Berkeley first city in California to ban natural gas in new buildings | Hacker News Reader

Berkeley first city in California to ban natural gas in new buildings

berkeleyside.com

33 pointslxm71 comments

That seems incredibly short-sighted. Currently, using electricity for heating generates significantly more CO2 than natural gas and you can always switch to electric heating when the sources become more renewable.

> using electricity for heating generates significantly more CO2 than natural gas

Do you have a source for this? It may vary per locality I guess. From the article: " in Berkeley, electricity is cleaner than gas: at least 78% carbon-free."

You forget that energy is fungible. If Berkley is using more clean electricity then someone else can't.

So it's important to use the best technology at the consumption side.

This new policy, on a global level, will cause the emission of more co2, and is thus incredibly shortsighted.

Think of it in terms of economics. If new buildings can do whatever, it will increase the demand for both (clean or dirty) electricity and natural gas. If they can only install electric heating/cooling, then only the demand for (clean and dirty) electricity increases. So this law indirectly promotes the clean electricity industry.

The clean energy industry is maxed out.

All this law does is promote the dirty energy industry.

> If Berkley is using more clean electricity then someone else can't.

I don't follow this statement at all. There's not a limit[0] on the amount of energy that can be supplied from renewable sources.

Preferentially purchasing green or greener energy sends a signal to the market to develop more green energy generation capabilities to meet those demands.

[0] within reason. Obviously there's limits to the amount of energy we can harness from renewable sources, but those limits are far higher than our total energy needs.

> There's not a limit[0] on the amount of energy that can be supplied from renewable sources.

Yes there is, the limit is how many power plants have been currently built.

So this new ban by Berkeley is very very foolish and counterproductive. Right now, today, by making people heat with electricity instead of natural gas, they force additional electrical generation with coal or natural gas, and since there is a ton of transmission waste, it's even worse.

>"..at least 78% carbon-free."

Well that's obvious nonsense.

Usually I laugh when the Berkeley City Council tries to save the world (broadcasting its deliberations would make a great reality TV show), but in this case, it makes sense: the imbecile heaters used in the Bay Area seem designed to heat the outdoors. It boggles my mind they can't figure out how to buy gas heaters from the East Coast where they're designed to heat the inside of the house.

How would heating with electricity generate any CO2 if it were sourced from Solar or Wind?

It wouldn’t, but man do we still burn a lot of coal in the US for electric plants.

Not in California. And California overproduces power by state law.

https://www.snl.com/web/client?auth=inherit#news/article?id=...

coal is always kind of lurking in the background though.

Because you can not pin down the source of electricity that way.

It's all mixed together.

Well the creation of the necessary metals and semiconductors would probably generate CO2... but I don't know how much.

> Based on that study, solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner." [1]

[1] https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/ho...

You probably want to install heat pumps instead of resistive heaters. Then you get 3-5J of heat for every Joule of electricity. Retrofitting those into a house with gas heating is quite expensive, so not using fossil fuels for new construction in the first place is probably the right decision.

In Berkeley you can probably slap a small number of solar panels on the roof to produce more electricity than you need for heating (and cooling).

It really isn't very expensive. Installation is mostly connecting the inside unit with the outside unit through an 8-10mm pipe (1/3"). The work is about 2-3 hours and material costs are pretty insignificant. The HX units are pretty costly, though. About $2K for a decent one.

Where I live, Norway, a lot of houses have gotten these retrofitted.

Oh that's interesting. What I've heard is that changing the heating system from radiators that use water heated by gas (as is common in German gas heating systems) to a heat pump is difficult because heat pumps don't give you such high temperatures. So you'd need a lot more surface area to heat adequately with the lower temperatures provided by your heat pump, i.e. you'd need to switch to underfloor heating, which means ripping open all your floors. Glad to hear that there are apparently simpler ways. We need to switch almost all buildings over to heat pumps over the next two or three decades after all.

AFAIK it's not ideal but possible to use existing radiators.

My parents recently added an air heatpump to their existing (wood) heating system without changing radiators. They Installed a new boiler (water tank, not sure about the translation) where the top half is heated by the heat pump and they can optionally heat the whole tank using the old wood heater.

Do you have actual numbers for the COP factor for modern heating and cooling solutions? If its actually 5 (after accounting for transmission losses from power plant to building and other inefficiencies), then that means electric heat pump heating releases 3x less C02 than a in-building gas heater [1]. A solar panel solution will release like 4.5x (assuming 90% efficiency) less C02.

