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Comment by nephy | Hacker News Reader

I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat. My gas bill is around $15 a month. My home has proper ventilation to the outside and I have no intention of converting a cheap gas bill into a high electric bill.

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This is why we need a carbon tax. Your gas bill needs to be much higher.

As opposed to my electricity, which is mostly produced by a coal plant?

The carbon tax should fund renewable energy sources.

...lots of things SHOULD be true, but are not in practice.

Emission reductions and or efficiency improvements are also possible outcomes if the tax is higher than the cost of these changes.

Only if you can finance/afford it. If not, it could even delay change as it reduces available funds.

The target is really industry. If no one has to pay the cost of emissions no one has any incentive to change.

Look to the oil crisis of the 70s for examples - it was a bad time but the cost of fuel spurred a surge in sale of small cars because fuel efficiency finally mattered. On another front it spurred the cycling culture of the Netherlands - they didn’t take up cycling and build infrastructure to support it out of altruism, they did it because their fuel supply was nearly cut off entirely.

Innovation only happens when there is a reason to innovate. If carbon emissions don’t cost the emitter anything then there’s no reason to invest in ways to emit less.

If the costs can be passed on, then there is potentially no incentive to innovate, either. It might also still be more cost efficient to innovate less to reduce costs than to actually innovate to reduce costs. Predicting where these things go is quite tricky.

But if the costs can be passed on then that’s a means for emitters to differentiate on cost. If manufacturer A emits more and passes the tax onto the consumer, manufacturer B can undercut on them on price if they’re more efficient.

Right now there’s minimal financial benefit to being more carbon efficient. If anything it’s disincentivised because efficiency is itself costly, so it’s cheaper to just emit.

But only if undercutting isn't too expensive/pays back fast enough. The issue is that from a revenue perspective things always look simple, from a profit perspective it gets more complicated, especially if things have switching costs/limited fungibility, are oligopolies and other structured markets. It might work like you outline but I would not be surprised if there are a lot of unexpected or undesirable results, too.

And then there’s the energy wasted in transmission.

Impose a law that forbids the constructions of new fossil fuel power plants, and any existing plants must be decommissioned when their current planned operational life-time has expired.

Either the market will start to invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives when demand exceed supply, or people will elect governments that step in and invest in non-fossil fueled alternatives. Either way, the coal, oil and gas plant can not continue to be part of the European energy grid.

You say you're in South Carolina which is 30% coal generation, not "mostly", and which is set to plummet rapidly over the next few years as several of the increasingly uneconomical coal plants are shut down.

The idea that energy bills need to be higher is sure to be a political winner. I encourage any politician who believes in that idea to openly run for office on it rather than trying to hide it and do it once they're already in office.

Certainly the poor will appreciate their sacrifice for the good of helping climate change.

A good start would be to have the same tax on electricity and gas. It's absurd that gas is heavily subsidized in most of Europe:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa...

Fortunately, I live in one of the few countries which don't subsidize gas (Sweden). When I visit the continent and see a gas stove, it feels like going to a museum. Induction stoves are so much better.

"Induction stoves are so much better."

Depends. When the electricity comes from a gas power plant, it is way more efficient, to use the heat of the gas directly, instead of heating water and steam, running through a turbine, transmit lossy overland, convert to household power -> turn the electricity into heat again.

But when you have renewable sources, it is a different story. I believe you have mostly nuclear power in sweden?

They are just nicer to cook on. They get hotter far quicker and can be more easily controlled.

We produce 170TWh per year in Sweden. 41% is hydro, 29% is nuclear and 19% wind. So a large chunk is nuclear, but far from the majority.

You are ignoring the cost of laying millions of miles of natural gas pipes to each and every home. And the leaks through all these pipes, which is 9%.

Electricity is the first utility and all homes have it. Of course, you can be off grid and have no utilities, just have solar+batteries, electrification works perfectly in that scenario.

