.
A big part of the reason for banning gas is not energy but indoor pollution. There's pretty strong and growing evidence that cooking with gas leads to substantial health risks because of various combustion products that end up in your air (especially if not properly vented).
The total effect on health seems rather debatable, and even if so there are better solutions (e.g. minimum ventilation requirements) for that.
Total bans on products people use and can enjoy responsibility due to potential health risks is nearly always a bad idea in my opinion. Just look at smoking in the US, for example, which recently hit an all time low. We could have gone the prohibition route (and we can guess how that would turn out), but instead we clamped down on advertising, increased taxes, and helped usher in a societal change where smoking is largely seen as unacceptable behavior by huge swaths of people now.
Theres a comment upthread championing this law because eventually government will ban all the miscreants who use gas powered appliances and heating from using them and using something much more hip and palatable to a subset of voters who can afford expensive house upgrades and electric cars at the snap of a finger.
A top end GE induction range top is $1700. A lower end one is $400.
These are both rounding errors vs. a year of energy bills. If you want something even cheaper (for instance, because you hate your tenants, and they are paying the power bill), resistive ones are still available.
Are you going to be paying for the electrical upgrades to homes that people on fixed incomes will need to get their 100+ year old homes up to code to be able to use one of these induction tops or should they just not live in a house to make you feel good?
Cool, let me tell my grandparents who are on a fixed income that they need to replace their heating and stovetop because they're dirty polluters and it's totally only going to cost a month or two of their after necessities money to do just their stove top!
of course we can. big tobacco can't get away with lying about risks any more so new smokers know what they're getting into
the plain packaging stuff is moving past people taking informed risks (even if i think they're stupid ones) and towards overt control of behavior for technocratic reasons. which explains why there's way more uptake for it in europe and australia than here
As far as I know, the lower levels of smoking have not made the US health outcomes any better than places where smoking is at ridiculously high levels, like France.
> For example, the analysis included multiple studies that found an association between gas cooking and respiratory disease in children but variously failed to evaluate parental smoking habits, indoor smoke, pet ownership, or outdoor pollution as other possible factors which might underlie the observed associations. In other words, we must interpret these conclusions with a high degree of caution.
Indoor pollution from a gas stove has more to do with how the building was built.
Older construction leaks a lot more air than newer construction, primarily due to changes in code. More specifically, the air in an older home, from the 1980s, might change over every four hours or so. In a newer home built to modern building codes, it's eight or ten hours.
Hours is still an awfully long time to have dangerous chemicals floating around in your air after each time you cook a meal.
My apartment has a gas stove, which I was was induction. The gas stove plus the lack of a hood that vents to the outside means the indoor air quality gets pretty messed up. I usually have to open some windows when cooking, which is not great in winter.
What you need is a real vent that vents outside. Or a stove that doesn’t emit NOx (and carbon monoxide, etc).
Frankly this whole thing is a bit absurd. Everyone ought to know that flue gas from a furnace or water heater is extremely dangerous when it ends up indoors. Why are gas stoves ever considered okay?
From what I’ve read the same indoor pollution exists with induction even if not vented. The confounding variable is that induction generally is present in new construction which will have proper ventilation.
One of the concerns is nitrogen oxides (mostly nitrogen dioxide, as I recall) from high temperature combustion. Car engines attempt to limit combustion temperatures (usually by adding some exhaust gasses to the intake air) to reduce its production.
Ventilation prevents it from reaching hazardous levels from a gas stove; induction does not produce it.
The point is most of the harm comes from the cooking, not the gas. Classic over optimizing. Might as well ban Teflon while you’re at it (the eu did this, as it’s harmful)
I'm not sure whether that's true (nitrogen dioxide can be pretty bad), but I am sure that ventilation is the answer either way. I suspect the main motivation for the ban is to be able to shut down the gas lines in the future because their existence results in methane leaking into the atmosphere. Health concerns might help them sell it ("think of the children" tends to be pretty effective, politically).
There is some evidence that the skyrocketing asthma rates are due to natural gas.
They should ban teflon. It leaches estrogen analogues into food, and is an endocrine disrupter. Also, teflon pans last 2-5% as long as cheaper cast iron / stainless steel equivalents (or most more expensive options).
Cooking on induction at moderate temperature does not seem to produce significant particulate pollution. Source: I have a stove, and I have a portable PM2.5 meter.
So you can simmer a stock for a couple hours without needing to run the fan (and cook most anything under 300 degrees or so), and with the fan off you don’t lose nice conditioned air from inside.
I don't have a view either way, but we can measure pollution from different cooking methods under controlled conditions so we know which is better or worse independent of ventilation.
Ventilation depends partly on individual behaviour, eg I open windows in good weather and close them in winter.
>and for heating, where, if what all the heat pump folks say is true, gas should fall out of favor vs. heat pumps eventually anyway
This is exactly what governmental action is meant to put a stop to. We have a case where due to inertia, consumer preferences, market failures w.r.t. externalities, etc. residential gas use would, if left to the market, make up a significant proportion of heating energy.
Maybe "eventually anyway" gas would "fall out of favor", but what needs to happen is for it to no longer be in use (along with 1000 other such changes). The market cannot achieve this for us.
There is also a third problem with this.... what happens when shit hits the fan?
If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a power outage, you can help your neighbors and heat/cook their food too,... or in case of a gas system outage, they can help with yours. If you heat with gas, you don't freeze even with a power outage, and can still buy a cheap electric heater with a gas outage... if you heat with electricity, you can atleast try to find someone with gas heat to let you sleep over and not freeze.
Banning everything except electricity is just calling for a catastrophy.
(yes yes, i know, old heaters will stay, this applies only to new construction, but in 30 years, most old devices will be replaced too)
edit: i don't know why the downvotes... probably not many people from texas here... or anywhere else in the world... or maybe people think that NY is somehow immune to such outages
I'm guessing (maybe hoping?) that the downvotes are for the seemingly overly apocalyptic tone of your post.
But FWIW, as someone who is from Texas who lost power for 5 days during Uri and nearly a week for the latest freeze this winter, I wholeheartedly agree. Not sure how I would have made it during Uri without gas - even with gas, we couldn't run our heater (system still needs electricity to run the fans, thermostats, etc.) but we could run a gas fireplace, which kept our house temp just high enough to keep our pipes from bursting. I still shudder from all the pics of people with icicles dripping from their ceiling fans.
To be fair, here in Québec I lost power for 4 days not even 3 weeks ago. So did 1 million people in Montréal (!). The only reason it wasn't catastrophic was that the weather was exceptionally merciful (if we ignore the freezing rains that caused the outages in the first place). We used our wood stove a lot (not legal in Montreal itself but still is in most areas around it) even with warmer temperatures and the stove honestly saved our Ramadan meals lol.
I guess it depends on where you live! But to me it's certainly iffy to ask people to just be ok with being helpless if unpredictable stuff happens.
Two decades and a half ago, the Quebec grid was completely fubar* for the most part of January due to freezing rains too so it's not super uncommon.
*worse than Texas 2 years ago as the electricity infrastructure physically collapsed, literally.
I get the argument, but to me it seems overly myopic. Our current electrical grid isn't alien technology we're just stuck with. If it's so bad we can't realistically rely on it to heat our homes or cook our food, maybe we should work on making it better, and in the process have all the other benefits of a reliable grid. The recent Texas outage is a perfect example. It was incredibly rare weather, but my understanding is that a lot of the problems could have been significantly mitigated with some investment in improving infrastructure. Again totally understand the concern, but having to keep gas around forever because we can't be bothered to fix our grid seems like not a great long-term solution compared to fixing the underlying issue.
I mean... it's a power outage, those happen and sometimes last a long time.
In my country, we had a strange mix of humid air hitting a cold air front, so one side of the country had rain, the other had snowfall, and in between you had frozen rain...
Was it a problem? Sure. But not a huge once, since everyone in the rural area was familiar with power issues even from the yugoslav era, wood furnaces are still common, even in houses with central heating (most nowadays), and well.. the country of ~2mio pop. has ~162k voulonteer firefighters, and fallen trees were removed, roads were cleared, and due to a lot of shitty wood, the toilet paper was cheap :)
Now we're looking at this (article here), and germany banning gas, oil and wood heating, and many other countries following, and even a localized event or just some operator fuckup can cause a huge catastrophy. (also, I might have a slight bias, since I know how the infrastructure works and many people who operate it, and it's a miracly we don't have more outages.... same for the internet itself... the core of the internet is based on routers saying "This is me, i own this IP block, just send me the traffic" and all the other routers believing it and doing what it's said... so yeah)
Some form of backup heat is considered rather essential in many parts of Canada, including in suburban detached homes. A small fireplace-style natural gas burner that doesn't need electricity is common -- I think about 1 in 4 homes have one? A significant proportion further have something else, like a wood stove, or bottled gas.
When the grid goes down for an extended period, people can and do freeze, or suffer the effects of poisoning or fire, from less safe forms of heat used out of desperation. (BBQ grill or wood/trash fire indoors, etc.) The Quebec/New England region grid collapse during the 1998 ice storm was particularly bad with dozens dead. An atypical event, but many do plan for that kind of eventuality in some way, whether by having backup heat or hopefully knowing someone who does.
We lost electricity due to an ice storm for a couple of weeks when I was a kid in Mississippi. No natural gas at all, but we bought propane heaters to get through it.
A surprising number of gas stoves do not work without electrical power. It's supposedly for safety reasons because a user might leave the gas on after the electronic igniter fails to fire. Of course, it's possible for a sufficiently incompetent user to turn the knob past the light position and achieve the same result when it does have electrical power, so this feature strikes me as nonsensical.
I had an annoying experience with this during a multi-day outage in Alaska last year. We did have other options including a generator, but I'm not a fan of being patronized by an appliance.
Why is that a feature? ...interesting :) Our stoves here usually have some heat-based protection, where you have to hold the knob pressed in until a tiny rod heats up (usually 2, 3 seconds) and after that you can release it and the gas will stay on. Without power, you just need a ligher (or anything releasing a spark) to ignite the gas. Also, the default configuration for gas stoves is 3x gas cooktop + 1x electric, so most people are covered in both cases.
I've used the design you're describing with a heat-based valve, and it's definitely superior. I've never seen a cooktop with both gas and electric - is this redundancy in case one service or the other is interrupted?
I have no idea what the reasoning behind it was then, but it was a standard carried over from yugoslav times (usually 3 gas + 1 electric or 2+2) :) So yeah, could be redundancy...
I remember only one gas outage (some repair work done somewhere and they closed the valves) but there were quite a few power outages, where you had to use a lighter.
An argument for backups is an argument for backups, rather than an argument for gas stoves.
Gas systems could make a backup, but don't unless they're designed to, and even if they do, you're gonna have a cheaper time installing just the one system than multiple. A generator, or a community generator with rollover practice is the right answer.
You don't see hospitals making every other room gas so they can survive a power outage. Instead, they have a generator
My gas furnace won't run if there's no power because it uses various electrical systems for safety controls. I am not convinced that "we'll have it if we lose power" is actually a meaningful part of the public's reasoning for purchasing gas furnaces.
I have a propane camping stove (a slightly modernized version of the classic Coleman model). This is the main reason why. They aren't that expensive, and you can also take it camping or set it up near your outdoor grill to prepare a side.
If "shit hits the fan" to the point that you don't have electricity for several weeks then it's unreasonable to expect to be able to shelter in your own home imo.
If you live in a remote enough place that you need your own backup plan then I would think only having to think about electricity would make things easier
Not necessarily. The two times in my life when we had week long power outages, the root cause was an ice storm that brought down trees onto power lines. The ice only lasted a couple days but the damage took longer to repair. Roads were cleared within a couple days. If you live in a remote enough place where your road won’t be cleared shortly after the storm, you need to have a backup plan that doesn’t rely on any outside services.
Sheltering away from home is extremely expensive, disrupts anything resembling normal life - which a power outage does not - and may not even be possible if a large fraction of the local population all tries to find a hotel outside of the outage area at the same time.
* Refrigeration. For a 6-12 hour power outage, leaving the doors closed is sufficient. For 1-3 days, fridge temperatures may be maintained by buying bags of ice, but not a freezer.
