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Comment by wu_187 | Hacker News Reader

I have a different perspective. Having gas during freeze in Houston allowed us to boil water while the power is out. It not only allowed us to have warm water for taking a bath it also allowed us to boil the water to make it potable as the water was unsafe to drink during that time. Had we not had gas it would have been much worse for us.

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This is a really good point, in that the cities that are banning natural gas in new construction, have not as far as I know invested in more reliable electric infrastructure to compensate for the lost redundancy. Are they considering the consequences of eliminating a second redundant energy supply leaving a “single point of failure”? More people will inevitably freeze to death, and that human cost should be accounted for along with the climate crisis, in finding the best path forward.

BTW in my experience, natural gas infrastructure is no more reliable than electricity. In winter 2011, our gas was shut off across Northern New Mexico for a week, due to high demand with record cold temperatures, and the need to retain pressure in the pipeline so it could function at all. Wood saved the day then, and seems to me a more distributed and robust emergency solution. Wood is super dirty of course, so it seems plausible that retaining gas residential hook ups as a backup to the electric supply, could be better for the environment by reducing wood use. Have the cities that are banning natural gas done this analysis?

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-ga...

For safety gas needs to be shut off during many emergencies. Solar panels and battery backups are probably better as they are less dangerous and less prone to common-mode failures than gas. As you mention, a woodpile is also a nice low-tech and low-risk backup.

Most solar installs are grid tied and add no emergency redundancy.

Unless you have a modicum of electrical knowledge, a willingness to break some small safety regulations/laws, or lacking the former, a thirst for danger

I like most rational people have no desire to be fined by my cities code compliance officers.

Powerwall can be both grid-tied and allows emergency redundancy. It disconnects from grid during an outage.

Growing up in an area that commonly has power outages a gas range is a must for me for all of those reasons. But, they are secondary to how much nicer gas is to cook on than any electric range I have tried.

Makes sense. It seems like it would be best to create a fault tolerant society and have multiple forms of energy production instead of going all in on a single one. This can be done in an eco-friendly way, too. I don't think there will be one energy "winner" unless there's a huge breakthrough. We're one big solar flare away from needing paper and pencil for a few weeks.

On the other hand, on the west coast the likely cause of water contamination issues is a major earthquake. In which case gas would most likely be out longer than power.

The only reliable solution is to have a backup that’s not reliant on infrastructure. I.e everyone should have a camp stove and a couple of bottles of propane for it or an alternative self reliant solution that’s good for 3 or so days.

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