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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This is such a foolish law, environmentally speaking.

I totally understand doing this once we've phased out burning natural gas for electricity.

But we are not there today, today we are burning natural gas for electricity. So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful.

And yes I'm well aware that induction stoves are a thing. But induction stoves of today cannot run all four burners and the stove at the same time.

We would need to basically double the electric supply to the range to do that.

The standard 50 amp plug is not enough. And a lot of homes go with the cheaper 30 amp.

Each burner needs around 15 amp and then the stove needs maybe 30. Basically you need around 100 amp supply, or more realistically two 50s.

Of course homes typically max out at 200 amp service, so 100 amp for the stove plus 50 amp for the car plus 30 amp for the dryer plus 30 amp for the water heater plus 30 amp for the AC, and you can see we're in trouble.

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> I totally understand doing this once we've phased out burning natural gas for electricity

I've been thinking about this in Europe. How to wean oneself off of gas.

The big wins are electric generation, and those can be done within a reasonable timeframe by states with largely unilateral decision making.

But the long tail... Domestic use of gas. That's hard.

How does one ask an entire populace to rid themselves off of gas hobs, gas heated water, gas heated radiators?

It takes time, maybe with concerted effort in only one generation could it be achieved.

Weirdly it makes sense to start banning things on the long tail and seed the idea that this all comes to an end and early adopters need to be on electricity already.

As ridiculous a drop in the ocean of banning a BBQ grill... That long tail has to be addressed.

I'd love to see a ban on all gas combi boilers and gas hobs in the UK as soon as 5 years time. I'm more surprised this isn't seen as an opportunity to innovate in this space and open multiple new markets and leaps in what can be done with electricity.

One easy thing to do is build all new homes with a good electricity connection, heat pumps and no gas lines anymore. Leaving out gas lines saves a lot of complex infrastructure costs and risks.

Upgrading old homes is less urgent. Make the first step first, the rest will come.

This is why we created Lun. Every gas boiler's consumption emits about 2tCO2 per year - and there are about 90 million buildings in Europe that could be heated using heat pumps instead, with huge benefits for energy efficiency and carbon emissions.

As you said, it's a hard problem.

Luckily, politicians and bureaucrats are passing more and more legislation that will force the fossil fuels out of heating over the next decade. We see it as our job to make sure it's going to happen in real life by being the glue between all parties in the value chain (consumers, OEMs, installers, utilities, governments, financial institutions).

And we're looking for great people ;) careers.lun.energy

For where I live in London, ground heat pumps are infeasible and air heat pumps would produce too much noise and not be permitted under conservation area rules.

What most of the UK needs is an effective drop-in replacement to a combi boiler, ideally one that doesn't need a large water storage cylinder. It could even be a combination of a slow boiler (for radiators) and a fast water heating unit (for bath/shower/taps).

Any retrofit of air or ground heat pumps into Victorian terraces just wouldn't work or be acceptable.

The UK needs to replace millions of these style boilers https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/products/boilers/directory...

As yet no comparable electric version exists at similar price, size, capability. This is where a govt can incentivise innovation to both create what we need, and then help it be deployed (first with a stick like banning things, and second with a carrot like helping those in poverty get it for cheap/free).

For dense, urban environment I think district heating should we the way to go. Works very well in Denmark!

Still unrealistic.

Requires land for the district heating facility, and then ripping up the road to lay plumbing, etc.

For the UK the solution is known: create and mass produce an electric alternative to the combo boiler.

The numbers required, and the time to fit them offers at least a decade of mid-skilled manufacturing and trades employment, as well as recycling opportunities for the old boilers (aluminium, steel, brass).

The cost can also be spread over time and you can start anywhere once the boilers exist.

Consumers tend to be price-sensitive and the gas stove is usually cheaper than the low-end electric stove tops, to say nothing of the higher end ones.

Also gas is familiar and popular perception for electric tends to be poorer than gas. Admittedly anecdotal but when I hear someone who I know choosing gas over electric, that is often their primary justification.

And do it for bad political reasons, as opposed to good political reasons or good reasons in the absolute?