* Emergency communication. Landline phones might still function, depending on exactly where the breakage occurred. Cell phones have 24-48 hours of battery power at the most.
* Central heating. Even a gas furnace requires electricity for its controller.
* Kitchen ranges (conditional). For a gas range, this depends on whether you have a lighter or matches.
A power outage disrupts normal life. During a power outage, you cannot cook food, cannot preserve food, and cannot heat your home. Depending on the duration, sheltering away from home may be the less disruptive option.
I mean, ideally it should be free to go to a community shelter. If it's not a disaster and just an unfortunate situation, that's what insurance is for. I guess I don't know what a natural disaster would be like where you're from. This is why I live in Japan, where disaster preparedness is taken extremely seriously at a societal level.
If the plan is to phase out natural gas heating in a reasonable timeframe, you need to stop new investments in it soon. A ban is a crude tool, but it may be better than telling residents of new buildings that they must start planning to replace their heating systems, because natural gas deliveries will end in 2035 or 2040.
I don't understand banning these kinds of things in general opposed to simply taxing them considerably.
A man should have the freedom to damage the environment so long as he pay for it, and that money can then be used to undo his damage.
Of course, it's always quite inconsistent how these things are applied based on cultural reasons. I've been in favor for a long time for higher taxes on paper. The production of paper is apparently 1/5 of deforestation and there really is not much justification for it now with alternatives with less of an environmental footprint, but too many people, even those who supposedly stand for the environment, are too emotionally attached to paper for cultural reasons to see this ever pass.
>Gas is used for 2 main reasons: for cooking, where it represents a miniscule amount of overall energy use
Gas cooking makes sense when the infrastructure costs can be amortized with that of heating. One of these costs is the 2-3% of gas that leaks, and this loss will occur even if you heat your home with heat pumps so long as you're connected to the gas grid. If your only use of gas is cooking, it makes much more sense to simply buy cans of propane.
In my area I got a 50k quote to get connected to mains gas even though it's less than 200 meters away. They can pound sand, even the a state-of-the-art heat pump system is a fraction of that.
It's starting to feel like government "solutions" are aggressively targeting freedoms (for lack of a better word) with the fewest, least-organized defenders rather than any consideration for actual impact.
For example, here in Canada, we recently banned a wide range of window blinds including the very popular top-down bottom-up style (a personal favourite). Why? To save the kids of course. One Canadian child a year was killed, on average, over 30 years.[0] So it's a performative win and, let's be honest, who's going to defend our right to buy and install blinds?
No one is banning gas. You can go ahead and buy a gas stove and use it.
What you cannot do is expect buildings to install piping throughout the building, the gas provider to provide infrastructure to supply that building with gas, and get the gas out of a tap.
The vast majority of the world in fact does not have gas coming out of a tap because it’s not profitable. The U.S. has it almost entirely because of regulation thst requires it to be provided, which has now baked in expectation among homeowners that it will be there. This expectation leads to buildings paying extra to supply gas at exorbitant costs so their homes don’t feel less luxury than an equivalent competitor.
> The U.S. has it almost entirely because of regulation thst requires it to be provided
If this is true, then why is the New York Times calling it a ban? Wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a repeal of whatever legislation that was requiring it?
California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
Eugene tried this as well. City council passed it without input from the community and is facing backlash. Since the 9th circuit decision, the ordinance has been called into question.
The community has since generated enough signatures to put the ban to a public vote that will be voted on in November. Anecdotally, I'd say, most my neighbors are against the ban, judging from the names on the petition that I signed when they dropped through.
Personally, I believe folks should have the liberty to choose the best solution for their energy needs. I do a bit of home brewing, and I can say, without question, gas is superior for heating a large quantity of water quickly and keeping it at temp throughout the process. I even looked into electric brew kettles and >10G vessels require a dedicated 240V circuit.
Taking this all into account, I'm not sure I'll be buying / building within city limits. That or I'll just move to using my own methane composting biogas bladder. I'd love to see the greenies tell me I can't make my own gas in my back yard via composting.
Have you tried induction? A kettle on an induction stove will boil pretty quickly and evenly, induction stoves are superior to gas stoves for most tasks (the exception being wok cooking, but you can get curved induction stoves for that). When we rewire our kitchen, I want a 220-40V plug for a separate kettle as well, just because water boiled so much faster in China than when we moved to the states.
If the 240v circuit is your problem, then this ordinance helps solve it, no? Future houses will be better set up to handle your task using electricity than hooking in a gas pipe to your boiler
That implies that the code cretins would actually make a carve out for it. If I go to the trouble of jumping through all the state / county / local building code applications, I’m just going to build a 20kw capacity 48v solar array with a dual inverter that supports 240v and have the power company (government monopoly) as backup / battery top-up.
My point is, that this is really unnecessary. Shoehorning the general public into electrification isn’t the answer here. And it goes far beyond just my small needs as a residential subscriber. Commercial breweries, restauranteurs, and everything in-between, use gas because it is far more efficient, cheaper, and suitable for their individual applications.
Choice, is the essential thing here. Let the market sort it out. If the market can make a compelling argument for electrification, that’s the way people will go. But for now, I’m unconvinced.
(btw — I lived in Berkeley for years, and houses that were gas grandfathered were especially sought after. Government diktats just create perverse incentives.)
A bigger problem is getting a feed to your house that can handle your hot water heater, stove, washing machine, and electric car charging all at once. That's rather impractical in some areas, so there is some work to coordinate between the appliances so they can share a smaller feed. The way some stoves are participating is that they charge a battery at relatively low current all the time, and then cook from the battery at high current when the half-hour a day that you cook comes. That way you don't need a special circuit, and can cook while your hot water heater or washing machine is running. The added benefit is that your stove is now a UPS basically, so you can cook while the power's out. (I believe some can share power with other appliances, i.e. keep your refrigerator running for a while.)
I have a gas range and it doesn't work when the electricity is off. If that's your contingency plan, check that a safety valve doesn't close when power is lost.
(Heat pump) Hot water heaters and washing machines are not major power draws. Some rough figures on power consumption of typical appliances, from most to least:
Continuous-flow electric water heater: 20 kW
Heat pump or central air, big home: 12-15 kW
EV charger: 7 kW
Electric tanked water heater or hybrid water heater in electric mode: 7.2 kW
Clothes dryer with heating element on: 5 kW
Heat pump or central air, small home: 3-4 kW
Electric oven: 3-5 kW
Induction range: 1.8 kW
Instapot: ~1.5 kW
Toaster oven: 1-1.5 kW
Electric kettle: 1 kW
Microwave: 1.2 kW
Dishwasher: ~500-1000 W
Heat pump water heater: ~600W
Washing machine: 500 W
Vacuum cleaner: 200-300 W
Home server or desktop: 100-200 W
Box fan or air purifier: 100 W
Laptop on fast charge: 65W
Laptop on slow charge: 30W
LED light bulb: 12-15W
Cell phone charger: 6W
For reference, 200A electrical service can supply up to 24 kW of power, and even 120A service in older houses is good for about 14.4 kW.
Individually coordinating appliance loads or including a battery with each appliance seems like an inefficient, expensive and unnecessary extra step. Basically, all you need to do is a.) charge your EVs at night when nothing else is running b.) don't use electric water heaters unless they're heat pumps and c.) insulate your home if you're using heat pump HVAC. All of which you should be doing anyway. The kitchen appliances are easily manageable if the EV and HVAC are not running at the same time, and everything else is rounding error.
There might be some benefit to grid-coordinating EV charging and heat pump HVAC operation, particularly since these are the cases where naive loads all hit the grid at the same time, and they already come with batteries included (literal ones for EVs, thermal batteries for HVAC). For smaller appliances it's totally unnecessary though.
I don’t think it’s impractical to upgrade service lines. It is, however, impractical to get PG&E to approve the upgrade. (For us, that process cost about 3 years and $10K. They ran a wire 6 feet from an existing transformer to a pole we had to install ourselves).
When they pass these laws, they should come with an SLA for the utility provider to approve “engineering” plans for the utility hookup and whatever transformer upgrades are required utility-side.
There should be a ~ $250 per day fine, payable in cash to the homeowner once the SLA is exceeded. That’s roughly 2x normal homeowner costs due to delay of construction approvals (and therefore financing / alternative housing costs for those days) and using gas generators to power the site.
It's really amazing how people can talk about 200 amps as if it's nothing. We have a household installation of 40 amps (220) and last year there were months that cost 400 euros per month on electricity, and we are not heavy electricity users (we have no electric cloth dryer but have a small robot mower tho)
It is almost like talking about 400HP cars/suvs, my 3 cylinder car is doing just fine at 84 kW max.
You're talking in Euros... we have 230V power, while Americans and a few other holdouts still use 110V. The problem is, the lower the voltage the more current you need - an 1 kW vacuum draws 9 amps in the US, but 4.5 in Europe.
The unit of billing - kW/h - however remains the same.
This sounds plausible but is subtly incorrect: the US uses split phase power and 100A means 100A on each of the two legs (+/-120V). So if you balance the legs correctly, you can get 240V*100A on 100A service. This is important for example for car charging where both legs are used and balanced.
America is 120v now, I believe - and many houses have a centre-tapped neutral supply [1] which means they actually can have 240v outlets in garages, workshops, utility rooms (etc) for high power devices.
So this is different from a 3 phase system (N L1 L2 L3) with 120 degrees shift between the lines? It is instead basically a 2 phase system N L1 L2 with a 180 degree phase shift between L1 and L2?
I was already confused with the 240 being mentioned somewhere in this thread... it becomes a bit clearer now.
Most US residential housing is fed off a 240V center tapped transformer. Center tap is connected to ground and neutral at the breaker panel. That gives you two 120V phases to neutral. And 240V from phase to phase.
In the breaker panels the phase alternates as you go down the rows of breakers. So you can install a dual breaker for 240V. Typically only large appliances like stoves, water heater, driers, and air conditioners are 240V. Everything else is 120V.
I heartily recommend a three phase induction stove. 400V of cooking power (mine is rated at something like 8kW…?). Carbon steel pans get ready in seconds.
Maybe this is a bit of a tangent but... shouldn't the world as a whole not be thinking about how to consume less in stead of obsessing with how to do the clean energy transition, without changing our habits a bit?
If you think about it, there is still plenty of room for optimizing our energy consumption.
The trend seems to be, replace the gasoline car not with a more fuel efficient one but rather with a car weighing almost double because it has to drag along a huge battery. Then replace all copper wires with double the section (copper mining, plastic production, tearing open perfect roads, ...)
Some ideas, not very far fetched I would say, combine a few of these will get us a long way:
Car pooling.
Electric bicycles.
Insulate your house better?
Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
> Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
> Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
> Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
People do these things anyways with the right incentives, just to save time and money.
But we still need to get off of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation if we want to avoid the worst climate change scenarios.
The reality is that people really value convenience, and we have to find sustainable ways of delivering that. That might mean a great electric bus system, EVs, community thrift exchanges, etc
I understand your points. I'm sure those are valid for you. I'm thinking more about the whole picture. You say you work from home, that's already big influence.
My point in this discussion thread is, i saw 200 Amps at 240 V per household being mentioned, i want to show this should not be the norm or trend. Imo this way of thinking is not leading to an efficient system.
If you have an electric car, you probably don't need to charge it most of the times at the highest current. And when you do, you won't turn on all electric devices with high amperage.
The other examples are just examples, not everyone needs to apply them all. I advocate for the culture shift, the more-is-not-better mentality. This needs to go hand in hand with cleaner technologies and government policies.
I agree, but it needs to be a combination of change of infrastructure and people's habits. After all it is just culture and culture evolves,so let it evolve in the right direction. 200 amps to every household seems not to be the right direction.
As behind-the-meter demand management technology advances, and behind the meter storage becomes more affordable, we will be able to increasingly support high power use cases without needing 200A service drops at all. This is where we will end up: sipping power through a straw and storing it for short bursts of high-power usage.
It depends a lot on your existing service. For many homes the wire is already rated for 200A, and you just need a new main panel. In those cases the utility charges you $0. On the other end of the spectrum, some homes have buried power lines where they need to dig up the street and driveway to run a new higher-rated cable to your home, and I've heard of those costing upwards of $50K.