Finally, burning natural gas inputs additional heat energy into our atmosphere, with the gas-burner inputting 3x more heat into our atmosphere compared to the electric heat pump. A solar panel solution doesn't add more heat to the atmosphere. It takes energy that was going to get absorbed by the atmosphere anyway and concentrates it inside a building for localized heating. Except for the second hand effect of some of sunlight that would have reflected off from the roof back into space, now being dispersed as high entropy heat into the atmosphere.

Not to mention that if you use solar

[1] This is assuming that the power plant is a hybrid natural gas one (60% max efficiency) so 5*0.6 = 3. And the in-building natural gas heater is 100% efficient.

Wikipedia has some numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump#Thermal_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-source_heat_pumps#Efficien...

These numbers don't account for transmission losses or power plant inefficiencies. But even if you low ball things you likely save some CO2 over just burning the gas for heat, e.g. take the power plant and transmission efficiency to be about 0.4 and even with a poor heatpump efficiency of 2.5 you break even. Not to mention that the heatpump runs on renewable energy without further investment once the power grid is modernized.

A COP of 5 is quite optimistic for a domestic scale heat pump, at least in the climate where I work (UK). Sensible values here would be more like 2 - 3.5 depending on the temperature gradient required.

This is a function of how big the radiators are and how cold the heat reservoir is, so if you plug an air->water device into some normal radiators its performance won't be good on a really cold day, whereas if you plug a ground->water or water->water device into underfloor heating it'll probably be pretty good.

The big question (in the UK) for per-dwelling heat pumps is whether the distribution network has enough capacity to meet the winter peak load - if everyone gets a heat pump the cost might have to include replacing a lot of substations and distribution wires.

I am interested in the question of whether you could have PV cells on your roof with a coolant loop that goes into a heat pump, and a thermal store in the house for buffering. Then when it's sunny you can dump some electrical heat into your thermal store whilst also use your heat pump to chill the PV cells, keeping them at high efficiency. When it's not sunny you can draw off your thermal store giving a high efficiency for the pump.

If the numbers came out right you might be able to be self-sufficient for heat using something like this, just by making good use of the radiation already falling on the house.

In dense enough areas you can also do well with heat distribution networks, or mixed heat and cold networks. These are a good low-regret choice because you have a big central plant which you can easily refit if the best supply technology changes.

Also if you're running a heat pump having one big central heat pump with a big thermal store can allow you to get better conversion ratio from electricity to heat.

In nearby Concord, yes. Have you been to Berkeley?

I love the sense of class humor in Berkeley weather. Down in the affordable flats, the fog often clears. Up in the "four bridge view" hills, not so often. Annual sun striking the entire roof would still generate more electricity than needed, but there's that storage problem.

The key word there is currently, and it depends entirely on your local area what your mix of energy production is and how clean that is.

There's no net-zero carbon options on the market for natural gas. So installing gas-fired options for heating/cooling means that you don't have the option of choosing from a green energy source.

Installing electrical heating means that you do have that option - you can reduce the amount of energy you need through local energy production (solar PV, solar hot water), you can store energy locally reducing the need for off-site generation, and you can choose to purchase power from off-site generators that are cleaner.

Electric heating can be a pain when compared to gas heating. Gas heating in Europe is rather efficient and I expect it to continue for a long time even as other energy uses are switched to renewables. In the comments someone mentioned that electricity in "East Bay Community Energy [gives the option of 100% renewable energy]".

I would conclude that this is a move that is specifically useful and possible for Berkeley, but not necessarily for e.g. European countries at the moment.

I belive the Netherlands passed a similar law recently.

> Electric heating can be a pain when compared to gas heating

How? I've never used gas, but electricity is plain simple. Just plug whatever in any outlet and turn it on, how is that a pain?

The pain is in the form of a far higher monthly bill.

In the UK, gas is ~ £0.03 per kWh whereas electricity is ~ £0.13 kWh.

Additional data point for Belgium: €0.04 KWh for gas and €0.30 KWh for electricity. You'd need a COP of 7.5 in order for a heat-pump to be at cost parity of natural gas.

And yet, the Energy Saving Trust suggests that it can save 100 pounds a year even compared with a modern gas system, and much better against all other alternatives.

I'm not sure if those numbers include government incentives but if they do then they're still a good proxy for the actual costs with a reasonable carbon tax included to internalize externalities.

