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Comment by BuildTheRobots | Hacker News Reader

In the UK I've only ever encountered diesel fuelled generators with tanks usually long enough to run the DC for hours if not days. Easy to see in hindsight, but I guess I'm slightly surprised at the use of generators running off mains gas for this very reason. Does anyone know how common this is in the USA?

Liveleak actually has some security camera footage with audio of the recording: https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=aZhBY_1608918884

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Anecdote: In my experience, a small but sizeable number of homes in suburban areas that are still outside the city enough to be affected by weather-related power outages every several months have whole-home generators connected to city natural gas lines. Growing up in one of these areas, there was the occasional power outage (once a year or so at most) but I can't recall any gas line outages. Those who had whole-home generators experienced no real outage, although in a colder climate having a gas heating system and a gas stove with a backup lighter/match are definitely more essential than keeping the lights on.

Gas lines don't typically go out due to outright outages for these types of situations, but I've experienced multiple outages in the past few years due to the grid not being able to accommodate the surge of demand during large power outages.

It's even worse/ more likely to happen for hurricanes, when natural gas wells and pipelines are shut-in in anticipation of the weather.

I'm more surprised that Nashville has city gas. It's not a very cold climate. It almost never even snows there.

For many years there was an unholy union between the timber lobby and the lineman’s union that required all power lines in Tennessee to be above ground. Middle Tennessee regularly has serious wind storms that knock out those power lines, so gas is attractive.

Also gas is just an efficient way to produce heat.

A lot of cities in Florida have natural gas including mine. My cook top, hot water, dryer and pool heater run off it. Not used for heating the house as a heat pump is plenty for the mild winter.

What city in Florida? I have only seen this in newer planned communities, never city or county wide in Florida.

Clearwater, FL

https://www.clearwatergas.com

You can see a maps of the gas lines in FL and counties that have it here:

http://www.psc.state.fl.us/files/PDF/publications/consumer/b...

Gas is useful for ranges or water heaters regardless of climate.

Sure, but as someone who's lived in the Southeast my entire life, I've never seen city gas. Where there's gas there's a tank that's filled by a truck.

Lack of gas service is mostly a geography issue ie rural vs urban, and less of a climate issue. Most of the small rural towns in the SE have gas service in at least the city centers, if nothing else for the municipal and the hospital generators.

On site Propane storage can be super expensive capital wise, and also it just does not give you much runtime for any serious usage. The best solution is battery with generator backup for onsite, which our local 911 just went to in the SE, because the uptime in that setup was 4x generator with onsite storage because of the increased production efficiency.

New Orleans has it.

I thought it was a warm-ish area, but, its 20F there right now!

https://darksky.net/forecast/36.1041,-86.7758/us12/en

I live at basically the same latitude. That's thing... this is about as cold as it ever gets, and it was 70F here two days ago - 30 currently.

Very common. Short of something like this, it's unlikely your natural gas and electric service will both go out at the same time. Natural gas turbines fed by the city service are a common backup source. Some sites will also have provision for running off bottled gas, some won't.

Very common for residential buildings - the house I grew up in in Ohio had an automatic standby back up generator than ran off of piped in natural gas. The idea was to protect against weather-related power outages. (Generally snow or wind causing trees to fall on power lines)

I’m not sure how common this is in commercial buildings. Mains gas powered generator doesn’t seem like a very good idea for anything critical.

There have been companies offering gas-mains alternatives to generators; it's pretty rare that both your electricity grid and gas grid go off together - and if someone is bombing your building you've got other problems.

Ex-telco here. Wherever underground diesel tanks are practical, they use that instead. Nat-gas is for dense urban installations only, as I understand it.

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