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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

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

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).

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.

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.

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).

Crab bucket.

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