Berkeley becomes first US city to ban natural gas in new homes | Hacker News Reader

Berkeley becomes first US city to ban natural gas in new homes

sfchronicle.com

22 pointsturtlegrids35 comments

I present you the latest NIMBY measure under an environmental pretense! Brought to you by Berkeley of course.

If they care so much about the environmental impact of natural gas, how about grandfathering the measure to their own houses VS the tiny fraction of new housing that gets built every year in Berkeley?

How about not making the new generation living in the Bay Area pay the burden of a housing-related policy for once?

Check out Berkeley and Oakland property transfer tax rate. $16.10 per $1000 of property value! Most other cities are $1.10. That adds up to an extra $10k on every property sale. $http://www.californiacityfinance.com/PropTransfTaxRates.pdf

This makes no sense to me. Explain where I have this wrong...

47% of electricity in California is generated from natural gas.

https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...

So about 50% of the electricity in these houses is coming from a gas that gets burned to turn a turbine to make electricity (and waste heat) that gets sent down a power line (where some is invariably lost) to go into a house where the electricity is then turned back into heat (presumably for hot water and heating the home)?

How is this more efficient than just burning NG for heat directly?

I could understand banning coal burners from homes (if we had any left), as I believe China is trying to do, but this seems like it will require more energy not less (yes I realize its a tiny scale).

It makes sense as a long term move because now you have a single point of change to switch to renewables. Suppose there is an unprecedented improvement in solar efficiency or power storage tech in 5-10 years or a nuclear power plant gets built. Then you cut natural gas usage to zero at once, which would have been impossible if all the houses still depended on it.

You can use the same argument for electric vehicles.

Sort of?

We don't use electric vehicles for heat, so they are sort of fuel agnostic when it comes to where the electricity is coming from; we burn fossil fuels to make heat or electricity.

The future proofing argument makes some sense for California. Coming from the Northeast heat is a lot more important, I'll do a new HE Gas Boiler for 12k in a single family this year, converting from oil...save me probably 2k a year. If that were electric heat I'd be paying 400% more every year which would be insane.

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/household-heating-costs#co...

And that's exactly why this is being done in California, isn't it?

Agreed. I used to live in Alaska, and when my wife and I bought our first home there, the furnace was broke and we couldn't afford to replace it right away. The electric baseboard heaters cost us $900 to run just for that January!

It can be more efficient to burn gas at the generation plant because electrical heating can be 3-500% efficent by using the energy to move, rather than create heat.

A similar argument applies to electric cars. Electric motors are so much more efficient that they still beat the alternative after being transmitted and stored in a battery even if the original source is burning gasoline to generate electricity.

That's before getting into carbon and pollution.

Heat pumps are only efficient down to a bit below freezing temperature, so it may make sense for Berkeley, but it gets really expensive if winter temperatures get much colder.

"efficient" is a little vague.

Ground and water source source heat pumps can keep their efficiency down to extreme temperatures as their source maintains its temperature. Air sourced heat pumps can go down to -20C and still be above 100%,(though this is notably below their peak in warmer ambient temperatures) and they often have fallback resistive heaters that are independant of outside temp and are 100% efficient (though probably not sized to work alone generally).

So whether they are efficient and expensive really needs a complex comparison including up front investment in digging trenches for geo or pipes, ongoing costs of fuel, predictions of heating and cooling days for the region, whether insulation makes more sense than more heating and so on. I don't think there's anything that strictly rules out heat pumps in most places people live or restricts them to California.

Stockholm getting heat from the North sea is a good example of their counterintuitive potential in colder climates.

Ground-source heat pump installation is expensive - estimate by a vendor near Boulder, CO $30k/14 year pay-off for residential - http://www.energyhomes.org/pricing.html but a bit light on details of their assumptions.

A heat pump being "efficient" can casually be thought of as "multiples better than just resistant heating" (but is measured in cooling and heating efficiency, seasonal performance, etc.)

This drives whether the heat pump is economical or not, because the more heat you have to produce directly from electricity, the less economical your installation is, compared to other heat sources. A gas vendor in Washington, DC area estimates annual savings of $1,500+ by using natural gas heating and water heating over electric, including air-source heat pumps, and significantly lower lifetime costs: https://html5.dcatalog.com/?docid=2db77d07-d752-43b8-bfaa-a8...

Even the gas vendor in a country with famously low gas prices and an aversion to pricing in carbon seems to put it as a close second, well ahead of propane or oil on operating costs.

You say $1500 saving but that's against resistive heat, not heat pumps, which are only 150 to 350. Which could be small enough a difference that providing cooling with one system may cover it.

And those are only operating costs, and I'd guess if you didn't have a gas grid magically installed for no cost, then propane or oil are the two options you'd more realistically go for rather than pay build a gas connection, whereas a house without an electric grid connection is pretty rare and could be considered a sunk cost in most cases.