Like I don't let Joseph Biden tell me how to talk, what to think, who to blame, whom I should stand by or do in. I'm not going to let him tell me how to cook.

Plus it looks counterproductive, like an uneconomical reduction in gas usage leads to a higher gas usage in the profitable part of the economy to make up for it.

lun.energy

What is lun? I looked at the website and learnt nothing.

> 30 amp for the dryer plus 30 amp for the water heater plus 30 amp for the AC,

Heat pump water heaters and heat pump air heaters solve that problem and save money.

Heat pump dryers on the other hand are a bit rubbish (take a very long time to dry clothes, but they do save money).

Heat pump water heaters are also bad, I wanted to buy one and didn't because they are very slow to heat the water. Too slow to be useful for me.

They are especially bad in northern climates since the incoming water is cold, and they put cold air in your house - which then has to be heated by the home heater.

An A/C is already a heat pump.

> water heater…slow

it goes in an insulated tank? why does the speed matter? the tank is always at temperature. if you run out of hot water, that’s a tank size issue, not a heater technology issue.

A 40 gallon tank can provide 2 showers per hour. You can get 80 gallon ones for residential use, larger than that is in commercial territory.

But that's still just 4 showers - if you have a bunch of people all getting ready for an event, and you also have laundry to do (which uses double what a shower uses, although takes longer) and run the dishwasher, etc.

It's not enough. You would need a truly mammoth tank.

Instead you have a large fire at the bottom, and heat the water almost as fast as you use it, then you don't run out.

A heat pump water heater would simply not work for a 6 person home in the north in the winter.

Congratulations on creating a scenario in your mind that will never happen. If you are all less than an hour away from leaving for an event, why are you washing clothes that won't be ready in time? Did you really have to run the dishwasher right before Kim's wedding or could you have set it to run while you are gone or after you get back if you somehow have a dishwasher without a timer setting? If you know you need four people to shower, maybe don't all wait until the last minute.

Is this a theoretical analysis? My assessment is that they are already much better, particularly if combined with an efficient house and sufficient battery storage to use low demand electricity. The power output from an ASHP can exceed a typical gas boiler if that is desired.

> The power output from an ASHP can exceed a typical gas boiler if that is desired.

That is desired, and apparently is not actually the case. I did my research and that's what people tell me, so I didn't get one.

They might work better in hotter climates, but in northern ones with incoming water near freezing, they don't.

Our heat-pump water heater is outdoors, so it doesn't cool the house down any further. Our hot water cylinder is also able to heat water if the heat pump can't keep up.

"So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful." I (genuinely) wonder if what's true. I remember thinking the same things about electric car "how can burning fuel in a factory, storing it, send it thought line for kilometers and then store them in a car batteries and then feed the motor be more efficient than burning fuel directly in the motor" and was proven false. Assuming we aldready have the electric lines of course. (I also dont know the ergy waste of packaging the gaz in usable bottle, move them and retrive them, I assume it's significant, maybe i'm wrong).

If you're burning fuel for power that's one thing, but you don't get any conversion losses at all if you're burning it for heat underneath/inside the thing you want to be hot.

You're not losing any if you're burning it inside the thing you want to heat (your home). You definitely lose a lot if you're burning it underneath the thing you want to heat (a pan on the stove); a lot of the heat goes around the pan. Just feel the air above the pan. All of that is wasted heat.

I could see gas being less efficient at heating a pan since it's using convection in an uncontained space.

What I was getting at was the fact that with electric, you're burning the gas inside a heat engine to generate power first, so right off the bat your best outcome is the Carnot limit.

The modern power plants with combined cycle have an efficiency of up to 65%.

The power plants with heat cogeneration have an efficiency of up to 80%.

I doubt very much that even half of the energy consumed by burning gas ends inside the cooking pot in most cases.

Regardless of the energy efficiency or pollution risk of gas stoves, there are people who prefer other cooking methods just because they like their results better.

Even if I have a gas stove and I continue to pay for gas as if I would use it, because I live in a condo and there is no individual metering, I have stopped using the gas stove several years ago.