But many homes already have it (in europe). Huge network of big and small pipelines.

Replacing is a cost.

> Replacing is a cost.

Sorry, I don't understand. What is being replaced? With what?

"I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat."

With the electricity equivalent.

Makes sense when all is powered by green energy, but it does not makes sense to switch all that and power it with electricity from coal. Then the CO2 costs are higher.

Coal is less than 20% and is continuously going down. Coal will be negligible in a decade or so. Renewables is more than 20% and growing!

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Even if your electricity is generated from gas, induction is more efficient: https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...

(And the above even generously assumes the generation is not CHP which would make induction look better still, and ignores the extra energy needed for chilling your house)

The low efficiency of transferring heat from gas to the cooking vessel kills the odds for the gas range in the competition, most of energy goes to heating air instead of the kettle.

(But we shouldn't generate electricity from gas of course, fossils need to be left in the ground to avert worst of the climate disaster)

what a snob comment.

We should let people decide what sort of stove is best for themselves rather than pushing one from the top down. Also, most people who are pressed to prematurely replace their stove will choose the cheapest option, which if pushed away from gas would be resistive electric not induction.

If there’s a negative externality to the fuel it should be priced-in, which is really all carbon tax is intended to do. You can still use gas but you have to pay for the environmental cost upfront. The carbon footprint of electricity usage would be taxed as well, but if it’s overall more efficient it would have a lower carbon tax.

Even electrical resistance heating is more carbon efficient than burning gas at home. This doesn’t even require a high-renewable grid - it produces less CO2 burning gas for electricity to run an electric stove than it does burning gas at home due to the efficiency of a modern gas power plant and the dreadful waste heat of a gas burner.

I live in Sweden as well, I used to live in the Netherlands. The former is close to gas-free while the Netherlands is (or was) one of the most gas-dependent countries in Europe owing to the discovery and exploitation of large gas reserves in the north of the country and the North Sea. I have used gas, resistive electric, halogen electric, induction electric as well as wood stoves for cooking. I wrote a sizeable comment on the virtues and vices of induction earlier in this thread and found out one of its parents had been killed, most likely due to its author's clearly stated preference for cooking on gas. This is what I wrote on the subject in reply to a comment very similar (but much shorter) than yours which simply proclaimed induction to be 'superior':

That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.

Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.

If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.

Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).

Crab bucket.

Yeah, it will totally be $16 to reflect the minimal carbon used for the utilities GP mentioned.

I don’t think a carbon tax is economically efficient, but I’m starting to think it is emotionally efficient to just let people do all the minimal little things that I don’t think warrant discussion (paper straws, dishwashers, gas logs).

Induction ranges heat up water faster and use less energy than gas ranges: https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...

Since you mentioned that you have backup heating, I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat and water heater is your most efficient lowest cost option, not a gas system.

Part of your gas bill is just paying the gas company for a line. Your bill would be around $10 even if you use 0 gas. So basically having two different bills costs you extra money already.

Then there’s the fact that you can get a solar system and generate your own electricity, which you can’t do with gas. Solar systems can have a payoff period in the 5-10 year range which is very reasonable. If you pair it with an electric car you’re almost never paying a utility or oil company for your fuel needs.

I’m not saying you should run out and retrofit your whole home because that would never pay itself off, but in your climate I would never touch gas in a new build.

Do they make them without glass tops?

I had my glass stove top shatter. Turns out that is the only thing they don’t warranty. I did not opt for the extended warranty on the next stove…

Also, apparently induction stoves require special cookware

So you just throw out all your pots?

While I can make no comment about your pots, cast iron, and many types of stainless steel are compatible, so any pots purchased recently should work. What I can say is it turns out all my pots worked and I didn't have to repurchase any when I got my induction stove. And it was worth it. Induction is better than gas!

You can purchase copper pots and pans right now and they won't work still, it's not the time of purchase but the material. Non-ferrous materials won't work with induction. Copper, aluminum, clay, stone, glass etc. won't work no matter when purchased.

