So who is paying for this week's "gas stoves should be banned" PR push, then?
Rocky Mountain Institute - Carbon Free Buildings paid for funding of study.
Well known astroturfers.
They’ve known since 1970 that climate change due to induction stoves… wait, sorry, confused them with Exxon.
Easy mistake.
Who has deeper pockets and more to loose if anthropogenic climate change is real and caused by co2 emissions? If you truly think it’s the folks that are cutting grant checks to climate scientists, I have a bridge to sell you.
My brother in Christ, re-examine your priors.
My brother in Christ, re-evaluate your thorazine dosage.
For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period of time, far more heat than an ordinary house circuit would be able to power. This replicates some of the advantages of gas.
But honestly I think the ban gas stoves thing is brought to you by the same people who gave us bans on plastic straws. "Let's maximally inconvenience people for extremely tiny environmental gains while ignoring huge contributors to pollution and climate change. That way we alienate as many people as possible and drive them into the arms of the far right."
See the problem is that the far right is so ridiculous and repellent that the left is having to work really hard these days to lose. They're having to push for things like banning gas stoves or the word "field" to have any chance at losing to the people who brought you Qanon and January 6th.
Now we're seeing the pushback for the pushback. fvdesson is right.
There's an article from 2003 so this isn't exactly new.
If you roll out the tax as 25% starting in July, increasing 25% every 3 months after that until it hits 300%, people have some time to plan for it and you don't hit them this winter. Maybe you need to return 1/3 of the tax money to low-income households who are having a hard time getting their equipment upgraded in a timely fashion and 1/3 of the tax money in incentives to that same group [and landlords of affordable housing] to help them cover the capital costs.
Trying to backhand it by making people "not want" gas stoves seems like a longer and less certain path than just giving people economic incentives to do the thing that you want them to do.
- That would have an immediate financial impact on people with gas boilers in a way that banning new gas appliances does not. This kind of thing would need to be rolled out very slowly over time if you want to avoid extreme backlash. Constraints on new construction don't have the same effects.
(EDIT: Ah, you edited your comment to address this one - sure, if you can reliably distribute funds for lower-income people to replace their appliances then maybe. I bet you still get a lot of backlash from people who can afford it but don't want to though. Unless it's rolled out very slowly.)
- Ultimately we need to get rid of the infrastructure piping all that gas around too, as that's where a lot of the climate impacts come from. Any new gas usage at all, whether for cooking or heating, makes it harder to do that.
Utilities already have the means to bill and tax fuel. Most already have conservation rebate schemes in place. Many already have low-income billing plans and rate cards (probably all have multiple rate cards). I think you could reliably administer a tax, rebate, and capital credit scheme using mostly existing mechanisms.
> I just installed a new gas boiler (I wanted to go electric but it was massively economically disadvantageous). That thing is probably going to run for 20 years.
You're making a bet that gas will remain economically advantageous over electric for 20 years. I don't know about you, but the way the winds are shifting, that doesn't sound like a good bet.
If they do disconnect and electric becomes advantageous, I'll have saved money for likely a decade and can consider switching at that point. (It was capital costs that made it non-advantageous, not operating costs.)
Not true, at least not by definition. I heat with oil and cook with gas. My gas stove is fed by an outdoor propane tank that's filled once a year. When I was house hunting there were plenty of houses with gas ranges but I didn't see a single one with gas heat, that's really uncommon here.
Personally, I like my gas stove, though I expect to have to adapt to something else in my lifetime (the big push in Ireland is towards heat pumps, and once gas heating goes it will not be economic to maintain the home gas network just for stoves).
Depends exactly where you live, but it's unlikely that all the gas generation is by CCGT; a lot of places would use far less efficient plants for peaking at least.
> and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove
Hmm, where are you getting this? From a quick look, gas stoves are about 40-50% efficient, induction about 85%.
You also have to consider transmission loss, and the possible (in many places likely) presence of coal in the electricity supply.
In any case this is all pretty irrelevant; stoves just aren't a big enough piece of peoples' energy consumption.
In one experiment, using coal fired electricity to boil a pot of water on induction released 0.29 pounds of CO2. Using natural gas to boil a pot of water released 1.16 pounds.
https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-bet...
As you said, it's fairly irrelevant. The point is to reduce natural gas heating and methane leaks. Natural gas cooking is a side effect.
The real reason seems to be elsewhere: people care about cooking with gas, but they use gas heaters if they have gas. If you can stop people from cooking with gas, you can switch entire houses to electric more quickly.
Depends on ordinarity of a house. My ordinary house has 3phase power and my pretty cheap induction stove outperforms all gas stoves I had. When I was living in a flat, I only had single phase power, but 4kW should still be enough for a stove. In USA you typically only have 110V (or 220v for those daring), so anything electric is straining your circuit breakers.
Surely stoves are connected to the 220 V connection? Same for washers and dryers.
110 V in the US is one arm of a centre tapped secondary.
Yes, except the washers.
It was put in to replace a gas cooktop which was there when we bought the house, and vastly out-performs that unit in speed and heat output.
If you converted you'd be pulling a dedicated circuit through anyway - no one's tying induction cooktops off to just whatever line you already have.
The one area gas can be better is if you're doing wok cooking, but that's more to do with how wok's are shaped and heat up then any limitation on the ability to get heat into them (I've not been able to find one of the adapters which apparently exists to solve this).
Also, if you are really serious about wok cooking, you’ll go with propane rather than natural gas.
https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-...