California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/eugene-s-natural-gas-b...
The community has since generated enough signatures to put the ban to a public vote that will be voted on in November. Anecdotally, I'd say, most my neighbors are against the ban, judging from the names on the petition that I signed when they dropped through.
Personally, I believe folks should have the liberty to choose the best solution for their energy needs. I do a bit of home brewing, and I can say, without question, gas is superior for heating a large quantity of water quickly and keeping it at temp throughout the process. I even looked into electric brew kettles and >10G vessels require a dedicated 240V circuit.
Taking this all into account, I'm not sure I'll be buying / building within city limits. That or I'll just move to using my own methane composting biogas bladder. I'd love to see the greenies tell me I can't make my own gas in my back yard via composting.
But, for when they come for your natural gas line — https://www.homebiogas.com/
Since the NY ban is for new construction, wouldn't the obvious thing be to install more 240V circuits in the new buildings?
My point is, that this is really unnecessary. Shoehorning the general public into electrification isn’t the answer here. And it goes far beyond just my small needs as a residential subscriber. Commercial breweries, restauranteurs, and everything in-between, use gas because it is far more efficient, cheaper, and suitable for their individual applications.
Choice, is the essential thing here. Let the market sort it out. If the market can make a compelling argument for electrification, that’s the way people will go. But for now, I’m unconvinced.
(btw — I lived in Berkeley for years, and houses that were gas grandfathered were especially sought after. Government diktats just create perverse incentives.)
I heard President Biden wears one, at the request of his wife.
I have a gas range and it doesn't work when the electricity is off. If that's your contingency plan, check that a safety valve doesn't close when power is lost.
And for good reason. Gas cookers require ventilation, to prevent carbon monoxide build up. An electric extractor fan won't work during a power cut.
I'd love to have a real setup. Unfortunately I've not been given that option and it is the same for many others.
Electric hot water heater = 20 amps
Electric stove = 50 amps all burners on and oven
Washing machine = 15 amps
Car charger = 50 amps
Total = 135 amps
Standard residential service in the US = 200 amps split phase @ 240v
Whats the problem?
Add in the 80% rule and 200amps doesn't go as far as one might hope in a gas free-house.
None of those devices pull the rated amount continuous except may the car charger which can be adjusted for less draw / longer charge time if needed.
Simply scheduling car charing for overnight would eliminate any issue, even so there is plenty of headroom on a typical residential system.
Requiring new builds to have even more electrical capacity and more robust incoming infrastructure is a win-win-win situation and hopefully that is what code & consumers demand.
If you can stick to plugin hybrids and go without AC during a power outage...
Electric hot water heater = 20 amps
Electric stove = 50 amps all burners on and oven
Internet, Misc = 1 amps
Total < 75 amps
Its not like its year 10'000 and we polished technology, infrastructure and everything to the max physics allow. For example you can easily break whole internet if significant portion of its users decide to download something relatively big at the same time.
When they pass these laws, they should come with an SLA for the utility provider to approve “engineering” plans for the utility hookup and whatever transformer upgrades are required utility-side.
There should be a ~ $250 per day fine, payable in cash to the homeowner once the SLA is exceeded. That’s roughly 2x normal homeowner costs due to delay of construction approvals (and therefore financing / alternative housing costs for those days) and using gas generators to power the site.
Must have been a while ago because in 2021 they charged me $0 (not a typo) to go from 100A to 200A. It took just a month or so to arrange.
It is almost like talking about 400HP cars/suvs, my 3 cylinder car is doing just fine at 84 kW max.
Am I being pedantic?
The unit of billing - kW/h - however remains the same.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/487836/how-d...
I was already confused with the 240 being mentioned somewhere in this thread... it becomes a bit clearer now.
In the breaker panels the phase alternates as you go down the rows of breakers. So you can install a dual breaker for 240V. Typically only large appliances like stoves, water heater, driers, and air conditioners are 240V. Everything else is 120V.
European houses have had two or three decades of efficiency improvements made to everything, so we don't have the 5kW clothes dryers mentioned above.
If you think about it, there is still plenty of room for optimizing our energy consumption.
The trend seems to be, replace the gasoline car not with a more fuel efficient one but rather with a car weighing almost double because it has to drag along a huge battery. Then replace all copper wires with double the section (copper mining, plastic production, tearing open perfect roads, ...)
Some ideas, not very far fetched I would say, combine a few of these will get us a long way:
Car pooling.
Electric bicycles.
Insulate your house better?
Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
> Electric bicycles
> Insulate your house better?
> Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
> Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
> Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
People do these things anyways with the right incentives, just to save time and money.
But we still need to get off of fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation if we want to avoid the worst climate change scenarios.
The reality is that people really value convenience, and we have to find sustainable ways of delivering that. That might mean a great electric bus system, EVs, community thrift exchanges, etc
> Electric bicycles
I only ride bicycles for exercise or as an activity but never to go somewhere. I’m no longer 12.
> Insulate your house better?
If the government wants to use my tax dollars for this instead of SNAP/TANF then I’m all for them paying for it but it’s not going to be me paying.