Obviously for many existing homes you do magically have gas pipelines for free, but in the context of new builds, you'd want to compare those costs.

I hate cooking with electricity, can't make a decent stir fry with it, changing the temperature takes a long time. How much of an impact does this make to a person's carbon footprint?

Use an induction cooktop. Much faster heat times than traditional electric

Sadly, renters don't get much input on any of the appliances. While suggesting a different type of electric stove is great for people with that control, most just suffer with the cheapest appliance the landlord could get away with providing.

You can always put a portable induction top on top of your unused electric top.

Heat diffuser too?

A what? Do you mean one of these things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_diffuser

If so, then I don't think you'd ever need one? None of the use-cases for them seem like they would apply to a good induction stove.

No I meant for an electric stove

But the goal is to make your cooktop _more_ responsive, not _less_ responsive.

An induction-compatible disc that heats up via induction and transfers that heat by conduction to your non-induction-compatible cookware.

Simple, inexpensive, inefficient, and possibly damaging.

https://www.centurylife.org/the-inefficiency-of-induction-co...

And also nearly zero waste heat so your kitchen doesn't get so hot while cooking.

Coal has lots more carbon. It's coming back:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-1n27coal23479-coal...

You'll get the best wok hei. FYI, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Wok_hei

Berkeley is only 31 miles away from a business called Koch Carbon. The name alone tells you all you need to know. You can buy carbon from the Koch brothers. By banning natural gas in new homes, Berkeley is supporting this local business.

These new houses will probably be at least as expensive as the average house there just due to the nature of single family houses in the Bay Area.

Cooking during the whole year and heating during the winter will cost more. Those winter months will be hundreds of dollars more (possibly hundreds of dollars more per month).

The people living in these places can probably afford it just due to them being able to buy the house itself.

Makes better insulation, solar panels, and houses designed to soak in heat if desired more attractive.

Non adware/spyware article

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/07/17/natural-gas-pipes-no...

Are there occasions where having natural gas available in a house would be essential?

Aside from an apartment that had a gas stove and gas-powered water heater, the houses I've lived in always had all-electric, and the overall experiential difference between the two circumstances was unremarkable (in my opinion).

Hot water worked fine with either a gas or electric water heater, and the stove was really the only "daily-use" item that had an obvious difference, but the functionality was fine either way (stuff still got hot on top the burners or in the oven). If I specifically wanted an actual gas flame for cooking, I just used a $20 tabletop camping grill with a small propane tank. This "adjustment" was a very minimal effort way to deal with not having gas pipes.

Overall, if not having natural gas saves infrastructure costs (and tax dollars) from being spent maintaining natural gas pipes, and also removes any need to worry about carbon monoxide and having detectors installed, then this seems like not a big deal to adjust to.

Carbon monoxide detectors aren't just there because of natural gas appliances. They're also essential to protect people in cases exactly like you mentioned -- a temporary tabletop camping grill.

It's frightening to read about people who don't have CO detectors and put a combustion-powered generator in their house when the power (and thus heat) goes out in the winter. As of a decade ago the rate of CO deaths was around 400 per year in the US. Whatever it is now it's still terribly high.

For a sad time here's a random article from news.google.com when searching for "carbon monoxide generator" https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/2-Boys-2-Men-Dead-After-Ca...

>Are there occasions where having natural gas available in a house would be essential?

Maybe not in California (Southern), but in colder climates there is definitely an advantage. I was once in a North East Ice storm where there was a deep freeze after a warm spell that brought down the electrical lines. We were without power for 2 days in sub freezing temps and the gas fireplace kept the house warm.

I'm sure in California where they don't require any heat, you could get away with just electric service as long as it remains affordable.

In freezing climates household heating with natural gas is substantially cheaper than electric.

However, that’s probably not a problem for Berkeley, and the infrastructure costs alone probably justify avoiding natural gas hookups.

You can heat and cook food during a prolonged power outage, but that's kind of it as far as "essential" goes.

You can't heat your house during a power out, even with gas, because the furnace won't light without power to run the blower (to prevent overheating and therefore fires). But you can heat at least one room in a power outage with a gas fireplace (been there, done that - for hours, though not for days).

The vast majority of heaters in Berkeley are wall-mounted top vent gravity heaters. They do not need power to operate.

Central HVAC is uncommon due to the mild climate.

There are lots of heating systems (steam boilers, for instance) that don't require blowers. And your gas-heated hot water will also let you continue to take hot showers.

I don't get it, how do you warm the water? I know you can have an electric heater that keeps a certain amount of water hot all the time. But isn't that vastly more wasteful than just quickly warming the water you are using by burning it using gas?

What about the wok?

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