Should California ban gas in new homes? A climate battle heats up
latimes.com
latimes.com
If it was literally "impossible" then you probably have some impairment that prevents you from caring for yourself. But "Impossible" here doesn't mean its literal definition, right? It roughly translates to something like "too different from my old routine for me to put forth any energy toward adapting in the name of public health and the environment."
This has to he the most bogus and first-world complaint for people to throw a fit over having to cook with electricity.
EDIT: fireplace->stove
Either way, OP’s remarks are common sentiment. I’ve heard from plenty of home chefs that a gas stove is drastically easier to work on. I can sympathize with them wanting options in their life.
However it is more difficult to cook well on electric hobs than gas hobs as you can't directly adjust the heat as needed. Given the choice (I don't have it) I would take gas everytime.
Also, water boils so fast now! You'd be amazed.
I'm very happy with my electric ranges.
I've never seen an induction hob ever. Almost everyone I know has gas or electric and electric has always been more difficult to cook on.
I find it MUCH easier to simmer at a low temperature with electric, and I prefer the dial a temp, over dial a volume of natural gas. You don't have to tinker nearly so often. Want a nice slow boil, just set the temp, watch it run at 100% till it reaches the temp, then throttle back as the temp is reached.
Similarly when cooking any kind of reduction you don't have to keep tinkering as larger fractions of the water cooks off.
No one compared it to that or anything like that.
I didn't say that so please don't put words in my mouth. Natural gas is the most reasonable and common way to cook with fire year round. Additionally, new wood burning equipment is already outlawed in many places.
I also did not say it was impossible to cook at all with electric. I said it is impossible to cook properly with electric. If you know anything about cooking you know that is a fact.
Some people cook as a passion and care deeply about the tools they use to make the food they eat. Maybe we should outlaw whatever hobby you have! How would you like that?
I do and I do not know that as a fact. Can you cite it please?
Heat is an important aspect of cooking, but the source of the heat (outside of hotspots) isn't maybe as important as cookware heat-storage-capacity/heat transfer speed.
The only thing I can immediately point to gas doing that electric/induction cannot is a traditional round-bottom wok. But I'd be lying if I said a wok was a major part of my cooking.
Commercial kitchens have been switching to induction because the new units can maintain precise temperature, it also allows for much cooler kitchens, it’s easier to clean, and it gives them flexibility for staffing options, because the precise maintainable temperature control some cooking methods become almost foolproof.
Really, no. Walmart's "own brand" stainless steel pans that start at under $10 work fine. The pans it doesn't work with are actually rare/expensive (pure aluminum/pure copper, and certain high-end stainless steel that are now largely discontinued).
People repeat this special pan thing often (multiple times in this thread) but I don't know where this idea came from. The most common/popular pans for the last fifty years work with induction, and cheap ones are MORE likely to work.
Pans are the same price as regular cookware, you just need to make sure it's compatible.
Simply put, they shouldn't. But they have more money and thus more political sway to get carve-outs.
Plus even for the stove, it has an attached gas oven, which doesn't really bring me any benefit except maybe a marginally faster pre-heat time that I can live without. It's even a net negative to me because now if I want to do any kind of slow cook in the oven I need to worry about ventilation and it's hard for it to hold a steady low temperature. Heck even for the stove, I wish it had half electric burners and half gas, if I'm doing some slower process like making a stock or chili or something I'd rather use electric to again avoid the fumes.
So despite the fact that I love being able to saute over a flame now, I'd definitely support a tax that makes using gas much more expensive. A full-on ban would be extreme, I'd agree with you that's overly aggressive control, especially until electric burners get better. But ideally I could choose and in places where I actually get a lot of value from it I could pay the higher price to offset my environmental impact, but in all the other uses it would make more economical sense to avoid it so appliance makers, construction companies, etc would be incentivized to drastically reduce the use of gas.
NG v. Solar is a non-obvious environmental question to ask. If you are posting from CA (the reflexive support for an additional tax suggests Pacific coast at least), you have the sort of folks who can answer that in your own backyard, LLBL. Lawrence Berkeley Labs. Check their website and publications.
