Americans’ Gas Stoves Are as Bad for Climate as 500k Cars | Hacker News Reader

Americans’ Gas Stoves Are as Bad for Climate as 500k Cars

bloomberg.com

28 pointsmettler37 comments

While I am generally supportive of electrification efforts as a major tool in combating climate change, I am wary of having a single energy source to my house.

Particularly in light of the grid failures in Texas last winter. We would have been in big trouble without uninterrupted gas service. Running a small (1500 watt) generator to power the blower and control circuits, we were able to heat the house and cook without issue.

The redundancy was hugely important. Granted a rooftop solar+battery system would also suffice, but I'm wondering how long you can run a stove or furnace from those batteries.

This is the reason many people in northern New England typically have a combination of propane, electric, or a wood stove. Relying on any one is an invitation for frozen pipes.

In all fairness the Texas grid failures were the result of intentional choices made by the Texas government. Other states with similar weather had nothing like the catastrophic failure TX had.

Absolutely true. But redundancy is still a good thing.

The title could be re written as "Americans’ gas stoves are as bad for the climate as less than 1% of US all cars".

They didn't really dive into the fact that if you switch all of those gas stoves for electricity...a lot of that electricity comes from NG or coal fired plants anyway.

They focus on leaks too...well every appliance plugged in leaks electricity it multiple forms.

There is a planned pivot from dirty electricity to clean electricity. There is no pivot from dirty NG to clean NG.

More efficient electronics and less wasteful leeches are possible over time. Sealing hundreds of thousands of miles of decentralized gas piping effectively is cost-prohibitive.

Eventually...and maybe once we get to 100% clean electricty we can look at adding more things like 100% EVs, heat and cooking stoves. However pushing to add them now doesn't help the situation. Old appliances in general should probably be replaced...a 30yr old freezer is probably not as efficient as a brand new one, just like a 30yr old gas stove is probably not as efficient or leak free as a brand new one.

My father in law, a quite intelligent person with a non-technical background, asked me a really good question re: electric appliances and vehicles.

He was holding off on getting an electric car, because he didn't understand how it could possibly be more efficient and cost-effective to use gas appliances in the home, but suddenly it's more efficient and cost-effective to use electric motors in cars.

Of course the problem is that generating heat with electricity is probably easiest done by spark-gapping to start a fire, and letting the fire generate heat, whereas generating motion with electromagnetism is quite easy compared to harnessing explosions to transfer to movement.

At any rate, I'd say let's replace cars first, then come after home appliances. They're relatively efficient at their job.

And cars are a much much larger scale problem. Home stove emmisions are a rounding error.

To add confusion; induction is drastically more efficient than resistance heating; heat pumps are drastically more efficient than gas or traditional heat.

So the communication problem is also one of changing technology. Technologies that adults learned 30 years ago are not the same as those today.

Resistance heating is 100% efficient, how can inductive heating be more efficient than that?

Resistance heating is 100% efficient at heating the element, but to heat the pan, it has to transfer through the pan/element interface.

100% isn't the highest efficiency you can get though. It's even more efficient to use the electrical energy to concentrate existing heat than it is to create new heat

Outside is a really large heat sink. So you can dump unwanted heat or cold outside to heat out cool your house using a heat pump.

Resistance heating is 100% efficient at heating the world. Considerably less efficient at heating the one specific pot you are trying to heat.

So Americans' gas stoves are as bad for the climate as ~0.2% of Americans' cars.

I'm very environmentally conscious but personally I'm gonna switch to an electric vehicle and heat pump before changing my stove to an electric one I think.

I will make sure to have proper ventilation when cooking though from now on, I wasn't aware of the health aspect of all the byproducts of cooking with gas.

To be fair. Your gas stove in your home can pose health risks due to often poor ventilation of the fumes.

Your personal and childs health might improve by moving to induction.

True, I hope that being more mindful of ventilation, especially while cooking will have a positive short term effect.

I recently read that most fume hoods aren’t powerful enough to remove the worst of it, but can’t find my source.

Many hoods are ductless and recirculate the air after passing it through filters. I imagine these likely do nothing or close to it regarding removing the offending substances.

All but a very few instances of natural gas malfunctions (like a completely severed pipe) are safely mitigated by mixing and dilution.