It's different depending on the line that runs to your home and the transformer serving your street. If the line to your home has enough diameter to carry 200A and the transformer and the main line have enough spare capacity, all it needs is to exchange the main fuses/circuit breakers on the utility side. Most new constructions these days are severely overbuilt to accomodate the rise in electric car chargers.
For older constructions however, it can be more involved - the line from the main line to your home might need an upgrade, the main line might need an upgrade or in the worst case the transformer might need an upgrade. The further up in the grid you go, the more expensive it gets for the utility - and some measures might even require significant work involving construction permits.
In our situation, the issue was that the service had been disconnected, and we needed to move the meter about 20 feet (no obstructions, no buried lines).
It's very bold of you to assume that my kitchen has ventilation at all. There's an electric extractor fan that just blows the air back in your face. I've seen other people's place where they don't even have that charade.
I'd love to have a real setup. Unfortunately I've not been given that option and it is the same for many others.
> … getting a feed to your house that can handle your hot water heater, stove, washing machine, and electric car charging all at once.
This wasn’t on my radar as being a thing. What type of service is typical out there? Where I am, 200A is fairly normal and I haven’t really perceived of the concept of not having enough electricity to run a family as a thing.
Do people trip the main breaker more than “almost never” out there?
All the other 15 amp circuits people take for granted for things like lights, the clothes dryer and the heat/cooling system you left off your list (heat pump + air handler + emergency heat coils)...
Add in the 80% rule and 200amps doesn't go as far as one might hope in a gas free-house.
There are some induction stove startups that are using batteries to not only not require 240v hookups but perform even better than a standard induction stove... the idea is that with cheap battery technology you can take advantage of the fact that not everything in your house will be running and charging at the same time.
The 80% rule is for running circuits and for breakers. It has nothing to do with actual load capacity. I.e. with 200A service you can have well beyond 200A nominal worth of breakers in your box (250A), but when all those things are running it should still use 200A or less if the 80% rule was followed.
There are a lot of jurisdictions where piped natural gas is not available and 200 amp service is very common, as a practical matter it is not a big deal.
Requiring new builds to have even more electrical capacity and more robust incoming infrastructure is a win-win-win situation and hopefully that is what code & consumers demand.
You didn't include air conditioning, vacuum, power washer, power tools, etc. It's not that you'd be running all these things at once (although AC run a lot), but it's pretty crazy that you could even come close to tripping your main breaker.
Pretty crazy? Not sure I follow, if you push anything fancy to the limits shit will happen, and over the limits there are some guarantees you will not like the result.
Its not like its year 10'000 and we polished technology, infrastructure and everything to the max physics allow. For example you can easily break whole internet if significant portion of its users decide to download something relatively big at the same time.
Most people around here buy enough battery or generators to keep the power on. PG&E is way below one nine of availability this year, but the outlets inside our house are at 6 nines followed by an eight.
Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co-ops are starting to spring up.
This is the SF Bay Area, so it’s pretty much a third world country if you measure things by quality of government services. I assume this isn’t typical for most other parts of the country.
Part of this is because California is the most populous state with a high average personal income.
When talking about actual tax burden averages the best way to calculate is by dividing the total state and local taxes by the total income in the state.
In 2020 the total tax rate in California was 10.01% of total personal income. This put it at 37th place among the US states, and 0.52% above the US average.
For the other most populous states, Texas was at 8.56%, Florida at 7.21%, and New York at 13.92%.
The cheapest state was Alaska at 7.13% (with Florida the second cheapest), and the most expensive state was New York (with Hawaii the second most expensive at 13.16%).
Some of this data is confounded by state revenues not being solely from taxes (or especially from personal taxes). Regardless though, California isn't that much above average, and is one of 30 states with a graduated state income tax that hits higher earners harder than lower earners, whereas 11 states have a flat tax structure.
Your tax burden in California is also less if you are poorer. For example, you’ll pay more income tax in Alabama than California if you just make $40k/year, since AL taxes are more regressive in general.
Californians actually pay lower overall taxes compared to other states due to low property taxes.
Also, my power in San Francisco has probably been out for no more than 6 hours over the last 10 years. I don't know how many 9s that is, but it's more than 1.
Mileage varies a lot in California. A high-income single person who just bought a place is paying a lot more than an older couple who have lived in the same home for 4 decades.
To critique your link based on its footnotes:
> 1 Calculated based on “State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets for 2020” from the Tax Foundation and “Median Household Income by State: 2018 and 2019” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
What is the distribution of households in each state by marital and dependent status?
> 2 Calculated based on “Property Taxes by State” from WalletHub and “Median Home Values Across the U.S.” from Experian.
Various propositions in California affect actual property taxes. In the chart in your link the property tax tax burden is shown the same for California and Texas based on Median income, but the actual property tax rate in Texas is almost double that in California (at least last I checked, a couple of years ago). Housing in California has just been more expensive compared to income, which is a con in affordabilty, but a pro in net worth for property owners (especially those who have owned for a long time, and thus pay lower taxes on their primary residence).
I've got nothing to say about the sales tax burden, except to wonder how much of the "per capita personal consumption expenditures" are taxable transactions, and how much aren't. I've got no clue here though.
In the Boston area, I almost never lose power, at all, ever. One hour five years ago in an ice storm was an aberration. Something is very wrong in Cali.
California is a far bigger state in both population and area. Much of that area is also uninhabited, but power lines cross it. Many are quite old and not well maintained, and either start fires or are subject to other climate issues (fires, snow, high winds, etc). It’s a more challenging environment, plus PG&E is basically incompetent.
We’re in the Boston area (west suburban town) and there are outages about every 4-5 months (Eversource). It’s quite annoying and I’m contemplating getting a whole house generator. My solar panels do nothing during an outage. Would love to get a couple of Tesla Powerwalls but too expensive and long waiting list.
Yes. There’s been a lot of storms this spring and the wind has brought down power cables left and right. That’s in addition to whatever other crap is up that’s causing power and even occasionally gas to be shut off for days at a time. Depending on where you live in the bay area, you might’ve had a few hour long shut offs, a few day long shut off’s, or worse and that’s just this year. I personally have had almost 3 total days without power where I live in the inner sunset of San Francisco, including 6 incidents of between 1 and 5 hours, and 1 period of two whole days. I have friends elsewhere in the city who’ve had it a lot worse. I don’t personally know anyone who has had 14 days total outages, but I would absolutely believe it given what I have seen. Also my personal PG&E bill for my home of two people and a baby is over $500 a month between electric and gas. I also run a small-midsize 400 seat theater in SF Chinatown and the monthly power and gas bill for that is almost $3000 a month even though we only run events two or three days a week. It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Can’t speak to California, but where I am in Canada (national capital region) I’ve been without power for over 14 days total in the past 12 months and we don’t have half the problems they do.
There was an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a couple ~24 hour outages.
Surprisingly very few short outages or brownouts or anything.
I’m sitting at having utility power ~95% of the time over the past 12 months. I’d have no problem believing two weeks… or more.
It’s becoming more and more common, especially in places with older homes which the East Coast is full of. There are many, many millions of home with 100A or even 50A service. That was standard until the 80’s and 90’s. The grid was built to support that.
But now a lot more people run AC and electric car charging, among other things like induction ranges. The infrastructure is struggling to keep up. A lot of it is super old and it’s not uncommon to come across 50 year old transformers, etc.
Brownouts and blackouts have become rather common.
But the gas always works. Where I live a lot of people have installed natural gas generators.
My whole house natural gas generator was closer to 10k and 5-10k install. Provides like 90 amps. Good for all the storms around here. I just turn off my hot tub and EV charging and I can do anything else including AC.
That works if you have natural gas service. My estimate assumes solar panels, batteries and a generator that tops the battery off in emergencies.
This year, most people with just batteries lost power due to no sun, and people with just generators lost power due to no propane delivery service/supply.
Most natural gas generators are orderable for propane. Propane delivery is available most places, although you also need to find a place for the tank. It's more convenient to have fuel delivered via pipeline, but somewhat less resilient (although I personally don't have any experience with outages of utility natural gas, it is a possibility).
Based on the one ~ 3 day outage I had, my whole house generator's tank is good for probably close to two weeks, although if it were very hot or very cold, that might change. I have a portable generator for my well, that one runs on gasoline and doesn't sip fuel, I'd probably just run it for a few minutes twice a day (did not have that generator during the 3 day outage... we were just stinky)
> This is the SF Bay Area, so it’s pretty much a third world country if you measure things by quality of government services. I assume this isn’t typical for most other parts of the country
You would assume wrong. California's grid reliability statistics are actually better than the national average:
It is absolutely a big miss, but it's in the context of long tail events (in the magnitude of the event severity), which California by its very nature experiences more than most other large population states: relentless storms, heat waves, wildfires.
Should California utilities be better at restoring power in these situations? Absolutely, and we shouldn't cut them much slack in that regard. But that doesn't mean it's a "3rd world country" situation with respect to power reliability like the GP described. The typical power problems faced in developing countries are daily power reliability problems that are due to poor grid management in normal conditions, not exceptional conditions.
I’m from a third world country, and now live in the Bay.
To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
It’s absolutely third world country level when the weather is anything but exactly 70 degrees. You have zero idea what you’re talking about, the original guy is correct.
> I’m from a third world country, and now live in the Bay
> You have zero idea what you’re talking about
Same here. I've endured the sweltering tropical heat in a polluted developing-country city during power cuts, so I well understand what I'm talking about.
> To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
In my Bay Area neighborhood there have been no outages for the last 3 years, but that anecdote is no more or less valid than yours when generalizing about California at large. It's a huge state with incredible variability in nearly every dimension.
Hyper-local conditions matter greatly to reliability. I'm in a dense urban environment, near hospitals and fire stations. That's probably why our power is more reliable. We have friends who live in a wealthy wooded and hilly area of the Peninsula who have lost power for days this past winter, because those repeated winter storms made so many trees fall on power lines. Similarly, extremely fire-prone neighborhoods just 10 miles from me experience public-safety-power-shutoffs frequently in the summer while I don't.
Your power problems sound highly localized, and you are right to be upset about it, but it's on your utility, not the overall grid.
Palo Alto has its own municipal utility. There is a huge difference. A municipal utility is only responsible for retail electric sales and distribution infrastructure in a specific area. That includes local substations and power lines, which are the likely source of your electricity reliability problems.
Palo Alto doesn't manage supply and demand in real time, maintaining 60Hz AC, or run the wholesale electricity markets. CAISO does those, along with transmission and regional interconnects, all of which are functions of the electric grid. The meanings of words matter when discussing these things.
> Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
So when we refer to the weather induced disconnections, these are issues with things like trees on the lines and problems with our substations. These are principally managed by the utility, which you know is what I was referencing by “grid”.
What more would you like explained here?
Live with PG&E and live with PAU and then talk about it. Semantics are totally irrelevant.
Where I live in New Zealand, I haven't experienced a power cut in years, and in my entire life I've only ever experienced a handful of short power cuts. So when I hear about the California experience, it feels pretty third world to me.
You hear about a whole state's worth of local power outages. If you instead compare to when anyone in new Zealand has a power outage, you'll be closer in comparison
blackouts are once yearly occurrences, almost always caused by natural disasters. roads are high quality and abundant. we have some of highest quality tap water in the world, which meets drinking standards even before being treated. three airports. seven major bridges. way too many highways. three world class universities. and despite what you might hear, san francisco remains one of the safest cities in the country.
as it turns out, cloistered and fear-mongering tech bros don't really have an accurate bearing on reality. as a relatively normal person I am happy to report that despite being a suburban car-dependent hellhole, the bay area is very much a "first world" metro.
That it’s very strange that SF (and Seattle) are so much wealthier and developed, but I routinely see organized retail crime in those cities — but not in much poorer countries, who maintain a stricter social order.
To add some nuance, third world countries can be very different. Crime isn’t just a matter of “3rd world” or not (I don’t even think that’s a meaningful term). Guatemala City felt extremely dangerous even during the day. In contrast, Fez felt very safe from crime. In contrast, Singapore might be considered “3rd world” by some definitions but it is by far the safest place I’ve lived.
