How soon until "new" homes come with a blank space for the new owner to install an aftermarket stove that can cook food properly?
Agreed. An induction cooktop and electric stove are far superior to gas.
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New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#142Berkeley attempted this and it was recently overturned: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-overturns-berkeley-califo... California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
>Berkeley attempted this and it was recently overturned: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-overturns-berkeley-califo ... There is a legal difference between a state banning it and a city. States have far more powers that cities don't (unless the state delegates that power which they often do)
In this case it would not matter, the ruling says it's pre-empted by federal law.
It would still be pre-empted by federal law even if the state did it.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#143Berkeley attempted this and it was recently overturned: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-overturns-berkeley-califo... California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
A bigger problem is getting a feed to your house that can handle your hot water heater, stove, washing machine, and electric car charging all at once. That's rather impractical in some areas, so there is some work to coordinate between the appliances so they can share a smaller feed. The way some stoves are participating is that they charge a battery at relatively low current all the time, and then cook from the batt…
(Heat pump) Hot water heaters and washing machines are not major power draws. Some rough figures on power consumption of typical appliances, from most to least:
Continuous-flow electric water heater: 20 kW
Heat pump or central air, big home: 12-15 kW
EV charger: 7 kW
Electric tanked water heater or hybrid water heater in electric mode: 7.2 kW
Clothes dryer with heating element on: 5 kW
Heat pump or central air, small home: 3-4 kW
Electric oven: 3-5 kW
Induction range: 1.8 kW
Instapot: ~1.5 kW
Toaster oven: 1-1.5 kW
Electric kettle: 1 kW
Microwave: 1.2 kW
Dishwasher: ~500-1000 W
Heat pump water heater: ~600W
Washing machine: 500 W
Vacuum cleaner: 200-300 W
Home server or desktop: 100-200 W
Box fan or air purifier: 100 W
Laptop on fast charge: 65W
Laptop on slow charge: 30W
LED light bulb: 12-15W
Cell phone charger: 6W
Individually coordinating appliance loads or including a battery with each appliance seems like an inefficient, expensive and unnecessary extra step. Basically, all you need to do is a.) charge your EVs at night when nothing else is running b.) don't use electric water heaters unless they're heat pumps and c.) insulate your home if you're using heat pump HVAC. All of which you should be doing anyway. The kitchen appliances are easily manageable if the EV and HVAC are not running at the same time, and everything else is rounding error.
There might be some benefit to grid-coordinating EV charging and heat pump HVAC operation, particularly since these are the cases where naive loads all hit the grid at the same time, and they already come with batteries included (literal ones for EVs, thermal batteries for HVAC). For smaller appliances it's totally unnecessary though.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#144Berkeley attempted this and it was recently overturned: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-overturns-berkeley-califo... California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
Most modern gas stoves require power as well, look at the most popular GE or Samsung models
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people around here buy enough battery or generators to keep the power on. PG&E is way below one nine of availability this year, but the outlets inside our house are at 6 nines followed by an eight. Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co…
> Most people around here buy enough battery or generators to keep the power on. This is a surprising assertion to me. How can “most people” afford batteries and generators?
$50-60K is enough to buy a backup system, and not much compared to the price of a house in this area.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people around here buy enough battery or generators to keep the power on. PG&E is way below one nine of availability this year, but the outlets inside our house are at 6 nines followed by an eight. Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co…
> PG&E is way below one nine of availability this year You’ve been without utility power for two full weeks in 2023?!
Can’t speak to California, but where I am in Canada (national capital region) I’ve been without power for over 14 days total in the past 12 months and we don’t have half the problems they do.
There was an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a couple ~24 hour outages.
Surprisingly very few short outages or brownouts or anything.
I’m sitting at having utility power ~95% of the time over the past 12 months. I’d have no problem believing two weeks… or more.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s impractical to upgrade service lines. It is, however, impractical to get PG&E to approve the upgrade. (For us, that process cost about 3 years and $10K. They ran a wire 6 feet from an existing transformer to a pole we had to install ourselves). When they pass these laws, they should come with an SLA for the utility provider to approve “engineering” plans for the utility hookup and whatever transfor…
> (For us, that process cost about 3 years and $10K. They ran a wire 6 feet from an existing transformer to a pole we had to install ourselves). Must have been a while ago because in 2021 they charged me $0 (not a typo) to go from 100A to 200A. It took just a month or so to arrange.
It's really amazing how people can talk about 200 amps as if it's nothing. We have a household installation of 40 amps (220) and last year there were months that cost 400 euros per month on electricity, and we are not heavy electricity users (we have no electric cloth dryer but have a small robot mower tho)
It is almost like talking about 400HP cars/suvs, my 3 cylinder car is doing just fine at 84 kW max.
Am I being pedantic?
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#148Berkeley attempted this and it was recently overturned: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-overturns-berkeley-califo... California's electric grid is in horrendous shape. We can barely keep the power on in the summertime, especially when wildfires happen. When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food? Fire up my JetBoil? My BBQ?
> When the power is out, am I expected to start a fire in my yard to cook food?
You can't assume that gas supply works in a power outage. Some modern gas stoves depend on external electricity for active power regulation or flame surveillance, and the compressors along the line require electricity as well to function - which was one of the problems in the Texas power outage IIRC, as the gas peaker plants couldn't get powered on because the gas grid compressors were offline.
Keep a camping stove for emergency scenarios, way more reliable and if you're running out of gas you can always walk to the next open hardware store.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s impractical to upgrade service lines. It is, however, impractical to get PG&E to approve the upgrade. (For us, that process cost about 3 years and $10K. They ran a wire 6 feet from an existing transformer to a pole we had to install ourselves). When they pass these laws, they should come with an SLA for the utility provider to approve “engineering” plans for the utility hookup and whatever transfor…
> (For us, that process cost about 3 years and $10K. They ran a wire 6 feet from an existing transformer to a pole we had to install ourselves). Must have been a while ago because in 2021 they charged me $0 (not a typo) to go from 100A to 200A. It took just a month or so to arrange.
It depends a lot on your existing service. For many homes the wire is already rated for 200A, and you just need a new main panel. In those cases the utility charges you $0. On the other end of the spectrum, some homes have buried power lines where they need to dig up the street and driveway to run a new higher-rated cable to your home, and I've heard of those costing upwards of $50K.
Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings
#150Only 24% of my state (Washington) has gas stoves. We have already begun the process to ban Natural Gas into new buildings. Nothing major is happening and the sky is not falling. If you are curious about your state's ratio of gas to electric stoves, you can check here [PDF warning]: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/...
Washington is unique in its hydropower positioning. It's easy to electrify in Washington because it makes sense to do so. Hydropower is cheap and clean.
Unfortunately it's not a replicable model for the rest of the country.