Most common gasses are only dangerous in large amounts, when stratified and consentrated in a small confined space.

Which is why ductless hoods are able to meet code in the first place.

Ironically, this has become a bigger issue because of houses being more tightly sealed due to efficiency regulations. Old houses would naturally draw and vent in the event of any sort of out-of-equilibrium gas buildup.

Swapping a gas stove for an electric can easily cost double the price of the stove. Consider running a 30, 40, or possibly even 50 amp circuit and capping or removing the gas line. Neither of these tasks are ones that are ok to be done poorly.

And that's before you even turn it on.

Electricity is far more expensive per BTU than gas pretty much anywhere with municipal gas.

Do you have a source that quantifies it? Something along the lines of "It costs 5 cents to make a box of macaroni and cheese using gas, but 7 cents using electricity".

I just moved from a condo that used electricity for cooking to a house that uses natural gas for cooking. Same number of people in the household and same amount of cooking done. How much less am I paying? $1? $10? Is it enough to matter?

There's ~100,000 BTUs per therm (as sold in the USA). A therm where we are (Bay Area California) costs roughly $2 USD.

We pay ~$0.30 per kWh via electricity.

We can convert a kilowatt hour to BTUs - ~3400 BTU/hr ~= 1 kWh.

Whereas the $2 we pay for a natural gas therm is equivalent to (100000/3400) ~= 29kWh or ~$0.07/kWh.

tldr; leaving out all other conversion inefficiencies, gas is roughly 25% the cost of electricity, for equivalent energy, at least in California (which is a place that would presumably push a bit harder for gas->electricity conversions).

Excellent, thanks! Now we just need to know how many BTUs are needed to complete a specific cooking task. My main goal is not to question - just to quantify. Is the energy cost of cooking a big enough deal to worry about whether you are using gas or electric?

I just looked it up - in my area gas is about 40% the cost of yours and electric is about 30%. So for me, electric is ~3x more expensive rather than 4x. I'd still like to know if that matters :)

In general, our natural gas costs are overwhelmingly for heating - house heating in winter, and hot water. Our gas per month expenditure in the middle of summer is perhaps 20% of winter.

My guess is that our gas stove costs rarely exceed $10/month, maybe less than that.

I would recommend checking your gas bills for mid-winter and comparing to mid-summer. And then take into account any other gas users in your house (clothes dryer? hot water heater>).

More likely than not, the vast majority of your gas costs (especially if you live in a place with cold weather!), is similarly going towards heating, not stove..

Here in Georgia, before junk fees:

  $0.0566 per kWh
  $1.09 per therm ($0.038 per kWh using your conversion)

That's true with marginal costs, but it doesn't consider fixed costs. My range is the only thing that uses gas in my unit. The connection fee is $18/month. The actual charge for gas was $0.73 last month. Sure, the marginal economics look better, but I'd save close to $200/year if I could switch over to all electric.

According to Statista there's 284 million cars in the US; so getting rid of gas stoves would address < 0.2% of the problem posed by cars.

Not to mention where does the electricity for those replacement stoves come from...probably NG or coal...

I don't have a strong opinion either way, but it's great to see a study with accompanying data and reasonably human-readable documentation: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707

https://archive.fo/stDMo

I appreciate that this is mathematically interesting, but from a practical standpoint, they should focus on “the emissions from gas stoves combined with an absence of fresh air inflow and poor exhaust outflow” if they want to see actual change.

Here's an excellent article about how our damning of cheap, reliable, "dirty" energy is going to push us into a crisis that dwarfs anything in recent memory. What happens when energy isn't cheap and isn't available?

https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/09/29/will-esg-creat...

I respectfully disagree. This article make large generalizations with little data. Borderline fear mongering

> Almost every day, we hear of a different policy plan to reduce energy production. We learn of new mandates, new taxes, more cancelled pipelines, more cancelled permits, and more penalties. What we don’t hear about is where the replacement energy comes from.

Solar, wind and more recently battery capacity is growing at an incredible rate. Even just this week there have been announcements for massive battery expansion in Texas and in California

Not saying there wont be problems over the next decade. Transitions are difficult. But for the article to to say "it will cause chaos for most of society" seems disingenuous

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