Not delusional at all. I appreciate that this acknowledges it doesn't have to be this way. Governments don't have to be dominated by the private market's profit motive.
There is a legal difference between a state banning it and a city. States have far more powers that cities don't (unless the state delegates that power which they often do)
In this case it would not matter, the ruling says it's pre-empted by federal law.
It would still be pre-empted by federal law even if the state did it.
> When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food?
You can't assume that gas supply works in a power outage. Some modern gas stoves depend on external electricity for active power regulation or flame surveillance, and the compressors along the line require electricity as well to function - which was one of the problems in the Texas power outage IIRC, as the gas peaker plants couldn't get powered on because the gas grid compressors were offline.
Keep a camping stove for emergency scenarios, way more reliable and if you're running out of gas you can always walk to the next open hardware store.
Pg&e runs both gas and electric for Berkeley. They are for-profit. It is in pg&e's best interest to keep demand for direct natural gas. It's in their best interest to keep the electric grid unstable so that people will be tricked into supporting direct natural gas.
Fortunately, pg&e has enough regulatory capture and marketing to trick regulators into letting them rob taxpayers and trick taxpayers into docility.
The issue lies not with a natural gas ban. The issue lies with having a for-profit monopoly in charge of all energy production and supply.
Most states in this the country has less than 50% gas stove usage. This would not be an issue in most states. CA, NY, NJ can catch up to the rest of us.
> When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
How about a little butane stove? They work great at hotel omelette bars! Or a Coleman stove? It's not that big a deal to cook when the power is out, really.
People downvote but I went to REI to get a dual purpose propane stove for both camping purposes and emergency purposes. At that moment there was another person in the store that was buying one just for backup. Luckily, haven't had to use it for emergencies yet (and successfully deployed it car camping).
My point is that backup cooking solutions for when the power is out are both cheap and convenient. You don't need to build a wood fire in the backyard just to cook.
Or just a tinfoil tray, a wire rack, and some candles. You're not going to really cook that way, but it should be more than enough to heat up some canned food or ramen or whatever.
Only 24% of my state (Washington) has gas stoves. We have already begun the process to ban Natural Gas into new buildings. Nothing major is happening and the sky is not falling.
Washington is unique in its hydropower positioning. It's easy to electrify in Washington because it makes sense to do so. Hydropower is cheap and clean.
Unfortunately it's not a replicable model for the rest of the country.
Germany has almost no hydropower, no nuclear power anymore, but German government is continuing to insist a similar ban on natural gas in all new buildings should be introduced (or maybe already in action).
Germany thought they'd have cheap Russian gas from Nordstream. Now they're looking to move manufacturing to the US because energy is too expensive.
Look at it this way, even is CO2 levels are primarily anthropogenic, most of the world isn't willing to do anything about it substantial (i.e. Global South). In which case the Western economies martyring themselves isn't going to change anything.
OTOH, if climate change is not primarily anthropogenic the West martyring itself with expensive green energy decisions is a disastrous mistake.
Global South, i.e. BRICS+, sells and consumes huge amounts of oil.
Russia has proven mineral reserves of $75T, most in the world by a fat margin. If they stop selling their oil they're done, and so are China, India, Japan, and parts of Europe. BRICS don't have the ability to drop oil without catastrophic impacts on their food and energy systems.
>Yikes
Climate science is hard. The margins of error are wide. They already have a track record of being overly aggressive on predictions.
As a WA resident, we also see weeks of subzero temperatures every year. And we've had power outages that can last a few days (if you're lucky) to multiple weeks (rare but not unheard of). Knowing that I have natural gas as a backup source of heating my house is great, and I've had to use it multiple times already in the last 3 years.
Having a backup method of ensuring my pipes don't freeze and my family is (mostly) comfortable is great. But if you're an electricity purist who hates cheap, available natural gas for some reason, enjoy sitting in the cold while your house destroys itself. Or spend thousands of dollars more on a device that BURNS GAS to run your electric furnace anyway
Which should lead you to conclude that I, in fact, don't live in or around Seattle? Contrary to what our governor would have you believe, there's a lot more to WA state than King county.
Not that any of this matters to the conversation about gas, my points still stand. Last winter we hit -10F, and there were power outages, so having gas meant having heat when it was extremely cold.
What about if the gas lines have cold-related outages ?
Ultimately you need to be ready to be self-sufficient. I live in a cold climate and run my house on a heat pump, with an oil furnace backup, AND a wood stove with plenty of wood as a third layer.
Electricity is a universal protocol - you can generate it with multiple different energy sources, ranging from gas to nuclear. I think this change future-proofs constructions, and makes our infrastructure less fragile.
California's strategy for electricity is non-existent. We have been perpetually at peak electricity use since 25+ years since I came here. Meanwhile electricity use from EVs has soared, and we don't have enough electricity for everything. AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now.
Plus, I'm paying over $0.50/kWh when I hit Tier 3, which I hit after 2 charges of my EV. Everything is untenable. There is no strategy at all. It's just a mess of ideology and dogma but no science or logic, it's infuriating!
> AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now.
California has had a grand total of four nuclear power plant, three are decommissioned, the fourth has is scheduled to have its two reactors be decommissioned in 2029 and 2030.
The “on hold” description for the 5-year extension (the schedule used to be 2024/2025) is inaccurate: it was contingent on replacements being identified and operational, those have been identified but were delayed by factors including a temporary tariff on relevant components, but are expected to be operational well before the 2029 date.
What's the rooftop solar situation where you're at? I live in Oregon and maybe a fifth of the houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar. A friend of mine in California mentioned that their rooftop solar setup fully covered all their usage and had them selling about 30% of their power generation back to the grid. Seems like an obvious win in California.
Reminder that pg&e is a for-profit monopoly. Reminder that this is the dumbest way of organizing an energy company imaginable. I literally can't think of anything so stupid. You know they make profit. They steal about 16 billion a year. Think about how much infra improvement we could do with 16 billion.
It's highly regional. Per kWh, Connecticut pays twice as much as New Jersey, on average. Boston pays three times what Arizona pays. The government updates price tables monthly:
It could have been, but ideologues won’t stop talking about wind turbines vs fossil fuels. Over 30% of California’s grid comes from renewable resources, which seems great, but appears to have come at a cost.
Please don't promote falsehoods. Texas power outage wasn't due to wind turbines. It was due to gas plants freezing and being unable to operate. Of course Gov. Abbot decides to blame green energy when that's literally what prevented even more blackouts. [1]
"Power equipment in Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather.[44][45] Natural gas power generating facilities had equipment freeze up and faced shortages of fuel. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and some other politicians initially said renewable energy sources were the cause for the power outages, citing frozen wind turbines as an example of their unreliability.[46] Viral images of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine said to be in Texas were actually taken in 2015 in Sweden.[47] However, wind energy accounts for only 23% of Texas power output;[47] moreover, equipment for other energy sources such as natural gas power generating facilities either freezing up or having mechanical failures were also responsible.[46] "
That one huge fire a few years ago was caused when a thick piece of iron WORE THROUGH from 100 years of wear and tear.
But the laws have specific exceptions for oil and gas pipelines (one permit and the land owners have to dealwithit), for new electric lines everyone who can even theoretically see them can (and will) complain.
How is an all-electric infrastructure “less fragile”? I don’t see any advantage for the end user. The only thing that works during a power outage is the gas stove.
Regarding power generation, gas is cheap and plentiful and gas power plants are much easier to build than nuclear. Nuclear takes years to get regulatory approval. Anyway, no one’s building nuclear. Germany closed down their last three nuclear plants, for some reason, and California would love to close their last nuclear plant but simply can’t.
You forgot one small thing, there's two orders of magnitude more emissions with gas plants which makes this technology unsuitable for any future development, it's basically legacy, regardless of what you think of nuclear.
Afaik on an international level there's been a somewhat universal consent that natural gas is the "transition fossil fuel of choice" [0], due to being the fossil fuel with the lowest emissions.
It also has the added bonus that gas infrastructure can realistically be retooled for green hydrogen, and related products.
I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing.
Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise and suffers from its storage problems, the list of potential providers is also an issue in Europe as seen during the Ukraine war (and it's not like Qatar, Algeria or Azerbaijan are better than Russia)
> I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing.
This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.
As the fossil fuel reliance doesn't only extend to the energy sector, but also manufacturing industries, where hydrocarbons, as a resource, are responsible for pretty much everything that defines modern life. [0]
> Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise
The infrastructure is expensive, but it's also the only existing energy infrastructure which can realistically be retooled for renewable replacement through green hydrogen.
Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].
It's a dimension to this way too few people have on their radar, as most of the public debate is solely centered on electricity generation from fossil fuels, when that's actually the easiest problem to fix with renewables.
But the dependencies on fossil fuels as manufacturing resource, fixing those is a much bigger and involved task than making electricity grids green and renewable.
> This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.
Gas cannot be considered for a transition because of it's very high emissions, diplomatic issues and high infrastructure costs. It's a very polluting tech which should stay back in the 20th century along petrol. The stability problems of renewables must be solved first to be adopted, in a better way, burning fossil fuels when they do not work ain't one.
> Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].
The whole cycle has disastrous efficiency with 70% loss, as it is now, hydrogen storage isn't that useful until we invent some better tech. There's some use for it of course but that's not a large scale solution by any means.
The accusation of hydrogen having bad efficiency is just something BEV companies came up with. It is basically marketing FUD. A more realistic analysis will show that there is very little difference between using hydrogen and direct electrification strategies. This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.
The state of the art on the full cycle has 65% loss. No production ready tech goes below than that.
Once we said that, how you judge this very high losses depends of your personal opinion.
> This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.
Unless some better hydrogen tech is invented, that won't be useful towards this goal.
It is already below 50% and rapidly dropping. There is no significant difference in efficiency already, and this will vanish entirely within time. BEVs are simply lying about this fact.
Energy storage will require hydrogen energy storage. This is the fundamental problem of direct electrification strategies. They will need vast amounts of energy storage that cannot be solved except using hydrogen.
> How is an all-electric infrastructure “less fragile”?
I can generate electricity at home with off the shelf parts. I can also store respectable amounts of it with stuff I can buy off the shelf.
Electricity generation can also be distributed easily, you can have multiple small power plants around the grid.
Gas needs to be centrally pumped out of the ground, processed, pressurised and fed into pipes. There is no practical way for a normal home to make enough of it at home.
Gas is cheap except when it isn’t. If you are a European depending on cheap natural gas from Russia, well, a simple war with Ukraine could be enough to shut you off.
Not true. That's a problem with the implementation, not the protocol. Elevators in my building run on electricity, and it has local backup generators. I think the solution is a better grid (including generators, electrical panels, and batteries).
There's this thing called a fan that's inside your furnace. If the electricity goes out - you're gonna die of cold anyway because there's no way to move the heat from the furnace through your ductwork.
But duh, I am realizing that shorting the contact won’t do anything so you’re right.
But I have a small solar generator and could probably make it work from that, because it requires very little electricity, as opposed to say, a heat pump.
Gas valve and igniter run on low voltage, I think the combustion blower runs on 120 VAC, the main blower that distributes the heat to the rest of the house is definitely 120 VAC. A small gas generator that can provide maybe a kW would probably be the most straightforward backup.
Still won't work. If your home is sufficiently air-tight so that you won't die of cold with that paltry amount of gas, you're going to die from the carbon monoxide from your stove.
The propane heater from Home Depot either has the same problem or it uses electricity for the air induction system.
If your goal is to be prepared, a generator and a heat pump will last longer, it will be cheaper for you and society in the long run, it will have more utility, and we have far more gasoline stockpiled and ready for emergencies than we have natural gas.
You can take hot showers with a tankless Propane water heater as well assuming there's water pressure, costing < $300 on the low end. Sure, proper ventilation is important...
Gas spoils & does not store for very long. Diesel & propane are both better at storage.
You can even run generators off propane, though at less power than gas. There's even dual fuel (Gas & Propane) generators you can purchase for < $300 USD. It won't power your house, but it will at least be something which can charge batteries & run small appliances. They are loud though. If you own a house, getting a proper generator is the better choice. If you need something off grid or in an apartment (running on the balcony for ventilation), a single smaller generator or 2 in parallel will work. Smaller generators also save on fuel.
