New York City bans natural gas in new buildings | Hacker News Reader

New York City bans natural gas in new buildings

reuters.com

306 pointsmortonstreet676 comments

For the doubters - I've completely converted my 1962 house to electric over the last few years. Gas furnace > Heat pump. Gas water heater > Heat pump water heater. Gas range > Electric Oven, Induction Cooktop. Even has a heat pump clothes dryer. We had the utility company come out and permanently disconnect our gas service.

AMA.

In addition to electrifying the house, both cars are electric, I've got 12kw of solar on the roof, and 26kwh of battery storage. My house is a case study in electrification and what we need all homes to look like in the next 20 years. It's not without it's challenges, and it requires some adjustments, but really not much. I contend everything being electric is awesome, not compromising.

The main problem I see is that these sorts of retrofits are expensive, and I don't see how most Americans (let alone the rest of the world) do it without incentives.

I assume your equipment was working - why did you replace? If for environmental reasons I feel like removing working appliances is counterproductive (especially since you have solar and battery storage and so you basically wouldn't use electricity otherwise). If for cost, I'd imagine the renovation break-even point would take years, if not longer.

The main thing I'm looking at is eliminating CO2 emissions as best I can. I'm not in control of them all, but where I am in control I'm working to eliminate. Bottom line is that we need to get emissions to zero as fast as possible. With that in mind, the energy cost of new appliances that are run on renewable energy pays dividends before those appliances are at end of life, and existing working gas appliances fall into a sunk-cost fallacy IMO.

It doesn't matter if I have 1 GW of solar and batteries and EVs and the whole grid is converted to renewables and I only eat vegan from my own back yard, etc. If my home furnace runs on gas it's emitting CO2 to run. There was literally an exhaust pipe running out the side of my house for the furnace, water heater, etc. The only way to eliminate those emissions is to eliminate the appliance.

I don't know what the break even cost on all this stuff is, because I frankly don't care. I did do the math on the heat pump water heater vs. what we were paying for the gas water heater (there was a time where the water heater was the only gas thing running), and the new water heater saved us about $30/mo in energy costs just comparing gas to electric. And with solar panels the savings over a gas heater are even greater. I figure break even on a very high end water heater is <4 years.

[edits because I mixed up answers to another comment]

Why do you personally care about eliminating CO2 emissions?

In addition to the obvious point mentioned in a sibling comment (existential threat to humanity)...

Switching to zero-emissions alternatives now means less adjustment later when the polluting versions are (hopefully inevitably) banned.

When they are banned however there will likely be incentives, cheaper prices and better technology. Switching now makes even less sense.

Tragedy of the commons right there.

> If for environmental reasons I feel like removing working appliances is counterproductive

I don't think this follows. There's not THAT much that goes into making a furnace, but it emits a hell of a lot of emissions every year that it's running. I suspect they paid back the CO2 cost of the new equipment relatively quickly.

Didn’t OP mention this was all tied up in a remodel? If so, makes perfect sense to do this all at once.

How do you maximise self consumption of the electricity generated by your solar panels ?

Or do you not care because you’ve installed massive batteries?

I haven't had the batteries long enough (just a couple months at this point - took more than a year to get them) to work that into our habits in all seasons. I expect for 6+ months of the year the batteries will enable us to run virtually off-grid, with minimal draw from the grid, perhaps with the exception of charging the cars. Power production in those months vastly exceeds our usage.

Conversely, this time of year (winter) the way our house is positioned with the sun (on a hill, surrounded by tall trees) we generate a pretty small amount of solar, and are running the heaters a lot, so very grid dependent. The batteries would power the house for maybe 12 hours in an outage.

Last summer I'd often charge a car during the day instead of at night because we were generating more than the draw of the EV charger. I have an internal debate about whether this is better, because the power company's time-of-use structure incentivizes me to not do this, but instead export the power to the grid. So I'm not actually sure whether maximizing my energy usage at the time of production is less carbon intensive than exporting it to offset the rest of the community's usage. I guess it all depends on what's generating that grid energy at night.

For the most part within the house though, the batteries let you not care too much about what energy you're using when.

Imagine dividing your solar capacity among several hundred dwelling units in an NYC apartment complex and then you might be close to an apples-to-apples comparison to what this regulation means.

The benefits of electrification are not limited to those with local solar production. But obviously if you are generating your own power, running everything on that same fuel type has big benefits.

Solar in NYC is complicated. In my condo building, there are 500 apartments and the roof area is about 10k sqft, and it's shadowed by our neighboring building about a third of the day.

However, there are some fascinating cases that work: https://www.stuytown.com/sustainability/solar This project is almost complete and seems to be working really well.

Well, in that case you'd also want to add in things like offshore wind capacity and large remote solar array capacity and remote energy storage capacity. A NYC apartment complex can no more be expected to be energy-independent any more than it can be food-independent.

Cities will always require the import of significant materials, food, and energy from surrounding areas, and electricity is actually a more efficient means of importing energy than natural gas is. Replacing all the diesel trucks and buses with electrical versions, that's equally desirable. Cities will become much cleaner places, which is to everyone's benefit.

> it requires some adjustments, but really not much

can you be more specific here? What sort of things would other readers interested in electrifying a house not be considering?

- Does your house have the proper infrastructure (e.g. 200amp+ panel)

- Is your house wired for the load? (e.g. you need bigger wires to handle the higher amperage. Walls might need to be taken down in order to rewire the appliances)

Those are the two biggest issues. Depending on your house layout, you might basically need to gut your entire house just to rewire a single appliance. I'm obviously throwing out a catastrophic example here, but it can happen. This sort of thing is best done if you're doing major renovations anyway.

Not the op, but I recently added a 50amp circuit for an oven to my ‘50s era house (currently gas). There was a crawl space behind the kitchen, which was not insulated. The hardest part was getting the conduit measured, bent and attached to the house to go from the electrical panel to the attic. Then I drilled holes in the studs for the wire and fished it through and insulated the wall.

Worst case, you have an insulated wall that you need to tear apart. For pre ‘78 houses, do a lead and asbestos inspection before starting work. You would have to tear down drywall/rocklath, tear out insulation, cut holes in the studs for wires, put up new insulation, new drywall, and mud/paint the walls. You could do that in a weekend assuming you have the materials and tools starting Saturday morning.

Looking forward to a reply by op because I suspect their house is above 200amps because of the appliances and cars they have.

OP here - we upgraded to 400 amp service, but 200 would still be sufficient for us. I just have a hard time saying no when 'overkill' costs only 10% more.

> Depending on your house layout, you might basically need to gut your entire house just to rewire a single appliance.

This is simply not true. Any decent electrician will be able to fish the lines with a few strategically placed small holes.

There's no way you can say this without seeing the house, existence of a crawlspace, etc. Low gauge wires are thick, stiff and notoriously difficult to snake.

I do agree though that the average house would not require gutting to wire an appliance.

Sibling comment about electric loads is accurate - we had 100amp service which was insufficient (though we almost made it - we added an ADU (also all electric) which needed it's own big breaker and we didn't have space for that - so that's what really put us over. I ended up going a bit crazy and installing 400A service because it wasn't that much more that 200. Cost was about $11k. We also redid most of the electric wiring in our house as part of renovations.

What I had in mind with the comment above though is that it's just a shift in mindset. In the past I had no idea what a 'therm' of gas was, or how much that was, or any way to connect "run the heater for an hour" to a unit of energy or cost. With everything electric, and everything monitored in detail, and production of electricity on the roof, now everything in the house is on the same unit of energy which I can at least wrap my head around. I can connect "run the heater for an hour (3.5kwh)" to "2 hours of shaded solar power" or "a whole day of hot water" or "a 10 mile trip to the shops in the car". With data comes awareness, and with awareness its inevitable that you'll shift your behavior to be more efficient.

What is the cost to 'upgrade' to pure electric supply / generation household? Say per SF? And why would you remove gas connections when they could be used as backup? Plus why is this what future holds should look like?

The cost is enormous for older houses. It's prohibitive for most people, thus my advocacy for incentives. We did a lot of the work as part of larger renovations, but I'd expect for most homes the cost to convert all the gas appliances to electric and bring everything up to code is at least $30-40k. If you're adding solar and home batteries to that, then even more. We're probably in >$100k gross, though we've taken advantage of probably $30k in incentives for solar and batteries.

The batteries are the backup. Keeping gas service "just in case" comes with it's own risks in terms of leaks, and where I live, with major earthquakes. Disconnecting it means I don't have to worry about that, or pay the $4/mo minimum to keep it active.

I believe this is the future we need if we're serious about eliminating CO2 emissions. It's not just power plants and cars - my house put out just as many emissions in the winter as my car did. Probably more. In a world where we're getting CO2 to zero there's no place for gas appliances. We need everyone to accept that, and it's going to take a while.

What batteries did you go with? Are you concerned about the fire risk?

I'm in the process of electrifying in Brooklyn (Unrelated to this rule) and these common battery systems are terrifying if they catch fire.

While not the person you were asking the question of - I recently installed 40kwh of batteries to complement my 20kw of solar. I'm using Enphase for both the solar micro-inverters as well as the batteries. The batteries are LiFePo, so fire risk is very very low. The cars in my garages with gasoline represent a much greater risk.

I ended up with Enphase instead of Tesla Powerwalls primarily because the Enphase system supports direct generator integration, which allows smart generator use to offset the battery/solar system in a grid-off situation. The combo of batteries and genset makes for a very reliable scalable solution.

> The batteries are LiFePo, so fire risk is very very low. The cars in my garages with gasoline represent a much greater risk.

Is this really true, and do you have a source on this? Gas vehicles are extensively tested to ensure the integrity and safety of their gas tanks, even in extreme crashes, so I feel like the danger is actually very low.

I’m also curious what batteries you specifically used and how they are doing in terms of holding capacity after hundreds of cycles. Also, do you live in a cold location?

Your feelings are ignoring basic physics of the materials which is well known.

Danger is contextual though. My LiPo burning down in the middle of a concrete patch is no risk to anyone, but having it burn down in a backpack in my cupboard will probably burn the house down.

Petrol inside a petrol tank inside a modern car is not the same risk as petrol sitting in a jerry can by the stove for another example.

Agreed on the petrol - The risk of starting while in a car is very low (at least a modern one), but the risk if you have a fire from another cause is certainly higher. 50 gallons of gasoline is lot of stored energy (as is a couple of propane tanks). All of this risk is still very low, and I would be most concerned with something that can start a fire. Of course some electric cars like the Bolt have been problematic.

In looking at risk, I would be most concerned with what kind of malfunction could lead to what outcome. LiFePO batteries can be punctured without catching fire, and if a fire is caused by something else, they are not fundamentally very combustible. This chemistry is very different from Lithium-ion. In terms of add this to your house, there is low risk of them starting a fire, and low risk of them contributing to a fire in a significant way.

Gasoline in a car has a low risk of starting a fire, but a higher risk in the event of being exposed to a fire. Storing gasoline in a jerry can probably has higher risk of the first, and certainly the second.

Keep in mind both of these risks are much much lower than so many other things in your house that you do every day. Extension cords, faulty wiring, arcs, heaters, kitchen fires, etc.

I am using Enphase Encharge batteries, which are a LiFePO4 chemistry. They are in my garage, which is heated, so outdoor temperatures don'r make a difference. If they were outdoors, cold temperatures would be a problem below 0F, so if that is your situation I would only do an inside mount. I only have 20-30 cycles so far, but the cycle count is generally well regarded with this chemistry. Still, I don't expect these to last more than 15-20 years.

Thanks for the details. How do you scale this up to power the whole house? On the low end I would imagine you need 30 kWh worth, along with the appropriate equipment (5 kW inverter, cabling, enclosures) to tie it all together into a single system, manage charging, connect it to your home’s circuit safely, and so on. Do you buy off the shelf solutions for all that or pay for some kind of ongoing service or DIY?

The scale is based on two things - storage capacity, and power capacity. Storage is the kwh of storage, which will determine how long you can run off-grid. The power capacity is the peak output power of the system when off-grid, and is usually limited by the inverters.

I am using the Enphase Encharge system, in which each battery unit also includes grid-creation capable micro-inverters. They are integrated into the same boxes, and can provide both grid offset, or grid generation. There is also a 'smart switch' that does the interconnects to the grid, and provides the autotransformer capability ( needed to have 120V split phase ).

There are some more details in my house/shop build thread on garage journal: https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/jeffs-mountain-s...

Thanks for sharing - that seems like an ambitious (and expensive?) project. Are you planning to do an all-up retrospective on it (not just the backup power but the entire site and building)?

Definitely make sure you have that generator and also setup a local only monitor of the state of the system. In hurricane Ida's aftermath a lot of Enphase systems bricked themselves because the cell and internet service was down and there's nothing to indicate state of charge etc without external connections.

I have 2 Tesla Powerwalls. I'm not too worried about the fire risk, as I haven't heard of any case of powerwall fire. The city seems worried about it though, my permits and inspections all have to go through the fire department which has slowed things down a lot.

Probably a good idea to install them somewhere that would be easy to flood with water if there was a problem though.

This is something that I’ve wondered about. I’ve got a trio of Powerwalls in my unfinished basement. My town seemed cool with that - for the most part the inspector was totally geeking out over the setup and how clean the installation was.

I read about a lot of places that require Powerwalls to be outside or have additional fire suppression for inside. Anyone have suggestions for what I can do given that I’ve got these guys installed? I haven’t found much help on how to protect myself there.

It might be a horrible idea to attempt to extinguish a lithium fire with water. [1]

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/290443/ddg#29...

Tesla's guidance for dealing with battery fires in their cars is to basically flood them. I think the idea is to keep the temperature down. The water won't extinguish it because it's a chemical fire, but you can use water to keep it from spiraling out of control.

Yes, it’s to keep the temperature down to not start secondary fires. You cannot stop thermal runway and must let it take its course.

However dumping water on mass amounts of stored electricity sounds scary.

If there is a fire indoors that you cannot extinguish very, very quickly, you need to immediately get out and call the emergency services. The longer you wait, the larger the fire gets and the less professionals can do about it.

Don't try to be a hero and flood batteries from your 10 litres/minute faucet. Just get out before you inhale too much smoke, faint, and die.

> Probably a good idea to install them somewhere that would be easy to flood with water if there was a problem though.

I can see why the fire department was concerned with these batteries: https://youtu.be/cTJh_bzI0QQ?t=344

That's lithium metal though, lithium ion batteries don't behave like that. The flammable part is the electrolyte, and the high power density of lithium cells which produces a lot of heat when short-circuited.

I believe the FDNY has not yet approved battery systems like the Tesla Powerwall for use in residential solar systems.

They have -- there are limits to the storage capacity. I cant remember what it is off-hand.

Replacing natural gas for heating is something I could get behind. Replacing it for cooking is an adjustment I would never make. Cooking represents a minuscule portion of natural gas consumption, prohibiting it will have basically no impact on emissions. However it would mean that many of the things I routinely cook, I would no longer be able to cook. Induction is great, I have an induction cooktop, but there’s simply things you cannot cook on it. I wouldn’t give up stir fry cooking for some tiny and irrelevant impact on emissions.

I make stir fry on an electric cooktop all of the time, and it's not even induction. Have I just been dreaming?

Maybe.

A typical 2500W electric burner is equivalent to about 8,500 BTU/hr.

The biggest gas burner on my decent Samsung range is 22,000 BTU/hr.

A high end wok jet ring burner typically found in restaurants (or in some people's homes who like to stir fry) can reach 160,000 BTU/hr.

You can't really get wok hei (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Wok_hei) without that amount of heat and proper preparation & cooking technique.

Wow, TIL. All of my stir-fridays have been a lie.

i wonder if this type of niche use case would be best served by an lp gas tank type situation rather than outfitting an entire building with gas piping.

my guess is, most people in most cooking situations would never need restaurant grade stove tops. but like we do now, us nerds with nerdy niche cases will figure out how to do it for ourselves with elaborate projects :p

That might seem niche from a Eurocentric perspective, but a gas burner is probably the most ubiquitous cooking appliance around the world. A lot of the worlds cuisine has been developed around cooking on top of one.

Sure, but high BTU (restaurant grade)? Most people are going to have a learning curve as they burn food trying to get used to the insane heat output.

The traditional method for cooking a stir fry is in a wok and at a very high temperature. Induction doesn’t get hot enough, and it’s not possible to heat a wok on one anyway. You can make a stir fry in a pan, and at a lower temperature, but it’s going to taste completely different.

> Induction doesn’t get hot enough, and it’s not possible to heat a wok on one anyway. You can make a stir fry in a pan

This is not true at all. I have been cooking with my wok for years using induction. Only real requirement is that your wok has a flat bottom which while not 100% traditional works just fine.

If your wok has a flat bottom, then it’s not a wok. The circular shape of a wok diffuses heat up the sides, which a flat bottom pan doesn’t do. A flat bottom pan also doesn’t allow you to toss whatever it is you’re frying properly. If an induction cooktop was capable of providing the appropriate amount of heat, this would simple end up burning some of the food. However, it most certainly is not. An induction cooktop _might_ be capable of heating a pan up to the appropriate temperature (I’m skeptical about that), but it can’t keep it there. That temperature will drop the moment you put anything in it, and if you want to properly stir fry something, you need your wok to keep that scalding temperature the whole time you’re cooking.

You can cook food in a flat bottom frying pan on an induction cooktop, but you can’t do anything close to a traditional stir fry technique.

A wok with a flat bottom is wok with a flat bottom not a normal flat bottom pan.

As for heat my 11kW induction top has never failed to keep any wok/pan hot enough for stir frying.

According to this convertor I found online https://www.stovesareus.co.uk/kilowatt-conversion it is roughly equilevant to a 37000 BTU/h burner.

> A wok with a flat bottom is wok with a flat bottom not a normal flat bottom pan.

And this was done to fit western stoves. It is not traditional and changes the method of cooking as well as heat distribution. Woks need round bottoms.

The biggest problems with gas stove tops are not emissions but the impact on air quality indoors (NO2 in particular) and the risk of fire/explosion.

If the building codes don’t require safe gas installations that seems like a problem that could be resolved by updating the codes to require safe gas installations. That doesn’t appear to be the basis of the policy described in the article though.

But once you use gas only for cooking, maintaining all the expensive and dangerous infrastructure isn't worth it and more.

Much cheaper to put a nice electric induction cooktop into every kitchen than to run gas onto every floor.

In Europe, there is more electric than gas cooking. However, the voltage is higher - 230 nominal, with three phase being very standard as well (400v phase to phase).

The issue is that the lower voltage ~115 requires higher currents (over twice) which translates to more copper everywhere, beefer silicon for SMPS converters that are even used for induction tops.

U.S. residential induction (and ceramic, electric coil, etc.) cooktops are all 240V.

Houses will never be heated by electricity in the north. Its currently -30 degrees celsius in the Calgary where I live. Its going to be -35 tomorrow. People would literally die if you got your wish.

I'm in Minnesota. True air source heat pumps aren't great at such temps, but ground source heat pumps it doesn't matter at all. Lot higher install cost though.

Thankfully most of the cost is in drilling the hole, not in parts that may need to be replaced.

This resource suggests that the frost line in Calgary is about nine feet underground: http://www.urecon.com/applications/municipal_ambient_below.h... . That's the depth at which the ground temperature is above freezing for the whole year. That means that a heat pump can exchange heat via pipes buried nine feet under your property. Technologically, it's extremely feasible. Whether or not it makes sense for you will depend on economic factors, of course.

No it is not feasible. You are not digging up ground under then tens of thousands of houses that already exist in the city in any economically feasibly way.

Community "large loop" heat pumps should help with the economics, but there are still lots of details to fill in.

I can come up with napkin tier ideas too. But lets leave the city planning to the professionals

No need to dig, only to do some drilling. It is very common here in Sweden. You just need to check the map first so you don't drill into the subway.

Dude, you're arguing semantics. A drill is still digging up dirt.

Also, people often don't realize that the temperatures that matter thermodynamically are degrees Kelvin, not Celsius. 30 below 0 is 243K; 20 above (room temperature) is 293K. The coefficient of performance for a Carnot heat pump at those temperatures is 293 / (293 - 243) ~= 5.86; that means that one joule of work will transfer 5.86 joules of heat. This isn't great, but it's less of a difference than people would expect given our subjective experience of how cold -30C is. The coefficient of performance for a heat pump trying to heat 0C ambient temperatures up to room temperature (or alternatively, an air conditioner cooling 40C temperatures to room temperature) is 293 / (293 / 273) = 14.65, so your heat pump in Calgary will be maybe 2.5x less efficient than one in NYC. Drill below the frost line, like you suggest, and you'll get similar efficiencies regardless of where you are.