> And yet, the Energy Saving Trust suggests that it can save 100 pounds a year even compared with a modern gas system, and much better against all other alternatives

By switching to a heat pump system?

Yep.

https://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/renewable-energy/heat/a...

See the section headed: "Potential annual savings of installing a standard air source heat pump in an average sized, four-bedroom detached home:"

Also details the carbon saved, which some people might consider important as well, depends on the relative weight you place on "saving money in the near future" vs "causing the end of civilization as we know it".

What is the principle at work behind a heat pump?

It's a fridge running backwards. Gasses expand soaking up heat, then you compress them and it ejects the heat. Then you repeat the cycle.

You dump the heat outside if you're cooling (fridge or AC) or inside if you're heating.

The slightly unintuitive bit is that you can still extract heat even from something that would feel "cold" to a human as long as there's enough of it. Making a big volume slightly colder can make a small volume much warmer (or vice versa).

You don’t just “plug in” the type of electric heater that can heat a large space such as an entire home. It’s wildly inefficient and there are safety concerns with constantly plugged in space heaters.

Well, frankly one does. A heater on some of the walls has been enough for our family home in Norway for decades. Not sure how it's "wildly inefficient". Could always install a heat pump if so.

And if it were true that one cannot just plug in some heaters, one would then have to integrate something better into one's home... how is that still more pain than having to exactly that for the gas to work? Not sure about the safety concerns are anything compared to burning gas, either.

This law is for new buildings, and it makes complete sense to only install heat pumps instead of resistive heaters in new buildings.

I asked a friend in Florida what she has to heat her house. She has a heat pump with an air handler. For both heating/cooling. And that's just gob standard in her area because, no city gas.

I feel like because this regulation is for new construction it'll have essentially zero negative effect on anyone.

Perhaps the electrical standards in Europe allow for it, but in the US, a normal plug outlet is not designed to safely transfer the kind of power needed to heat a home for long periods of time. I’ve also never dealt with a situation where a place needed to be retrofitted with a heating solution, in which case running electrical wires might be just as much work as gas lines, but way more expensive in the long run in the US as gas prices are super cheap.

Two problems:

- main fuse would blow up

- your head would blow up from electricity bill

I have a strong preference for cooking on a gas stove.

Otherwise, this seems fine.

Can't upvote this enough. People seem to think having an electric or induction hob is somehow superior to gas.

Nah. Gas is by far the best thing to cook on.

You cook the whole planet as a side effect though.

Found this article interesting (have not fact checked):

568 kWh/an * 0,98356 kg de Co2 = 559 kg of Co2 / Year and per UK Familly cooking with electricity 534,3 kWh/an * 0,231023102 kg de Co2 = 123 kg Co2 / Year and per UK Familly cooking with natural gas 534,3 kWh/an * 0,260 kg de Co2 = 139 kg Co2 / Year and per UK Familly cooking with bottled gas

https://www.solarcookingatlas.com/cooking-and-resources-gas-...

You could probably get butane gas cylinders, no? If you only use them for cooking, even a smallish 13kg cylinder lasts a long time.

Funny I'm downvoted, is it such a weird idea? They're fairly popular around here, and it's what I use at home. Just plug 'em to the stove.

In the US at least, external propane tanks exist but are relatively rare outside of use in outdoor grills.

I know of a few places that have big propane tanks bolted to the side of the building, but it’s predominantly in rural areas and for big kitchens — church parish halls, community centers, etc.

Frankly, I'm not even sure you need to regulate against natural gas. Product-wise & economically, it's already lost. Electric heat pumps are fantastically more efficient [1] and work both for heating & cooling. Electric water heaters are cheaper/better to operate. Induction stoves are so fast and precise. I don't know about a commercial building, but for a home, you'd probably save $10K+ in piping, installation, and connection fees.

[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/

Heat pumps are a disaster when temperatures drop below 20 degrees F. We end up using auxiliary heat which is extremely inefficient and expensive.

How often does that happen in Berkeley?

Fortunately for this particular case, Berkeley winter temperature hasn't seen a record low below 25 degrees F in the last 30 years. Or more, Wikipedia doesn't go back further than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California#Climate

So heat pumps should be OK for Berkeley.