At the end of the day, multiple fuel sources will probably work. Wood/coal/propane/kerosene for heat, solar/diesel/propane/gas for electricity, etc. Most grid down scenarios last less than a few days.
Being able to boil water is important as well. There are often boil alerts when there are brown outs.
$600 for one that will run your gas furnace. $15000 for one that will run your whole house. You probably want to spend more than the cheap end just so it is reliable. Or you can hook an inverter up to your car.
There are about 3.5 million total housing units in NYC. Say half of them needed electricity to heat the space all winter. The grid simply cannot deliver on that load.
They clearly do just fine in summar, and heat pumps use basically the same amount of power in either direction. I don’t see why the grid would be overloaded.
The irony is most of the industrial energy used in NYC to spin the pumps and fans in HVAC and thermal energy provided for heating water in boilers / air in NYC comes from steam generation plants. I used to live next to one near w58th street. For those who don't know, these massive facilities as large as power plants (some historically protected) run on natural gas!
Although, it did boggle the mind how my luxury 2br apt (built in 2018) had a gas stove with only a small "suck" vent (return air of sorts that just vents to the roof)in each bathroom. If I ran the stove too long I'd set the fire alarm off from carbon monoxide and particulate in the air. So I'm actually a big proponent of doing this for indoor air quality.
If buildings were required by code to have a more "fume hood"-like setup for capturing exhaust (with supply and return paths maintaining flow) then it would lead to better indoor air quality. As a bonus this is even a good idea anyway for electric stoves since it keeps any smells and smoke from leaving the kitchen area.
They ARE required by code and have been for years. Parent's "luxury" apartment was not built to code. Probably one of those illegal NYC apartments where you tear open the walls and there's a whole other furnished room inside that isn't shown on the blueprints.
It's very possible, and might be impossible to upgrade a large multi unit building. In most jurisdictions a large renovation would force you to upgrade such things. In this case I would assume simply disallowing a gas stove without proper venting. Though I suspect the permitting process in NYC resembles something out of The Sopranos, assuming the proper permits were obtained.
Is that to say there's a municipal steam power system of some sort? That's pretty alien to me, but it reminds me that there was a municipal hydraulic system in London before the advent of electricity that industrial users used for energy.
I think that comment is just referring to power plants using steam turbines to generate electricity. But there is also a stream distribution system in NYC. My apartment complex has heat and hot water from Con Edison (power company) steam.
Large parts of the south in the USA lack natural gas from pipes also. Propane is much more common in those parts (see the cartoon “King of the Hill” for example).
No one "subsidizes" gas pipelines in most areas. Usually it is a (gasp) capitalistic private company that does that.
But I agree it is easy to do it yourself with propane with one proviso: propane(like butane) has the somewhat insidious property that it is heavier than air so it flows downhill as it dissipates. If it flows to a spark or fire then a flame will spread from the point of first ignition to the propane source.
So if you decide to build a home with a propane(or butane) tank you might consider locating your home on or near a hilltop (that you also own) so that any propane fumes roll away from your property:
Natural gas is much lighter than air and rises quickly up and out of structures. b/c it dissipates so rapidly it is far, far safer than propane. But it is not as easily compressed as is propane so natgas is usually transported to the user in pipes at low pressure.
A state-sanctioned monopoly is hardly a private company. They can set any price they want and force you to pay. That's not capitalism, that's extortion.
So yes, gas infra is highly, highly subsidized. In a competitive market direct gas would have died out decades ago.
Dumbest take I've heard all day. Banning gas would increase quality of life. Why subject yourself to pollution, gas leaks and expensive secondary energy infrastructure when you can just not do that.
I understand the gas lobby has spent billions convincing you otherwise, but the fact is that direct natural gas is far inferior to electricity at this point.
calling people dumb is also a really bad sales pitch.
the problem with nanny-state types is they're just terrible at convincing anyone of anything, which is why they're always so upset at everyone else for being so dumb and ignorant.
"i didn't call you dumb, i said this is a dumb take!"
the problem with nanny-state types is ...
anyway, i'm going to go cook some factory farmed pork bacon on my gas range and then hop into my pickup truck and drive about an hour to go visit my parents in the suburbs, catch you later.
Natural gas is ubiquitous in the US indeed. Which is why a small peninsula on the edge of the state/country deciding to ban it shows how insular NYC leadership is.
Every single climate change prediction (hundreds of them) made since the 1960s have failed to materialize.
...But I'm the crazy one since I refuse to run around like a chicken without a head.
The church of climatology and latter day taxes is full of shit. It has always been full of shit. It was always and shall always be a power play.
I know for sure that earth's climate changes, but also know for sure that taxes and economic ham-stringing isn't going to influence it in any way, shape, or form.
What subsidizing? I built my house, I had to pay someone to dig into the street to hook up to the gas lines and then fix the road. Then I had to pay the gas company to install a meter and turn on service at my new address. And finally, they send me a bill every month for the gas I use.
Having that gas hookup saves me a ton of hassle during the winter months when, inevitably, power goes out and I need to keep my place warm for a day or two (or more, though rarely) while I wait for service to be restored. My neighbors appreciate it as well, as they can come get warm in front of my gas fireplace and cook on my gas range.
I have yet to see a downside of having gas as an option, it's only helped ESPECIALLY given the geographic realities of where I live (feet of snow overnight, subzero temps for weeks/months). Ironically the pushbacks against people who are PRO gas proves how insular the anti-gas crowd is, because apparently they can't imagine a reason someone would NEED that as an option
Everyone is worked up about losing their gas stove, but natural gas heating is far more reliable and efficient than any electric option right now. This will create a lot of issues until heat pumps catch up. Northern New York is very cold.
Heat pumps are about 250-300% efficient. Relative to resistive heating which is of course 100% efficient. Gas is about close to 100% (you loose some via exhaust). Ground source heat pumps work pretty much anywhere. Air source heat pumps can be more challenging but can also work at more extreme temperatures. They don't stop working but their efficiency drops a bit. And of course resistive heating doesn't stop working.
Heat pumps are used all over Scandinavia and well into the arctic circle, including rural areas in the parts of Scandinavia (i.e. the polar circle) that see extreme temperatures far more regularly and for far longer periods than NY. Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid and excellent building standards. Triple (not double) glazing is the norm there, for example.
And of course more rural places would also feature wood stoves as a backup. There is mostly no gas network there; especially not in rural areas. Before heat pumps became popular about thirty years ago they would have used that or oil based systems.
> And of course resistive heating doesn't stop working.
Well except…
> Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid
Okay, yeah. That would pretty much be my concern.
Having been without power for over two weeks in the past 12 months the propane tanks and propane stove / furnace / water heater have been a lifesaver.
Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
Gas furnaces don't work without power by default. The fan that pushes the hot air through your house won't work. Many gas furnaces have electrically powered safety features that won't allow the furnace to function if the power is out.
> Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
My furnace runs on 120V power pulling ~8A when running. That's ~1kW. Comparable sized resistive heating would use about 9kW.
1kW for a few hours a day is easy to provide through a cheap generator, a couple small solar panels and a single marine battery, or apparently a ~$220 wind turbine I can order on Amazon that can output up to 1200W. 9kW is a whole different ball game.
And that's just heating. My stove uses in the order of single-digit watts for seconds at a time. It can also just be lit with a match without power. My water heater does run a small exhaust fan while it's heating, but again... we're talking hundreds of watts instead of kilowatts.
Yes, all these options pretty much still need power, but the smaller power requirements are a hell of a lot easier to provide than the power needed for resistive electric heating. I could run my water heater off of a desktop UPS.
Sure. When we’re talking about the temperature band they work in. Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all. At that point you have two things happening…
1. You are using electricity to warm your coils outside to keep frost and snow off them.
2. You are using drastically inefficient heat for your home.
200-300% in their band under ideal conditions, maybe. Seems like cherry picking.
200-300% efficient is what a very bad heat pump would do under ideal conditions. Good heat pumps have a coefficient of performance above 3 for temperatures above freezing (and above 4 for only mildly chilly outdoor temperatures), and still well above 2 at temperatures around 15°F/-10°C.
My 10 year old apartment has a heat pump rated for a CoP of 2.3 at a temperature of 17°F/-8°C, which is actually below the record low outdoor temperature for this area. This isn't some exotic new equipment or a model designed for cold climates; it's what was cheap and mainstream a decade ago.
17°F isn't the point at which my heat pump stops working. It's just the lower temperature conventionally used as a point of comparison on the spec sheets for such devices. There's another column on the spec sheet for 47°F (where my heat pump model is listed as having a CoP of 3.6).
And as for the question about colder climates: it's not a matter of whether an area can occasionally experience temperatures below eg. 17°F. What matters is whether you'll ever experience daily highs that are cold enough to prevent heating the house.
I was responding specifically to this bit: "Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all." I've refuted that. If you want to discuss some more distant goalposts, I won't be able to offer firsthand evidence.
This guy[1] ran a test on his home during last winter, and found that his mini split had a COP of around 1.5-2.5 down to -10C.
The data wasn't terribly correlated to temperature, though he didn't have a mini-shed for the outside unit to protect it from snow, so it probably had to defrost more often during the less-cold, snowy days.
FWIW here in Oslo, we've been using a mini split as the main heat in our home, where it's often -15C for long stretches during winter, and can get down to -25C. It's in the main livingroom, and we do supplement the upstairs bedroom with resistive foil floor heating during the coldest periods. Other than that it's doing great, and comparing the electricity bills with friends and colleagues who don't have a heat pump it's definitely helping a lot.
I'm not cherry picking, I'm merely describing the status quo in a place of the world that can be pretty extreme compared to NY.
You are talking about air source heat pumps. There are actually variants of that technology that work fine at -20 and below. -20 is actually quite far above absolute zero. The challenge is not that there isn't enough energy but finding and pumping liquids around that can absorb that "heat" and actually stay liquid. Efficiency indeed drops below zero. But it still works.
However, ground source heat pumps are not dependent on the air temperature at all and work anywhere you can get a decent temperature gradient from the ground. Which is pretty much anywhere except maybe on top of the arctic ice sheet in e.g. Antarctica.. Stick a few pipes in the ground and get them deep enough and you can have an nice cozy house pretty much anywhere that is not located on a few miles of ice. NY is perfect for that. No permafrost there and stable temperatures below ground throughout the year.
And again, they have been doing this for decades in places like Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland, etc. That's because this stuff works and is reliable and efficient enough. This is not some new kind of science fiction technology. Millions of households depend on this when it gets to minus 40C and below (about the same in C and F). And having lived in Sweden and Finland, I can tell you that they like their houses heated properly there and it really gets that cold up north. They don't use gas in houses there at all and never have. There are no gas distribution networks there. Oil based heating has been phased out in most places there a long time ago. But people forget that that stuff has to be trucked in and trucking anything in gets tricky when there's a few meters of snow on the roads. Heatpumps, resistive heating, district heating, and wood based stoves is pretty much all they use there. District heating is not common outside the more populated areas (i.e. most of the Arctic region) with the exception of the larger towns and villages.
Yes, but the vast majority of the population of New York State lives in places where air source heat pumps work just fine. Air source heat pumps can be built to work down to at least -20 Fahrenheit[1]. That's equal to the coldest temperature on record in places like Buffalo and Albany.
For those relatively few people living in places which get even colder than that, there's the option of either ground loop heat pumps, or more pragmatically propane burners for the very few nights of the year that are super-cold.
Yes, of course if they're bi-directional. And theoretically, you can also use excess renewable power to heat up the soil in summer and draw on that stored heat in winter.
-20 - at which point the COP of the heat pump I linked to is still well above 1 - is equal to the coldest temperature on record in the locations I mentioned. Not the coldest daily maximum. The coldest temperature ever recorded, and the heat pump still wouldn’t require any backup system. Yes, it’s probably working hard at that point, but so? We’re talking exceptional conditions for the location.
And for the other 99.99% of the time the heat pump is so much cheaper to run it’s not funny - and in the long run you save even more when you’re not paying for all that gas infrastructure to be installed and maintained.