No? Where did you get such a ridiculous idea?

First google

https://www.neff.com.au/service/support/induction-cooktops/w....

Well that’s flat-out wrong, and stupid to boot.

Aluminum doesn’t work, but any cast iron or stainless steel should be fine. I don’t think I even own any aluminum pans.

We have a couple dozen pots/pans, collected from merging two households and a few decades of collecting pots/pans as needed.

So far we found one that doesn't work.

Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case. It is not on the critical path for optimizations either. Unless you subsist on boiling noodles when you’re late for a meeting.

I use an electric kettle for this.

Exactly. Talking how fast to boil water is pretty much useless. Tell me how to actually cook on induction like I do with gas.

The same, only without giving money to Russia.

Electric kettles are even quicker at heating up water and use less power to do so. They are also cheap and can last for decades if taken care of reasonably well.

> Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case.

It'd be helpful for my household for hot water for coffee and tea, and it'd also help us for heating up some extra water for grits or risotto when they need more.

Also, isn't boiling water just the measurable outcome of the test but what matters is that the pot is coming to temp sooner? Pots and pans heating up more quickly is helpful all the time.

Electric kettles are great for heating water quickly.

Pans coming to temp sooner would be useful if the gap was measured in large units of time but it isn’t. I care more about the properties of the pan and fire more. For instance cast iron pan is used to hold a lot of heat but isn’t very reactive. A copper pan can heat up quickly but more importantly it can change temps quickly. This is known as reactivity.

For instance maybe I want to sear a pork chop on high heat and then drop the burner and toss in butter and herbs. I need reaction (in this case the pan cooling quickly) for this basic technique or else I have burned my butter.

Its like having a car with outrageous acceleration. In the case of a car you are wildly careening all over the road doing cruisin usa wheelies backflips barrelrolls and all. In a pan it means scorched butter and half cooked bacon compared to burnt bacon on the same pan.

But the main function of any stove is to heat things up. Induction can simply do that faster. Boiling water is just an easy way to measure it

I guess you don’t cook? The main function of a stove is to work with your pans/etc to create the heat you desire. Different applications have different requirements. I may use a cast iron pan to store a lot of heat and release it over some time. I may have another where I want to change temperatures in the pan quickly, which is far more common for me.

For example I may use high heat to sear meat and then drop the heat to add butter and herbs and then use the pan drippings to make a sauce which requires intense heating to deglaze and flambé to enhance flavor and then reduce heat quickly to mount the sauce. Copper is the best material for this and it doesn’t work with induction. High quality steel just doesn’t perform.

To me, this sounds like an argument largely built around the idea that you don't want to learn how to use a new product. Many people have convinced themselves they can't adapt, and I think this follows from the marketing ploys described in the article.

You're downvoted because people who aren't enthusiasts just don't have the experience to understand.

It's like the EU ban[0] on lead paint. Fine artists said "wait but what about Flake white? It's a critical paint! Nothing else compares! We know how to use it safely!" And the response was "Just substitute Titanium white. It's brighter anyway!" But Ti is absolutely not a substitute. It's like telling sculptors to substitute plaster for marble.

[0]I can't recall if the ban was lifted. I live in the US.

EDIT: Don't take my word for it. Here's Michael Harding on the subject, he makes paints that are among the very very best available:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pXT06HXX0

https://www.lucillesmithson.com/single-post/2016/05/06/in-co...

This point is making the opposite case that you think it is though: the artists are basically a tiny population that benefits from keeping lead paint legal while the larger population suffers.

When it heats it faster, there is less loss into the environment before all of it gets up to the required temperature. Efficiency gains is _always_ the desired optimization when you look at what new energy policies are trying to do.

Main thing induction seems actually worse for is being able to lift the pan above cooking surface and differentially heat different parts of the pan, particularly useful for Chinese/wok cooking.