> Taking turns with neighbours to do grocery shopping or bringing kids to school.
See point #1
> Try to repair stuff in stead of bying new.
I do this where possible because I’m cheap but I doubt it is any kind of significant savings of energy.
> Drying clothes with renewable wind energy. (a hanging rack)
Now I’ve got clean clothes covered in dust and pollen. Thanks.
My point in this discussion thread is, i saw 200 Amps at 240 V per household being mentioned, i want to show this should not be the norm or trend. Imo this way of thinking is not leading to an efficient system.
If you have an electric car, you probably don't need to charge it most of the times at the highest current. And when you do, you won't turn on all electric devices with high amperage.
The other examples are just examples, not everyone needs to apply them all. I advocate for the culture shift, the more-is-not-better mentality. This needs to go hand in hand with cleaner technologies and government policies.
For older constructions however, it can be more involved - the line from the main line to your home might need an upgrade, the main line might need an upgrade or in the worst case the transformer might need an upgrade. The further up in the grid you go, the more expensive it gets for the utility - and some measures might even require significant work involving construction permits.
This wasn’t on my radar as being a thing. What type of service is typical out there? Where I am, 200A is fairly normal and I haven’t really perceived of the concept of not having enough electricity to run a family as a thing.
Do people trip the main breaker more than “almost never” out there?
Continuous-flow electric water heater: 20 kW
Heat pump or central air, big home: 12-15 kW
EV charger: 7 kW
Electric tanked water heater or hybrid water heater in electric mode: 7.2 kW
Clothes dryer with heating element on: 5 kW
Heat pump or central air, small home: 3-4 kW
Electric oven: 3-5 kW
Induction range: 1.8 kW
Instapot: ~1.5 kW
Toaster oven: 1-1.5 kW
Electric kettle: 1 kW
Microwave: 1.2 kW
Dishwasher: ~500-1000 W
Heat pump water heater: ~600W
Washing machine: 500 W
Vacuum cleaner: 200-300 W
Home server or desktop: 100-200 W
Box fan or air purifier: 100 W
Laptop on fast charge: 65W
Laptop on slow charge: 30W
LED light bulb: 12-15W
Cell phone charger: 6W
Individually coordinating appliance loads or including a battery with each appliance seems like an inefficient, expensive and unnecessary extra step. Basically, all you need to do is a.) charge your EVs at night when nothing else is running b.) don't use electric water heaters unless they're heat pumps and c.) insulate your home if you're using heat pump HVAC. All of which you should be doing anyway. The kitchen appliances are easily manageable if the EV and HVAC are not running at the same time, and everything else is rounding error.
There might be some benefit to grid-coordinating EV charging and heat pump HVAC operation, particularly since these are the cases where naive loads all hit the grid at the same time, and they already come with batteries included (literal ones for EVs, thermal batteries for HVAC). For smaller appliances it's totally unnecessary though.
Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co-ops are starting to spring up.
This is the SF Bay Area, so it’s pretty much a third world country if you measure things by quality of government services. I assume this isn’t typical for most other parts of the country.
And yet Californians pay enormous taxes.
Also, my power in San Francisco has probably been out for no more than 6 hours over the last 10 years. I don't know how many 9s that is, but it's more than 1.
https://www.prudential.com/financial-education/tax-burden-by...
To critique your link based on its footnotes:
> 1 Calculated based on “State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets for 2020” from the Tax Foundation and “Median Household Income by State: 2018 and 2019” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
What is the distribution of households in each state by marital and dependent status?
> 2 Calculated based on “Property Taxes by State” from WalletHub and “Median Home Values Across the U.S.” from Experian.
Various propositions in California affect actual property taxes. In the chart in your link the property tax tax burden is shown the same for California and Texas based on Median income, but the actual property tax rate in Texas is almost double that in California (at least last I checked, a couple of years ago). Housing in California has just been more expensive compared to income, which is a con in affordabilty, but a pro in net worth for property owners (especially those who have owned for a long time, and thus pay lower taxes on their primary residence).
I've got nothing to say about the sales tax burden, except to wonder how much of the "per capita personal consumption expenditures" are taxable transactions, and how much aren't. I've got no clue here though.
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Part of this is because California is the most populous state with a high average personal income.
When talking about actual tax burden averages the best way to calculate is by dividing the total state and local taxes by the total income in the state.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-and-local-t...
In 2020 the total tax rate in California was 10.01% of total personal income. This put it at 37th place among the US states, and 0.52% above the US average.
For the other most populous states, Texas was at 8.56%, Florida at 7.21%, and New York at 13.92%.
The cheapest state was Alaska at 7.13% (with Florida the second cheapest), and the most expensive state was New York (with Hawaii the second most expensive at 13.16%).
Some of this data is confounded by state revenues not being solely from taxes (or especially from personal taxes). Regardless though, California isn't that much above average, and is one of 30 states with a graduated state income tax that hits higher earners harder than lower earners, whereas 11 states have a flat tax structure.
You’ve been without utility power for two full weeks in 2023?!