So you have all the heat pumps going on full blast on the coldest days, all together. It's a huge spike in energy demand. As long as the grid can deliver it fine, but when it doesn't the potential is catastrophic. Natural gas heating is far less grid dependent. Even if you lose power you could run a gas furnace with a small generator. Not the case with a heat pump.
Rationally speaking we can only turn the ship as fast as it can turn. Rushing and forcing things to happen that do not have a solid foundation (i.e. a suitable large and reliable grid) are just going to cause problems.
> So you have all the heat pumps going on full blast on the coldest days, all together. It's a huge spike in energy demand. As long as the grid can deliver it fine, but when it doesn't the potential is catastrophic.
Repalce heat pumps with gas furnaces and you have an equally true sentence, if "the grid" is the gas grid.
Gas usage also spikes on those cold days. You know what people do to prevent this being an issue? Storage. Nothing you couldn't also do with electric
power.
Sure. A heat pump only needs to be 170% efficient to make back the generation losses. As for infrastructure losses, natural gas distribution has leaks as well.
Also, if the power plant is integrated into a CHP system to heat nearby households then generation gets back some percent.
Heat pumps are dramatically more efficient. A good gas furnace is 95% efficient. Meanwhile, a ductless heat pump can be 300%. They more more energy than they consume. That's the huge advantage.
Converting gas heat to heat pumps, even if they have a gas heat backup for worst case days in northern latitudes, would still be a big win in the net environmentally.
This is completely false. Gas heating is way, way less efficient than a heat pump. And don't bring up low temperatures, modern heat pumps can have back up resistive heaters and combined use will still be far, far more efficient than gas heat. If you can install geothermal that's better still. Stop spreading fossil fuel industry lies.
They probably mean cost efficiency rather than thermodynamic efficiency. It would cost a lot to install those systems in addition to the electricity storage necessary to run during a blizzard. I’m not disagreeing that electric is better but there’s a lot more to consider than just “modern systems are better so you should install them” and it’s not a lie to say so.
Sure, in CA a ban makes sense (though Berkeley law was overturned). But in a polar vortex winter storm, how do you have enough power to keep the building warm if there's no power, and the minimal reserves you may have with battery backup are not enough to run the heat pump?
I think this ban is too bold and will result in political backlash that will end up doing worse than if something less drastic was proposed.
Hochul was 10pts away from losing the last race to a complete RW zealot.
I wouldn't say it's "completely false", it depends on the temperature. Heat pump efficiency drops as the temperature drops. If you live in a place with very cold temperatures for prolonged periods of time, gas may indeed be more efficient.
I lived in a building with heat pumps in Europe. In colder climate, they're loud. As in, LOUD. It's likely fine when you can install the external module somewhere on the roof (poor birds though), but in many apartment buildings you can only put it on the outer walls, and you can clearly hear the sound inside the flat. Internal modules that cycle air are also noisy, though less.
Some are, and some of those even live up to their temperature rating, but they are subject to wind chill and can also fail due to ice and snow build-up, so its not as good as it sounds.
Electric resistance heat is super inefficient. That's why it's often referred to as "emergency heat".
Ironically the best combo is a heat pump + natural gas furnace as a backup. Best of both worlds. But here we are making those illegal so we can pretend to save the planet.
> Ironically the best combo is a heat pump + natural gas furnace as a backup. Best of both worlds. But here we are making those illegal so we can pretend to save the planet.
How does this work in practice though? The natural gas distribution lines don't pay for themselves. If they're only gonna be used in emergencies then they'll be crazy expensive. You have a lot of money by not having to run natural gas through a neighborhood at all.
A more realistic backup in these types of places (which is used widely in the northeast) is heating fuel oil in a tank.
I agree with everything you said except there has been a war on heating oil since before this tiff with natural gas. So even suggesting that is anathema because it would be career suicide for the politicians pushing this. You can certainly use an oil furnace as a second stage, though oil is more often used as a boiler for steam or hydronic.
Storing heating oil is risky, expensive and is a dirty use of a property due to the need for an underground or above ground tank.
Abatement of tank leaks can run into the millions as you have to dig up all soil contaminated by heating oil when the tank is retired, and tank retirement is a cost that holds up many property sales and redevelopment here in the Pacific Northwest.
That's not really true elsewhere. Using in-ground oil tanks is an antiquated practice that isn't used anymore. Any modern heating oil installation has the tanks either in the cellar or in the yard behind the house. Either one would immediately reveal a leak so it could be remedied quickly. Yes Seattle is full of shitty bungalows with in-ground oil tanks that have to be condemned, it is a problem and one of the many reasons Seattle sucks. I did a stint at AWS so know the area. You can get away with a heat pump or baseboard electric in Seattle because the outdoor temperature rarely dips below 30F in winter. Go to a place like Maine where the vast majority of houses use oil. There is no natural gas infrastructure and heating with electric is impractical. 30F is a 'warm' winter day. A heat pump cannot effectively deal with the frigid climate in the NE and electric space heating would be insanely expensive. Many thousands of homes are heating with oil in the northeast everyday and not turning their yards into superfund sites. There are many compromises that work for the milquetoast PNW that won't work elsewhere.
The problem is when it kicks in for everyone in the neighborhood at the same time on an especially cold night and causes a brown out. (Happened to me this winter.)
Not when the power's out for days - as often happens in winter storms.
You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator for a week or even better a natural gas whole house unit in perpetuity.
If you take the investment that is the infrastructure for gas lines (all underground) and do similar for most electricity then storms don't take out electricity and people don't die.
Best of all, the total investment and maintenance actually decreases.
"You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator.."
Likewise for a heat pump, right?
Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often? I am from Manitoba and my worst-ever experience was 10-11 hours when it was very, very cold out in 35+ years.
You need way to power to drive the heat pump than you do to run the blower. But I agree, it's stupid to act like a natural gas furnace is a good choice for long-term power outages.
Depending on your definition of long term… I’ve got ~900lbs of propane tanks sitting beside my house, a propane forced air furnace, and a dual fuel generator that can run on propane.
Assuming I run the generator for 12 hours a day at half load (powering my whole house, still firing my equipment up and working remotely…) and the furnace runs for three hours a day throughout that time… I can keep going for a couple of weeks. If I _can_ get gas to fuel the generator with that can be extended pretty substantially—the generator is really what’s using up all my propane.
So in the realm of the kind of power outages where you reasonably expect society to recover and continue… works pretty well for me.
But yeah, in the future I would love to move over to a heat pump and solar generation / local storage. That extends your potential runtime pretty near indefinitely. (We’re talking lifetime of batteries and solar panels at that point instead of “when the propane truck can come by next”.)
> Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often?
Near Ottawa—in the past 12 months I’ve had an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a few day long outages.
We don’t need to survive the -40 or -50 of the prairies, but even with good insulation a -10 day in the spring makes the house pretty cold after a couple of days.
They clearly over-generalized. I didn't say they "overstated." They didn't say "in some parts of Seattle" they said "in Seattle."
I'm sure there have been edge cases in every state of the country where the power has been 10 days at someone's house because of unique circumstances. That doesn't meaningfully change the risk profile of a heat pump over gas furnaces.
It wasn't a unique case. It happens about once every 20 years. The time before the 10 day event it was 4 days. I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country. The powerlines were down for miles around. The powerlines thread through the trees, and the trees fall on them during a windstorm.
No. A heat pump requires a significantly higher amount of electricity to function.
An average gas furnace blower motor draws around 7A at 120V.
A heat pump can require between 20A-40A at *240V* PLUS the air handler which is the same as above. A heat pump air handler is just a furnace without burners. If supplemental heat strips are needed they can be on a 50A breaker at 240V.
What nonsense. If you ha e a backup generator your power isn't out. Gas heat doesn't work with the power out. Why are you resorting to lies to push fossil fuels?
Heat Pumps can run in very cold temperatures, but it's just not worth it, economically, because their efficiency drops and gas becomes a cheaper option.
In almost all of the continental USA the number of days that cold are more than offset by the savings during the rest of the days of the year. This YouTube channel covers the topic extensively https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI
It is not always a cheaper option. Especially, if for example, you don’t have natural gas service at all currently. In some areas of Seattle there is no natural gas service and so homes may be all electric if newer, or if older may only have oil heating.
Also, I know you likely didn’t mean to exclude this, but in cases where gas service might be cheaper in the short term that’s only because it’s effectively heavily subsidized and many of the costs are externalized.
IMHO: The government including EPA has been hijacked by corporate interests that destroy the environment literally on an industrial scale. The same club of multinationals have expropriated our middle class and sent it to China, which is profitable in part because of the lack of environmental regulations which manages to be even worse than the hollowed out ones we enjoy here.
So while all this is going on we have the bullshit with straws, our printers turning themselves off constantly, and now this, as if people in their homes are the lever that needs to be pulled to fix the environment. It’s a farce and a diversion from the corruption that’s actually contributing to environmental damage.
Electric and gas stoves are not analogs, at all. Bet your ass the politicians pushing this for optics will NOT be using an electric stove at home.
Induction stoves are cheaper, more energy efficient, safer, and better for your health.
There aren't any advantages to gas at all. The gas industry has, however, put many billions into lobbying and marketing to convince you otherwise. And it seems they have succeeded.
That's false. Gas means you can instantly adjust the heat level. Electric is nice if you don't actually cook or don't know how. You don't find electric in any restaurant ever and there's a reason for that. Again, the people pushing this legislation 100% do not have electric ranges in their house. This is performative politics that has nothing to do with actually caring about the environment.
Basically everything you just stated is out of date. You're thinking of old, incandescent electric stoves, which are indeed garbage.
You can heat faster and also adjust heat faster with induction than with gas. Many restaurants are moving to induction. People pushing for this legislation have induction ranges in their house... in fact, most serious people with concerns about air quality have already switched.
The reason why this topic as so controversial is that the vast majority of people don't understand how powerful modern induction ranges are. It's effectively as great a change as geothermal heat pumps will be in our lifetime. They are a total win on every aspect except aesthetics.
Meanwhile here in europe electric stoves work just fine, cook faster, are cleaner and safer. Entering a house with gas stoves feels like stepping back in time.
I am curious how one pops popcorn, shakes a pan, throws the pan, and heats the sides of the pan when eg reducing stock. How do woks work, exactly, on an induction burner? Why does spilling liquids cause the problems I encountered? Why does the bottom of the pans have to be perfectly flat? Some of my cast iron skillets (whoops never mind) are 50 years or more old and are not perfectly flat. They cook fantastic on a gas range. My All-Clad skillets reduce stock while caramalizing above the liquid level, and... the flavor gain is detectable. My only a few years old set of de Buyers "work" on induction but they're not perfectly flat, either. They are ever so slightly concave up in the center. They work fantastic too on a gas burner, but are a disaster on induction.
While moving house across the country, our Viking gas range preceding us, I installed a moderately high end induction stove (~$1600) and cooked on it for three weeks before I completely gave up. I even bought "induction ready" pots and pans! No doubt it improved the resale value of the kitchen but for people with competent technique, an induction cook top is a culinary disaster.
Far superior? Yeah, I don't think so.
I really wanted to love that induction stove, it's why I paid extra for one to sell the house. But I was duped. Ah well there is theory and there is practice, and I remind myself yet again to always stick to practice.
> I am curious how one pops popcorn, shakes a pan, throws the pan, and heats the sides of the pan when eg reducing stock. How do woks work, exactly, on an induction burner? Why does spilling liquids cause the problems I encountered? Why does the bottom of the pans have to be perfectly flat? Some of my cast iron skillets (whoops never mind) are 50 years or more old and are not perfectly flat. They cook fantastic on a gas range. My All-Clad skillets reduce stock while caramalizing above the liquid level, and... the flavor gain is detectable. My only a few years old set of de Buyers "work" on induction but they're not perfectly flat, either. They are ever so slightly concave up in the center. They work fantastic too on a gas burner, but are a disaster on induction.
... we do all of those things on our mid/low-range induction stove? Our primary cookware is random cast iron, the pasta water boils over all the time with no ill effect, we make popcorn, we make stocks, toss things in a pan by lifting it from the surface all the time. I don't know what range you had but something is wrong with it.