If only electricity was as easy to distribute over long distances as oil and gas... oh wait...

I guess someone should tell Norway that their residents don't really exist

I agree that heat is more challenging in climates like yours. But it's not impossible. Extreme insulation and smart energy management goes a long way (check out passive houses), and if thermal is really needed natural gas is not our only option. Do trees grow near you? Grind them up and burn them, they're carbon neutral. Better yet, geothermal heat pumps which I'm hopeful will become more cost effective in the near future.

If trees are carbon neutral, then fossil fuels are also carbon neutral - just a different timespan.

Burning trees typically creates an enormous quantity of particulates.

This isn’t true. Our fossil fuels were produced during the Carboniferous period, something which the planet is very unlikely to go through again.

Tens of thousands of houses already exist in the city that are nearly all heated with natural gas. There is not a single economically feasible way to change those houses

You just moved the goal posts from "impossible" to "not economically feasible" - those aren't the same thing. I agree, economically, it's very difficult. We need governments to help with the cost, because it will be enormous. The cost of not doing it is even higher.

Also, the % of people who live in climates like yours is relatively small, so everyone who doesn't live in those places should not be using this as an excuse for inaction.

No they simply don't work either.

Ground source heat pumps exist, but cost a minimum of $10,000 to install. That is only if you have a large enough plot of land and the right soil type. It can easily be $20,000.

Don't be silly. Heat pumps with water that go down drilled holes (the term for it here in Sweden is mountain heat) would work just fine and probably be cheaper too

No they would not be. Or they would have been used. Do you guys seriously think you know more than the engineers and city planners that live here?

Heat pumps are used all over the Nordics and work just fine. Air one can get quite expensive to run during the coldest days but ground heat pumps literally do not care how cold it is outside (the ground temperature will stay the same anyway)

For Helsinki they are moving to heat pumps for the district heating as they want to close the 2 remaining coal plants in the next couple years.

In your case you would use geothermal energy. In countries like Finland, geothermal + electric keep everyone warm.

People will die either way.

It's -17C now, a couple weeks back it was -29C... I have 100% (geothermal) heat pump heating and it's 24.5C inside at all times. The buildings/houses require a good thermal insulation but heating, itself, is not an issue.

Can I ask what state/country/region you're in? What's the typical low temperature for winter in your area?

Bay Area California. December has been highs in the 40s-50s, lows 30s-40s (Fahrenheit). I definitely benefit from living in a place that's not extremely cold or hot, which reduces our energy needs.

Reduces your energy needs and makes a heat pump a complete solution.

Most sources I've looked at say heat pumps lose efficiency below 40F outdoor temperature and only work down to around -5F. If I were to convert to only using heat pumps, I'd have extremely inefficient or straight up intermittent heat and hot water for about a third of the year.

Falling back on resistive electric heating drives your heat bill through the roof.

I'd definitely love to get a heat pump for the other 8 months of the year, but the cost is hard to justify when I still need to maintain some other form of heat anyway.

That sounds great to me, but I don’t see apartment buildings here in NYC being built with induction cook tops. The ones with electric ranges have the crappy ones under glass the switch on and off instead of having variable heat. They’re useless to cook on. This seem like another law written by people who own brownstones that will make life shittier for people who rent.

Buy an electric pressure cooker. You can cook 100% of your meals using one. I don't even use my oven or stovetop any more.

You can cook 100% of your meals in one. That sounds like some sort of ironic punishment I'd receive in the afterlife for a grave misdeed.

I don’t understand it. James Coco went mad in 15 minutes!

You can cook all your meals using a microwave too. But no one would seriously recommend that to anyone.

Mm, I love me some pressure cooker hamburgers.

You can use the saute mode in the place of a stovetop pan.

“Saute mode” is from a universal feature of electric pressure cookers, AFAIK.

It's also, while good for the particular use cases it is aimed at, not great general substitute for a proper set of stovetop cookware.

Most people mentioning electric pressure cookers these days are referring to the "Instant Pot" or similar. Check it out.

I have two Instant Pots and am quite familiar with their features, which is why after I mentioned that the feature was not universal to electric pressure cookers, also discussed the feature itself.

You could, but no one would every suggest that the city government should force you to do that.

Thumbs up to bland food

> That sounds great to me, but I don’t see apartment buildings here in NYC being built with induction cook tops.

Why not? Most new construction is "luxury" priced, as since the land/structure is expensive anyway, and it's only marginally more expensive to put in "premium" appliances that allow you to charge a significant rent premium, everyone does that.

Of course new apartments are going to be built with induction cooktops when gas isn't an option. Induction isn't even that much more expensive.

IME premium appliances often means new, stainless steel but still cheapest model. It's premium aesthetic not functionality.

> Most new construction is "luxury" priced

They aren't luxury, they are market rate and the people renting them are often definitionally rent burdened.

> marginally more expensive to put in "premium" appliances

Induction cook tops cost nearly $4k. A whole electric stove and oven for about $600.

> since the land/structure is expensive anyway

In NYC you need an expected profit margin of 5% to get a development loan, and that quite high for large real estate projects. Slapping and extra $3-$4k onto each unit just isn't going to work for most projects.

> Of course new apartments are going to be built with induction cooktops when gas isn't an option.

As of today, there are fewer than 20 apartments for rent in NYC that list induction cooktops in their listings. I've checked every major rental site, and some didn't seem to actually have them based on photos. Plenty of building have electric, but I've never seen a rental with induction or heard of anyone who has one at any price of unit.

> Induction cook tops cost nearly $4k. A whole electric stove and oven for about $600.

You are comparing a Tesla Model S to a Toyota Civic.

Here is a $500 36-inch induction cooktop

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Empava-36-in-Built-In-Electric-S...?

That's fair, but still the price of a whole electric of gas oven and cooktop.

Ok, but I'm addressing this argument:

> Induction cook tops cost nearly $4k. A whole electric stove and oven for about $600. In NYC you need an expected profit margin of 5% to get a development loan, and that quite high for large real estate projects. Slapping and extra $3-$4k onto each unit just isn't going to work for most projects.

the cost of the cooktop and oven is not increasing by $3600. It's actually only increasing by $500.

Also 5% of a 800k condo unit is 40k.

Also your 5% profit margin is a bare minimum. In reality, I doubt any developer would do start any project unless they expected at minimum 15% margin.

Induction cooktops don't start at $4K, more like $400.

> Induction cook tops cost nearly $4k. A whole electric stove and oven for about $600.

I can buy 5 Miele induction cooktops for $4k, what planet are you living on?

Sf did a similar ban because gas infrastructure is leaky over time. Expensive to maintain, bad for your health, bad for the environment.

I'm not sure who these people are that sit around and scheme about how to craft laws who fuck over people they'll never meet.

> scheme about how to craft laws who fuck over people they'll never meet

No one, they just don't consider that effects on peoples' lives. Sure, natural gas isn't great for indoor air quality, but it's easily mitigated by cracking a window or some airflow. Getting stuck with a cheap electric cook top makes cooking a lot more miserable and unreliable and there's nothing you can do to improve the situation if every apartment is built that way.

I love cooking on my gas stove but it's also worth noting that Julia Child filmed The French Chef on electric coils. They are certainly not ideal but they are also far from the worst thing you could be forced to deal with in the kitchen.

Saying that one of the most famous chef's ever cooked on a crappy range is a poor argument for legally banning the alternative. You, as you've mentioned like myself prefer a gas range. I gladly acknowledge that induction is equally suitable. However banning gas in new apartment construction forces people by law to use the thing we both agree isn't very good, sine few building will be built with induction.

I honestly don't know all the tradeoffs here. I lived with electric coils for a few years when I was in a rental apartment and somehow we were still happy. It's not ideal but I can certainly picture criteria under which it's the optimal policy.

The point about Julia Child is that she was creating works of art using this supposedly unusable tool. If she can manage that, your average Joe should be able to bang together some burgers and saute some vegetables on one.

That doesn't really follow. An inferior tool may be prohibitively hard to use for a beginner while an expert effortlessly compensates.

It doesn't follow in the sense of being a formal logical syllogism, but it is nonetheless true. You can learn to cook on electric coils. Millions of people have. You can make both beginner and expert food on them. And Childs' use of them is evidence, but not proof, of this fact.

Hello, rdI*

r*d*l*?

I didn't know what the big deal was and thought it was silly until I actually lived in a place with a gas stove. Definitely motivated me to cook more. Induction also excellent. I'm not saying I physically can't cook with electric but it's unpleasant

A cheap gas cooktop is by far the worst possible stovetop out there, far far worse than electric. They are so slow, ineffectual pieces of crap. At least electric can always get really hot. But there are so many gas ranges these days that don't focus the heat in the right place by having bad grill designs. Id take the average cheap coil electric range over gas any day. And id take induction over that.

And by comparison, a nice gas range is significantly superior to all of the electric cooktops I've ever used. By nice gas range, I mean one of the 6-burner types on one side, griddle on the other, and double side by side ovens. I'd happily electrify the rest of the building if it was economical to do so (it's still not in many places), but having gas for cooking is the one hard, non-negotiable feature I have in a property.

I suspect the average lawmaker does not take cooking seriously, which I think is fairly sad.

I’ve read that gas cooking produces about twice as much PM2.5 as electric cooking.

Some of that can probably be mitigated with good fume extraction, but it’s a consideration.

Induction has huge advantages over gas, I’m seeing it increasingly used in newer high end homes. Gas wins out on lower end luxury builds given that a gas stove is much cheaper than an induction stove.

> but it's easily mitigated by cracking a window

Uh, the air pollution of a typical urban street is a _disaster_.

Not in NYC where the AQI hasn't been above 50 for more than 3 years and often hovers in the mid 20s. Your indoor air-quality is almost certainly worse.

Saying you can just open a window takes the problem too lightly, I believe gas stoves like the risk of childhood asthma by the realm of 40% [1]? I think we’re going to at least be talking about mandatory hoods over the range considering they contribute to a significant amount of all respiratory issues despite reasonable alternatives existing.

Gas sure bets induction especially when filling up a large skillet with food. People can adopt though. It really wasn’t very long ago when cooking was mostly done with wood.

Personally I would just impose a tax on new hookups and more regulations before I actually banned gas though, but there is justification for government intervention when people are pumping highly flammable toxic and environmentally destructive gases into businesses and residences for the sake of making a better omelette.

The only really strong argument I see for gas is that reducing heating expenses has a substantial effect on local poverty.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/6/1724/737113

On one hand you got people that think the government is always scheming against them. One the other I have a couple of friends that actually served on various governmental boards. The latter think wealthy influential crooks are usually the ones scheming.

No, my claim was that city governments often pass laws without thinking about how ti might effect average people.

My claim is that's because you don't pay any attention to what your city government does and so you only notice when they mess up. But never when they don't.

I pay a lot of attention and do notice when they are effective, but that's mostly expected.

It doesn't get cold in SF.

I don't understand why people say things like this. According to a quick search, it's 8°C right now and is forecasted to be as low as 3°C later this week.

I know that it's not Montana, but the vast majority of people aren't walking around in T-shirts in almost-freezing weather. These temperatures are pretty objectively cold, if you ask me.

FWIW, I've been to SF, but have never lived there. I am from (and currently live in) a much colder city. Even during summers where I've been to SF, I've experienced significant wind chills which have forced me to wear a hoodie.

> I don't understand why people say things like this. According to a quick search, it's 8°C right now and is forecasted to be as low as 3°C later this week.

That's still above freezing, which some may not consider "cold".

For example, even 'basic' heat pumps, the ones that look exactly the same as AC-only boxes, can typically work down to 5C. However once you drop down freezing and into the negatives (C) you tend to need mini-split systems. That's what the GP may mean when the word "cold" was used.

It's not everyone else's job to work around someone using words incorrectly to make nonsensical comments.

What's a mini split system?

> Mini-splits are heating and cooling systems that allow you to control the temperatures in individual rooms or spaces.

* https://www.fujitsugeneral.com/us/residential/what-is-a-mini...

> A single-zone (also called a mini-split) ductless system allows you to control the temperature of one room by connecting an outdoor unit to an indoor unit, with no ductwork needed. An outdoor mini-split unit is placed outside your home and is connected to an indoor mini-split unit by small cables and a refrigerant line through a hole in the wall.

* https://www.trane.com/residential/en/products/ductless-syste...

> A multi-zone (also called a multi-split) ductless system connects an outdoor unit to an one or more indoor units, letting you control the temperature in several different zones of your home. Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) systems are a type of multi-zone ductless systems. VRF systems are energy efficient, and they can be used to heat one zone while cooling a different zone at the same time.

* https://www.trane.com/residential/en/products/ductless-syste...

Also SF is bad at infrastructure safety- https://missionlocal.org/2021/12/gas-lines-embedded-in-concr...

I'm 57, and have been cooking on conventional electric stoves with time proportioning controls for my entire life. What am I missing? I could consider an induction stove, but running gas to my kitchen would require some pretty major surgery to the house.

There are recipes and sticky situations where having a near instant heat switch is a real convenience, if not a real life saver. That said, if you've made it this far you probably aren't going to get much out of them. I love gas because I love cooking with a direct flame, but I think from an environmental perspective we're going to have to start making due without them

Good points. I probably have a sixth sense for avoiding recipes that the stove can't manage.

I had no idea about the amount of leaking, but it makes sense. Unless you're actively checking every foot of gas pipe everywhere, chances are it's leaking here and there. But it's too bad. I learned while doing process control in a plant with steam heated processes, that you can run a lot of power down a gas pipe. I have a hunch that they could heat all of NYC from just waste heat.

Induction gives you most of the benefits of gas: instant heat control. It's even faster heating than gas, easier to clean, safer to use.

The hob itself costs more, and the cheapest pans aren't compatible. Gas is often cheaper to run.

Other than initial purchase price, a normal electric hob has no advantages.

Some desserts/baking and traditional woks can’t be done on electric. That’s about it. Also electric are more expensive and less reliable for the same quality

Replacing a cooktop is a 1 hour job.

with a 3k price tag for the cooktop, and another 500-1000 for induction cookware?

This regulation effects rental units, renters aren't going to swap ovens and cookware every-time they move house.

> with a 3k price tag for the cooktop

Here is a 30-inch Samsung induction cooktop for $1100

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Samsung-30-in-Smart-Induction-Mo...

> and another 500-1000 for induction cookware?

Here is a $43 induction cookware set which includes both pots and pans

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-8-Piece-Non-Stick-Kitche...

I bought an induction cooktop for around USD 350 a few years ago. That was the premium unit of a cheap brand. They also had a cheaper one for around USD 200.

The cheap, government-controlled rentals in my town started switching to induction for all new cooktops a decade ago.

This is in Europe, though.

> That sounds great to me, but I don’t see apartment buildings here in NYC being built with induction cook tops.

Very true for the average apartment.

Two (huge) obstacles for induction cooktops:

1) They're still more expensive than a non-induction electric cooktop. Might not be a big deal in a $1 million apartment buildout, but if someone is remodeling a block of apartments that are going to rent out no matter what they contain, the remodelers are going to get the cheaper non-induction equipment.

2) They depend on the type of cookware used. Again, not a big deal if you're a homeowner spending $$$ on a remodel and cookware to go with it. But it is a big deal if you're trying to rent out apartments to people who have cookware and you don't want to get constant calls about the fancy cooktop not working.

It's not realistic to expect the average NYC apartment to get fancy induction cooktops. They're just going to get the cheap electric units.

I don’t “buy” the cookware argument. A cast iron skillet, a pot, and a good saucepan are enough for most folks, can be acquired for under a hundred bucks.

> A cast iron skillet, a pot, and a good saucepan are enough for most folks,

There's a reason 99% of people have non-stick aluminum cookware. Everything else is horrible, and I say that from bitter experience. How often do you scramble eggs on your cast iron skillet?

That said...

> can be acquired for under a hundred bucks.

You can certainly get a small set of non-stick aluminum cookware with induction plates built in for under $100, however, it's not the easiest thing to find in the first place.

I hear your argument about the needs of tenants and don’t disagree about your general point. I just wanted to add that I’ve given up entirely on non-stick skillets. The finish inevitably comes off that I probably ate or it loses it’s non-stick properties (presumably from microscopic portions coming off that I probably ate) and I have to bin it.

So I actually do cook scrambled eggs (and omelets) in a well seasoned carbon steel pan. I’ve made eggs fried over easy in my cast iron. It requires butter and the pan has to be the right temperature (it sticks more if you start too cold), but it’s doable.

It does stick a touch more than non-stick, but it’s not difficult to clean by any measure.

I had the same experience as you. Thought I was doing something wrong and went with an expensive coated pan. Still lost its nonstick after a year. Have since changed to uncoated pans from tramontina. It took some time understanding temperatures with the pans as sticking and burning both can be avoided, but are much more apparent with these. I actually asked a salesperson to upsell me their expensive coated pans and the amount of work they laid out was basically the same as my uncoated pans, except that mine will not stop working because some proprietary magic dust isn't working anymore

We’ve been using All Clad non-stick pans (below) heavily for maybe 8 years and they haven’t lost their non-stickiness. We tried many others, including a different kind of All Clad non-stick that didn’t last even a year, we’re very happy with these.

https://www.amazon.com/All-Clad-E785S264-Anodized-Nonstick-D...

Ikea, $60. Or $15 for an even cheaper set.

Maybe this is because induction hobs are much more common in Europe.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/annons-5-piece-cookware-set-gla...

I'm in the US. I went and checked the pots and pans in my kitchen. Out of five pots four are magnetic. And we have a cast iron pan. I assume that means they'd work on an induction stove.

>How often do you scramble eggs on your cast iron skillet?

Every time I make scrambled eggs. It isn't difficult. I don't even see what you are getting at with this question.

Same. “As often as I scramble eggs.”

> How often do you scramble eggs on your cast iron skillet?

Almost daily, through there are things one leearn. Butter is a must, especially in term of flavor, and if you fry bacon before then you need to let it cool down for a bit or the egg white will get bubbly.

I find the cultural aspect interesting. Non-stick teflon frying pans tend to degrade over time and as such, do not get passed down when people here move out. It was also not something that we used when I was young since they easily broke if misused. That is th part I suspect will change with time.

I cook on cast-iron twice a day, just about anything. Once you actually learn how to cook on it, there are zero problems with sticking or anything else. Tends to be healthier than cooking on a nonstick surface as well.

And yes we make quite a lot of eggs, scrambled and fried, works just perfectly without a mess.

Seasoned carbon steel woks are a lot better for most non-acidic foods then teflon; they are truly non-stick.

I ONLY use a cast iron pan. Every flatmate we've had have ended up scratching the shit out of our non-sticks (even after educating them on how to use it...).

Cooking on cast iron is great- you simply heat it on a low temp with some oil on the surface first, and scrambled eggs / ommelet is no problem.

It's pretty heavy to hold with one hand, but overtime I've gained stronger wrist strength and can handle it no problem now.

We're on our third non stick, but the cast iron is still going strong.

> Every flatmate we've had have ended up scratching the shit out of our non-sticks (even after educating them on how to use it...).

The rule is simple: those pans must never even be looked at by something metallic during use or cleaning. Wood or plastic are fine. I use wooden tools. Fingernails are not OK too.

Of course flatmates use to be quite anarchic and careless especially young ones.

What happens to wooden tools after they are used? In my experience they end up in the dishwasher where they get ruined.

Try bamboo. Can be soaked, it's great.

I put wooden spoons in the dishwasher. They don't last as long as they might, but they cost €1.

I'll handwash more expensive wooden tools.

I wash them with my hands. Dish soap and warm water.

Flatmates can also do bad things to cast iron, e.g. dump them in the dishwasher and let them rust. Can't tell you how many times I've had to reseason a pan. After a point I just stopped trying to educate them and said, "you buy your own stuff and feel free to ruin it if that's how you want to treat your stuff".

I don’t understand why carbon steel isn’t more popular in the US.

Other than heat retention, it’s as good if not better than cast iron in every way, and it’s way lighter to boot.

Agreed. We (US) own a couple carbon steel pans of different sizes. Incredible cookware for <$100 total. Far and away cheaper than our Le Creuset cookware and in many respects just as good

> There's a reason 99% of people have non-stick aluminum cookware. Everything else is horrible

Onyx pans are amazing in every way (nonstick, scratchproof, dishwasher safe, induction ready) but not yet sold in the US I think: https://onyxcookware.de/

There are similar ones sold on AliExpress that would presumably ship to the US, e.g.: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mr49PaC

cheap pans are 3 for $12, 8x as cost effective

Induction cookers are expensive today, but they aren't theoretically expensive. One day, they'll be cheaper than resistive heaters.