There was an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a couple ~24 hour outages.
Surprisingly very few short outages or brownouts or anything.
I’m sitting at having utility power ~95% of the time over the past 12 months. I’d have no problem believing two weeks… or more.
Amazingly this is not the worst US utility company. They are all pretty horrible.
But now a lot more people run AC and electric car charging, among other things like induction ranges. The infrastructure is struggling to keep up. A lot of it is super old and it’s not uncommon to come across 50 year old transformers, etc.
Brownouts and blackouts have become rather common.
But the gas always works. Where I live a lot of people have installed natural gas generators.
This is a surprising assertion to me. How can “most people” afford batteries and generators?
This year, most people with just batteries lost power due to no sun, and people with just generators lost power due to no propane delivery service/supply.
Based on the one ~ 3 day outage I had, my whole house generator's tank is good for probably close to two weeks, although if it were very hot or very cold, that might change. I have a portable generator for my well, that one runs on gasoline and doesn't sip fuel, I'd probably just run it for a few minutes twice a day (did not have that generator during the 3 day outage... we were just stinky)
You would assume wrong. California's grid reliability statistics are actually better than the national average:
Electric Utility Performance: A State-By-State Data Review https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
The only statistic where it falls last is "AVERAGE AMOUNT OF TIME TO RESTORE POWER PER CUSTOMER, IN MINUTES (CAIDI) WITH MAJOR EVENT DAYS"
Compare the California's power reliability with West Virginia's before making any assumptions.
It’s like if your a top basketball player but you come last in movement speed.
Should California utilities be better at restoring power in these situations? Absolutely, and we shouldn't cut them much slack in that regard. But that doesn't mean it's a "3rd world country" situation with respect to power reliability like the GP described. The typical power problems faced in developing countries are daily power reliability problems that are due to poor grid management in normal conditions, not exceptional conditions.
To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
It’s absolutely third world country level when the weather is anything but exactly 70 degrees. You have zero idea what you’re talking about, the original guy is correct.
> You have zero idea what you’re talking about
Same here. I've endured the sweltering tropical heat in a polluted developing-country city during power cuts, so I well understand what I'm talking about.
> To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
In my Bay Area neighborhood there have been no outages for the last 3 years, but that anecdote is no more or less valid than yours when generalizing about California at large. It's a huge state with incredible variability in nearly every dimension.
Hyper-local conditions matter greatly to reliability. I'm in a dense urban environment, near hospitals and fire stations. That's probably why our power is more reliable. We have friends who live in a wealthy wooded and hilly area of the Peninsula who have lost power for days this past winter, because those repeated winter storms made so many trees fall on power lines. Similarly, extremely fire-prone neighborhoods just 10 miles from me experience public-safety-power-shutoffs frequently in the summer while I don't.
Your power problems sound highly localized, and you are right to be upset about it, but it's on your utility, not the overall grid.
Highly localized across the entire bay for the atmospheric river a couple weeks ago.
Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
They are not on a different grid at all. Most of California, and definitely the entire Bay Area is part of the same grid managed by CAISO:
https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx
Palo Alto has its own municipal utility. There is a huge difference. A municipal utility is only responsible for retail electric sales and distribution infrastructure in a specific area. That includes local substations and power lines, which are the likely source of your electricity reliability problems.
Palo Alto doesn't manage supply and demand in real time, maintaining 60Hz AC, or run the wholesale electricity markets. CAISO does those, along with transmission and regional interconnects, all of which are functions of the electric grid. The meanings of words matter when discussing these things.
> Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Thank you for the pleasant feedback.
What more would you like explained here?
Live with PG&E and live with PAU and then talk about it. Semantics are totally irrelevant.
There is a legal difference between a state banning it and a city. States have far more powers that cities don't (unless the state delegates that power which they often do)
I tried this and a neighbor called CalFire on me since its illegal when its not a "burn day".
It seems the solutions are to have:
- a 5 gallon propane tank in the garage
- a BBQ in the back yard
- your own batteries
- a generator (also useful for refrigeration)
I have about 20 gallons of gas in my garage that is good for my generator. I use the gas for my motorcycle so they get refreshed regularly.
> I have about 20 gallons of gas in my garage
I'm with your neighbor on this one
You can't assume that gas supply works in a power outage. Some modern gas stoves depend on external electricity for active power regulation or flame surveillance, and the compressors along the line require electricity as well to function - which was one of the problems in the Texas power outage IIRC, as the gas peaker plants couldn't get powered on because the gas grid compressors were offline.
Keep a camping stove for emergency scenarios, way more reliable and if you're running out of gas you can always walk to the next open hardware store.
Fortunately, pg&e has enough regulatory capture and marketing to trick regulators into letting them rob taxpayers and trick taxpayers into docility.
The issue lies not with a natural gas ban. The issue lies with having a for-profit monopoly in charge of all energy production and supply.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/...
I fail to see how B is better?
How about a little butane stove? They work great at hotel omelette bars! Or a Coleman stove? It's not that big a deal to cook when the power is out, really.