That's actually correct, though you can also tune them for harsher local weather. I actually visited a heat-pump factory in Guangdong back in March. They make heat-pumps for residential projects in both freezing cold Harbin (Northern China) and hot as hell Guangdong (Southern China). Those are different SKUs that get tuned based on expected regional needs. The temp-vs-efficiency curves get all wacky but it still works. They also had a new product that combines two heat pumps: one for summer, one for winter.

I prefer having gas as redundancy for when electricity is unavailable. Especially in places it gets really cold, you can live without light, but not without heat and having a gas boiler and stove is a lifesaver.

> Product-wise & economically, it's already lost.

Not remotely. Induction is swell, but gas is an affordable luxury.

> Electric water heaters are cheaper/better to operate.

In what world? Gas is orders of magnitude more affordable than electricity for water heaters [0]. If your power goes out, then you still have hot water, can cook on the stove, etc.

> I don't know about a commercial building, but for a home, you'd probably save $10K+ in piping, installation, and connection fees.

Depending on where you live, you could potentially recoup that in a year.

Induction stoves are also 2-8x more expensive than gas or electric counterparts. If you're a landlord, it can be a considerable expense to replace appliances.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/energy-cost-calculator-elec...

> If your power goes out, then you still have hot water, can cook on the stove, etc.

It's not as if gas doesn't go out, right?

If you're in a place where your power grid is so unreliable, perhaps you should be looking at getting that fixed.

Yes it is as if the gas never goes out. Because the gas never goes out.

Another way to think of it is, it takes different things to make the different systems go out. The electricity can go out quite easily for a variety of common and not-infrequent reasoms. While it would take a earthquake to take the gas out. If you are having some event that manages to take both out at the same time, then you no longer care about the heat as you are on the roof trying not to drown or running for your life from asteroids.

I thought gas was comparatively efficient, compared to other fossil fuels?

It is, but we need to stop using fossil fuels in the next twenty years. Homes usually last longer than that and retrofitting heat pumps is quite expensive.

It is, but we need to stop using fossil fuels in the next twenty years.

That's easy to say, difficult to implement.

E.g. China is cutting back on domestic use of coal, but has decided to build hundreds of new coal plants worldwide: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placin...

Also, there are other vast large-scale man-made ongoing changes to the world's ecosystem. E.g. the Amazon rainforest continues to be under attack. Same in other countries like Indonesia.

One US city switching away from natural gas is totally insignificant compared to all that.

If you really want to reduce climate change, figure out how to stop the big big crazy things. Banning natural gas in new construction in Berkeley is simply symbolism over substance.

We need every little bit we can get if we want to prevent disaster. Whataboutisms don't really help.

> One US city switching away from natural gas is totally insignificant compared to all that.

Everything starts with one.

If it turns out that Berkeley doesn't spontaneously erupt into rioting and general disorder because gas is being phased out, well perhaps others that were considering it will see that it's not such a crazy idea.

It is

A lot of countries with dictatorship regimes are natural gas exporters. Avoiding natural gas usage makes the world a better place. So that's a right decision.

Note that California's net-zero energy mandate for new construction also starts in 2020 [1]. However, I'm not sure what that means (my web searches didn't find much).

My guess any new construction will need to be very well insulated, and in most of California's climate, won't require much heating?

I don't see how this would work in colder places like Lake Tahoe, though.

[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/ZNE/

People have built a net-positive energy house in the middle of Norway. It's mainly a matter of very good insulation, heat exchangers between outgoing and incoming air, heat pumps, and rooftop solar. In most of these buildings the windows can't even be opened, all air flow is controlled by the central system.

https://snohetta.com/project/60-powerhouse-at-brattorkaia

Honest question, how bad is natural gas actually carbon wise?

I remember it being touted maybe 15 years ago about how great it was compared to gasoline and being a renewable resource. If I recall some national parks vehicles and bus lines [1] were moving to it.

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy00osti/28377.pdf

It releases about 15% less CO2 than gasoline, so it's a bit better. It does produce fewer particulates and combusts more completely, so there are fewer other byproducts such as CO and NOx.

As far as CO2 I think it's half as bad as coal. Propbably 10 times worse than solar, wind, nuclear or hydro[1].

As the other responder says it causes less air pollution than gasoline and diesel.

[1] Heard complaints that dams -> organic rich sediment -> bacteria -> methane -> global warming. I have no good feel for this argument though.

In some ways, Berkeley seems like a great place to live. In others, a nightmare.

I'm glad they do these things, though. It's interesting and informative to see what happens over time.

Well the interesting thing to note here is, it is California and not Texas.

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