> They're still more expensive than a non-induction electric cooktop

I don't know where to buy cooktops in the US so I can't do a comparison, but on one of the biggest websites in the UK the cheapest induction hob is £105 right now, and the cheapest ceramic hob is £80.

> They depend on the type of cookware used.

You can buy a pad from amazon for less than $10 that will let you use any cookware on an induction hob. Most cookware _is_ suitable (I bought a new pan before the holidays and even the cheapest non stick pans had a stainless steel layer on the bottom)

While I was waiting for the electrician to add a new circuit for our new induction oven (replacing an aga), we bought a £35 plug in induction hot plate. 80% of our existing pans were induction ready too

It's also important to note that you likely don't need a new circuit if you already have a ceramic electric hob, only if you're installing a new one. I also just did a quick google and in the supermarkets around me, the only pan I could find under £30 that isn't induction compatible is a £10 wok from sainsburys. Everything else had a steel plate.

I now live in Asia, where almost everything built recently is induction. It's wonderful. Hardly an electric garbage stove to be seen anywhere.

> They’re useless to cook on.

I'd say this is a bit of an overreaction. They're definitely terrible to time correctly, heat-wise. But they also can definitely cook. I've made a rib-eye steak medium rare just fine on a cast iron using reverse-sear between oven and the glass range.

The part I really hate is how careful I need to be not to damage the glass when using a heavy pan like that.

You've done a pretty good job listing all of the reasons that they aren't vey good. In a small apartment, with limited time, and space the extra aggravation really adds up.

OP specifically said "They're useless to cook on" and I provided an example of an excellent dish that uses an electric stove.

So, that would certainly seem to disprove their comment because I did in fact cook something, which implies it isn't useless.

I don't think that is an overreaction. When looking for a place to live. Gas stove and induction oven are a hard requirement

If it doesn't have that...pass immediately

Do you mean convection oven?

my electric coil cooktop can't even boil water

London banned gas stoves in apartments years ago. They did that to reduce the risk of fires. Citizens adjusted fine, no one went hungry and life went on..

While I agree with you the gas stove tops are better, electric ones work OK

> London banned gas stoves in apartments years ago.

Do you have a source for that? I have a gas stove, and so do many others I know, and I've never heard of a ban.

I don't believe it's true, it certainly isn't something London could bring in on its own. However, gas appliances over here for apartments do need to have flame sensors (so the gas gets cut off), and if you're a landlord, you're going to need to do annual safety checks on gas equipment (apartment or not).

So the equipment itself is slightly more costly for an apartment, and a landlord specifically has a strong incentive to have little/no gas, to save on the annual checks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point

Tldr; a tower block suffered a partial collapse as a result of a gas explosion in 1968. Changes to Building Regulations were made to mitigate against 'Disproportionate Collapse'

(Effect on legislation) 'Existing buildings were allowed to resist an explosive force of 17 kPa (2.5 psi), provided that the gas supply was removed and flats were refitted for electric cooking and heating.'

Such buildings with gas supplies today will have been constructed to comply with the amended regulations.

I'm calling shenanigans on this. I've never had an electric oven top while renting in London, and all flats have had gas heating. Looking online, I can also see new build flats with gas, so I really doubt this is a ban in London.

We don't exactly have a lot of fires caused by cooktops in NYC.

For the record most (all?) induction cook tops have a glass surface too. Also induction ones are not that much more expensive. Here in Finland the price difference is ~50e when compared to a ceramic ("glass") one.

And as for cooking experience I prefer induction. It heats up the fastest and can control the heat just fine.

As someone who grew up somewhere without any gas supply (Norway), and hadn't seen a gas hob until I moved to the UK at 25, I find it hilarious when people say this. It's different to cook on, but it really does not make much difference for most people.

Electric cooktops are more expensive compared to the gas-equivalent ones, that counts, especially for middle- and low-income countries (even though I agree, in countries like Norway that might not seem like that much of a problem).

Also, in terms of resilience gas cooking beats electric cooking. In my experience (I live in an Eastern European capital city) gas delivery has been more constant compared to electric power, not to mention that even if both gas and electricity were to be cut off it's much easier to connect an existing gas cooktop to a small gas tank than it would be to connect an electric cooktop to an equivalent battery. In fact my parents still use gas tanks for part of their cooking (for the other part they use actual wood).

Norway used to be relatively poor. If anything too poor to consider building a gas supply network too. In that sense I guess Norway leapfrogged the issue. At the point building a gas supply might have been viable it just wasn't on anyone's radar.

As for reliance on electric supply, I haven't experienced any outage longer than a couple of minutes since the 1980s, but I get that will certainly depend on where you live.

Resilience of gas is important to consider as it eliminates the single point of failure, if your power goes out you still have a means of heat.

Many places the reliability of power is good enough that we're prepared to handle that by going to a hotel. It's been decades since I experienced more than a couple of minutes without power.

Meanwhile I've had gas boilers fail twice and had to resort to electric heaters while waiting for repairs.

I live in Canada.

Snow and ice storms are a reality that make self sufficiency highly desirable.

I grew up in Norway. Snow and storms were insufficient to give most people a reason to worry. Some homes will have a fireplace or wood fired stove as a last resort, but it's more and more rare. In rural areas having a fallback is slightly more common.

So I stand by what I said: Many places the power reliability is high enough. A long outage in Norway would be treated as a major national emergency.

Portable cassette gas stove is pretty common here in Japan. This is the best for emergency. https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Iwatani-Cassette-feu-Master-Po...

So what are your plans for when your batteries go kaput in 15-20 years, or are you planning to sell before then?

Who knows what things will look like in 15 years. 15 years prior to now such a thing was not feasible, or would have cost 10x as much. I expect in 15 years the cost of home batteries will be much much lower, and replacement costs will be affordable. We're still in the very early stages of these products development and scale.

It's definitely going to be interesting to see, considering the replacement cycles of 15-20 for the batteries, and 20-30 for the solar array what the scaling, the costs, and what the net environmental impact is going to be.

Replace them...?

Should be able to replace them easily - no idea how they are build, but one would expect a modular design.

How much did all the upgrades cost (both before and after tax credits) and how much lower is your typical utility bill per month?

Just got my (mostly) December utility bill: $350 for 1971kwh. That will probably be the biggest bill of the year, it's been a very cold December. We're on a 'net metering' plan though, so our electricity is only billed annually - prior to that it's just costs and credits. Our bill in July was -$400, so the summer credits balance out the winter costs. I don't expect we'll owe anything at true-up time.

I should also mention that we have a 1BR apartment downstairs that we rent out, so this is usage for 2 households, each with electric kitchens, heat pumps, laundry, etc. Our usage would be lower without a tenant downstairs.

As for total costs, it's hard to say because so much of it was part of other major renovations to the house. We redid all the electrical in the house as part of that, which would normally not be necessary just to upgrade a couple of appliances. Things that might be necessary is upgrading your main electric panel to a higher capacity (going from 100a to 200a for example, which would cost around $8-10k). Cost of the appliances themselves are a big variable. Our main heat pump was $15k, but a lower model would have been more like $10k. The water heater was $2k (again, you could get a cheaper one).

Solar panels were installed in two systems a few years apart.

In 2017 my 6kw system cost $24,000 before any incentives (by SolarCity).

In 2020 my 7.8kw system cost $15,000 before any incentives (by Tesla).

After tax credits those two probably cost net <$30k.

The Tesla Powerwalls are being paid for entirely by the state of California SGIP program (which depending on your situation will cover about 30% or the full cost). Without that program they would have been in the $20k range.

Which water heater did you get?

It’s a Rheem ‘hybrid’ heat pump water heater (80gal). You can get them at Home Depot.

It is nice when a few houses do this in a neighborhood, but when more do it then the electric company is going to get challenges that come with the high demands of power.

Electrifying everything in a whole city will come with very expensive infrastructure changes. Especially if every house can also be a supplier so the amps can ramp up in different cables every time

(Also wow, your solar panels are expensive. Is that inc. Battery? I put down 4kw systems for about 3-4k 10x400wp panels)

Very cool! What region are you in and how do your electric bills compare to previous gas+electric?

I'm in the Bay Area. Net electric bills for the year are $0 or <$0. Hard to compare to 'before' because the EVs were added after solar, but my next door neighbor with a somewhat larger house, no EVs, and both gas and electric has $1200 energy bills in the winter. I don't think ours would have been that high, but at least half that.

Don't expect net metering to exist forever. As more and more people install solar, I'm expecting utilities to switch to the cost of a hookup plus net metering.

Great! How do you heat your house when power goes out for three days straight in the winter?

I don't! But that was also true when we had gas.

Was it? I’ve lived in the Northeast for over 40 years. Multiple power outages per year, including some that have lasted several days. NEVER had the natural gas go out. The gas distribution lines run compressors on gas itself, no dependency on the grid.

In our house we have central heat which requires a fan to blow the warm air to all the vents. No power = no heat, regardless of the fuel source.

We also don't have prolonged winter outages here since there's no snow (coastal california). If that was a common problem I might strategize a little differently or have gas as an emergency backup.

Homes in the Northeast will often have radiator heat, hot water which circulates by convection. A modern boiler might need electricity for the computer controls, but an old one won't.

Modern heating systems need electricity to work even if they generate their heat from gas.

Yep, I have oil heat and our boiler needs electricity (I think for the ignition - maybe something else). Definitely doesn't work when the power goes out.

As a New Yorker who loses power for extended periods of time seemingly every year now, the opposite is true for me. I've never had a gas outage, and being able to use the stove when the power and the heat are out to cook a warm meal is a huge boon.

Electricity goes out here semi-regularly, but the gas has never had any outage in the 20+ years I've lived here.

It's certainly very nice to have gas even when power is out. Means I can cook just fine on the gas range, the water heater is working so I still have warm showers.

And, while I haven't done this too often, I can run the house heater fan off a small generator, it doesn't take that much power. So I can even heat the house when needed if power is out, with the gas furnace.

Heat pumps are rather inefficient according to this video [1]. Are you not bothered by all the noise it generates? Why not just use electric heater instead of a heat pump?

1 - https://youtu.be/GhAKMAcmJFg

> Heat pumps are rather inefficient according to this video

Despite the many faults with this video, the person actually mentions the efficiency of heat pumps, which are WAY higher than the efficiency of fuel burners.

> Are you not bothered by all the noise it generates?

Modern inverter based heat pumps are incredibly quiet.

> Why not just use electric heater instead of a heat pump?

Because 100% efficiency is way worse than 300-500% efficiency (i.e. the coefficient of performance of an air source heat pump).

This video is mostly talking about "air to water" heat pumps, in other words, replacing a traditional fuel fired hydronic system with a heat pump. This is not an ideal use for heat pumps. Typical hydronic systems are designed for high water temps, which means replacing directly with heat pumps will not work.

This person's argument is summed up as "we have horribly built houses and we should never improve them, so let's just overheat them so they feel comfortable". Oh and "there's a conspiracy to artificially raise the price of gas to trick us into buying heat pumps".

I've had this video on in the background. It's some amazing fear mongering.

I've run into this guys videos before, and I find them a bit conspiratorial, and certainly not academically honest. What you describe is not my experience with heat pumps at all. Sibling comment says it best.

I grew up in homes built in 1975 and 1995, both of which have no gas hookups. They're great homes.

But now that I'm living in California, electricity is so expensive and time-of-use so annoying that I can't imagine electrification unless I'm off-grid.

Where are you and how does the running cost compare?

I'm burning 5 therms a day to keep my interior at 16 C averaged over the last four weeks. Having intact exterior walls would probably help, but after two years I'm still waiting on local planners to give me permission to ask for permission to build.

I'm getting really close to bailing to someplace sensible.

Why is time-of-use annoying?

Presumably: because electric rate charges vary with time of day, while cooking demands are relatively static.

In a high-renewables regime, there's the "duck curve" problem where renewable energy, especially solar power, is most abundant during the midday, whilst demand peaks in the early evening as lighting, heating or cooling loads (depending on season), and you guessed it, cooking loads come on-line.

If you arrive home at 17:30 and plan on eating within the half hour, you're using the most expensive electricity of the day.

That said, total cooking energy use isn't tremendously high (2--3 kW), and most heating tasks consume less than full output for well under an hour. You can operate a cooktop or oven at full heat for an hour for well under $1 unless rates are Texas-level high. That would be seriously atypical usage.

https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/how-much-energy...

Taking advantage of lower midday rates would be possible with a crock-pot, slow-cooker, sous-vide, or similar methods, though that does require advanced planning and doesn't suit all cooking techniques.

Presumably they're talking about putative electric heating, not cooking.

Because of the cognitive burden of trying to optimize and work around ludicrously high rates with changing windows. It's why I cling to my outdated tiered plan - I just don't want to let yet another thing steal my attention.

Baking a loaf of bread would cost me $7 at current TOU peak. It's cheaper for me to buy one from the grocery store on energy costs alone, nevermind the material. That's craziness.

And even baseline rates in CA rise at 3-4x inflation. Maybe burning kerosene for lighting will become economically viable again.

Following up - I'm currently visiting my parents in eastern Tennessee and asked to see their electric bills. They're all-electric and they averaged 3x the consumption that I do. But their electricity bill is 2x lower. I almost cried.

5 therms looks to be about 150kWh, that’s ridiculous!

What do you mean intact exterior walls? What do you have now?

I'm literally missing one of my exterior walls and have been unable to repair it properly because getting permits through NIMBY municipalities is slow and painful by design. I've done my best to tarp over the hole and abandon and seal off the impacted rooms, but that only goes so far to reduce loss.

How is a heatpump more economical than natural gas? I am in bay area and it can cost anywhere from 15-20 cents a kwh for electricity.

$0.15-$0.20 is extremely cheap for PG&E. Are you grandfathered into a low rate plan?

Heat pumps are 3-4 times as energy efficient as a gas furnace. However, PG&E charges 7-8x as much per kWh of energy in electricity form as it does in fossil gas form.

When you have your own solar and storage, it can be as cheap as $0.04-$0.07 for the solar. And depending on the storage vendor these days, it can be anywhere $0.05-$0.15 per kWh that gets stored and discharged. At those rates, it can be cheaper than gas.

Unfortunately recent California requirements make it a challenging to have more than 20KWH (e.g. two tesla powerwalls are too much). As a result it can be useful to have gas appliances to reduce the amount of energy storage you need.

> Heat pumps are 3-4 times as energy efficient as a gas furnace.

This depends totally on the outside temperature. Larger, more expensive heat pumps can stay efficient down to lower temps. However, they all have a point where they become less efficient than resistive electric heat.

Whoops I was off. It's around 32 cents per KWH.

How many solar panels do I need to get 12kw in winter in the Pacific Northwest?

Answer: per this solar axis[0], we average 242Wh/m² in January. Assuming 25% solar panel efficiency, this gives 60.5W/m². To get 12kw would require 200m² of solar panels, or 45"x45". If we covered our entire house with solar panels it'd be 80m²=4.8kW.

0. https://globalsolaratlas.info/detail?c=47.503287,-122.313538...

So it would take care of over 1/3 of your energy needs with most of the rest coming from (I assume) hydroelectric generation. Doesn't sound that bad to me.

we're pretty much entirely on hydro here, so you're correct. our house uses mostly electric everything. my comment was more that solar panels don't magically let everyone live off-grid

Did you mean 45' (feet) or 45" (inches)?

oops. feet.

We have a house that was built in 1962 in the Pacific Northwest. This was a time when electricity was essentially free and homes were designed accordingly. It came with a 200 amp panel stock which I suspect would be a non-starter for a lot of people. Having grown up with gas, it was not nearly the as tough a transition as I thought it would be. Most of the efficiency upgrades are simple to do or have done over time. Swap out a water heater one year. Replace resistance heat with heat pumps the next. We have been driving two electric cars for several years and our monthly energy bill is 160-400 a month depending on the time of year.

I should add we are the benefactor of incredibly low grid rates (.11 per kWh) making the math workout very nicely.

Air pump heat pump?

How many kWh of gas were you using for heating in winter before the switch? How many kWh of electric do you use now?did you have to replace your radiators or add any extra insulation?

I’ve got a 1962 house with an oil boiler, currently using about 10 litres a day on heating, tempted to change to an air powered heat pump

I love gas, I had a propane tank buried and migrated my range and hot water heater to gas. You can’t beat cooking with gas. I’m forced to use gas hot water since my electric service is a little too small to support on demand.

Electric is cool but I’m not tribal about it. We should all use what makes sense, in some cases that’s gas.

I've done mostly the same (heat pumps, all electric), also in the Bay Area.

In addition I upgraded the building envelope by air sealing it to high levels (1 ACH50 for building science nerds - close to th the Passive House standard) and installed an always-on heat recovery ventilation system.

The net effect is that the house uses 75% fewer total BTUs for heating than it used to when I had a gas fueled furnace.

In terms of operational cost, due to the 300%+ efficiency of the heat pump used to generate those BTUs, it results in a heating cost of roughly $100 (for roughly 400kWh) for the entire winter, vs the $500 (for roughly 250 therms) that I would spend on natural gas heat.

So on an absolute operational cost basis it's not much savings, since the climate is mild, but it's wildly more comfortable and my indoor allergies are a thing of the past.

> The net effect is that the house uses 75% fewer total BTUs for heating than it used to when I had a gas fueled furnace.

You do realize that the 75% reduction is from your insulation improvements, not changing your furnace to a heatpump.

Given the current construction/remodeling costs it's not very cost effective to insulate. It's financially "better" to just burn more heat. Yes perhaps worse for the environment longer term but most people still make decisions based on direct costs not indirect environment.

> You do realize that the 75% reduction is from your insulation improvements, not changing your furnace to a heatpump.

Yes I realize that. In fact, I designed it that way to allow me to downsize the heat pump significantly.

> Given the current construction/remodeling costs it's not very cost effective to insulate. It's financially "better" to just burn more heat.

If you are undertaking a major home remodel that involves removing drywall, then it makes a lot of sense to upgrade the building envelope.

Short of that, there are also products like blown in wall insulation and Aerobarrier that can be done without a major renovation.

If you are changing the siding on your house, one should consider add a vapor permeable air barrier material to the outside.

Air sealing and (re)insulating unconditioned attic floors are another cost effective way to improve the building envelope performance.

Also, bear in mind that these sorts of improvements are investments in the longevity of the house, and also can create far greater comfort due to more consistent temperatures. Those things have a value also.

What's your plan for an extended power outage like Texas experienced?

Hope that we don’t have one in the middle of winter. Most times of the year the solar + batteries should be able to keep the lights on and at least minimum heat. Any half the year we could comfortably run off grid for long stretches.

heat pump sounds great as long as you don't live in the half of the US where it actually gets cold in the winter.

Another way to interpret these changes is to expect housing to become more expensive as heat pumps are more expensive than using (existing) gas infrastructure.

Random anecdote: in New Jersey installing a Mitsubishi hyper-heat heat-pump in a 8 room house (4 bedroom + 2 bathroom + living room + kitchen) is much more expensive than running hot water baseboard in all rooms. And with most heat pumps you can usually only zone 4-6 heads per compressor, so you'd need two compressors. A single compressor is probably pulling 50 amps alone, so you'd need 100 amps available usually for your breakers. For reference, a normal house usually 100 amps dedicated for the entire house, not just HVAC. Drastic upgrades in electric infrastructure will be required.

Heat pumps heat more efficiently than gas, but I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some sort of rolling blackout and thousands of people freezing to death because we went all-in on electric. Will these buildings also have generators to combat this potential problem?

Ideally we could just use existing gas lines and another, man-made produced gas through the same lines that's carbon neutral or negative.

I'm excited to see the development of heat pumps, though. I'm not a huge fan of the forced-air heat pumps. I hope something like a radiator-heat-pump can be made soon.

My house used to have a gas furnace, gas water heater, and gas cooking. When our power was out, none of those appliances worked. Gas doesn't save you in a power outage, unless you have some kind of gas fireplace, but even then a widespread long-term outage is likely to affect the gas infrastructure as well.

You can actually use a gas furnace, water heater and cook without electricity. You just have to manually light the pilot. For obvious reasons this isn't recommended as you're dealing with combustibles, but if the alternative is freezing to death, well...

Most (all?) powered-vent systems will refuse to work without electricity to keep the gas valve open.

But the gas cooktop should work without problem if you light it with a match/lighter.

You're right in that they generally don't with electricity, but again if you have the know-how you can manually keep it open and light the pilot.

Again, definitely don't do this, but in a scenario where the alternative is that you freeze to death, it's possible to do so safely.

With modern combi boilers (tankless hot water + boiler) I believe your point stands.

edit: I mention this mainly because in Texas last winter some people froze to death during their electricity crisis.