An electric motor is more efficient mostly because of regenerative braking. Not having an engine with variable RPM helps.

They should make a car that's basically a generator charging a medium sized battery, and everything else is electric. (Don't directly power the wheels from the engine, that makes things too complicated.)

Kind of like a diesel-electric train, but with a battery to capture energy from regenerative braking, and for surge power.

No, the regenerative breaking isn't the reason why electric vehicles are more efficient. Traditional ICE are very inefficient, only converting 20% of chemical energy to kinetic energy (with the rest being turned to heat). Diesels are a better at 40%. (modern ccs gas power plants get to 65% from gas to electricity)

Electric motors in cars are approx. 90% efficient. Combined with charging losses and others, that comes out to approx. 70%-80%.

Regenarative breaking only adds an additional ~20%.

Isn’t that just a series hybrid?

Yes, that's exactly what that is, and apparently there are none for sale.

There must be a reason why not, but I don't know what it is.

Chevy had one called the Volt, but ended production in 2019.

From Wikipedia:

“In 2018, General Motors decided to end production in March 2019. The primary reason given was that the Volt is a sedan, and sales of traditional sedans were in decline. Car salesmen were proving resistant to selling the car because it was more complicated (and thus took more of their time) to explain how the vehicle operated. Marketing trends showed that sales of hybrids were dropping as more customers were turning to all-electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Bolt. The range-anxiety associated with all-electric vehicles had been in decline due to better battery technology, and most hybrid drivers were turning on their gas-powered engines less frequently. The battery technology developed for the Volt had already been incorporated into the Bolt.”

It's not very efficient, certainly not enough to be "better" than a conventional IC-engined car.

You're carrying around a lot of batteries, motor, and generator that are basically just dead weight. A petrol engine and gearbox is light.

In trains it works quite well because you need an immense amount of torque to pull away, proportionately far far more than you need from even a large truck, and then you need a relatively small amount of power to keep it moving. Having a big generator driving bogey-mounted traction motors with simple reduction boxes means you don't need a huge gearbox and very complicated driveshaft system, and you don't care so much about weight.

I've seen this series-hybrid system also used in buses in my town. I'm not a mechanical or electrical engineer, but as far as I understand, the advantage in this scenario is that the motor can run nearly continuously at lower RPM where it is apparently more efficient. The spike in power usage that's needed during acceleration is then handled by the battery acting as a buffer.

It isn't efficient exactly but it can make financial sense depending on the cost of electricity. Efficiency is not the only metric and needs to be balanced with other issues. An ice engine may be less efficient than a turbine but that does not mean you put a turbine in a pickup truck.

> but it can make financial sense depending on the cost of electricity.

Don't forget to price in carbon emissions and the cost of pollution.

> So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful.

Depends entirely on what you use it for. For heating, burning gas is very efficient: everything gets turned into heat. For cooking, a lot of heat gets lost, because you heat the air, the air heats the pan, and the pan heats the food. An induction stove heats the pan directly, which means less heat is lost, which also makes cooking more comfortable.

> But induction stoves of today cannot run all four burners and the stove at the same time.

Yes they can. Mine does. Of course your electricity supply needs to be powerful enough, but that's easily upgraded. In NL, 3x25A is extremely common. Our house had 1x35A which wasn't enough, so we had it upgraded to 3x35A, and that's plenty.

Of course switching from gas to electricity will mean changes in infrastructure, but that's not a blocking obstacle. It would make sense for any new homes built today to have a better electricity connection and no gas. Heating? Heat pumps are even more efficient than gas heating.

If you're worried about gas usage, the stove seems to be the wrong place to care as well. We use propane for our stove, which comes to somewhere in the neighborhood of $100/year (<30 gallons). Our space heating is oil, and that is over $2000 a year and is more energy dense (~1000 gallons).

If you want to have the most effect on usage, you'll worry about space heating not cooking. As long as your home is warm, you don't care. My wife specifically wanted gas for the stove instead of electric when we redid the kitchen, so we went through the effort to get propane.

15% of all natural gas use is residential.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...