Obviously there are some cooking techniques that require flames, but heat is ultimately fungible when it comes to pans etc.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90313508/why-top-restaurants-are...
Also, the gas stove will continue to work when the power is out. All I have to do is light it with a match, but the induction cooktop will be out of commission as long as the power is out. We regularly have electric outages, but I don't remember ever having a gas outage.
Yeah, sure but certainly not from a gas flame.
Induction cooktops largely fix this, though.
Here we are talking about achieving a more even Malliard reaction on flapjacks. Cooking may not be significant enough to worry about first either, I don't know, but it is a form of control (free choice of more evenly browned flapjacks for no choice of of someone else facing faster timeframe to be flooded out of their nation or city).
http://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/pages/supply.aspx
With renewables making up 32.7%.
When the sun drops by late afternoon, CA will be making electricity on natural gas.
Heating at night will almost be entirely natural gas. Even if you have an electric heater, the electricity will be generated using natural gas.
So what is exactly the benefit of ripping out natural gas from homes?
If new buildings being added to the building stock are built with gas, then people will still be reliant on gas to cook. If they are added with electric/induction stoves, then everyone will benefit from the grid's shift away from natural gas.
Requiring a 240V drop in the kitchen I could see. Makes the replacement of a gas oven with electric easier, if the homeowner wishes and an easy requirement for builders to meet.
Banning an NG connection limits choice today and is based upon a forecast for the future that may not occur in the timeframe you are expecting.
California will be burning gas 10 to 20 years from now.
Without nuclear or dramatic battery innovations, we will always burn natural gas for night time energy.
How sure of that are you? I’m not so sure but quick google says maybe not as true as you imply: https://slate.com/business/2015/09/texas-electricity-goes-ne.... Maybe région dépendant? Is that a deal breaker given power can be transported between regions?
> Battery tech
I see part of the point of this legislation is to drive innovation. We’ll never get change if we just say “it’s impossible so we have to burn fossils.” I don’t dispute any of your points really except if the policy is gradual enough it will force us to adapt and that is a good thing IMO.
Burning natural gas to produce electricity to power electric heaters at home is actually worse from a CO2 perspective than burning natural gas directly for home heating.
Using daytime solar excess to pump water uphill lets you get double duty out of the hydro and looks to be about the right amount of after hours energy use.
You need energy storage at scale at night. The only solution at night after batteries (chemical, stored water, gravity, etc.) are quickly depleted is natural gas.
Modern nuclear reactor designs could easily fill the gap. Public sentiment and the risk of building in earthquake prone geography has prevented investment in nuclear.
If the rate of new construction is low, then hopefully renewables plus batteries will be able to keep up with increased nighttime demand.
- decarbonize 80% of US energy by as soon as 2035
- create up to 25 million new jobs
- save the average household $1000-$2000 every year
- massively reduce pollution-related health effects
I'm an open-minded person, and I've installed solar and micro-hydro residential systems in the past. I'm a fan of these technologies and a carbon-free future, but I'm also highly skeptical of intelligent humans who make bold, risky predictions about massive systems and how they'd react to changes. Historically, it's gone rather poorly most of the time.
Also, for my house a winter's worth of electrical heat costs about $1,700. Propane heating costs about $1,400. If I use my woodstove and buy the wood it costs about $600. If I cut my own wood it costs about $150 for fuel and maintenance. So forcing electrical heat also amounts to a large implicit tax.
PS I grew up in a wood-heated home in Vermont and stacked cords of wood every year. Except for freezing my ass of every morning until the fire was going, I think wood heat is great. Unfortunately it does have some particulate issues in urban areas, and (related) doesn't scale well. But I'm not saying people shouldn't use it where it makes sense.
But it's also a royal pain in the ass compared to twisting the dial on a thermostat. There's a large cost in time, energy and attention.
Induction cooktops are pretty close as far as speed of adjusting temperature, but they still aren't hot right away, and are really expensive and require specific (more expensive) cookware.
You do need magnetic cookware so pure aluminum pots are right out but you really don't need expensive stuff.