And carbon monoxide poisoning was common in Texas too. I'm not sure city-wide having novices tinker with gas equipment would save more lives.

oh, agreed. however a cheap 1kwh battery could power a normal houses gas appliances very easily without any trickery needed.

How do you do that for furnace? I assume you have to bypass the thermostat somehow.

It depends on the furnace specifically, but yes, exactly. Again, don't do this, but it's possible.

This would work for a passive gas furnace like an old gravity furnace. Modern high efficiency gas furnaces require electricity for the blower.

Yeah, unfortunately. Though I suppose if this were really an issue you could keep a battery around as they don't really use that much electricity.

Yeah PowerWall or generator is really the solution for this. They're surprisingly big electric hogs though - our furnace is 500W and is our biggest power draw during the winter. A PowerWall will only power this for about a day of continuous usage (realistically heater use won't be continuous because of thermostats and insulation, but it can be appreciable in cold climates).

Really people in winter clothes or blankets can tolerate very cold temperatures for a very long time, especially indoors out of the wind. Healthy people with adequate clothing in NYC could easily survive in -10C temperatures for a week or more. The more pressing need at that point would be access to water (assuming it needs electricity for distribution).

It's very rare to have a gas hot water heater that requires electricity.

Similarly with gas ranges, you may need to manually light it, but the valves are usually manual (the oven is a different story).

Any power vented gas water heater will require electricity to function correctly. More modern gas ranges will too, if they support child safety features, such as range lock-out, which may be required in some locales.

Same goes for gas fireplaces that do not have a standing pilot and electrically actuated valves, which many newer appliances have.

> It's very rare to have a gas hot water heater that requires electricity.

It's not all that rare these days in cheap condo units (heck, even SFH...) in large cities to require power vent water heaters due to simply horrible architecture imo. Chimneys may not be a thing in some buildings, and locations of utility closets seem not optimized for venting at all.

A surprising number of gas appliances are slowly requiring electricity to run. I wonder if it's even possible to buy a gas clothes dryer these days without electronic controls without going through hoops? Certainly a fraction of the market.

Modern safety standards also drive "cop out" solutions to them like electronic interlocks with stovetops. I wonder how many modern gas stoves actually function without the A/C plugged in? Think I'll actually test this with my two units tonight!

You can power all those gas appliances with a reasonably-sized generator, though. It's also possible to run a heat pump on a generator, but you'd need a much bigger generator and a soft-start for the heat pump to limit starting current.

You wouldn't even need that. The electricity usage of gas appliance is miniscule as it's usually just to automatically light the pilot or vent. An 100Wh battery could probably power everything for a week or longer.

Good point, although ideally the house would be wired to make it easy to connect that battery to just the gas appliances so that other stuff (lights, fans, refrigerator, etc.) wouldn't drain it much sooner.

Personally, I'd rather have the generator if I had the space, but this would be a good option for people in townhouses and condos.

Why didn’t the gas stove work?? I mean I have a newer model with electronic ignition, but you can just use a lighter. I’ve never seen a gas stove that wouldn’t work without electricity - and it seems fool hardy to buy one.

Gas hot water heaters without power vents are still readily available so its not hard to avoid this problem. If you really must have power venting the power requirements are low and can be powered by minimal backup generation or batteries.

Gas infrastructure is surprisingly resilient to widespread outages. That’s just a fact - how often are there widespread outages? It’s minuscule compared to electricity.

> Gas infrastructure is surprisingly resilient to widespread outages.

Except freezing, as Texas showed.

Well I think I that was unexpected freezing that was the issue.

it had happened before, and there were reports warning about it happening again. Texas made the choice to not winterize their utilities despite them.

Sure I guess my point is that in much of the country it gets quite cold, so these things are accounted for.

I’ve been through a few significant power outages in NYC. The gas worked fine, we just lit the stove with a match. For hurricane Sandy, I made a huge pot of soup with most of what would spoil in the refrigerator, then boiled it every couple hours for the next several days. Family was fed, food wasn’t wasted.

A bigger problem in NYC is electric water pumps: When the power goes out, the water stops when the water tower on the roof empties. This is mostly for buildings over 5-6 stories, older buildings were somewhat height-capped by municipal water pressure. No water means no toilets. Again, people don’t seem to know that toilets use gravity, a bucket will flush them. Big storm coming? Fill the bathtubs with water.

Natural gas utilities rely on electricity to power their delivery infrastructure (compressors, pressure sensors, etc). If only your building is out of power, your gas will likely still work. If there's a regional power outage, then you will be in the same situation with gas as with the water issue that you mention.

Don't they have auxiliary power backups? I'd think that critical utilities like gas and water would invest in a few generators so that they're independent of outages in other critical utilities like electricity. Most supermarkets and offices do, and they operate on a much smaller scale.

Only time I've had the water go out during a power outage was when I was in a house on well water. Otherwise, the pipes still have pressure. Gas furnaces won't work because of the blower, but the gas itself should still flow.

Gas stove should still work if you have a lighter or some matches.

Depends on how old your installation is.

Our prior home had pilot lights for the gas furnace, stove/ovens, and water heater. No electric igniters. All the items were pretty dated. But when the grid went down, they kept working.

The water heater and stove should work in a power outage. Gas water heaters shouldn't use any electric, and stoves are easily lit with a match or lighter.

My parents thought this as well, but it turns out their new gas stove has a safety feature which prevents this. If there's no electricity, a solenoid doesn't engage when you turn the knob, which in turn doesn't allow any gas through to the range.

I'm assuming any modern gas water heater is in a similar boat, with an electric starter instead of a pilot light - and it's much more difficult/annoying to light a water heater than a stove with a match.

Gas water heaters do not require electric power. There are no wires to connect.

The spark to light the pilot is a piezoelectric thing, manually operated. Newer models (less than ~15 years?) have a control board which is probably mostly mechanical, but does have a flashing LED. I assume that whatever drives the electronics is charged/powered by something that works off the differential of temperature in the chamber vs outside.

My new gas tankless water heater requires electricity.

Tankless is different, for obvious reasons.

I'm kind of surprised about the gas cooking not working. while a gas range is usually started with a spark from electric sparkers, they can also be started with a match or lighter.

Part of it comes down to an air conditioner just being a heat pump that works one way only, so there’s fairly easy opportunity to build in some efficient heating capacity going forward without much incremental cost by installing reversible systems.

The other thing is that a heat pump can be so efficient, that it’s net beneficial to burn nat gas at a power plant and use that electricity to run a heat pump.

But this all falls apart near and below freezing temperatures.

NYC will still want to have direct-burn natural gas heating for cold days because that’ll be more efficient than resorting to resistive heating.

TIL - I always thought that heat pump and air conditioning were just different ways of saying the same thing - here in NZ, I don't think I've ever seen a heat-only heat pump.

We don't have heat-only heat pumps, we have cooling-only air conditioning.

To clarify, in the US, there are two commonly used HVAC heat pumps:

- A/C units, which can only cool a room but can’t heat it up

- Heat Pumps, which typically do both.

What’s particularly frustrating is that the only thing that separates one from the other is the inclusion of a $20 reversing valve[1], and some software that can use it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversing_valve

Well, that and you tend to split heat pump systems instead of pumping around warm air to pick up efficiency. And the design of the condensers, etc, is a little different for efficiency and to cope with e.g. condensation outside.

The AC unit can do heating if you just run the pump in the opposite direction. It is just a feature the manufacturer did not bother to install/wants extra money for (it is literally a single $20 part for the valve).

Obviously they are not the most efficient heaters as they are not designed for it but they would still work.

> NYC will still want to have direct-burn natural gas heating for cold days because that’ll be more efficient than resorting to resistive heating.

I agree.

With climate change and unpredictable weather I really wouldn't go all-in on heat pumps. Even with hyper-heat it only works efficiently down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. NYC rarely gets colder than that, but I wouldn't be surprised if the extreme cold days are the same days where electricity has problems. Those two things together means people freezing to death.

I think buildings should have both, and default to heat pumps.

> Those two things together means people freezing to death.

If we want to prevent people from freezing to death, the best way is to help people get 1. food 2. clothes 3. shelter 4. health care.

I'd argue gas based heat isn't even on the list. As you said, we should not go all-in on heat pumps. We can and should have alternate sources of heat for vulnerable people (I am thinking hospitals, retirement communities, and so on).

I am confident that healthy, well-fed, appropriately dressed people in well insulated homes do not die because the weather outside dips below freezing for under a day.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/bayc-j28.html

That’s a big misconception. Latest generation heat pumps can work well even in very cold climates eg Lake Tahoe. The “fixes” needed to make that work aren’t that dramatic eg a bit of pre-heating of some parts with regular electric heating elements.

What's the big misconception? My comment doesn't disagree with what you're saying.

Heat pumps work in cold weather and should have emergency heat where it's resistance coils inside the home. Your HVAC installer should install the correct system by zone.

Your fear of people freezing to death over heat pumps are unfounded. There are backups built in that work with the insulation value of a house. New homes should be very air tight and require less heating, suited for heat pumps.

I never claimed heat pumps don't work in cold weather. The point is about non-electric redundancy, not heat pumps having resistance coils. I'm well aware of the functionality of modern heat pumps.

Even in a house with foam insulation - the highest "normally available" insulation - freezing to death is just a matter of time without heat. When considering city-wide infrastructure it's something that needs to be considered. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen, but you'd be dumb not to think about redundancy measures, hence my top-level comment.

This type of redundancy is why many commercial buildings have gas generators, for example.

A gas furnace would require electricity. You need electricity to ignite and exhaust most natural gas heating. There are vent-free options. Not common for those to be installed and back to having your own option for backup power. Which can be propane or gasoline.

The amount of electricity a gas furnace requires is trivial and not really relevant to this discussion. A heat pump requires many orders of magnitude more electricity. A 10kwh battery could power a gas furnace and a water heater electrically for a year.

Now this natural gas house has a 10kwh whole house battery backup too? Hope your refrigerator can also last a year off that battery pack (oh wait it's a ac compressor too!),

Heat Pump for heat, Heat Pump water heater is the future for new home builds. Buy a portable generator, a 10kwh gasoline generator is <$1,000 USD and 1/10th the price of a 10kwh batter pack. Problem solved.

I don’t disagree. My point is that what’s nyc doing for redundancy?

The problem with relying on resistance-based emergency heat is that it means heating efficiency tanks by a factor of potentially 4 or so at the same time as heating demand is also at its highest. This is a really great recipe for collapse of the electrical grid, which of course people are going to be 100% reliant on for heating, at a time when not having heating would literally be fatal.

I know people that spend months in a tent on an Antarctic or Greenland Glacier, with no access to mains gas.

They don’t freeze to death.

You can get heat pumps that work in colder weather, those are very common here in Canada. Certainly plenty sufficient for NYC.

You can also mix and match a variety of backup/supplemental heat sources (only some of which make sense in an urban context), and of course a ground source heat pump is another (expensive) option for very cold climates.

> Those two things together means people freezing to death

What is the deal with americans and freezing to death? I’m from Scandinavia, and the only times I’ve heard people discuss that is in the context of someone getting drunk and passing out outside.

Fuck me, even if it somehow reaches -20C inside all you need to do is grab a few extra blankets and stay under them in order to remain warm.

If you’re really worried, just invest some money in a sufficiently warm sleeping bag. Installing gas as a backup would be moronic unless you’re expecting to spend months without power.

I think it's Americans invested in competing technologies, doing the modern cultural thing of hyperbola and escalation to the point of insisting that people retrofitting stuff with heat pumps are MURDERERS and clearly seeking to literally kill hapless victims. I'm seeing a lot of intense argument here that's going waaay over to the extremes of scaremongering, and the context doesn't seem to warrant using emotional arguments to shut down the proposal in shame and guilt over actually setting out to kill lots of foolish people. That seems… excessive, as a claim.

Me, I'm in southern Vermont, heat with a wood stove and oil furnace, and just replaced a deteriorating resistive water heater with a big heat pump water heater. I do envy the cooking-with-flame folks, though :)

Hi Neighbor! I'm also in Southern Vermont (Readsboro), also heat primarily with a wood, also have fuel oil backup, and also recently replaced my resistance water heater with a heat pump. I don't know if you need to envy the flame for cooking, though. We've got a fairly weak propane range top, and while the largest burner works OK, I'm thinking of upgrading to induction at some point.

> But this all falls apart near and below freezing temperatures.

That's a concern for designs with air-based heat exchangers, but for environments where this is expected to be a problem you can instead exchange heat via pipes into the earth, where it remains a more-or-less constant 50F/10C year-round. Pump heat out of the earth in winter, pump it back in in the summer.

> But this all falls apart near and below freezing temperatures.

There are heat pumps designed for cold climates that work well into the -30C range or so still holding a COP of 2 or more.

Here are some test results from Finland from a few years ago https://www.scanoffice.fi/vttn-testiraportit-ilmalampopumppu... (Lämpökerroin = COP)

And if one is doing it at district level just pump the heat from the ground or sea where the temperature stays the same all year around.

In Australia Gas is so expensive, we found it was cheaper to just put an electric heater in every room we wanted to heat. The only thing we on gas now is the cook top, so we plant to replace that as well.

Heat pump or resistive? Not familiar with Australia, is the electricity sourced from gas or coal, or something else?

Resistive

I bought 4 Nobos. They are clean, quiet, fast enough, and best of all have a "lifetime warranty" that I plan to make use of when they die. https://www.nobo.com.au/en-au

What am I missing? These things just look like fancy resistance heaters, exactly the same efficiency as a $15 space heater (significantly less efficient than a heat pump).

No they are not efficient, but my power is almost free, and renewable. Heat pump hardware is very expensive and not as flexible.

Lots of Australian electricity comes from coal (about 60%).

I live in the ACT so its 100% renewable. We also recently put 6.5kw of solar on the roof so most of our daytime power is self generated. (I was against the rooftop solar but my partner insisted, it makes no sense economically or environmentally.)

Norway has been almost all-in on electric for a good while now. I can't remember experiencing a blackout in like 15 years or so. As with many things, Norway may be special in many ways, but I can't help but think if you start building everything in society around electricity (and free up some of the money needed to maintain gas and other parallel energy distribution infrastructures), you'll make really damn sure that it works 100% of the time.

I've heard that some keep propane heaters for backup/emergency. I have used one at a cabin and it's damn effective.

Your example sounds really inefficient.. modern houses should have balanced ventilation, and you should only need one compressor and 2-3 heads. I installed a small balanced ventilation unit (TwinFresh) in a bedroom, and that helps keep the room warm by pulling in warm air from the hallway which is connected to the living room with the heat pump head.

We also have some electrical heaters in the other bedrooms just to make sure it can't get too cold there. Though maybe my perspective is a bit warped: everyone I know likes to sleeping in a cold room.

> Norway has been almost all-in on electric for a good while now.

According to a quick Google search: "The current population of Norway is 5,483,767 as of Friday, December 24, 2021" and NY state is estimated at 20.2 million as of April 2020, and New York City at 8.8 million. It seems you appreciate that Norway is a special scenario. It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations, and states with around four times the population of your entire country.

Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less. New York City could for example use a relatively shallow bore hole to gather geothermal energy and get “low grade” heat (50-100C) for district heating where such systems don’t really work for single family homes.

> Economies of scale make energy distribution more efficient as you scale population not less.

This may be so, but New York also has one of the oldest electrical grids on the planet. Upgrading it to support larger and larger populations is a challenge, not just to manage it overloading with the density, but also in terms of logistics.

You can't just tear up a major street in New York and upgrade the electrical for a block, without causing massive logistics problems for the city. Upgrading New York's grid is going to be a huge challenge

It’s going to have to happen eventually. Why keep putting it off?

That’s something for future Ted…

High-population means high complaining ratio. Also lots of rich companies there who will sue when things go wrong.

Why pay for today when tomorrow’s shareholders will pay for it instead? See also: PG&E

How much would the upgrade cost, can anyone estimate?

It seems worse simply because it’s concentrated in a small area. The project would actually be less disruptive in NYC than doing the same thing for 8+ million people in the suburbs somewhere. Especially if they could reuse tunnels built for deprecated systems like copper phone lines.

Hell NYC already has district heating, adding a tunnel under the existing building could swap things over for 1700+ customers with minimal disruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

Off topic meta point: The narrative "X wouldn't work here because of [size/population]" where X is unrelated or even helps the argument seems to be reproduced almost exclusively by (often highly informed) Americans, from personal anecdotal experience. Does anyone have a theory about the origins of this thought pattern?

“X wouldn’t work here” probably stems from generations of institutional belief in American Exceptionalism, the “because” part is probably attempting to justify that (unconscious) view

Also - isn't >90% of all Norway's electricity production hydro?

It would seem a lot more feasible to go all in on electric when you have that much hydro. Since that much of the production is hydro - I'm assuming it's relatively economical, and not just Norway paying a massive premium to be green.

> It seems silly to assume something that works there would work in a country that has single cities with larger populations

it would also be silly were we to imply that scaling up automatically means less efficiency. in many situations things get significantly more efficient the more they scale.

it also would seem silly to assume that we couldn’t take many of the pieces that are actually working in an entire country and adapt to our situation. We are very good at adapting things for various situations.

NYC has more people then all of Norway. So any redundancy Norway has needs to be scaled to account for that.

I would be curious though; as where i grew up in the upper midwest USA, there were always concerns of ice-storms or blizzards knocking out power lines. I'd assume norway would have similar concerns so i wonder how the problem is solved there.

If your power goes out you're not running a natural gas furnace anyway

Why not? Mine growing up worked despite power outages IIRC.

You need electricity for the blower motor to force the air through the ducts of your house

The original comment is comparing to radiator heat not forced air.

My boiler system has an electric pump. I'm not sure my boiler would run without electricity either.

~30% of the NYC area is still probably running steam heat which just uses physics to get where it's needed.

Depending on the system size a car battery and inverter can run a forced hot water system for a pretty long time.

Forced hot air is gonna be worse than that but the electricity to run the blower is still peanuts compared to a heat pump system.

Forced air natural gas furnaces need electric power for ignition and the blower motor that moves hot air out of the combustion chamber.

Most high efficiency gas furnaces use an electric ignition system and cycle on/off based on thermostat input. It does seem like they should have a battery backup or a way to manually ignite it in an emergency, but most don’t as far as I know. However if they’re just on already and continuously running rather than cycling, then they don’t need electricity. These furnaces are also typically coupled with a fan (a blower) to force the air through ducting and take air back through a return vent. Those also tend to be electric.

Gas furnaces can heat water or oil for radiators too, which requires no fan.

Water radiators often have a pump attached to force the hot water to move more than with a gravity system. A couple years ago, the pump on our radiator boiler went out. Only half of my house ended up with heat without it.

Norway is approx 5.4 million people and NYC is about 8.8, so while the population is greater, it’s not by an order of magnitude or anything.

Norway is also much colder than NYC. I would imagine in terms of energy needed for heating, the two would be comparable.

300 sq miles vs 150K sq miles too…

Of course cooling NYC is what strains the electrical grid.

Burying power lines is a thing. I don't think it is cost effective to bury the big high voltage lines though.

Great! That means NYC can get more economies of scale and be even more efficient!

Huge dense city like NYC would be a perfect place for district heating and cooling. No reason for apartments to have boilers, really.

NYC increasingly depends on power imported from Quebec. The grid is a complex system that won’t age well.

There’s a new line being built from Quebec to nyc area In the works.

This is not the one that’s being killed in Maine.

https://gothamist.com/news/canadian-renewable-hydropower-hea...

Sure. The point is a big portion of the base load for the city was generated by a nuclear plant a few miles away, and will shift to a foreign hydroelectric system hundreds of miles away.

When you think of a place as large as NYC and the scale of making any kind of change, it certainly adds an element of risk if conditions in Canada or failures between NYC and Canada take place.

Knowing what (little) I know about the Quebec/NY grids, I’d put my money on Quebec-sourced power for reliability.

Norway is almost entirely hydroelectric, which is pretty close to ideal in terms of providing reliable non-fossil-fuel power - and unfortunately something most countries don't have the geography to pull off, which is why Norway ended up so much more electricity-centric. I think they also accept the odd multi-day outage affecting small numbers of customers like everywhere else, especially in urban areas, just because weather gets in the way of providing 100% reliable power. Also, remember larger-scale outages are long-tail events which means it's not really possible to measure exactly how likely they are especially with a small country like Norway.

I think you’re a factor of 5-10 out on your calculations.

2 outdoor units running 110V x 50amps is 11.0kW which using a base efficiency you can expect from a heat pump of 4:1 input electricity to heat results in 44kW of heating / cooling.

If your 4 bedroom house needs 44kW of heating I would be looking at other winter warmers first, like buying glass for your windows.