Induction doesn’t require you have perfectly flat pans/whatever. Your “induction ready” pots/pans were probably just really bad, like maybe aluminum (yikes) with some kind of induction-compatible insert? You want to use pure cast iron anyways.
Everything your gas burner can do, a proper induction range can do better. Mine has a dedicated 240V 60A line and can boil water faster than anything but a restaurant-grade gas line (which isn’t even an option in most neighborhoods).
I don’t use woks at all, but I can’t see why one wouldn’t work.
There is one really great use for induction stoves I found. My wife and I have a small one burner induction stove from Ikea, which is basically a high powered hot plate. Its great for putting on the table for hotpot, fondue, shabushabu, korean bbq, etc. Even though I love my gas range, I am always a little weird about putting a propane stove on my dining room table.
I really want to like your comment (and I will) but... but... hot pot, ..., korean bbq isn't the fire in the center of the table part of the entertainment the restaurant supplies?
I suppose we can always in the glorious future buy electric table candelabras with solar powered rechargeable batteries that we can place into the window light on the annoited day and be sure our dinner date at our table works out... well?
I choose the firebug spouse of mine who runs the campfires on outings and isn't afraid of a (controlled) spontaneous combustion.
Yeah, those bbq baskets advertised for grilling vegetables are sensational for charring Anaheims and Poblanos over a big gas burner. Bell peppers become a no brainer. No problem at all to do a much better job getting the skins off than those roller things out in front of the grocery stores in the fall. I can do about 8 at a time.
The rest of the responses, hoo boy, I think I live on a different planet.
Overselling my competence... amusing, because my view of my own skills is that after 40 years of building on what appears to in hindsight have been an extraordinarily well chosen set of parents I might just now begin to understand how the best kitchens work.
I got an induction stove at a scratch and dent store for 60% off and if and when I move it is most certainly coming with me..I'll never go back to gas or electric. the time I've saved heating water alone has tripled the investment. and it came with a sous vide like temperature probe, which is priceless for making a decent cup of coffee
"In addition to the environmental concerns raised by such widespread use of natural gas, some health experts have also argued that using it in the home, especially when cooking, may pose a health risk to consumers."
Spending a day walking around NYC is probably worse for my health than years of gas stove usage. Every time I leave the city I feel like I need a shower from all the grime and who knows what I feel caked on me.
It seems to me that every time people reference the slippery slope fallacy, the people claiming slippery slope get proven right 10 years down the line. Even in this case, banning gas in new buildings implies that gas will be banned in the future!
It makes no sense to call the slippery slope a fallacy. Some things are a slippery slope, others are not. But it’s not fundamentally impossible to have a slippery slope.
It's called The Law of Merited Impossibility. It's a popular tactic for authoritarians in the last 30 years or so. Deny something is happening, and anyone who claims it is is paranoid. Then quickly do the thing, and smear anyone who says it's a bad thing. The point is to avoid ever actually debating the ideas they're pushing by denying it.
Why are you ignoring the title and first paragraph?
> The facts and strategy behind the outrage over rumors of a ban on gas stoves
> The conservative media was in uproar last week over speculation that the federal government planned to ban gas cooking stoves and possibly seize them.
The aim is clearly to dismiss the concern as manufactured outrage—note the words “strategy,” “speculation,” and “outrage”—rather than a concern about something that may happen because it’s an aim liberals definitely have.
I seem to remember at one point that conservatives celebrated federalism - something about the states being the laboratories of democracy. Who knows, maybe New York will show how successful such a ban can be and the federal government can take that into consideration, but for now it seems like this is just New York.
Having lived in the metro area for quite a long time, I am qualified to tell you that few things NY does is exemplary of success. Most energy or public works projects turn into a total debacle. Shoreham Nuclear Power station is a good example. Billions spent, and they never even turned it on. Residents are still paying that down. Endless road project cycling. I'm not sure there has been a single transportation project that wasn't at last 3x over budget. Public corruption, kickbacks, bribery, influence peddling, patronage... The entire state apparatus is rotten to the core and rife with incompetence. I'd like to believe in the state's benevolence and concern for the well-being of its residence, but then I'd have to start or join a new religion (on blind faith alone) with its dogma being the bullshit that the state feeds to its residents.
And yet I believe it is considered the capital of the modern world in some sense, isn't it? (My perception as someone who's never visited the NE US). You choose to live there, or at least chose to live there for quite a long time as you said, so there must be some reason.
NY state is consistently ranked 2nd after California for the # of residents leaving. New York saw a net loss of over 75 thousand families last year.
Immigration helps offset those numbers a bit, because like you said people see NY(C) as the capital and plenty of people still want to live there.
Deterioration happens slowly and builds up over time. Humans are very resilient and adaptive to things getting worse (as every war has shown). When things happen slowly you don't notice how bad it is and forget what is lost. The older (usually conservative) people who notice the deterioration are often dismissed as cranks, boomers, out of touch, etc. So immigrants/young college kids still flock to NY and start building a life there before noticing that living there as an adult is way harder than it should be.
Moving states typically requires things to get really bad and people often don't understand the cause/effect of shitty gov and deteriorating cultures.
The ... ahem, administrators of Fox News and the Conservative media bubble told their flock that 87,000 IRS federal agents were being hired to come to everyone's houses (Conservatives first though) to remove all AR-15s and gas appliances as soon as possible, probably after Kamala Harris orchestrates Biden's removal from office via the 25th amendment so she, famous trans progressive, can implement the true LiberalTM agenda.
Fossil fuel use for energy (in the long term) should be centralized, then replaced. Building gas lines to new buildings should therefore be less preferred than running all-electric. Then of course, there is the reason gas stoves got brought up recently, which is concern with interior air quality and its long term impact on families.
The reality is that eventually, gas appliances will probably be restricted/phased out of use in new installations for several reasons. This shouldn't be surprising, sensational or controversial. The fiction is that they will be forcefully removed from existing installations. See electric vehicles, where my Fox-ian father thinks all gas cars will be banned in 2025 or some shit, when in reality new sales won't even be meaningfully restricted for another 12 years.
> Conservative media bubble told their flock that 87,000 IRS federal agents were being hired to come to everyone's houses
Did they actually say that, cause that sounds pretty hyperbolic to what their narrative actually was, which is that 87k agents were being hired which would effectively be targeting middle class and small businesses, instead of big corps.
I have friends who were were wrongfully audited, and it’s a huge costly, stressful burden.
I don’t think it’s wrong to question how the IRS is managing its budget.
Part of the narrative was how they would all have guns too.
It ignored the fact that most of those employees were actually customer service representatives, and you can see this year the huge increase in number of tax filers who were able to actually speak to someone from the IRS on the phone.
I'm not a "journalist" nor do I, fact-sharer or opinion-spewer, have hundreds of thousands of followers. The obligations I have to society in this regard are lower than cable news.
At some point that will happen, or else it will simply be so inconvenient to use gas it will be impractical for anything except remote places with propane tanks.
Why is that shocking? Are you also upset that you no longer have easy access to whale oil for your lighting, or a market for steam-powered sedans? Yes, someday in the relatively far future (decades) gas stoves will be a novelty, something small kids look at like they look at CRT televisions or ham radios today.
Who cares? My point is that the outrage on conservative media was built on lies and exaggerations about the now, as if in 2024 gas stoves would be banned. You You moved the goalpost in your comment.
I'm not writing this response to you, but to other people who might read the conversation.
Whale oil was replaced because of cheaper and superior synthetic alternatives. CRT Television were replaced because of more practical flat panels.
There are no advantages to electrical stoves compared to gas stoves. Gas stoves are far superior to electrical for cooking, and for operating both electrical and gas are equivalently practical. The energy cost of gas vs electrical is unimportant for home use, and in professional use you will use gas stoves.
Both electricity and gas (in general) are equally modern (or old) technologies, being a couple of hundred years old. Replacing gas with electricity is in no sense progression, it's just different tech.
Induction stoves are much better than conventional electric, but they are a far cry from gas stoves, which have all the benefits of induction and none of the drawbacks.
There are many ways that outrage can be fake, and a variety of them apply to this situation. For one thing the conservative talking points were all about a sense that the feds were coming for your freedom, and not in any way about the merits or otherwise of being able to burn gas in the place you live. For another, this was being talked about as something that would impose a heavy burden on normal people, which is simply not supported by the facts, both because none of the plans that have been put forward involve forcing you to buy a new stove, and because most normal people already have electric stoves.
By the way, I don't know if you actually read or listened to that segment, but it makes clear that there is a real possibility that this could be regulated. Calling it "fake outrage" is not to say "they're making up the possibility that it could be regulated", but "they're blowing this (real) possibility out of proportion, ignoring the reasons it might be a good idea, and instead making up vague and manipulative reasons to object to it".
> For one thing the conservative talking points were all about a sense that the feds were coming for your freedom, and not in any way about the merits or otherwise of being able to burn gas in the place you live.
Well if the federal government’s opinion on gas is operative, and not your own, how is that not coming for your freedom?
You may think they have good cause, but that doesn’t change the nature of a law that bans you from doing or having something.
I want the government to always be balancing the good of society against my individual freedom. These people are saying "this limits my freedom" and ignoring the societal benefits. That's disingenuous. And you can tell it's disingenuous because the next thing they say is "we need government to ban books about gay people", or "we need government to ban abortion". I'm not saying your freedom shouldn't be a consideration, I'm saying it should be one consideration that is balanced against others.
You are wrong. Most normal people in nyc have gas stoves and they are massively superior in every way to a typical electric range.
Induction cooktops can be nice, but they are more expensive last I checked, and impose lots of limitations on what cookware you can use, including making it infeasible to use high end copper bottom French sauté pans, which also happen to be very hard to match the performance of.
It is absolutely a burden, and meddlesome, and a reduction in freedom of choice, and gas stoves use minuscule amounts of gas.
If you try to do exactly what you were doing on the gas stove in the same way, you will have a bad time, but my and many other people's experience is that a decent electric stove is perfectly capable of making good food once you figure out how to use it. Electric stoves in general can heat faster than gas, and in my experience heat more evenly (no hot spots), so you don't need the crutch of a copper bottom to conduct that heat across the surface. It's certainly true that there are a lot of crappy cheap electric stoves out there that are not nice to cook with, but there are also plenty of crappy gas stoves that don't work well too. There's a ton of propaganda out there about how cooking with gas is better (much of it funded by the gas producers and distributors), but it doesn't hold up well under inspection.
You are right that most people in new york have gas, but new york is an outlier in that -- one of only five states that are majority gas. Most of Tucker Carlson's audience have electric stoves.
Have you used an induction stove before? It's better than gas, and it's not even close (and yes, I have a gas range). Note that induction is not the same thing as resistive.
To be clear, I used to believe the gas stove propaganda myself. I too, like GP, had the feeling that gas was self-evidently better than electric, and that it wasn't possible to have an argument about it. Then I tried being open-minded about it and found the arguments for electric (and my experiences, once I gave it a chance) to be very convincing.
The person you are responding to managed to work Tucker Carlson into the convo so obviously knows precisely what is propaganda and what is objective fact.
All rational and educated modern chefs understand that copper bottom pans are just a crutch, because Mother Jones said so.
Exactly. Homes built now should be in their prime in the mid 2040s. At that point, we really, really, really don't want to need gas infrastructure for our homes. (If we get to that point, and a significant percentage of people are still heating their homes with gas, then how are we not screwed?)
We need to be building zero emissions homes. (Or as close to it as we can.) The heating technology already exists to replace most single family home gas heating. That begs the question: Why invest in gas infrastructure just for a gas stove? That, frankly, seems shortsighted.
This isn't just about individual choices, or even individual homes. This is about transitioning away from government supported infrastructure that brings gas to homes, which is a society-wide issues. 20 years from now, gas pipes to homes should be seen as unnecessary.
I have a heat pump and there are definitely days where it’s so cold it cannot heat my home fast enough and it’s rather uncomfortable and I’m in a zone where heat pumps in theory should be all you need. Geothermal heat pumps are comparatively very expensive (I looked into that initially)
I love my induction stove though. But I’ll admit it’s more expensive than a gas stove and you need to make sure all your cookware works with induction. It definitely wasn’t cheap to make the switch.