Hopefully if they ban gas in homes that becomes true here too. But I just looked, and the cheapest induction cooktop I could find was $1,200, 2.2x the price of an average gas cooktop and 3x the price of an average electric.
For a new construction, maybe, but the plumber is already onsite to do the water pipes, so it's not much more to add in a few gas pipes. For an existing house, it's already there. It takes over 100 years to turn over the housing stock, so you'd need to maintain the gas infrastructure for quite some time before you'd start saving any money.
> Then there's the gas consumption, but I don't know how that compares to electricity
Here in the Bay Area gas is a lot cheaper than electricity. But that's because our utility is a crappy monopoly. In cities with their own power generation, like Santa Clara, they're on par with each other.
There are zero hotspots so food doesn’t scorch.
The one I used heated up equally as fast as gas.
> There are zero hotspots so food doesn’t scorch.
Heh, I actually keep a heat gun next to the stove so I can check for hotspots. But you're right, that is a big problem with gas.
Induction will heat up food/water FASTER than gas. Twice as fast in this video for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjRcEwLGtV8
Induction has some issues (e.g. hotspots), but speed isn't even ballpark one of them.
> require specific (more expensive) cookware
It is the high-end/niche cookware that can sometimes be incompatible (e.g. pure aluminum/copper cookware), most common/cheap cookware is compatible just by virtue of the less expensive metal used in it.
Most stainless steel and all cast iron cookware are compatible, and most high-end/niche cookware is adapting to be compatible as induction is the new hotness (particularly with recent focus on the environmental damage/fume issues with gas).
There's a lot of reasons. First, harm to low income families. For instance, _requiring_ that new homes have electric vehicle chargers in the garage does nothing to help immigrant families purchasing their first home is a similar proposal that doesn't nothing but increase harm to the environment and low income families. This is another one of those stupid laws that are designed to move ownernship out of the hands of the poor and keep it centralized to the rich.
Second, This sounds like way to funnel money to political donors.
Third, didn't PG&E just set half the state on fire? Is this really a good idea to load them up even more?
Finally, politicians need to focus on results, not specifying the means. Let the free market, actual scientists and engineers figure it out.
Adding a level 2 charger to an existing home ranges from a few hundred dollars up to around $2k, depending on where you are in the US and whether or not you need a new 240 V circuit installed.
For a new home, where you can put in a 240 V circuit for it while you are doing all the rest of the wiring, with very little additional material or labor. It's only going to raise the cost of the house by a little more than the cost of the charger itself, which will be a few hundred dollars.
Someone buying a newly constructed house for whom an additional few hundred on the mortgage (which will add about $2/month to their mortgage payment) is a big deal is someone who is not anywhere near ready financially to be buying a house.
Solar panels is something I'm surprised isn't required more, but I guess depending where you live they could go flying off, like in Florida it is a concern to some. However, if it is built-in to how the roof is designed, I can't imagine it'd go flying off if properly secured on your roof. Maybe once the technology matures to the ones Tesla has and sells.
https://news.energysage.com/an-overview-of-the-california-so...
I'm not sure it is a great idea. Utility scale solar farms are more cost effective and California has plenty of room for more solar farms, even though the farm approach requires more transmission investments. It might prove beneficial if PG&E continues to respond to high fire risk conditions by shutting off power delivery.
CA lawmaking usually is kind of blind to second-order effects so I'm not surprised. Lawmakers have added numerous laws constraining home construction and then lament the "heart-breaking" housing crisis.
It's an interesting lesson in how to structure changes you want.
Even though some gas appliances (like ovens and heaters) don't work without electricity, I think stoves and gas fireplaces could be really helpful in life or death situations such as extended power outages caused by "the big one". On the other hand I suppose gas lines are one more thing that can be damaged, so there's a tradeoff there.
I actually know some people in outage prone areas who have invested in natural gas generators. Much cheaper than a Tesla battery pack and similar storage solutions
For the less fortunate, if you don't own a single spark source to light a gas fire in your house it's highly likely you have far greater immediate survival issues to face.
This doesn’t apply to gas fireplaces or smaller room sized radiant gas heater though.