For comparison a reasonably large heat pump would have a heating cooling rating of 12kW

My calculations were not talking about the usage of electricity, but the breakers the panels require. Hyper-heat models require 50 amp breakers and are 230V. Peak load usually only happens when the compressors cycle. The actual non-peak usage isn't that high as you've stated. Regardless the breakers must accommodate peak-load.

Yes, electrifying everything will result in more peak demand which will require upgrading many house’s main panels. It’s not an insurmountable challenge though, especially relative to dealing with the effects of 2+ degrees of warming.

You're missing my point - in the context of the article the issue is not upgrading the panels, it would be replacing the entire current electrical infrastructure. I'm not claiming it's insurmountable. The point is that these changes will increase the cost of housing, which will make people sprawl, the very same sprawl that will decrease the efficiency of the very same things we're talking about.

There's a political, economic and cultural balance to be struck here, technology changes notwithstanding.

A fully electrified home actually reduces overall system cost through 1- higher efficiency of electric appliances and heat pumps than their gas counterparts, and 2- a significantly reduced infrastructure cost to no longer having to maintain gas infrastructure, the totality of which (scouting, mining, transportation, last mile) is incredibly expensive. In fact, for new construction, it is often cheaper out the gate to go all electric and the efficiency savings in terms of lower electric+gas bills are significant and pure upside.

Moving on to electric retrofits, they are expensive but not crazy expensive. On the order of $2500-7500 per SFH to wire 220/30-50 amp circuits to the right places (HVAC, stove, water heater, clothes dryer, EV charger) and maybe upgrade the main panel - a far cry from redoing the entire wiring. It’s not an insane proposition to think we could retrofit all existing housing stock in a 15 year period if we wanted to take it seriously. We are going to need more electricians though.

Do you know what is actually really expensive? Billions or trillions of dollars in climate disaster losses and mitigation which we are seeing ramp up very quickly. If we continue burning fossil fuels even remotely like we are now, in 20 years time the losses we say today will look like peanuts in comparison.

Buildings make up a very significant amount of the CO2e emissions (depending on the location, often tied #1 with transportation) so doing nothing here is not really an option.

The efficiency increase for all electric appliances except for heat pumps is generally not worth the conversion cost. Gas infrastructure is already in place so the expense is irrelevant.

If what you were saying were true then economic forces would already have led to dominance of full electric without the need for government mandates to begin with.

That’s not really true. New high efficiency heat pump water heaters - as one example - often have a 1-2 year ROI, which is pretty dramatic. HVAC is actually often the most expensive from an ROI standpoint because of larger upfront costs.

Market forces will lead us down this path eventually but they are not instantaneous, and we don’t have much time to wait. Policy can help 1- accelerate, 2- bootstrap emerging markets (eg creating demand for more induction stoves turns that market from a niche to mainstream, with more competition, more choice, and reduced cost, all of which will serve to boost demand) and 3- finance infrastructure investments that may be beyond reach for many.

On gas infrastructure, yes it is in place but it still requires significant ongoing maintenance costs which would be eliminated if it was shut down.

The breaker size almost never matters in a circuit, including ac/heat pumps. These units are rated in MOCP (max overcurrent protection, aka, the breaker size) and MCA (minimum circuit ampacity, aka, what gauge wire to run.) You actually want to look up your unit's RLA (running load amps) which is what it's likely to max pull most of the time.

I'm assuming you're talking about a 4 ton multi-zone unit (which is pretty large). Those call for a 50A MOCP, but in reality, they only draw like 20A while running, plus a couple for the indoor units' fans.

The peak load for the hyper heat units I describe do require a 50 amp breaker. Breakers depend on peak load, not average.

And again, that doesn't matter because that's for inrush current for starting the motors, and not a steady state draw.

It does matter because my comment was talking about breakers in a typical house electrical panel.

The breaker needs to be able to handle the peak, not the average. Just go Google Mitsubishi hyper heat - it clearly states 50 amps per condenser.

I’m not sure what’s difficult to understand about this.

> Just go Google

> I’m not sure what’s difficult to understand about this.

Of course you may expect the casual reader to do the googling themselves. But if you want to make your arguments heard, it’s helpful to put a link to an authoritative source. Of course this is also true for anyone making the counter claim.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mitsubishi+hyper+heat+ampera...

Of course the Google link has nothing to do with my claim anyway, since my original post supposed that 50 amps was required by breaker.

Every single heap pump that I have heard of - has a slow start (triac based usually) module. Also the breakers should be type C (not B).

I wonder if having higher voltages in the US might be adopted for higher power devices. 110-120V is just too low, including for car charging.

My understanding from technology connections is that US circuits are 230ish volts, but it’s often centre tapped out to sockets.

I can’t imagine a permanent high energy install like a heater, shower, car charger, oven or heat pump would be 110v. If you plug in via a standard socket in europe you get about 3kW, which given european driving is probably fine overnight, but you’d want more than that in the US

>My understanding from technology connections is that US circuits are 230ish volts, but it’s often centre tapped out to sockets.

Indeed.

My heat pump is 3phase 230v/16A one, that's 11kW peak power, the pump itself is 5kW, though with the rest being a resistive heater. Car charging is similar as well 3phase is quite standard nowadays.

My understanding is that the US power supply is pretty similar to the one in Europe when it comes to delivery, and industrial equipment runs 3phase, 240v - something you can find at a lot (most new) homes in Europe.

That's right. All power-hungry appliances (those that produce heat, mostly) get their own 240V circuit at amps typically ranging from 20-50. Electric dryers and water heaters usually get 30A @ 240V, stoves get 40A-50A @ 240V, and AC/heat pump units depend on size, but usually 30A+ @ 240V.

It's really just our basic receptacles that are 15A or 20A @ 120V. This is plenty for 99.9% of uses, with the exception of some kitchen appliances that produce heat (e.g. a plug-in kettle.) If you bought a unit that required higher voltages and was rated for use in the US, you could always have an electrician wire a 240V circuit with one of the standard 240V receptacle types.

30A/7kW for a dryer? Wow how large are they and how long does it take to dry?

My oven is on a dedicated 30A circuit, but the dryer, washer, dishwasher, microwave, kettle are all on the same 32A circuit with individual 13A plugs and don’t trip it.

It seems a general pattern that any suggested positive change in the world is resisted by assertions that “the infrastructure isn’t ready”. Of course it isn’t, nor was it ready when the city was first built using gas heating. We built it. We will build it again.

> a normal house usually 100 amps dedicated for the entire house

Is this true on the east coast only, or have I been really lucky my whole life? I currently live in a little cabin in the woods built in the 70s and it has 200amp service, as have all other homes I've lived in the past 15 years.

depends more on the age of the house than anything - for a new house 200amps really doesn't cost much more than 100

I'm in a double wide mobile home in southern Mississippi from 1991. It has 200 amp service. I have no clue if that's original or if it was upgraded at some point. There is a detached garage, also.

>is to expect housing to become more expensive as heat pumps are more expensive than using (existing) gas infrastructure

Only if you ignore the externalities

It’s still more expensive at the point of purchase, or renting in this case which matters a lot to people who often pay 30+% of their income in rent.

> For reference, a normal house usually 100 amps dedicated for the entire house, not just HVAC.

Yes, that was pre-this-regulation though. Since the ban applies to the new buildings, they will not be getting 100 amps wiring.

Living in the southwest, I’ve experienced perceptible changes in weather patterns. Winters are now mild, summers have grown more intense.

My heating bills have dropped to zero. My cooling bills have jumped, and climbs every year.

Switching to heat pumps will be a minor expense compared to the effects of climate change we’ll have to pay for in the next few decades.

> heat pumps are more expensive

Even when you account for the actual cost of heating, not just initial investment?

it's really tricky to calculate. heat pumps generally require more skilled labor to install compared to gas heat. maintenance for heat pumps is also more expensive as more electrical parts are necessary. however actually running pump given a certain amount of BTUs in an insulated space is much cheaper than using gas.

given a cheap electricity source and increasing gas prices I'd say in the long term a heat pump is cheaper.

1. Muti-zone heating does cost more than central hvac. Central heat pumps are like $5k more and you won't need gas installed or pay the plumber to run lines. 2. 200amps is common now and $200 more than 100 amp. Ovens and heat pump waters heaters need the 200amp panel. Plus size, more breakers than older homes for dedicated appliances. 3. Rated breaker is sized for 80% max load, 2 50 amp breakers != 100 amps. Stoves are an exception for NEC reasons. 4 What homes are built with a gas only, no electricity needed heating? We had a 2 week electricity outage in our area and some water heaters need a fan for the vent pipe. 5. Electricity usage has dropped so we are consuming less KwH and high efficiency hvac systems also use less.

If you are worked about power outages, a <$1,000 gasoline generator would power essentials for one room.

Heat pump water heaters (most of them) take the same 30A @ 240V circuit that a standard electric resistance water heater uses, though running in HP mode, they draw far less than that. They typically have the standard 2 electric element setup as a backup/supplement to the HP, if you have high water demands.

Agreed. I live in the northeast and just looked into retrofit heating systems. For a house with radiators, the heat pump solution is a 4x capital expense, or 2-3x more if you put ugly/noisy split systems everywhere.

I’m all for accelerating innovation, but these stupid bans need to be paired with meaningful incentives.

I don't even know where to start on this. Even running a gas line from the street is a couple grand. My heat pump also cools my house and was 5 grand installed. Whatever that difference is, it's a rounding error in the price of a home. Not to mention the cost savings over the life of the system, or you know, if AC holds any value at all.

Rolling blackouts and people freezing to death? Because new housing uses 200 more kWh per month? Are you really serious?

Man-made gas through existing lines? Where exactly is that happening? Where is it close to happening? Where are people even talking about thinking about making it happen? How about any form of energy that has ever, or will ever exist through existing lines? That's what electricity is.

I just... I'm so confused right now.

I agree with everything you’re saying. Not sure about NYC but where I live I could use solar entirely if my heat was electric.

(But I do hate electric stoves and ovens. Gas ones heat much faster and much more easier to control the flame)

Makes me wonder if we should go the other direction entirely in very cold climates. Why isn’t home cogeneration a thing? Run a natural gas ICE engine or fuel cell and heat with the waste heat, dumping the surplus power into the grid after powering the home.

This would avoid wasting the useful work potential of the gas while probably being no more expensive than heat pumps and avoiding the blackout issues you cite.

Cogeneration is a thing in colder climates in Europe, but the other way around - most cities have district heating getting the heat from power plants, incinerators, etc.

Sure. I was just wondering why we don’t try flipping it around in lower density housing by doing distributed cogeneration.

> I hope something like a radiator-heat-pump can be made soon.

These exist, but are quite rare in the U.S. Check out air-to-water heat pumps from Sanden[1] and Chiltrix[2]. I seriously considered this for my new house (still in planning stages), but at double the cost of an air-to-water heat pump system it didn't make the cut. If they were more common, the cost would come down, but I think it's a chicken/egg thing at this point.

Of course, water-to-water (geothermal) heat pumps have been in the States for decades, and if I recall there are still federal tax credits available for them, but they're even more expensive and probably only make sense in very cold climates.

[1] https://www.smallplanetsupply.com/sanco2-for-combi-systems [2] https://www.chiltrix.com/air-to-water/

Over here air-water heat pumps have become quite popular for replacing old oil boilers, as you can keep using the existing water pipes and radiators. I don't think they're that common in new construction.

My father recently did exactly that, installing a unit by Mitsubishi. IIRC it has a COP of 2 at -15C, finally switching to resistive heating at -25C or so (which is somewhat unusual, maybe a few days or a week per year over here). He also has his old wood boiler as backup that he uses when it gets cold (it was a dual oil/wood boiler, though the oil burner and oil tank was ripped out as part of the retrofit).

You can pair a "traditional north American" type of air handler with the condenser. No need for one head per room if you have the ductwork. (1) I can't compare from experience on baseboard heating.

I'd say that with the hyper heat and appropriate wind baffles, you can remove the resistive aux heat in most of the lower 48. Consult your ASHRAE design conditions for specifics. (2)

I share your concerns however, about not having anything but electric heat. I think of the water pipes in Texas houses bursting as the electric grid failed and the temperature dropped to the kind of conditions seen in a fairly normal northeast winter.

(1) https://mylinkdrive.com/USA/M_Series/R410A_Systems-1/Multi_P...

(2) ashrae-meteo.info/

> Will these buildings also have generators to combat this potential problem?

For what it’s worth, much of Manhattan is heated by means of centralized steam, which tends to be more energy efficient than all of the different heating systems you mention:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system?wpr...

In much of Manhattan natural gas is only used for cooking.

Heating small apartments in large buildings is very different from heating ample single family houses in New Jersey. Electrical power outages in New York City also have much more extreme consequences for example with subways and busy intersections needing lighting and traffic lights and as such there is more motivation to keep the power on at a whole community scale.

My 4 ton heat pump draws 11.5 amps. Not sure where you get 50. And a heat pump is just a regular a/c unit, only it has a reversing valve. At the bottom end, you are looking at an extra $500-$1000 for a heat pump vs regular a/c. Adding a gas furnace adds at least $2000.

You can get 4 heads installed and a condenser for $1000 vs regular AC? The Mitsubishi hyper heat 36K BTU draws 50 amps.

> Random anecdote: in New Jersey installing a Mitsubishi hyper-heat heat-pump in a 8 room house (4 bedroom + 2 bathroom + living room + kitchen) is much more expensive than running hot water baseboard in all rooms. And with most heat pumps you can usually only zone 4-6 heads per compressor, so you'd need two compressors. A single compressor is probably pulling 50 amps alone, so you'd need 100 amps available usually for your breakers. For reference, a normal house usually 100 amps dedicated for the entire house, not just HVAC. Drastic upgrades in electric infrastructure will be required.

No, no, and no.

First of all, you would never put a head in each of these rooms. The minimum head sizes of Mitsubishi (and all other) mini splits is well beyond the heating or cooling loads of an individual room. Anyone who tries to sell a head per room is a charlatan and has never run a Manual J load calculation in their life.

Furthermore, if your four bedroom house requires 100 amps to heat it with a heat pump, you should have put money into air sealing and insulating it, rather than installing heat pumps.

This would impute a 160,000 Btu/h heat load, which is astronomical in New Jersey. (I know this because I live here, and design these systems.)

I'm not sure how you can say that without knowing the heat loss for every room. With a wall mounted unit and closed doors there's not really any alternative. My entire example is meant to just be an example.

In reality you'd use a ducted split system, not 8 heads.

Anyway, are you claiming installing a split system is cheaper than installing a Burnham boiler? The point of the post is to say that boilers/furnaces are much cheaper to install in order to heat your entire house.

> I'm not sure how you can say that without knowing the heat loss for every room.

I can say it because houses are fairly typical and if the heat loss for a room is greater than the minimum head size for a minisplit, the room probably needs some work before you should be putting a minisplit in it.

This is all just math, and 6,000 Btu/h (the minimum head size) happens to actually be a lot of heating for any normal room.

yes but a hyper heat can modulate down to 1.6k btu/hr, so you still would just put that in every room. (as long as total for condenser is 6k btu/hr, so 4 x 1.5k btu/hr) but again, that wasn't really the point anyway.

> Anyway, are you claiming installing a split system is cheaper than installing a Burnham boiler?

A boiler alone does not a hydronic system make. Hydronic systems are expensive, all in (piping, emitters/radiators, circulator pumps).

> The point of the post is to say that boilers/furnaces are much cheaper to install in order to heat your entire house.

No new house in New Jersey is getting built without air conditioning. If you're already installing ducting and an air handler, you might as well pay the marginal increase to get a heat pump instead of a cooling only outdoor unit.

So much bad info in this thread. Almost all new construction already uses forced air heat pump systems for energy cost reasons. Supplemental gas (or electric) heat is only turned on by the unit when it's too cold for the heat pump to function well. All this change means is that units with supplemental electric heat will be chosen over those with gas supplemental heat.

Additionally the compressors in these systems use far less than 50 amps, typically typically around 12 for a 3 ton unit.

The type of system you described is generally used for old construction where adding ducts is impractical. Because it's used for a special situation it will of course be more costly.

> Almost all new construction already uses forced air heat pump systems for energy cost reasons.

Here, natural gas is typically $2 a therm. Efficient furnaces are better than 90%, so $2 for 90,000 BTUs into the house or $1 buys 45,000 BTUs into the house.

Electricity is about 30 cents a kilowatt hour. Good air source heat pumps have a COP in mild weather of about 4-- much worse when cold. This is about 45,000 BTUs/$ best case.

So here, heat pumps are about breakeven vs. natural gas or slightly worse in energy costs... And they're more expensive in capital costs.

> Heat pumps heat more efficiently than gas, but I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some sort of rolling blackout and thousands of people freezing to death because we went all-in on electric. Will these buildings also have generators to combat this potential problem?

Everywhere I've ever lived if the power was out there was no way to burn the natural gas for heat.

Forced air furnace needs power for the ignition, control circuitry, and the fan that actually circulates the heat through the house.

I don't think it's a bad problem to solve, but it's not one that natural gas heating solves.

I'm just learning about a heat pump now from this thread and then reading about them.

Do we not already have a way to convert radiator/boilers to electricity? It's just boiling water right.

My condo is in a 110 year old building. I love my radiators even if they don't work that great ;) and really would hate those electric baseboard radiators

We probably will have to replace our boiler within the next few years due to issues (neighbors are too cheap to go all electric/vehicle chargers with me so no proactive changes).

I just assumed we could get an electric version? I would hope smaller and not a giant cast iron thing sunk under the house.

Would that not also work for new construction?

Keep in mind that a lot of NYC's heat is provided by a steam system managed by Con Ed. I don't know if anyone is building new construction that leverages it, but it's there as an option.

It seems like a lot of folks think of this ban as a way to tackle climate change when I always thought it was primarily a public health issue[0], with a second-order goal of eventually preventing natural gas explosions[1].

[0] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

At first I didn't really understand but then I realized this is America. Funding and maintaining infrastructure is not exactly a priority...

Because infrastructure is extraordinarily expensive because of how large America is.

Go to any small/wealthy town and you’ll see them invest tons into their infrastructure.

"how large America is" doesn't make sense here when the subject of the discussion is literally New York City

Most NIMBY cities (like NYC and SF) today no longer allow industrial buildings (like for example power plants or refineries) in their city limits. So yes, "how large America is" does end up mattering because electricity and gas and everything else ends up shipped 1-2 hours' drive away.

Los Angeles gets a good portion of their power from a coal fired power plant in Utah.

They are looking to change that by 2025 though.

https://www.ladwpnews.com/ladwp-accelerates-coal-power-reduc...

I'd love to see LA get a GWHr++ energy storage battery inside the city limits. They could trickle charge at will and supply cheap power 24/7. LA could have the cheapest power in the NA this way. It would revitalize manufacturing.

Los Angeles kicked out their manufacturing a couple decades ago. They literally refused to issue electrical permits to upgrade manufacturing lines. After some years the plants became noncompetitive and employers left town.

Sending gas 100 miles is cheap, and sending electricity 100 miles is extra cheap.

> At first I didn't really understand but then I realized this is America. Funding and maintaining infrastructure is not exactly a priority...

In the context of this sub-thread, we are talking about America.

> At first I didn't really understand but then I realized this is America. Funding and maintaining infrastructure is not exactly a priority

As opposed to where? Asia?

The US typically spends between as much or slightly more of its GDP on funding infrastructure vs what either the EU or Eurozone do. European spending on infrastructure has been mediocre for decades.

2017 "Europe’s spending on infrastructure at ‘chronic’ low level ... Spending at 20-year low threatens region’s prosperity, EIB report warns"

https://www.ft.com/content/51524ab4-cf77-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd...

2017 "Germany’s low investment rate leaves its infrastructure creaking ... The country with Europe’s strongest economy faces potholed roads and crumbling schools"

https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/06/17/germanys-low-inv...

https://www.cpr-am.fr/institutionals/Local-content/Actualite...

2014 "EU Infrastructure Cutbacks Worry Economists"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-infrastructure-cutbacks-worr...

Spending doesn't equal spending efficiency. It also doesn't account for added costs due to age of infra/retrofitting vs new infrastructure.

I have no point to make, other than direct comparison misses a lot of nuance.

The quotes from policy implementers suggest this is about climate change.

> The bill to ban the use of gas in new buildings will (help) us to transition to a greener future and (reach) carbon neutrality by the year 2050," said City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, noting "We are in a climate crisis and must take all necessary steps to fight climate change and protect our city.

