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Comment by james_david | Hacker News Reader

In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality. Consumers bear the cost of LAUG while the utilities are guaranteed a 10% profit on their infrastructure expenses. This, along with subsidies for leak prone pipe replacement, leads to needless investment in outmoded fossil fuel infrastructure (i.e., pipe replacement) being prioritized over leak repair.

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>In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality

Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How hard is it to compare how much is put into the pipe vs how much comes out?

Measurement error in gas networks can be 15% of volume, so not precise enough for this work.

When accurate metering is called for we have the tech to do it just fine to far less than <1% error. This is a classic case where regulation is required. Rational capitalist enterprise is not going to fix this on their own. They don't currently have the right incentives.

To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost.

But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.

Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end.

Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.

Right, you could put a combustible-gas-safe mass flow sensor on every gas line, high and low pressure, at a cost of roughly 100x current rotary and aperture flow meters, but then metering would become by far the largest cost in gas production.

Nope, Ex rated coriolis flowmeters are barely $150k.

A residential rotary gas meter costs less than €15, and that's the long tail you need to replace to measure losses accurately.

Edit: And current turbine and aperture flow meters cost hundreds.

Ok...I don't think everyone here is saying you should put a Coriolis meter on every single residential service. That would be insane.

This thread is in response to a user who commented above:

> Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home).

Source?

omg this is real?

For far too long we have put up with unmetered popes. Lemme give you 95 reasons why all popes should be metered...

I know HN comments are among the last bastion of cogent online discourse, but I needed this today.

Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt.

Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.

Where on this chart do you see PG&E needing to cut maintenance costs before the wildfires? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

I don’t think that chart has enough detail to understand what happened.

Government owning the utility would be the answer. But politicians like to have a 3rd party to blame for price hikes and poor service .

I’m unconvinced that a change to new management, government-run or not, would automatically get technically competent people hired and give them the decision-making power to do things right. Sure, it might, but it’s hardly guaranteed.

I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that you can make large multiples of the amount you'd make working on this kind of thing by working on something relatively non-productive like finance, consulting, adtech, etc. A large percentage of my engineering class went into one of those. One of the smartest guys I knew there, who studied nuclear engineering, now does healthcare private equity.

The incentives are all messed up. We should do some combination of making these jobs more attractive and making those relatively extractive jobs less attractive.

If only our energy infrastructure could be run like the DMV.

How many fires were started by PG&E gas explosions vs power lines?

Thank you for pointing out why it should be a public utility that does the right thing rather then a private company who was willing to burn the state down for profit.

Public utilities can also face perverse incentives, and be run poorly.

Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.

lol. PG&E has had a culture of malfeasance since at least the 60’s - which is why all the records on those buried pipelines and power lines were missing or never recorded at all. Despite it being a regulatory requirement.

It just got worse as they passed more and more of it into investor pockets.

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