I like this for making eggs too. And lots of things.

Seems to be a function available in high quality cooktops? Here, called ProfessionalMode: https://www.vzug.com/ch/en/products/kitchen/cooktops/inducti...

Making spaghetti/tortellini/noodles, coffee, malt-o-meal, oatmeal, etc seems common enough for most to not be a "almost never use case". At least on stoves I've seen.

Totally agree, thank you for the balanced response. Most builders where I live install gas by default. I may have considered induction if I was building from scratch, but it’s really not worth it for us right now. Especially knowing the sources of our electricity at the moment.

If somebody installs something that requires a fee and extra connection when building with something semi-permanent like house appliances, kind of makes me think there is some sort of kickback scheme for them to do so.

Having gas appliances where I live is seen as a liability, as you have yet another maintenance item, and it contributes negatively to indoor air, so you have to have much more care regarding air handling in your areas where it is used. (unsurprisingly, demand for gas and gas appliances has plummeted ever since Russia started with their fuckery so people have been converting in droves as well.)

That’s another great point: no worries about CO or gas leaks/explosions with an all-electric house.

> I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat

Like OP, I also live in South Carolina. My primary heat is a modern, efficient electric heat pump. When it’s cold enough outside that the heat pump is no longer more efficient than gas (maybe 8-12 weeks/yr where I am), the system switches fuel sources and runs a natural gas furnace instead.

People pitching induction always mention that they boil water faster, and it's true. But in my experience with induction, which I admit is not a lot, it seems like that is the only thing it's better at.

Induction is really nice in terms of speed and responsiveness but it's harder to do the tiny adjustments that you can do with gas because the induction is digital rather than analog.

Tiny adjustments is a nice way of saying you avoid wild variations spatially and temporally when you use gas.

I mean, I feel like induction is less precise, but I suspect my cooking has actually improved as it stops me doing silly things with gas.

A big point of the article seems to be that standard ventilation does not/did not adequately get rid of the nitrogen dioxide generated from a gas stove. Is your ventilation just really good, or is this not a concern for you?

I have a fan with 5 speeds that sucks a lot of air. The stove is on an exterior wall and vents directly to the side of my house. I’m not really concerned about it.

Most people have no clue because you cannot see or smell it. So people tend to underestimate it. After all, they’ve been doing it for decades, so how bad could it really be? So, you’ll get feelings and intuition as replies if you ask this kind of question, not anything solid.

We are fucking terrible at risk analysis and management.

Interesting, anecdotally, the builder of my town home was convinced by promo dollars to install a gas range, gas heat for a half the house, and a gas fireplace.

I pay approximately $33 a month in service fees, $1 for gas 9 months of the year, and $30 for gas 3 months (we've sort of embraced the fire as a way to make some use of the fees)

If you're doing the math, we're paying $360 a year in fees for $70 (5x the fees as the use)

Oh and the game of carbon credits a $6 a month fee that the gas company then gives us a promo credit for each month

Do you source your own gas? I live in Texas, fossil fuel and natural gas state, and gas bill is between $50 - $255/month. This is with barely any cooking.

How much friggin gas do you use? Do you own greenhouses or something? Is that your bill on the months where there is a surprise freeze and the whole state poops its pants? Something is obviously missing from your consumption figure.

the average cost of natural gas in the U.S. is a little over $100 per month: https://www.inspirecleanenergy.com/blog/sustainable-living/a...

Natural gas from the county.

Why do you think it’s so cheap?

Do you also just dig a hole in your backyard and dump used oil there?

No, but my electric company buried tons of coal ash that leaked into the surrounding water table.

Sounds like they should be held responsible for environmental harm, perhaps part of their their restitution could be installing a bunch of renewable energy sources (kind of like dieselgate). Seems awfully dumb to let them not do anything about it, but doesn't seem like a valuable counterargument to stay with a energy method that directly contributes to poorer health.

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