Also health issues are almost certainly more likely with existing/older infrastructure and not newer buildings.

cities like nyc leak so much natural gas that you’re probably inhaling a little bit regularly as you walk through the city… there are hundreds and hundreds of detectable leaks

cooking with natural gas also exposes you to it, especially if you’re not using an exhaust hood

it won’t be as dramatic as lead because it’s not as obviously harmful, bit it could be one of those “wow i’m glad we stopped doing that” thing in 40 years

While I applaud this move, too bad they shut down Indian Point NPP, replacing the capacity with gas.

Stuffing your house with batteries that are near impossible to extinguish in a fire doesn’t seem like much of a safety upgrade. Gas lines can be shut off upstream.

As for your first point about indoor air - Gas for heating doesn't mean gas cooktop and non-gas for heating doesn't mean non-gas cooktop.

I have oil heat and a gas cooktop. The gas is propane which is supplied by a company who fills a tank once in a blue moon.

My parents have gas heat and a fully electric cooktop.

FWIW, One of my burners is definitely unsafe, the fire is too high and there's a distinct smell of gas after using it for a couple minutes. So I don't use that one...

The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2. Even if the power plants supplying electric heat pumps/radiators is natural gas, the shorter supply chain (only to power plant and not to every building in the city) go some way to offsetting extra emissions. Then you have the obvious benefit that once the NYC grid transitions to renewables there won't be as many natural gas ovens and heaters that need to be replaced.

The commenters pointing out that natural gas stoves don't have a significant effect on emissions are right, but once a building gets a gas hookup installing natural gas heaters and water heaters becomes more attractive and economical. That's something we don't want to be incentivizing

Climate town recently released a new video talking about this issue as well as the decades of marketing and lobbying the natural gas industry has paid for to neuter or outright kill legislation like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54

Many of the nice qualities of natural gas is the much higher power output. Gas burners go up to 60kw (normal kitchen burner is 9kw) while an electric resistance stove is 2.6kw. We now have inductive stoves that can surpass electric resistance stoves in power output and can match burners more powerful than a typical industrial kitchen.

tl;dr the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over.

I agree that we're trending to your conclusion, but we're not there yet.

You're kidding if you think the electric grid, especially in NYC, could handle the removal of all gas appliances and replacement with high amperage electric appliances. You're talking about an order of magnitude (or even two) increase in electricity usage.

Not kidding, totally doable with batteries. The power density in hybrid car batteries is roughly 500Whr @ 50C, so max power output is 25kW. So 72s at max power, even at industrial cooking of 9kw we see 200s. At max home resistance heater output we see 700s of runtime.

We can cook with batteries and have better performance than gas right now. Which means you don't even have to run 240v to the range. You can run a high power stove top off any regular circuit.

Where will these batteries be stored? How will the risk of a fire be mitigated? What's the plan for recycling the batteries or dealing with battery failure? The infrastructure should have a lot of redundancy - I like batteries but I personally wouldn't rely on them in extreme scenarios.

We are talking about a battery pack that is 100x100x600mm. LiFeO4 and other chemistries don't have the same failure scenarios. A home stove is not an extreme scenario, I believe you are just throwing up chaff and moving some goal posts.

I'm not talking about stoves, I'm talking about your claim that "the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over."

It's just not true.

>recycling

Invest in ABML or several other companies :)

this is all stuff we’re going to figure out anyway, it’s already happening… replacing old appliances as they fail and retrofitting existing buildings will take much longer

> You're talking about an order of magnitude (or even two) increase in electricity usage.

You're way off on this estimate. No way would the energy usage of NYC go up 10-100X! Those are absurd numbers!

Electricity usage, not energy. Electric heat, even a heat pump, uses orders of magnitude more electricity. Of course then we save on the efficiency of moving gas, but that wouldn’t necessarily be NYC

I know that this is talking about household energy use, but one of the larger uses of natural gas is metallurgy and industrial processes (like making fertilizer). Industrial natural gas use almost matches consumption for electricity generation in the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...

Changing these systems to use something other than fossil fuels is a big conundrum. In theory, hydrogen could replace it. But almost all hydrogen today is generated via steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2) which emits greenhouse gases. Electrolysis powered by renewable power is theoretically possible, but scaling it up proves difficult. Some hypothesize that thermochemical hydrogen production [1] with heat provided by fission could produce hydrogen at the required scales.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermochemical_cycle

We no longer need to deliver natural gas into cities to deliver power to a process, that was the original argument. Delivering it as a feedstock and or specific chemical heat source, sure.

From the comment I responded to:

> tl;dr the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over.

This is untrue. I explicitly acknowledged that the context is mostly in household use (did you miss that?), but this statement goes too far.

Running a small induction forge takes ~20kW or so, about the max deliverable to a house, so no. This output is achievable with gas.

I lived in a very old SF house that had some original gas lamp fixtures. These are overhead lamps from the 1900s that burnt gas for illumination.

There was a very faint gas smell in the entryway and we eventually traced it to one of these lamps. Its gas line was still under pressure and it wasn’t fully shut off. I tightened the valve and the smell stopped. (Though also the leak was so small a gas inspector’s equipment couldn’t detect it, but some people’s noses could)

Agreed that running gas lines everywhere may not be the best idea. We were dealing with the repercussions 100 years later.

> The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2.

This is only true in the short term. Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of less than a decade. By comparison, CO2 has a half life of thousands of years. Methane's greater immediate warming is drastically overshadowed by CO2's long-term persistence.

The GWP (global warming potential) which is what people talk about is calculated over the next 100 years, so "short term" is a bit misleading.

Global warming potential can be calculated over any chosen time frame, some use a 20 year time frame [1]. One hundred years is indeed short term when some greenhouse gases have a half life of thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

!. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

My understanding is that in the athmosphere methane slowly oxidizes to, well, CO2 (and water).

So in the short term (whether you use 20 or 100 years) methane is much worse, in the long term it approaches that of CO2.

"There are exceptions for new buildings used for certain activities, including manufacturing, hospitals, commercial kitchens and laundromats."

Want to take bets on who consumes the most natural gas, households or the exceptions?

Shhhhhh. Something must be done, and this is something. Therefore it must be done.

In NYC, it's almost certainly households.

On a per-unit basis, obviously the commercial users. But on a per-building and city-wide basis, almost definitely residential - huge amount of natural gas is used for residential space heating.

That's good because if there were no properly functioning woks in NYC I would be pretty pissed.

I use my wok with induction stovetops and it seems to work fine. I didn’t intentionally buy it for induction, so I was pleased to see it worked anyway.

Commercial woks put out 5-10x the heat of a home range. Commercial induction exists too, but needs a lot more power than a home setup

I wonder what it would be like to cook with a 60-100kw inductive wok?

At 100kw, 55 seconds at full power would be enough to melt a 10kg iron wok.

I mean either way you need a specialized version for commercial use yeah, so not sure how it’s different.

There are also induction cooktops specifically designed for the shape of woks. Which makes sense, seeing as how China is currently the largest adopter of induction cooktops.

I didn't know, neat!

I was looking at commercial induction woks earlier - they use on the order of 15kW per wok, so about 51,000 BTU burner - but all the heat goes into the pan instead of the hood, so more equivalent to a 150k BTU gas burner

  Consumption [0]   
    »  Residential  1,139 trillion Btu  5.4%   2019
    »  Commercial  1,122 trillion Btu  6.2%   2019
    »  Industrial  384 trillion Btu  1.2%   2019
    »  Transportation  1,211 trillion Btu  4.2%   2019

I wouldn't go to vegas if I were you.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=NY

Your figures show that commercial and industrial consumers consume more gas than residential consumers.

Probably commercial/industrial usage involves a few large consumers, not many smaller consumers. So there are fewer opportunities for leaks or explosions.

Those statistics are for New York State, not NYC.

See page 27 (PDF page 33) of [0].

Commercial natural gas usage in NYC is roughly 40% of non-power generation natural gas usage. The actual proportion varies greatly depending on time of year, presumably due to natural gas heating in residential properties in colder months.

[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/air/nyc-combin...

Want to take bets on how many more individual units are residential vs. commercial?

Didn't NY just shut down a few of their remaining nuclear plants that need to be made up for with coal and natural gas plants?

Yes. They closed Indian Point, a 2GW nuclear power plant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center

Though that’s the state policy, not the city. Shame though.

It’s deeply depressing that none of the comments here so far are positive toward this move. The earth will be utterly transformed by climate change in next century to detriment of nearly every living thing on it. We have only one reliable mechanism to mitigate to harm we are causing: ending fossil fuel use. To do that everything that currently uses fossil energy needs to be electrified. Every year we waste letting new buildings get built with gas furnaces makes it that much harder to limit the damage we’ve caused.

Stop using the fact much electrical generation still uses fossil fuels to argue against electrification. Petition to bring new renewable generation online and close coal and gas powered plants instead. Stop romanticizing a gas stove that pollutes the air in your home as you cook at it. Get an induction stove heats just as fast instead.

Stop pretending we have time to “wait and assess” and starting fighting for a livable future on only home we have.

Thank you for your comment. I myself have cooked on gas my whole life, have learnt over years how each of my different pans heats over gas (it sounds stupid but there are a lot of subtleties when it comes to cast iron, carbon steel and stainless steel, how they hear up at different rates and develop hot spots, how the sides and the center hear differently, and how that can result in burnt oil). I am anxious to have to learn all of this again on induction, and maybe even having to let go of my beloved carbon steel pan (it's unclear to me how well it will work on induction and whether it will warp or spin on the flat surface).

But overall the reasoning of this change makes sense to me - we'll all have to adapt and it'll be annoying but we can't wait. The right time to start was 30 years ago - the second best time is now.

"Petition to bring new renewable generation online and close coal and gas powered plants instead."

Recent European energy market seems to indicate that the more renewables you add to the mix, the more coal and gas you actually need to burn once the nature starts conspiring against you. Dark and freezing days with weak wind are the worst.

Right now there are 318 comments and 153 points.. nearly 2:1 comments. I’ve noticed that the most political and controversial articles/topics tend to be this way, where as the most technical links tend to have such a ratio in the other direction. It almost makes me wonder if I should filter HN by such a ratio to find the “interesting” links.

Anyone else notice these trends?

Yes, I remember dang making a similar remark (can't find the link atm though)

Electrification really is coming along apace! First california bans petrol lawnmowers and generators, now New York bans gas heating. I wrote a blog post on the first topic recently [1] but I guess there really is an impetus for rapid change now. Not that banning new users of gas in one city is going to fix the climate, but it's a start...

[1]: https://bearbin.net/blog/2021/california-is-not-taking-your-...

The main worry I have at this point is that while moving towards electric is great, we're not addressing all the problems we need to for that to work.

America's electric grid is in a bad state, and unless we also start improving it quickly, the extra load is going to cause problems.

Take California for instance. We're adopting electric vehicles rapidly, pushing for everyone to convert all their appliances and home systems to electric, and the increasing temperature is driving up air conditioning load every year. At the same time, our power distribution is falling apart and we have rolling blackouts throughout the state at the hottest point of the year. Not to mention that we're operating at a large energy deficit because of the shuttering of fossil fuel and nuclear plants before the renewable generation has even broken ground. By GWh, most of the under construction generation capacity in CA are natural gas turbines. While a major improvement over coal, it's still two orders of magnitude more CO2 produced per GWh compared to the nuclear plants they're replacing or the renewable plants we said we were going to build.

Electric cars will help tremendously with load shifting once we get bidirectional charging in 1-2 years. A Tesla Model 3 can fully power an average 3000 sq-ft home for 2-3 days. What will be most powerful though is helping the grid with peak shaving by giving some of that stored power back during the worst hour or two of the day.

That said I don’t disagree on some generation challenges, I’m finding it hard to find transparency on our long term plan to meet our power mix needs in the winter with pure renewables and no nuclear. Summer (where we have rolling blackouts currently) is relatively easier though since it tends to be a matter of just bridging the gap for a short while, which you can do in all sorts of ways.

> A Tesla Model 3 can fully power an average 3000 sq-ft home for 2-3 days.

An average US home is 2,500 square feet, but that aside the average US home power consumptions is about 30kWh per day, so, yes, the 82kWh battery for the newest Model 3 Long Range can power an average home for more than 2 and less than 3 average days.

Wow, this is oddly stupid. I thought just weirdos wanted this kind of change and this is the first I’ve heard of a municipality.

Gas is so efficient for heating (and great for cooking), it seems bad for climate change to not allow it.

Theater seems to be catching on and I hope we don’t see more climate change theater regulations.

How is it "so efficient for heating"? It's much more efficient to burn the gas for electricity then use the electricity to run a heat pump.

And it only gets better when you use the waste heat from the powerplant for even more heating.

No you lose energy in the transfer.

While burning nat. gas is efficient, you do lose energy in the process.

A coal plant is 50% efficient, and CHP plant is 80-90% efficient.

A nat. gas heat pump is 80%-93% efficient depending on the money you want to spend.

A standard efficiency nat. gas furnace is at least 80% efficient, they top out at 98% efficiency.

Pretty obvious that converting from heat to electricity to heat is going to be less efficient than just converting to heat.

Not to mention the furnace is more efficient than the gas plant (max of 98% compared to a max of 90%).

Also the transmission and storage of nat. gas vs electricity is more efficient.

You’re comparing Carnot efficiencies for heat pumps with nominal efficiencies for natural gas heaters. Heat pumps have nominal efficiencies well over 100%. They can move more joules of heat from outside than the number of joules of energy they consume.

The efficiency depends on the temp. outside.

That's why nat. gas is used for heating more in the north and less so in the south.

At a certain point it's more efficient to burn the gas directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

Unless you’re heating your house in the arctic, a modern heat pump is still going to have a nominal efficiency well over 100%. So if you’re claiming your heat pump numbers above are nominal efficiencies, I’m really curious as to where you’re getting them.

It's a simple formula, the CoP, I linked it in my above post.

The below PDF has a chart of temps to efficiencies. 47F will be around 100% efficiency or a CoP of 1. New York winter days are generally below that.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/04/f34/2_32219_...

That's a potential 40% energy loss. 20% at the plant, 20% at the house.

It all depends on the region's temperature. Electric heating is more efficient in some places, less efficient in some, and equal in some.

For New York, it does not make sense to use a heat pump:

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/New-York/Places/new-y...

That document lists the COP for an electric heat pump with an external temperature between 35F and 40F at around 3.25. The definition from the article you linked defines COP as “ ratio of useful heating or cooling provided to work (energy) required”. So at that temperature range, it’s still heating more than it’s consuming energy. A natural gas space heater cannot exceed a coefficient of performance of 1 (it would violate energy conservation). You’re still not comparing the same types of efficiencies, they have different denominators.

> Gas is so efficient for heating

Heat pumps are multiple times more efficient than gas for heating.

Heat pumps and induction ranges have changed the game. Dirty gas does not have the same advantages over electric that it used to.

Per reporting from the beginning of 2020, fossil gas is far worse than was previously suspected. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/super-pot...

> Gas is so efficient for heating

Nope. Put one kWh of gas in, get maybe 0.9kWh of heat out.

Put one kWh of electricity into a heat pump and get at the very least 3 kWh of heat out.

> Put one kWh of electricity into a heat pump and get at the very least 3 kWh of heat out.

Even when it is below freezing outside?

It’s -10C here right now and my heat pump is pulling less than 3kW to heat the whole house.

It’s a matter of the refrigerant you use. Don’t worry about the freezing point of water.

Heat pump efficiency drops as the difference between the indoor and outdoor temperature grows. No one specifically cares about the freezing point of water for this, but it’s a good proxy for “big temperature difference”.

> Even when it is below freezing outside?

Yes. For instance, one of the heat pumps in my house has a coefficient of performance of 3.2 at 17F/-8C.

Reference: https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product/51106

Heat pumps such as Mitsubishi's "Hyper-Heat" models should be above 3 to 1 down to a little below freezing, and better than 2 to 1 down to around 0℉ (-18℃). They are down to about 1 to 1 at -15℉ (-26℃).

Electricity is of (much) higher exergy than natural gas so it’s not a directly comparable measure.

Even burning natural gas in a peaker plant to generate electricity (nTh ≈ 0.6), and account for transmission losses(~0.9), and then using that electricity to run a heat pump (~2.5) - is still more efficient than natgas space heating

Why is electricity still ~5x as expensive as gas then? (in the U.K. at least)

Because generation is the cheapest part of the electrical grid. Distribution and "overhead" cause end-user electricity prices to jump 3-5x.

A small fraction of the cost of electricity is fuel cost. A much larger fraction is staffing, maintenance, and capital costs amortization. Distribution and maintenance fees are largely covered by per kWh price. The turbine I mentioned to do that generation costs $xx,xxx,xxx and is generally only cost effective to run as a peaker so that cost has to be amortized over fewer hours per day. Unlike natural gas hot water heaters etc, the turbines can't be built by the tens of thousands using cheap manufacturing techniques.

Burning gas for heating is less efficient than burning gas to produce electricity and use it to run a heat pump.

Burning gas for cooking is more efficient than burning it to generate electricity and turn it back to heat in an induction stove.

I can imagine banning natural gas from apartments to avoid catastrophic explosions, but it's not about daily efficiency.

> Burning gas for cooking is more efficient than burning it to generate electricity and turn it back to heat in an induction stove.

Is it? Induction cooktop heating is quite efficient. Gas is extremely inefficient. Huge amounts of heat roll up the side of the pot/pan and into the air, to be blown outside by the hood vent.

There’s quite a bit of loss in generating and transmitting electricity but I am not sure it’s worse than gas cooktop efficiency.

The stove may be 100% efficient.

Thermal electricity genetation is at best 60% efficient, and transmission losses add a couple percent.

Do you suppose that gas stove wastes a lot of heat when heating a pot that stands on it?

My gas stove heats the pot, but also the cabinets above and around the stove and the entire small kitchen. Just being able to feel the air temperature go up by a couple of degrees would certainly suggest it's throwing off more waste heat than what's actually going into the pan.

A gas stove is very close to 100% efficient at converting gas to heat. It is certainly not 100% efficient at putting that heat into the pot. Gas produces heat by combusting with oxygen and essentially generating hot air. The air will impart some of its heat to the pot. A ton of the heat will end up just heating the air around the stove (or being dumped outside if you’re running a hood vent).

This article claims 40% efficiency and provides a citation, for what it’s worth. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/efficient-cooki...

It’s worth noting that natural gas transmission can’t be 100% efficient either. I don’t know what the loss is but it certainly takes energy to push natural gas through pipelines and there is loss in the system due to leaks.

Gas is actually less efficient for cooking than induction https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...

however, for heating, it does seem like gas can be more efficient depending on where it is installed. I don't think it's quite right to call it stupid though. Gas is, on net, worse for the environment.

Cooking efficiency is an odd metric. Probably boiling (via induction-heated water) or microwaving heats things best but blech for taste.

How is gas better for cooking than induction? Induction seems flatly better to me. Just as fast and flexible, but no indoor air pollution, greater efficiency, easier to clean.

Induction is great but most budget apartments/homes are going to have resistive electric, either coil or glass top. These are objectively worse than gas for cooking, not least of which because you can't even lift up the pan 1 inch without losing heating completely. Glass top also has the problem of having to heat up a massive block of glass whereas gas heats up instantly.

If you've ever tried to make something that requires a hot pan (like a lot of Asian foods, or certain meats that you want to sear but not overcook on the inside) you know the difference is easily visible in the final result.

Which is silly, since induction isn’t inherently expensive. I got an induction stovetop in Germany in 2016 for 200€.

People used to say that coal is great for cooking, and the coal industry had PR campaigns around this just like the gas industry does today.

Personally I think that for anyone looking to buy a new cooking range today, induction is the obvious choice.

Gas is only efficient for heating when compared to resistive electric heating. Modern heat pump systems are capable of producing 2.5x the thermal energy as they consume electrical energy even when it's below freezing. The hotter it gets from there, the more efficient they get.

The main issue about doing electric heating in a very cold zone is what the reliability of the electrical system is. New York has a pretty good record with their hydroelectric generation though.

The grid cannot support heating all homes on electricity. It would be extremely difficult and make the load balancing really tricky, especially if relying on renewables. It really spikes up the seasonality in demand for electricity in a way that's hard to satisfy. Namely huge demand for electricity in the winter when solar is at its least available. That's not to say this isn't a good idea. But the shift to electric heating on a national scale will be difficult. The experience of doing so now doesn't reflect what it'll take to do it everywhere.

More than half of energy use in the home is spent on heating, and it's not uniformly distributed by time nor space at all. Not impossible, but very hard. The usual memes about just needing a lot of batteries need to be examined with some skepticism here. You'll need a lot of batteries to make that possible.

You can pry my gas stove from my cold dead hands.

Same here. I have had the displeasure of experiencing multiple multi day electricity outages in the Northeast, and having a natural gas connection to the house was an immense lifesaver.