Very controversial. U.S. as a divided land and government (now) can't pass anything in federal court so N.Y. is banning natural gas where oil companies in Alaska can dig well right next to preservation area and burn the excess gas on site (because app. it is cheap and they don't have infrastructure to transport or store), cooking massive fireballs 24 hours a day.
Is this step from N.Y. a leap too far? definitely. Is it in the right direction, as opposed to drill baby drill? Also definitely. However in actual climate impact, it is more sustainable to ban petrol car, but our battery tech does not allow everyone to buy EV. Either to public transportation or go junk traffic. Those petrol car (and SUV, "light truck") causes a lot more harm than natural gas which burns into water and carbon dioxide, from asthma to smog. Domestic use of natural gas is terribly effective to be ignored.
I don't know right now but I think they should mandate heat pump in every new houses so minimal energy can result in great heat in winter, instead of relying on AC and failed on grid. Also, N.Y. does not have tons of renewables?
I used to not really be for these bans but - the big issue that I find is that due to the gas lobby, we're not going to make progress on this front until hard hitting regulations come in. As long as you have a pipe that is being serviced going to your home - how many people can justify the hookup fee every month along with all the infrastructure to give you gas just for cooking? It's nonsensical because the amount of gas used is trivial. Therefore, the push will always be to use gas heating and other gas appliances as much as possible because the infrastructure for the building is still there. That's what the gas lobby relies on - using your emotional attachment to gas cooking (which has been a long effort by theirs for the last 50+ years) to make sure that they keep getting you to pay them money for gas for heating, drying clothes, etc. even if alternatives exist that are plenty suitable/better-for-us-all.
Also - this is going to be a miniscule amount of difference in the lives of us all. If you're so concerned - buy an old home. Good thing we basically don't ever build anything new. This is a non-issue.
While gas stoves are nicer for cooking then simple electrical stoves, induction stoves have become comparatively cheap and can be roughly as good as gas stoves.
At the same time having gas stoves is associated with a non small number of health risk especially with subpar ventilation and also associated with a non small risk for pretty bad accidents of all kinds.
Induction stoves are a lot better than gas stoves these days for most purposes. Faster and more consistent heating, easier to clean, less stray heat in your house... basically the only downside is that you can't use a wok or other non-flat pan without specialty equipment.
They also keep threatening to ban the replacement of existing gas appliances when they cannot be repaired. I will be moving my family out of state before this happens.
Any of you electronauts interested in a ~5000sqft home in the middle of a picturesque village with no crime? You'll have to call the gas company about removing the hookup after you move in.
Lots of places like this don’t have natural gas. It’s often propane tanks, which have their own issues.
Natural gas plumbing is not some magical, amazing thing that magically delivers a much-maligned but otherwise perfect product. It’s an explosive gas that’s piped through underground pipes with fancy pressure regulators and hopefully ends up somewhere useful. Those pipes are expensive, the regulators are complex and can leak or fail, sometimes spectacularly, and the final product is not that useful when delivered to houses. (And it’s not practical to make your own combustible gas at home, whereas making your own electricity can be done in several ways.)
If I were developing a new community from scratch, I would not install gas plumbing. The utilities would be fiber, electricity, water, sewage, and possibly district heating of some sort. This has nothing to do with regulations, just practicality.
With underground pipes carrying warm water and returning colder water to the plant [0]. This is agnostic to the heat source, small leaks are not polluting or dangerous, and large leaks don’t explode.
IMO the real problems with district heating are a lack of large-scale standardization (you can’t go to your local HVAC installer and ask for an off-the-shelf heater to pair with a district heating system) and that heat pumps are good enough and cheap enough that they erase some of the benefit.
That being said, a district heating system can inexpensively store heat for later use, whereas electric systems cannot easily do this. (Gas can be stored inexpensively on a large scale, too, which I think is really the major remaining current benefit of natural gas over electricity.)
I can imagine a modern system for a cold-but-mostly-sunny climate: a big PV (and optionally wind) installation produces electricity. When electricity is cheap (sunny / windy conditions), heat pumps heat a thermal reservoir sized to hold a few weeks of heat (this could be a large container of water or even just a bunch of earth insulated on the sides). During cold conditions with less power, heat from the reservoir is used for district heat.
I don’t know whether this would be economical compared to batteries, pumped hydro, gas peaking plants, etc.
[0] District heating with steam is a thing, but it requires higher temperatures, which is not so great if the heat source is a heat pump or waste heat from a lowish-temperature process. It’s not even great if the source is a dedicated boiler, since more energy is available from the same amount of fuel if the flue gas can be cooled below its condensation temperature. (Old systems did not do that, since the materials they were made of would be rapidly corroded by condensate.)
Yeah pretty crazy what people care about. This guy seems to live in (according to them) beautiful place they seem to like, no crime, huge house (5,000 sqft is massive), and they are upset about natural gas. ???
I'll be burying a 1000 gallon propane tank, for propane heating and two propane ranges (I have an apartment I've constructed) within the next year, with a propane generator to help during power outages, while I still can. I'll be heating/cooling primarily with a heat pump, but it simply cannot be relied upon for safety.
This is ultimately performative, as it doesn't really help reach carbon targets, and politically it seems like suicide with something like 70% of homes having a gas appliance. Even weirder, the governor is from Buffalo. I'm not sure that this is the hill to die on in the northeast. But I guess it would be good for property values of previous construction.
In Russia (despite one of the the cheapest gas prices for consumers) they are already ignoring gas for years. I think 95% of new buildings during the past 20 years or so were built without gas. So you end up with electrical stove and oven. The reason? It’s just cheaper and simpler for construction companies. There are a lot of regulations coming in if you decide to use natural gas in a new building, thus resulting in more expensive project, longer construction time and much more difficult acceptance procedures. Construction companies just prefer to ignore all these problems and use electricity instead.
If you have to use the coercive power of the state to make people use X instead of Y, it means Y is better in more ways for more people. You're just being an authoritarian and crushing individual liberty. The justification (correct or incorrect) doesn't matter. If it were really better, people will gradually switch to electric cooking equipment on their own. Like how government never had to ban horse drawn carriages and force everyone to buy an automobile.
Housing developers themselves often prefer not to run expensive natural gas plumbing into new buildings in addition to electricity. As an example, consider 461 Dean St, which besides being the largest modular skyscraper in the US, is fully electric [1].
This ordinance will just probably just push electrification from exclusively at the high-end out to the entire new housing stock.
Isn't it obvious that we've just been through this exact same conversation for climate change, renewables, EVs, heat pumps?
It follows the exact same format of FUD, JAQ-ing, denial, illogic, intentional misunderstanding and avoidance of factual information.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Start what is effectively a religion to defend the financial interests of those burning fossil fuels at the expense of everyone else, shame on you even more.
I have a gas range and love the idea of an induction cooktop. Plenty of power and control without the difficult cleanup. But heaven help you if you’re stuck with 208V service as many do in condos and apartments where the building is serviced with 3 phase 480V. The reduction in wattage for a 240V appliance is significant and easily noticed.
As someone who worked professionally as a line cook in my younger years the benefits of cooking over a flame are primarily in fine and quick control over temperature. Moving the pan, lifting the pan, adjusting the temperature, etc, are key to a good number of dishes. You lose that fine-grained control with the various electric stovetops.
The temperature decreases very quickly compared to a flame. When you’re cooking with things with very low burning points (like cream) being able to have that kind of fine control is important.
Also, moving the pan off of the center of the burner and cooking parts at different temperatures is required for some dishes.
These were techniques I was trained to use.
I haven’t worked in a kitchen in over 20 years so maybe the technology has improved to the point where this is possible with induction pans.
Given one of the health-deleterious of gas cooking come from the nitrogen in the atmospheric gasses used for combustion: maybe it would make sense to have stoves that used a pure oxygen source alongside the methane. This would be more expensive and hazardous but as a result lead to stronger controls over the combustion process.
Gaz stove have almost no upside compared to induction stove in most cases. Some elements of answer about why the adoption of induction is behind in the USA:
https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
This is a good idea in general… eventually all of this gas infrastructure will be incredibly expensive to maintain just to send energy when you could send that through wires.
I'm frankly amazed at how dogmatic the argument around gas stoves is. How does this happen? How have people been educated about an issue like this so quickly?
Why not ban, or at least seriously curtail the emissions of the organization responsible for the most toxic pollution & whose mission is literally to kill people, the military, instead? How about the multitude of other government agencies responsible for pollution?
Will this also prohibit the installation of propane or other one-off gas cooking options at summer homes in the Hamptons? Are all those personal chefs going to have to make do with induction ranges?
If the US evaporated from the planet tomorrow,
CO2 production would only decrease by 14%.
Global CO2 would continue to increase at the same rate.
The net effect on climate would be zero.
Second conclusion:
The proposal is to force 0.6% of NY State housing
units to use electric stoves.
The proposal is to force 0.04% of US housing units
to use electric stoves.
Electric stoves are NOT zero-emission devices.
Less, yes, not zero.
Even assuming zero emissions, the net effect on US CO2
contribution will effectively be zero.
Third conclusion:
This proposal is empty and ridiculous.
It has no foundation in evidence of any kind.
It does, however, serve to garner votes from those
who believe in this stuff blindly and follow politicians
like they actually know and care about any of this stuff.
Wait!
Wait a minute! You are only considering one year?
How about 50 years?
Right. So, the US continues to contribute CO2 to the world at a rate likely exceeding 14% of the total contribution and, somehow we are going to save the plante by not cooking using gas for half an hour per day?
What do you want to bet that the act of constructing 50K new housing units per year will generate far more CO2 than those 50K gas stoves will generate for their entire useful lifetimes?
Seriously! Is anyone even interested in science and evidence any more?
But, but, health?
Seriously? With eight billion people around the world, millions must be dropping dead every day because they cook for half an hour per day using fire. The horror!
This thing has become a blind belief system, not a subject people can discuss based on facts-based hypothesis that allow anyone to reproduce the results and confirm the conclusions.
A couple of potential definitions of the term:
Believing something in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
or...
A strong belief in a supernatural power in support of a conclusion.
or...
Magic.
Believing that forcing 0.6% of the stoves in NY State per year will have an effect on climate change is a belief so ridiculous that, in a rational society, it would be summarily laughed off the stage.
Yet, this isn't a rational society. It is a tribalized society based on blind beliefs of all kinds promoted through social media and mercilessly used by politicians to get the unthinking masses to vote for them.
Blind belief is a powerful tool.
With help, it seems to be a LOT easier to get the masses to believe in absolute nonsense than to actually work hard and deliver tangible results that actually benefit society. This is particularly true when the politician can take advantage of complicit actors in society who also stand to benefit from the nonsense they want to sell or the power they aim to acquire.
People, companies, are making money and gaining power with this belief system hand-over-fist. It is amazing to watch this happen as an objective observer. It is frustrating to yell out loud "The emperor has no clothes" only to be met with blind belief and ignorance of facts, as if it were a virtue.
This proposal is like claiming that banning birthday candles and fireworks will save the planet. It's ridiculous, idiotic, demonstrably false and anyone who can add 1 + 1 and get 2 should see it as such.
As always, follow the money and give no heed to virtue signaling politicians who claim to care about climate change while living in multiple homes, flying around on private jets and rarely spending any time in nature.
The monoculture could come and bite hard NYC. A city already a hot target for terrorism... now exposed to the unknown (tiny ?) probability, of 1 EMP, one solar flare, one major blackout via hack or mechanical failure....and its millions without basic heating, and who knows for how long ? an entire winter ?
This is a stupid idea for rural NY. Way to increase the cost of living here…
Like, this is why people in rural areas hate big cities. This is completely fair for NYC. Not for the rest of NY. Not without a lot of investment from the government.
You’re effectively left with oil, wood, and electric heat. All three have a lot of their own problems and difficulties.
Just curious, as I’m not in the NY area but are most rural homes over there on natural gas or propane? In rural parts of CA, people have propane tanks in the yard which wouldn’t be effected by this. Natural gas infrastructure seems to diminish further from cities, so I’m wondering how much this actually effects rural residents
http://web.archive.org/web/20230428234122/https://www.nytime...