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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see if this will make natural gas a more attractive source of residential heating as the price has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years.

The push for electrification seems like it relies on us metaphorically drowning in excess cheap electricity and want somewhere for it to go but right now the opposite it happening.

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>The price has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years

Not really, natural gas has immense exposure to geopolitics and the commodity markets: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/what-drives-natural-gas-pri...

There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people

I skimmed the article (so forgive me if I'm off.) It appears to reference non-US markets and the parent was assuming US (my assumption).

AFAIK, the US has a mid-long outlook of gas oversupply. EU's market is broken and has 3x the price (c.f. Henry Hub v. TTF). I haven't seen any major forecasters predict reaching parity anytime soon. Hence, LNG export projects keep getting (over-)built to chase the arbitrage.

> There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people

This has kinda wonky incentives though - if your fixed costs for gas are high but your marginal costs remain low and for whatever logistical reasons you can't cut the gas connection entirely, then your motivations are to move as much of your heating load over to gas as possible.

I'm currently facing this dilemma when it comes to my new water heater purchase. The $/kJ actually delivered into the water difference is so significant despite gas being less efficient that I'm probably going to switch to gas. Electricity has gotten so expensive that even with an efficiency advantage it still loses on the order of $500-800 per year.

Is gas actually less efficient? I haven't had to work out the math myself yet, but there are some very salient variables - e.g. what's the energy source of the electricity? If it's a natural gas power plant, you're looking at like 30-60% efficiency of gas->electricity in the first place. Are you looking a at a heat pump heater? If so, how much of its energy would be pulling heat from the house that needs to be replaced by the home's heating supply anyway?

This is the kind of thing where a carbon tax is great for sorting out the pricing to match the externalities.

You might be right, I'm just talking about "last mile" efficiency. I get electricity at $/kWh and gas at $/therm and then an electric heater is x% at converting that electricity into hotter water and a gas heater is %y. From what I can find y < x for water heaters on the market. But even despite that my $/therm is so low that it still comes out ahead.

> ”Are you looking a at a heat pump heater? If so, how much of its energy would be pulling heat from the house that needs to be replaced by the home's heating supply anyway?”

Heat pump water heaters pull heat from the outside. Usually with a split outdoor unit, just like normal A/C and heat pump systems.

I’ve also seen models where the entire system (integrated storage cylinder for the heated water) is installed outdoors, but those are presumably meant for more mild climates.

In any case, they certainly don’t pull heat from inside the house.

Thanks, that obviously makes more sense. (I think I was thinking about heat pump clothes dryers at the same time I was making that comment.)

Heat pump dryers don’t cool the room either because they work in a closed loop. There’s no external vent removing hot air to the outside like a conventional dryer. So they pull heat from the room but also put it back in the room, and the overall effect is to warm up the room slightly.

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