Heat (from gas fireplace), hot water, and home cooked meals were no problem.

Last time I experienced a major power loss during a winter storm, our gas logs were able to heat half the house.

It’s the only thing I tell new homeowners to make sure they have.

gas/electric/induction all co-exist for various reasons. i liked gas until i realized that for heating a pot of water, even standard electric is faster in the stretch because the element is in contact with the pot. also electric/induction are just a straight surface which is easier to clean. i currently have gas in a rental, but i wish i had one of the other options. if we have gas we can roast marshmallows, which fun... but maybe it just seems fun due to the higher carbon dioxide levels.

I like induction more than gas — you still get the speed and responsiveness, but it’s easier to clean. And it pollutes your own air less, of course.

From an engineering perspective it’s also more efficient, you don’t lose as much energy in the transfer. Not sure if that makes it more cost efficient though.

I just moved from a house with a gas range - I’ve had gas cookers for more than 20 years - to one with an induction stove. I’ve never used induction before but it’s really great. For every minor niggle with the induction unit, like the odd noise, there seems to be a matching benefit, like not scalding myself on the waste heat from the gas.

The best part is that it gets every hit as hot as a gas stove, maybe even hotter, and as I discovered just yesterday, you can set the temperature below boiling to keep something warm. I’ve never been able to do that with gas.

The fact that it can be made to be green makes me very happy.

I love our induction stove - on the same burner that I can boil a full pot of water in 2m, I can keep a soup going at a precise simmer. I could never get our old gas stove setup that precisely.

My concern would be this: cheap ass landlords are going to just install horrible, low quality electric ring ranges in apartments, not nice induction ranges. Gas is millions of times better than those electric ring ranges.

They already do that.

You can't charge luxury prices if your apartment has a shitty stovetop. This is something the market will fix.

Oh, you absolutely can.

A lot of "luxury" buildings are superficial branding with low-end appliances. Sometimes they're fine. Sometimes you wind up with an oven that takes two hours to pre-heat, and when you tell maintenance it's broken you discover they're all like that.

Granted, most of those places didn't have gas to begin with.

I don't see how this is relevant. You're not being asked to give up your gas stove, nor are you being asked to give up gas in your already existing home.

For contrast, I rather wish I had an inductive cooktop rather than a gas stove. The gas burners pump out a huge amount of heat that doesn't go into the pans at all.

Part of me is inclined to agree with you. In terms of pure function, I prefer the rapid response of gas stoves to anything electric. I have a moderately high-end glass/electric (not induction) range right now, and TBH it just doesn't work as well as a basic gas range. Unfortunately, I also have to consider the upstream and downstream impacts. This less-functional range is a price I'm willing to pay for not adding to the world's woes.

So new built houses in Brooklyn and Queens would need to be all electric?

Yay housing crisis. Add that to the list of NIMBY and zoning as things more important than homeless people and millennials having housing.

People are going to be very disappointed by their heating bills. Electric heating is expensive as hell, and gas is usually included in rent.

My small studio a few years back was +200$ in winter months with crummy electric heat.

> Electric heating is expensive

Air heat pumps are cheaper to heat with than gas in most situations. It takes rather extreme cold and cheap gas to out compete the 400%+ efficiency of heat pumps.

Technology is pretty awesome.

How do they get the efficiency number above 100? Are heat pumps that efficient at cooling as well?

It depends on your definition of efficiency. Electric heat is considered 100% efficient as 100% of the watt hours that go into the device eventually get turned into the same amount of heat.

A heat pump moves heat from outdoors to indoors. The outdoor heat lost is ignored in the efficiency calculation (as it should be), and thus the efficiency question is how many watt hours of electricity does it take to move a watt hour of heat (joules) from outside to inside. Depending on the temperatures involved, it's usually a multiple, for example, 1 wH of electricity moves 4 wH equivalent of heat indoors, ie: 400% efficient.

If you consider the whole system, much of the electricity for a heat pump may come from burning natural gas elsewhere, which involves losses along the way. This is still usually better than 100% overall efficiency.

Direct natural gas heating is less than 100% efficient too. Most furnace systems are about 20% loss in exhaust, though they can be much better. This is still usually better than burning the gas at a plant, converting to electricity and then heating with resistive electrical in your home.

Most modern gas furnaces are 95% AFUE, the minimum in northern US states is 90%

And comparing AFUE efficiency to HSPF is not really a thing, you can not look at a gas furance that is 95% AFUE, and a Heat Pump that is "400%" claim that the gas furnace is must less "efficient" that is not how any of those works. To be clear a heat pump at temps above 25 degrees Fahrenheit is more efficient but comparing the metrics in this manner is a bit misleading

Further heat pumps are good to 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, under that a gas furnace is normally used to supplement a heat pump in colder climates. Most heat pump manufacturers do not recommend operating a heat pump in below freezing conditions

Then how would you say it should be compared?

> Further heat pumps are good to 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, under that a gas furnace is normally used to supplement a heat pump in colder climates. Most heat pump manufacturers do not recommend operating a heat pump in below freezing conditions

Just wanted to chime in that they do make a lot of low-temp heat pumps, going down to -30f now. The efficiency drops dramatically at temps that low, the best site to look at cold-weather models is https://ashp.neep.org/#!/product_list/

If you look though, the "COP @ 5 degrees F" for a lot of models is above 2.0, which from my understanding means you'll be using 1/2 the electricity someone with baseboard (resistance) heat would. And above those temps the COP gets much higher.

Heat pumps are actually exactly what the title says. Using compressors they are able to extract heat even from relatively cold air and transfer the energy inside.

They can use 100 watts of electric energy to move 400 watts of heat from outside to inside.

The downside is that the colder it is outside the less efficient they get (since there is less heat outside) so it only works in relatively temperate climates.

This does only apply for air-sourced heat pumps though. Unless you are literally living on an ice-sheet, a ground-sourced heat pump can be efficient all-year round and beat out an air system easily.

Fascinating. I’m in the PNW where I don’t think it gets cold enough for this to matter

What I don't get is the comparison to gas though. Like how can burning natural gas to generate electricity then using that electricity on a separate device be more efficent than just burning the natural gas directly for heat. The essential output of natural gas is heat to generate electricity if the heat pump were 4x efficient then could a natural gas plant generate electricity, run a giant heat pump and then use the heat to generate 4x more electricity?

Though I agree that heat pumps are more efficient and cheaper (ongoing) - they're still more expensive to install. I'd say the #1 plus is that you get air conditioning or free, and so in that way it's simpler.

That is probably an issue - suspect developers ultimately are going to pick the cheap-for-them version. (Probably what happened in my case)

I doubt that they’re cheaper to install if you’re already putting in air conditioning.

Plus you save the $30/mo meter fee from the gas company.

NYC has "extreme cold" and likely puts heat pumps into their very inefficient range many days of the year.

It's generally fairly temperate in NYC.

The Daikin in my building runs at 100% capacity down to -4F. The last time NYC recorded below -4 was 1943.

They aren't generally cheaper "enough" to operate to justify the increased equipment cost over gas. A lot of that has to do with natural gas subsidies in New York though, which I expect to change in the near future.

I hate to bring practical experience with a heat pump to the table but ours is a 3 year old unit and last February in the Texas "blizzard" the heat pump became a solid block of ice and the system ended up using backup "glow rods" to heat the air. Glow rods are about as efficient as an old coil burner type range- exact same principle.

Heat pumps aren't a panacea, they have an appropriate use. Usually in a warm climate but they don't really work well (from my direct experience) in freezing temperatures or below. Something I assume NYC gets rather regularly.

You're the victim of cost optimization. A old climate optimized heat pump will have logic to run the pump in reverse to melt the accumulated ice. This happens without you noticing but it let's the pump keep going and keeps the net efficiency above a coefficient of 1.

If anything America is a victem of HVAC "specialists" who use their skills to install the bare minimum systems. Over in Japan everyone just buys a featurefull mini split and pokes a hole in the way and plugs it in. The net effect is Japan has a competitive market for featureful yet cheap minisplits. While Americians are forced to pay more for less.

> Technology is pretty awesome.

So I have a heat pump. In central Indiana. Temp ranges from -15F in the winter to 100F in the summer. Today it was in the mid 50s. My across the street neighbor has the same floorplan house, but he has gas. When we compare bills, I pay about $40/mo more for heat. He pays about $40 more for AC... so it ends up being a wash, except my HVAC plant cost about twice what his conventional electric AC / Gas forced air setup. As a bonus, the electric that I use comes from a giant gas plant so... Would feel better about electric if it wasn't just shifting production to a giant facility on the other side of town.

> As a bonus, the electric that I use comes from a giant gas plant so

Yes, however, that won't be the case for long (hopefully).

> Yes, however, that won't be the case for long (hopefully).

Ok, so, what are we going to generate energy with? Nuclear is a non-starter, coal is dirty, so without gas, wind and solar are simply not capable of getting the job done in a cold snap.

This seems to be for new buildings, not existing buildings. And for new buildings, one would hope that they would forego electric resistive heating in favor of reversible electric heat pumps for dual cooling/heating, which are competitive or better in cost versus natural gas (depending on various local factors).

If you think electric heating is expensive, wait until you see how much it will cost to keep ocean water out.

Was that resistive, or heat pump?

My builder estimates 30w/square meter in norther europe - but the house is built to an A+ insulation level

There are basically two options I see. One is implementing a general greenhouse gas tax and charge the shit out of people who use gas heating until they upgrade to more efficient systems. And the other is to mandate new builds comply with efficiency ratings.

The first option has the benefit of being generalised and applying to everything. But it hurts in the short term. The second option has the benefit of being a painless transition for everyone but could result in sub optional choices being made by the government.

Meanwhile in California, the plumbing unions repeatedly oppose this.

Unless you live nearby nuclear plant and your electricity is dirt cheap - this is awful stupid solution.

On account that 1. we’re still far away from scalable and economically viable clean energy solutions 2. Natural gas is as clean as natural resources can be

I wish there were someone with balls and physics degree to ban this decision.

Specifically, as I recall from the Technology Connections video on space heaters, transmission losses mean that electric heating is less energy-efficient than burning the gas yourself, since most power comes from gas and coal. Solar doesn't work well in winter and at night (without energy storage anyway), and wind isn't reliable.

If you lived next to nuclear power though, electrical heating would beat gas. Between those two it's a mix. So these sorts of decisions should be based on whether your mains is cleaner than gas, factoring in transmission efficiency and seasonal production/load.

Well, I have a PhD in physics, and I think this is a good decision (not that I could ban it if I thought otherwise).

Practically all serious decarbonization plans revolve around decarbonizing (and yes, scaling up) electricity production, and then using that clean electricity to decarbonize transportation, heating, some industrial processes etc. Cleaning up the electrical grid is underway. Much too slowly, and with some extremely regrettable setbacks like shutting down functioning nuclear power plants, but still progressing.

A major problem in this transition is that retrofitting existing infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming, particularly if it means replacing stuff before EoL. The least we can do is not building more of the wrong kind of infrastructure, which is exactly what this ban achieves.

OP’s point is about costs and affordability. PhD in physics is kind of irrelevant here.

changes at the individual’s level like this are meaningless on the scale at which carbon emission is occurring. for example, you could switch off every car, truck, boat, plane, train, ambulance, motorbike, etc. and you would reduce carbon emissions by less than 20%. _all_ residential usage (including electricity created by fossil fuels) by 10%. [1]

alternatively, you could switch off carbon production across all of the EU and the US. all of it. you’d cut global CO2 emissions by %15 (for the US) and ~9%. [2]

climate change is real and man-made. we need to tackle the actual causes of it, rather than make individuals lives harder: i’ve used many induction/electric cookers and they all _suck_.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

[2]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Well, I got PhD in physics too. And especially i dealt with thermodynamics a little bit.

And you’re some how ommitting the fact that all available so called clean sources are not even close in energy density, let alone energy production and delivery costs, to traditional sources.

The difference is so dramatical, it would basically mean - we should go to stone age economically speaking to allow full replacement of energy to “green” ones.

Which means basically we’re shooting in our own legs! Because weaker economies and poorer people are tend to make ecological situation worse rather than better in all

Yes, there are some countries so rich and developed (or with unique weather conditions), they can afford partial replacement, just for the sake of the ecology.

But I doubt US has already solved all major problems to afford such an expensive move.

This is for starter:

https://www.drexel.edu/~/media/Files/greatworks/pdf_sum10/WK...

Please stop spreading such a nonsense and consider all implications if you call yourself a PhD

In particular:

> revolve around decarbonizing (and yes, scaling up) electricity production

In general, this scaling is in 2021 near impossible or extremely costly at best, from pure thermodynamical point of view

Can someone explain this for Central Europeans?

Why is induction cooking problematic in NYC?

Why do you even need gas or heat pumps for heating? (Don’t you have “remote heat”?)

To me this whole discussion sounds quite absurd. Moving all in to electric heating could be messy if electricity prices explode as a consequence of increasing demand.

I live in Menlo Park, which is doing this as well. Our energy company, PG&E, gives you a break on your bill if you have an electric furnace because these cost more to operate than gas furnaces.

I'd like to think that a lot of hurdles can be overcome with economies of scale, but this policy tends to indicate that until a new type of electric heating is invented/popularized, there will be higher costs (either for the customer, or for the provider — who spreads the cost over all customers) associated with electric heating.

Downsides of electric transition can in general be mitigated by solar, but heat is most needed in the winter, and at night — and this is when there's the least solar energy available.

Are batteries a necessary missing link? Or is there another way to overcome these downsides to electric heating?

> there will be higher costs associated with electric heating.

it depends on future gas price trajectory, for example Europe currently observes 5-10 times gas price hike.

> until a new type of electric heating is invented/popularized, there will be higher costs

I wouldn't be surprised if electric heat pumps were already cheaper to operate than gas furnaces in many places. Especially in temperate areas like Menlo Park. They are being installed all over the American south.

In areas where people want air conditioning anyway, upgrading to a unit that heats as well is a minor expense.

I think part of the reason is that electricity is very expensive here. Apparently it’s the 3rd most expensive state in the country, with a cost over 75% more than the average nationwide cost. [1]

The electricity we receive is sourced from renewables, and I’m sure that’s part of the reason the price is so much higher than elsewhere.

1: https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/

The reason is not due to renewables, actually. In PG&E territory (which I am most familiar with) more than 2/3rds of your bill typically goes to transmission and distribution costs and 1/3 towards generation. Check out your next bill if you are curious. It’s not a huge surprise that T&D costs so much since that infrastructure keeps burning down the state and there is a lot of deferred maintenance.

It does make for a nice argument to try to decentralize more of the generation closer to where the consumption is happening (eg solar + batteries) to try to reduce our need to invest in T&D.

I see comments saying that heating with electricity is more efficient than with gas. So, will it cost less?

I assume they mean in terms of transmission losses and / or final conversion to applied heat.

Those are somewhat independent of the financial cost to end users (given the particular details of current markets and infrastructure).

Yes. My house is what the Japanese all "all electric". We have heat pumps for heat, induction for cooling, and a heat pump powered water heater. We save a good chunk of cash compared to our neighbors.

The downside is an increased initial investment. So property developers prefer throwing in gas or propane, they get more profit and can advertise a lower price. At the expense of the owners long term.

Are we including the cost of a future carbon tax?

I'm a happy owner of an all electric house. But it really bit me during the rolling black outs in the Texas winter of 2021. I survived, but had debates within myself on whether or not to go cut down a tree for firewood for my never used fireplace. My neighbors with gas, they just turned on their stove and never worried about whether the power would come back on or not. That experience has left me somewhat paranoid. I'd be quite concerned if I was farther north and forced to rely only on the power company for my heating needs. Certainly I'm not the only one?

Huh, I was going to write about what I heard about the natural gas pipelines freezing, but it turns it out they do not actually do that due to being buried at least 3 feet underground.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...

However, the multi-stage above ground pipes that carry oil and natural gas were compromised as well as refining stations for the natural gas due to the lack of power leading to a possible shortage of natural gas that did not happen that winter in Texas.

Learned something new.

Been considering going all electric for my future home with a heat pump as Mr Money Mustache did. Reading about the freeze in Texas and how even coal piles froze; it felt like relying on solar panels and batteries seemed safer. This will change my calculus a little.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2021/10/05/diy-heat-pump/

Aren't modern gas heating systems usually dependent on electricity ? Usually for regulation, safety sensors, water circuit pump, etc.

Not terribly large amounts of it. E.g. during prior blackouts I powered my tankless gas water heater just using a plug in inverter in a car. Even larger units can be easily powered by a modest generator.

Yes but a blower motor in a typical indoor air handler will draw less than 500 watts. The compressor on the outdoor unit will be more around 2500 watts with an initial in-rush of 20k+ watts.

If blackouts were a significant consideration, perhaps a diesel generator could be planned for.

This is an unwelcome change for me. Cooking with a flame is important to us culturally, and is simply part of the experience. This is the kind of environmental authoritarianism that I cannot stand, and bans in general feel like an aggressive tool, whether it is about gas cars or gas cooking/heating.

Even for heating, natural gas is just way cheaper. I have both a new high efficiency electric heat pump and a high efficiency natural gas furnace, and if I choose to heat via the heat pump I spend a multiple more of my entire natural gas bill.

So for new buildings they should include wells for ground source heat pumps? That sounds reasonable to me. It's much easier to include during initial construction than try to add it later.

Stockholm switched the whole gas net from natural gas to biogas 10 years ago. Not sure how much biogas could reasonablye be produced in the US in general or NYC in particular, but it has to be enough to offset some natural gas. The nice thing about it is you can just mix it and every % you mix in that its renewable helps.

What's the default heating for new construction in NYC if it isn't gas? I know there is a famous steam pipe system but does that have available capacity? is it still expanded?

This is about indoor quality more than co2 emissions.

Does burning biogas indoors release fewer toxic vapors than natural gas?

It does not (that I’m aware of). But the idea of banning gas, or replacing it with renewable gas obviously survives only on the climate benefit. New construction shouldn’t use gas at all obviously, but in existing buildings the CO2 issue will remain. That’s where biogas could be used until they are converted.

Induction cooking is by all accounts awesome if you have the right cookware.

I think we will see some nice high end electric heating fixtures as well. Plus more radiant floor heat.

I kind of hope not. Electric heat is far less efficient than heat pumps.

My mom got an induction stove not long ago and I tried it in my last visit, and I was thoroughly impressed. You have really nice control over the heat (even better then on gas stoves) and it heats up really fast.

The only problem is that if you have gathered an impressive set of pots and pans you have to start from scratch. However that can be remedied with an adapter. I’ve heard people complain about the adapter, however I was able to cook icelandic pancakes just as easily on an induction stove with an adapter as I would on a standard electric stove.

My landlord replaced my gas stove with an induction stove (with convection oven), and it is without question the nicest oven I've ever used. Even the broiler is somehow terrific.

Most of my neighbors are clinging to their old gas ovens out of nostalgic attitudes or skepticism. I've tried to convince them that they're missing out.

wow your landlord sounds awesome, do you live in nyc? I think I’m resigned to using gas until I buy a home (if that day ever comes).

I do live in NYC. "Awesome" isn't quite the term I'd use… he's highly motivated to get gas out of this building (one highly illegal piece of plastic ductwork from Czechoslovakia was found in our system — had there been a fire and this piece melted, BLAMMO).

Personally, I am convinced by recent studies that indoor gas is just blanket bad for health, so I was quite happy to cooperate.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...

"one highly illegal piece of plastic ductwork from Czechoslovakia"

Just wow, that is the last context in which I expected to see the name of my long defunct country of birth.

NYC landlords seem to be eager to get rid of gas because of the maintenance costs. For one, they have to use licensed gas line plumbers to service the building, and there are all sorts of safety regulations that have to be followed, all of which adds to the cost.

The city takes gas extremely seriously, as does ConEd, and the latter will shut down an installation that isn't considered safe. My apartment had a small gas leak on a gas furnace connection inside the apartment, and ConEd came and locked the gas meter. My landlord dragged his feet for more than a year because a plumber would cost him around $2,500 to inspect the equipment and do the necessary DOB paperwork. He actually chewed me out for reporting the leak to ConEd instead of going directly to him first (because then he could have used his unlicensed guys).

Other people in the building said he was trying to all the tenants to go electric — in an old Brooklyn warehouse with no insulation or modern heating. The only heating alternative he could offer was little space heaters he got off Amazon, and he refused to educate himself about heat pumps.

>My landlord replaced my gas stove with an induction stove (with convection oven), and it is without question the nicest oven I've ever used. Even the broiler is somehow terrific.

