Gas stoves aren’t “the problem”; natural gas space heating and leaks from the gas grid are.
Gas stoves are more collateral damage than culprit, in my opinion, although the indoor air quality issues are a compelling health concern.
Gas stoves are more collateral damage than culprit, in my opinion, although the indoor air quality issues are a compelling health concern.
But again, it's more of questioning the scale. How big of an issue is leaks in the natural gas grid? I'd like to see some actual numbers as to the damage that is done. Promote electric space heaters as primary option, sure. But this smells like all hype and little bite
We don’t know exactly how much leaks, but the estimates have been growing and most sources cite 2-4%. Given the 80x multiplier on methane as a GHG compared to CO2, that’s potentially a really big problem.
One of the reasons to be aggressive here is that building codes are upstream. You won’t see the impacts on the market (reduced gas consumption, strong demand for induction stoves & electric space heating) until many years after this change, and it’s precisely those shifts in demand we need to drive further advancement in electric stoves and heating to make them even better quickly.
This is leakage from between our recieving gas and it being metered to the customer. On the customer side, there's another estimated 2-4% loss.
Get your appliances serviced regularly!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-20/a-giant-f...
It’s not a helpful comment. If you have something to say… say it. If you don’t like the HOA rules don’t move to the HOA neighborhood. It’s hardly a Texas specific problem.
Not my house, I wouldn't have moved to that neighborhood, but my mom didn't have a whole lot of time at the time but of course that doesn't matter we must all embrace the free marketplace of ideas because no other solution is possible here I know I know... Bored now...
The funny thing is that my conservative friends complain about exactly this sort of mindset in California. And I tell them to move to Florida or Texas instead of perpetuating their own misery but they rarely do. One of them seems to have killed himself last year over this. I conclude that I do not understand people and why they can't just do the simple obvious things because you're right that my mom shouldn't have moved there but there's a story behind how she ended up there and you've completely neglected that. Maybe my late friend has a story too.
I find this unnecessarily political, but I also find the more "conservative" minded people to be more supportive of independence, including solar. Not sure how many HOAs are in your experience, maybe it is a lot more than mine.
While the protections have been extended and clarified by subsequent legislation, its worth noting that this policy (the Solar Rights Act) was adopted in 1978 in California.
HOAs can be pretty evil that way.
I also live in Plano. This law was passed many many years ago, so if the HOA is really saying that they should change their tune if you point them to that relevant passage.
Texas's power grid went down in part because natural gas plants couldn't get the necessary gas.
Are there 2 unique gas distribution systems? Was there no gas, or was it just super expensive spot price and no one wanted to pay for it?
I get the impression this isn't typical, but for me "gas" usually means a 150-gal propane tank, filled asynchronously, often by truck rather than gas main. A benefit of this, like most asynchronous systems, is that no amount of disfunction in the backend will have any immediate effect on local usage.
Actually, that is a specific thing that this method does help with: if people stockpile in a given month, it has no immediate effect on me, because my gas tank still has gas left in it. It might cause non-immediate problems, but a lack of local buffers doesn't help with that, and I've at least bought weeks or months of time for those problems to clear up.
But yeah- in my neck of the woods, anywhere outside the city has a propane tank on the property somewhere.
I'm sure lots of people used an oven or a range as emergency heat, but a point in favor of keeping those going is not a point in favor of natural gas space heating.
Quite a few. Older through the wall gas panel type gas heaters work without power. Often found in low-end apartments and trailers. Newer ones tend to require power, mostly for a fan, but sometimes for "cloud connectivity".
Gas production fell by almost half.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46896
Researchers found that frozen wells caused natural gas production to fall by 85 percent in the days leading up to Feb. 16, with up to two-thirds of processing plants in the Permian Basin experiencing an outage. Researchers looked at a sample of 27 natural gas processing plants, and found that as many as 18 of them had zero output at the worst of the storm. Natural gas producers are not required to weatherize their equipment in Texas.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/UT-...
The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas’ electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities — simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/18/texas-winter-storm-b...
Moreover, this very similar situation happened 10 years ago already and that had natural gas curtailments to retail customers. So, no, not a good backup solution.