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?
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".