After a gas leak during renovations in my building, rather than pay for inspections of the gas infrastructure, my landlord replaced my (and all the other tenants') gas stove with a used (not refurbished) electric stove that broke immediately and repeatedly until it was finally replaced with a new electric stove after five years -- after the managing agents were replaced.

Even with the brand new electric (not induction) stove, it's still significantly inferior to the 25+ year-old gas stove.

That's the other side of the coin for renters.

If he hadn’t promised an induction model, I would have fought the change like everyone else. We fortunately have a moderately powerful and highly organized tenants association.

> Even with the brand new electric (not induction) stove, it's still significantly inferior to the 25+ year-old gas stove.

Electric stoves vary a ton in quality. The flat top glass ones can be pretty great (and very easy to clean). The cheapest electric stoves are pretty terrible.

I guess the same could be said for gas, as some people are happy moving to (non induction) electric. But if your gas stove was holding up for >25 years, it was probably not the cheapest model they could get at the time.

>I guess the same could be said for gas, as some people are happy moving to (non induction) electric. But if your gas stove was holding up for >25 years, it was probably not the cheapest model they could get at the time.

That's definitely true. And the used resistive stove that replaced it was being sold on eBay for USD$250 around that same time. Which says that it likely was the cheapest model they could find.

Even with the new resistive stove, which was, at least, new, things are better. But still doesn't provide the quality of cooking (and consequently, eating) experience that the gas stove did.

I suppose some might recommend that I replace it with an induction stove, but that would violate the terms of my lease.

In the US, 220 Volts is standard for applications requiring high power, such as heat pumps, whole house air conditioners, cook stoves, hot water heaters, clothes dryers, electric car chargers, etc.

110 Volts is standard for lighting, ordinary outlets, and appliances drawing less than about 30 amps at 110 Volts such as clothes washing machines, dishwashers, furnaces, window air conditioners, etc.

great!

while in Italy, the main gas leader ENI (with its hands everywhere, even in cultural events) states:

"...[in a] path to contribute to carbon neutrality by 2050 [...] Eni's decarbonization strategy envisages [...] an increasingly important role for #gas"

https://www.eni.com/en-IT/low-carbon/strategy-climate-change...

so you have an idea of the pressure Italian's media receives from ENI, and not just media. Greenpeace says ENI gives money to university energy research on this (and universities do not want to disclose the amount of $$ they receive)

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/09/29/eni-e-leonardo-i...

That’s the same in most of Europe. Renewables have to be supplemented by gas plants which can turn their production up and down much quicker than nuclear, coal, etc.

In the future the gas plants can be replaced by various forms of storage, but until then gas is important even with electrified heating and cooking.

They'd have to bring a ridiculous amount of new electric power into my building, and rewire the building, in order to replace the gas ranges with electric. I think around 1kw of heat comes out of each of the 4 burners, and 4kw is way more electricity than I have available. I rarely uses more than 2 burners at once but even still.

> The power sector's carbon emissions in New York State should decline in the future because the state passed a law in 2019 requiring all electricity to come from clean, carbon-free sources of energy like renewables and nuclear by 2040.

So Niagara Falls is getting bigger? I don't see any new nuclear plants on the horizon.

Seems silly if it doesn’t address heating oil. Every apartment building I’ve lived in in the past 30 years (all in NYC) has used oil for heat.

As someone who lives in nyc this is wonderful news

On first thought cooking on gas range is one of my favorite thing. Quick to increase and decrease heating, easier to clean that electric coils and in general felt more heavy duty for some who deluded himself to be better cook in friend and family circle.

But on second thought this seems like thing whose time has come. So like other thing which I preferred as native desktop software, coding without over-engineered, over-abstracted frameworks, high wall cubicles in office etc, gas cooking needs to go away.

Induction stoves have all the benefits you mention, plus they are faster to heat and cool down and produce no indoor particulate pollution.

Being able to cook when the power goes out is resilient. 100% reliance on electricity is building a fragile infrastructure.

https://pastebin.com/f8hA5eUB

Redundancy is a great thing. If the power lines ice over, or there's a grid failure for another reason, heat goes, water pipes freeze over, and people will literally freeze to death in winter. There was power failure in the entire province in Quebec in 1989 due to a solor storm. This is not hypothetical happening, but something to be expected. Considering the age and general decline of infrastructure in large US cities.

Agree with this, but the green solution for this is home batteries, not fossil fuels.

We do need to harden and invest in the electric grid though, and I worry that climate activists may not be making it a high enough priority. You’ll lose support for electrification real fast if people lose their heat in the depths of winter.

I've experienced power going out for a week. I don't know if we have battery technology to heat a house for a week. The tesla battery is 13.5 kWh and costs more than $10k. Just rough calculation, a typical baseboard heater is 1k so thats just enough capacity to run one heater for 13 hours.

The space requirements and enough battery capacity for an entire 50 story apartment building that would last a week, would probably be prohibitively expensive. The alternative of having to fix frozen pipes in a large apartment building, even if nothing is flooded is probably months of plumbing work. If you could even find the plumbers to do the work if theres a large scale power outage in a city.

My uncle is a plumber, plumbing a new condo building takes months and even years. And thats without complications of having to tear out walls to find where the pipes burst. I had frozen pipes in a house and it was a nightmare to deal with. They burst in multiple places and flood when temperature heats up.

I'm for green technology, but not when it will kill people. Its important to make sound decisions, not based on ideology. Especially if you want to achieve your goals. You don't want the public to quickly turn against you.

Oh I agree with you, I’m talking long term really, once battery technology is much better than it is now.

But for now redundancy can be achieved with generators. That will allow us to keep some fossil fuels as reserves, without needing to build new fossil fuel infrastructure that will exist for decades to come.

> a typical baseboard heater is 1k

If you're talking big, expensive batteries, you may as well include heat pump heating/cooling systems, which are much, much, much more efficient than traditional electric heaters, and can be rigged up with shared infrastructure to reduce costs. For example, my building has one large hot/cold water loop that individual units hook into with small heat pump systems.

There was massive, massive power failure this year in Texas [0], dozens of people died from cold exposure. Few households in Texas have gas heating, so you could say it didn't make difference, although the electric heating itself was part of the problem because everybody's heat pumps hit the threshold of inefficiency at the same time, overloading the grid. Obviously, if you had gas to your house, you could run a generator and keep your pipes from exploding. If you had a gasoline car, you could put grandma in there to warm her up and stop her from dying. Or maybe you had a portable propane heater, or simply a wood stove or fireplace. The fully electrified house has none of these unless you spent $40,000 on a massive solar / battery setup.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

It's funny you say that because the only reason the electricity supply collapsed is because the natural gas supply collapsed. So no, you would have been just as cold.

What’s so stupid is this isn’t the problem - the amount of fuel oil heated buildings in Manhattan is astonishing

Heating oil is one part of the problem. Natural gas is another.

Oil heating and poor thermal insulation. Burn more oil in winter, and more electricity in summer!

I think adding good insulation would make the largest improvement both for energy efficiency and quality of life in such buildings.

IMO a blanket ban like that is stupid.

The amount of gas used for cooking is miniscule, accounting for under 3% of consumption[1].

Cooking with fire is different than cooking on an electric or induction stovetop. Banning the use of gas for heating would have been more than enough.

That's before we even get to the amazing fact that 40% of our electricity comes from burning natural gas [2], and that that natural gas powerplant efficiency is about 40%[3].

Which means that with the existing electricity infrastructure, switching from gas to electricity for heating results in more gas being burned.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse.

[1] https://www.livemint.com/opinion/online-views/is-your-cookin...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[3] http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/fossil-fuels...

I guess part of the reason is that, in the long run, you don't want to maintain the gas infrastructure for a whole city just to let people cook with gas.

All existing residential is excluded. Any new residential is mostly excluded for the next 6 years. Commercial, manufacturing, and laundromats are excluded.

The city will be maintaining the gas infrastructure for eternity. There will just be a subset of unfortunate residents that have to cook with electric while 99% of their neighbors continue with gas.

Yep. Practically everyone in New York has gas, and it is so wonderful. When I left I had to get used to electric again, it's like an easy bake oven.

An electric stovetop boils water faster than a gas stovetop

Please stop calling them “electric”. You are almost certainly meaning resistive. Induction is also electric and is superior to both resistive and gas.

I don't see landlords in New York forking out for induction ovens. Tenants will be lucky to get three working burners on a 1987 Daihatsu range.

Appliances do not last forever. The internet is telling me that a typical gas stove lasts about 15 years, and a gas furnace in the 15-30 range.

I'd expect that at some point in the next decade they will extend the ban to cover replacement appliances so as existing gas stoves and furnaces die they will be replaced with electric.

More current, more wires, more circuits... seems to me the smallest unit of replacement is a whole building that gets a good electrical rewiring. In NYC those will be large buildings.

The internet should also tell you that you can’t trivially replace gas with electric. You must run new electric lines to service the higher power requirements.

My fermi estimate is that every electrician in NYC would need to upgrade 1,750 apartments.

In many cities in NL the plan is to completely replace gas with electric by 2050. New buildings will not have a connection to the gas network, existing ones will have to be retrofitted. In some test neighborhoods, this is already happening.

I can imagine it will be the same more or less everywhere at some point, including NYC. Sure, there might be a setback and the law might change, but given the plan to reduce emissions it seems kinda inevitable (again, in the long run).

I assume the goal here is to eliminate the expensive and leaky natural gas delivery network entirely: nobody is going to build something that complicated just so a few foodies can make stir fry (and people who really care can purchase it in bottled form.) So any world where the LNG delivery network exists is going to be one where it’s used for heating. Getting to CO2 net zero involves moving those applications entirely to non-fossil electricity.

> I assume the goal here is to eliminate the expensive and leaky natural gas delivery network entirely: nobody is going to build something that complicated just so a few foodies can make stir fry (and people who really care can purchase it in bottled form.)

There are inductive surfaces explicitly designed for woks, with a very deep, concave "bowl" to accommodate the wok.

I know two families (both Thai) that have bought them with zero regret and no complaints. Not cheap and certainly niche, but they do work as expected.

UPDATE: There are also adapter rings designed to work with woks. These aren't "half-assed, maybe they work" items. They are made for commercial kitchens, as in actual restaurants. Restaurants don't pay Gaggenau for hoping something works and doesn't disappoint customers -- they pay them because it does.

That's great to hear! It's still legal in restaurants so less rush, but good to know.

>Getting to CO2 net zero involves moving those applications entirely to non-fossil electricity.

The necessary and sufficient condition for that is the cost of electric heating to consumer being lower than the cost of gas heating in both short and long term (i.e., a 5-year subsidy isn't it).

This requires a significant reshaping of our electricity generation. Everything else is a band-aid on an axe wound.

A federal tax on burning natural gas can make that shift happen, but will hit the poor people.

Finally, again, you can't shift to non-fossil electricity because you don't get to choose which electricity you shift to. As is, you're just going to burn more gas in a different place. The benefits of this rearrangement aren't obvious to me.

It's more efficient to burn gas to make electricity (45% efficient), transport it over the grid (95%), and then run a heat pump (250 - 600% efficient) than it is to burn the gas for heat (80 - 95% efficient).

And renewable electricity is cheaper than gas electricity, if it is available.

You have to factor in the energy efficiency of heat pumps, and if you do, burning gas to produce electricity to run a heat pump can be comparable in efficiency to burning gas directly.

This would really depend on the outdoor air temperature though, wouldn't it?

This has been covered pretty extensively in several comment chains, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687522. But basically, even down to below freezing it's still way above 100% efficient.

> That's before we even get to the amazing fact that 40% of our electricity comes from burning natural gas [2], and that that natural gas powerplant efficiency is about 40%

Like electric cars, a benefit would be that the energy source is generalized. I like thinking of it as a good separation of concerns. If nearly everything is electrified, then everyone benefits as better and more efficient energy sources become available over time.

It would also be easier to employ hypothetical future carbon capture systems at a small number of power plants compared to a large number of homes.

Efficiency of cooking with gas is less than 30% so I'm not sure your point about relative efficiencies is correct. But I agree with the overall point.

This is about heating more than cooking as heating is a way bigger energy use for most households, but you are seriously proposing it would a smart move to build out gas delivery infrastructure just so people can keep cooking with gas?

More importantly, please stop using the tired old excuse that we should wait to electrify until all electric generation is renewable. Converting domestic heating infrastructure to electric is a massive project that will probably take decades and represents billions of tons of CO2 emissions already baked in. We need to start now. Deciding to build new gas infrastructure today is committing to burn more gas for decades.

“…and that that natural gas powerplant efficiency is about 40%[3].“

The next line in your reference points out that combined cycle plats are >60% efficient which are pretty much all gas plants.

60% of the energy in gas is turned into electricity.

"New buildings in the biggest U.S. city with 8.8 million residents will have to use electricity for heat and cooking"

Hmm, I wonder where the electricity comes from. If it comes from natural gas as well, then they're just adding another step of energy transformation, which is aka more inefficiency, right? Or worse, maybe some of the electricity comes from dirtier sources than natural gas.

They're being smarter than that. The city also signed an electricity supply agreement with Hydro Québec, which is supposed to be operational before the ban on natural gas in new buildings comes into effect. [Minor correction: some smaller new buildings may have the ban in effect for 2 years before the new electricity becomes operational.]

Hydro Québec is, as the name suggests, hydroelectricity and therefore cleaner and more sustainable/renewable than natural gas.

No, even if power plants are still run by fossil fuels, the electrification of the home leads to greater efficiency due to the economies of scale that centralizing the power production provides.

Also, once everything is electrified, it’s easy to switch out the source of that electricity to something cleaner, at any time. Whereas people purchasing new gas appliances now will keep them in service for the next 10-20 years.

My immediate reaction was the exact opposite, because replacing natural gas with manufactured gas would be comparatively easy. You can even push plain H2 into the mix as long as the fraction is within a certain range. A gas network can serve as a considerable sink for non-dispatchable renewables to not go to waste. But it's the same (or better!) for centralized natgas plants, so that's clearly better, at least as long as there are no cheap compromises taken to go electric (like installing cheap resistive heating, which is actually a thing here in Germany, where an entire industry pretends that we'd be fine in cold air as long as there's some IR emitter pointed at our body)

Instead of burning natural gas at the building, burn 5x as much at a power plant hundreds of miles away to generate electricity, then convert it back into heat at the building. Smart.

A lot easier to switch to renewals with electricity. I don’t know of a way to do that with natural gas.

There's [1] but I'm not impressed by the efficiency numbers.

Also, no need to go through electricity. Significant part of my city is heated by waste heat of power plant that would otherwise go out the cooling tower.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

Couldn't they just cut off the gas and switch to electric once the power plants are clean(-enough)?

NYC already has relatively low-CO2 electricity and is signing an agreement with hydro Quebec to keep things that way.

No, you need to transition over time.

Your idea is to just cut off the gas one day, and expect everyone to go out and buy new appliances at the same time? I don’t think I need to explain why phasing in such a change is preferable.

I don't expect to just cut it off all of a sudden. They could announce the cut some years in advance.

Of course, if right now they already expect to cut off the gas a few years from now, they may as well not build new pipes.

A lot of gas distribution networks are experimenting with hydrogen blending (adding a % of sustainably generated hydrogen to the methane blend), much the same as adding ethanol to petrol.

However, beyond the engineering issues (existing pipes not always suitable for hydrogen blended gas) it just kicks the can down the road and delays the structural changes needed to get households away from using natural gas.

Only a few are doing full % hydrogen conversions, City of Leeds being the biggest project under way.

That sounds interesting, how are they managing the invisible nature of hydrogen flames?

Power plants are way more efficient, transfer loses are way exaggerated, and most of the energy will be soon provided by only renewable sources.

EDIT: and according to this [0], most of New York's electricity is already carbon free.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NY#tabs-4

Power plants are more efficient at generating electricity, mechanical work, etc. than small generators. They are certainly not more efficient at generating heat than just burning the gas is.

Why not? When you use a stove, look how much of the flame is open, and take note of how much heat is being thrown off and not going into your food. When gas is burned in a plant, much more of that heat is captured.

But it’s really a moot point, because the goal is to change the power plants to clean energy sources anyway.

Quantify "way more efficient". How many cubic meters of natural gas do I need to burn to produce a given number of joules of heat at point of use vs. at a power plant?

It's not just transfer losses. The power plant has to heat water to steam, use the steam to turn a turbine. There's losses all along that process vs. directly using the heat where you want to heat something.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, until about 0 degrees F, electric heat pumps generate more BTU per watt than burning natural gas in your room.

And the power plant is far more efficient at capturing the heat than the furnace in your home or building.

A huge power plant that burns 5 times the amount of gas also generates more than 5 times the energy compared to you burning it at home at your stove. Especially for cooking it really surprised me that cooking with gas is still so common in the US. Here, basically every new house has uses induction which has become really accessible.

When it comes to gas for heating I'm somewhat indifferent. Even if the electricity is primarily from fossil source (which I don't know, but it is likely) I'd imagine it is a whole lot easier to continue improving the energy production to reach net-zero than it would be to wait and replace the gas heating in thousands of buildings.

The power plant burns the gas to heat water, which creates steam, which turns a turbine, which generates electricity which then gets turned back into heat at my stove.

The gas burned at my stove doesn't need 5 times as much because the heat from burning it goes directly into whatever I'm cooking on my stove.

Have you ever tried to hold your hand next to the edge of the pot..? A lot of the heat is not going into the pan.

Yeah, the same thing is happening at the power plant.

It’s absolutely not.

I am very aware how natural gas energy plants work. However, your oversimplification of the process misses a crucial point. Many power plants improve their efficiency for example by providing district heating, etc.

Your stove is not only heating your pan, it also distributes a lot of heat into your room. And during summer you probably use quite a bit of energy to cool down your again. An induction cooktop is the most efficient type with somewhere around 80% iirc. Also, your electric cooktop can easily be supplied with carbon free electricity, while your gas stove will never be carbon neutral. Not to mention the possible health implications of an open flame burning natural gas while cooking.

I can't speak to the relative efficiency, but central power generation is much easier to upgrade (both in terms of scrubbing the emissions and switching to renewables).

According to my power bill, 50% of electricity in my Brooklyn apartment comes from nuclear generation, about 25% from hydro and solar, and the remaining 25% from fossil fuels, mostly natural gas.

Where I live heat can literally be the difference between life and death. I would never put my family in the position of relying on electricity for heat. If you do God help you when the renewable powered grid goes down. I’ll be warm and happy with my gas line and a full tank in the yard as backup. If you vote for crap like this you can’t come over.

These restrictions are arbitrary and nonsensical. No new gas in buildings under 7 floors after 2023. No new gas in buildings over 7 floors after 2027. …unless it’s a kitchen, laundromat, or manufacturing.

So… we’re going to have 99% of buildings wired for gas for many decades to come. We will continue maintaining the infrastructure with no end in sight.

Is this the biggest display of virtue signaling in US history? How will this accomplish anything at all?

As a NYC resident I want to be annoyed by this, because I prefer cooking on gas, but if I die of old age in NYC I won’t ever be impacted by this.

Would you be happier if they banned all gas outright? This is how you make change, in small steps.

If they actually banned gas I would just leave.

Fortunately, they can’t do that. Instead, they focus on writing rules that will have zero impact.

Well no, they don’t have zero impact. They have enough of an impact that they will improve things a bit, but not cause a sudden change that would cause people such as you to leave.

That’s the entire idea behind phasing this in, and by your own admission it seems to be well designed.

It’s not being phased in. There is no announced plans for this to ever apply to existing residential buildings. There isn’t enough new residential construction in NYC for this to be anything but a rounding error.

The only reason the council is even able to get away with such a ban is because of how pointless they’ve made it. It’s just pure virtue signaling by a council that apparently can’t find anything better or useful to work on.

Why not just let individuals decide what they want? Why use the heavy hammer of a ban? Maybe many people don't want this kind of change. Your comment reads a lot like “this is how you boil a frog, slowly”.

I'm sure this ban will have no side effects that would increase the cost of living for poorer people or make it more expensive to build new homes in NY due to the extra regulatory burden. NY is about to get even more affordable.

Sure thing this will not cause an increase in power consumption that cannot be fulfilled with NY's power production that would require lossy transmission of energy from another state that uses coal (much worse than gas) to keep the city lit. Thank you regulators for your good intentions

Have you actually read anything about this before posting? ConEd pushed lawmakers to ban it despite selling gas!: https://www.nysfocus.com/2021/12/01/coned-gas-ban/

Cooking needs are nothing compared to air conditioning, and new buildings are markedly more efficient due to things like heat pumps and improved insulation.

There's also a certain irony in your other point when most new construction makes NYC more expensive...

Tons of areas getting rezoned to allow developers to build overpriced luxury pads with insane tax abatements in exchange for paying lip service to affordable housing.

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