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Comment by gattilorenz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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