These laws are about removing the need for gas lines entirely.

I think that restaurants count as commercial so the impact would be even higher. It's nonsense to claim that these changes won't have an impact.

Using natural gas in an appliance is more efficient than burning it to produce electricity (heat pumps are the exception here). Plus, there's a good chance we will want to use the natural gas grid to move renewable hydrogen, methane, or dimethyl ether because those forms of energy are easier to store and move than electricity.

Electricity doesn't only come from natural gas.

I remember reading some studies and IIRC it turned out that overall power usage including energy transfer efficiency and grid leakage for gas stoves and induction was about the same.

One other issue with gas stoves which I believe some California gov agency recently discovered is that even when you're not using them they may contribute to methane gas leakage.

Someone wired 120 amps to just my stove. I think my A/C is the only other circuit that fat. House is a "builder" model I estimate is about 1 in 10 or 15 around here, from the 1980s.

120amp to your stove? What in the world does the plug look like? I've never seen a plug that big, except with 3-phase.

NEMA doesn’t define a plug that big, so it would have to be hard-wired, and probably has a cutoff switch.

I'm almost sure that's the case. Source: The breaker is 30A x 4 ganged.

you don't know what you're talking about or anything about induction stoves

induction stoves are far more efficient in terms of heat transferred to food vs gas, which mostly heats the air instead

and yeah it's a bummer the one time every 2 years you go to use all 4 burners at once you won't be able to max amp it

I use all 4 burners at the same time at least every week, if not more often.

You must not cook very much.

It's not hard: boil water for pasta, potatoes, make a soup, and then cook a protein, and bake a cake. That's not a complicated meal - you could do than on any random day.

> which mostly heats the air instead

That isn't actually true, which you can tell for yourself by simply putting your hand near a fire, and a fire with a pot on it.

> bake a cake

I'm willing to bet most people don't bake cakes daily. When i cook it's usually 2, max 3 at the same time, even with a multi-course meal.

So therefor, it's fine if you now have a stove that can only heat 2 burners at once.

Why have the other burners at all? We could save so much space if we just had 2 burner stoves and no ovens since I never bake either. I do use the oven occasionally but occasionally is not enough excuse to have it I guess. Obviously no one even needs a stove at all, that's what restarants and grubhub are for right?

> This is such a foolish law, environmentally speaking.

I concur. This is the same thing as blaming Climate Change on road vehicles when most of Climate Change is caused by energy, shipping, construction, concrete manufacture, glass making, etc. Mostly, Climate Change isn't caused by the People. It's business and industry causing it. IOW, greed causes Global Warming.

So they're focusing on a space that has negligible effect or no effect whatsoever on Climate Change, while there are massive methane and ethane leaks in Bakersfield and Aliso Canyon, the later of which dumped 100K tons of methane into the atmosphere. Pay no attention to most of the stupid oil rigs all over SoCal that are probably leaking mountains of methane and expressly not benefitting CA residents with fuel less than $8/gal.

Why does everything have to be so stupid?! Just shut it all down, every contributor, ban it all, bite the energy bullet now, and stop Climate Change before the dang Thermohaline breaks and Europe freezes over. Well, I guess that will stop it, but we'll all be half asleep and asphyxiating from so much CO2.

> This is the same thing as blaming Climate Change on road vehicles when most of Climate Change is caused by energy, shipping, construction, concrete manufacture, glass making, etc.

Do you have data on how much each of those sectors contributes? IIRC, road transportation contributes a relatively large amount.

Road transportation is 15% of total CO2 emissions. See https://ourworldindata.org/transport#co2-emissions-by-mode-o...

Thanks for the homework, but no thanks. You do it.

Off the top of my head, consumer vehicles globally contribute 5-6% of Climate Change-causing emissions. If you'd care to look, you'll see this pales in comparison to the major contributors, electricity generation, agriculture, deforestation, oil drilling, etc.

If we could overnight stop the major contributors, such as industrial processes, your ice car just wouldn't matter.

If you make the claims, the homework is yours. Otherwise, the claims could say anything.

I suppose you have data on that.

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