Most of our power outages is related to obsolete and un-maintained power-grid being fragile to high loads and wind.
> California bans gas in new homes
> Due to increased demand California starts buying coal based electricity from other states
Do they consider, for example, that the situation in the US is (or was for the last many years) a natural gas surplus due to the byproducts of the fracking industry? And that the gas would be burnt or flared if not sent for distribution? And that, with natural gas being better carbon-wise than coal-fired electricity, this might be a net benefit?
And that to incentivize the building of any kind of gas pipelines, it takes decades of certainty about demand?
And that household gas usage is a drop in the bucket?
The list of issues to consider goes on and on. It's not just "burning fossil fuels = bad".
If all or even most of that electricity were renewable or nuclear you'd have an advantage in terms of CO2 there, but it's not. Renewable can peak out at >50% of power during the day, but it's also important to note that heat and cooking needs usually peak at night. It's out of phase with renewable supply.
Politicians can set the what, but never ever let them specify how. They are not qualified. Set a CO2 target and let actual engineers figure it out.
Since I read your comment I've been trying to do the math on this. Obviously modern houses aren't going to use resistance heaters, they're going to use efficient heat pump/AC units. So let's assume (worst case) that the entire CA grid burns gas (i.e., no nuclear or renewables), and that only 40% of the energy from each unit of gas burned at a power plant actually reaches a home in the form of electricity. Let's also assume a fancy 90% efficient gas furnace vs. a standard 300% efficient heat pump.
So by my napkin math, for every unit of gas burned at the power plant the electric solution is getting us 40%*300%=120% of one unit worth of heat energy pumped into our home. Whereas for the same amount of gas (and assuming gas distribution consumes no energy, which is obviously silly), the gas furnace is getting us 90% of one unit of heat energy into our home. I'm probably not computing this correctly, but my naive understanding is that this means 33% more heat for a given fuel usage (and CO2 emissions production) when using a heat pump vs. burning fuel in the house.
But on top of that, CA's electric grid isn't burning just natural gas. It's burning a mix of different fuels, some of which are dirtier than natural gas, and some of which are low- or zero-CO2 emissions. This is before we consider the mandate to add solar to new houses. So presumably even today, using an electric-based system will give even better CO2 results than the mere 33% improvement in heat-per-unit-CO2 would seem to give us if we assume everything is powered by natural gas.
Maybe this is wrong, but I'm really struggling to see why we would pump gas into our house and burn it under these conditions.
You have forgotten about absorption heat pumps, which are powered by natural gas and are even more efficient than electric ones.
We heat and cook with gas. So solar goes to appliances, tech, and AC (few days in summer) and one Nissan leaf. It is still not enough for our family of 4 (maybe covers 70%).
Anecdotally, every person I know with solar does not pay an electric bill (I also live in the Bay Area). My neighbor has solar, and has four adults in the house. They also run a catering business so they have a commercial walk in freezer and refrigerator in addition to their normal appliances, and they don't pay an electric bill either.
And when I run the calculator for my own house, it looks like I won't pay a bill either, despite running the A/C all summer and the heat all winter. We've just been too lazy to get it done.
Maybe your system isn't working correctly?
Both CO2 and energy usage are global things, not local. There is no such thing as saying "my heat is sourced from solar power".
Getting rid of natural gas is environmentally foolish, at least until we reach the fairy tale world where nothing is burned for energy.
Today though? This idea of "no natural gas", harms the environment.
For cooking, induction stovetops are far superior to gas burners.
The only thing that may require resistive heating is the hot water heater, but that's a fairly small portion of overall energy usage.
And that’s before we factor in almost all emergency home generators run on natural gas.
Is there no way CA can massively reduce gas without banning?
Who would support this? I think California property owners should support any and all restrictions on new homes. Who is against this? Probably a small subset of people who intend on building a home in the near future.
Gas stoves and equipment are appreciated by good cooks.
Most common cookware works with induction. Even copper/aluminum core has no problem, and most stainless steel. The stuff that doesn't work is quite niche (pure aluminum/pure copper, and some high-end stainless steel).