Victorian (Australia) government bans gas in new homes from 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Victorian (Australia) government bans gas in new homes from 2024

abc.net.au

10 pointsGigachad14 comments

My country effectively did this in 2021. They didn't ban gas, however new buildings cannot meet energy efficiency standards if they use gas for heating, meaning you need a heat pump. Induction already became the standard for cooking ~10 years ago.

The thing is though we are in Northern Europe where temperatures below -20C / -5F are normal during winter. If it can work here, there's no reason why it can't work basically everywhere. In somewhere like Australia where sunlight is a plenty all year round, it seems stupid not to go that route.

Control the populace by any means

What exactly is your justification here? It seems like a fairly good mechanism for consumers rather than control.

1. Control by limiting choice 2. Potential control by being able to limit usage during peak times 3. Potential control if costs of producing electricity rise and consumers end up having less money for other things as a result 4. Potential control by making it easier for government to shut off power to people with “unacceptable” political views.

I realize that a couple of those thoughts edge into conspiracy theory territory. But that’s why I used the word potential. The possibility exists that things could move in those directions.

1. Most people don’t choose what’s in a house, take the suburbs with dark fibre/copper who have executed class action lawsuits

2. There’s potential control of any resource going into a house, gas doesn’t change anything

3. Gas is more expensive than electricity, maintaining the infrastructure would be a significant cost also

4. You’re a cooker.

Is gas more expensive because of natural market forces or because of government manipulation of the market?

Dunno, have you factored infrastructure and risk costs into your numbers?

Because Russia was a big supplier and they decided to invade Ukraine. But that only affects Europe and liquified NG users. In Victoria, the field they have been using is running dry, and they would rather not resort to fracking to find new NG reserves. It probably isn’t very economical to pipe it in from Western Australia where most of the current known reserves are.

The comment about gas being more expensive than electricity seems a bit disingenuous. I was under the impression that Australia has plenty of natural gas reserves, and gas would be cheap if it weren't for failure of government to manage it properly.

A huge part of the cost of gas is the connection fees and network maintenance. I had a place that only had gas for the stove and I was paying more for the daily connection fee than the actual usage.

It also costs a load to fit out in new builds which is a cost that eventually gets placed on the occupants.

It was commercially viable to deploy residential gas infra in the past (when electricity was a lot cheaper than now!) and yet gas isnt viable now. It doesn't stack up. I don't pretend to know much about the economics of residential gas supply, but I wonder if your high connection charge was a result of costs being spread across fewer customers (driven away by high usage costs).

Reserves in eastern Australia are tapping out and reserves in Western Australia are too far away from any city other than maybe Perth (but most of the reserves seem to be in northern Western Australia closer to Darwin). It is more profitable for them to liquify the gas in Darwin and ship it to Japan and China than to build pipes to eastern Australia. In fact, it looks like they are building a liquified NG terminal in southern Australia to get it by boat from northwestern Australia (competing with Japan and china for the same supply).

Impressive way to move the media on from the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games.

Why would they want to do that. The cancelation has been widely celebrated locally as it was an absolutely massive waste of money.

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