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New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

nytimes.com

981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#981

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California's strategy for electricity is non-existent. We have been perpetually at peak electricity use since 25+ years since I came here. Meanwhile electricity use from EVs has soared, and we don't have enough electricity for everything. AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now. Plus, I'm paying over $0.50/kWh when I hit Tier 3, which I hit after 2 charges of my EV. E…

Well, holy smokes, I thought electricity was cheap in the US.

It's highly regional. Per kWh, Connecticut pays twice as much as New Jersey, on average. Boston pays three times what Arizona pays. The government updates price tables monthly:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those batteries are too old/weak to effectively power a car how useful are they going to be at powering a household stove? Especially when why would you need such a thing anyway when you have 220v+ just itching to get the job done directly from the grid? The grid needs power storage, yes, but there's all sorts of solutions to that beyond lithium ion batteries including water & stone gravity storage systems. Or jus…

That really isn’t how it works. They hold less charge, but you can have more of them and weight isn’t really an issue. They can also charge more gradually, making the dynamics really different. A battery bank at home can be a good solution to grid balancing, eg if power is cheaper during the day or night, or if you have solar. Water storage systems aren’t very efficient and need lots of space, but there are people wh…

A battery bank at your house and that same battery bank at the power station are effectively equivalent. There's no benefit to distributing batteries here since transmission costs are relatively small.

So while yes water storage systems need lots of space, that's really only a problem if you're trying to distribute it. But you don't need to, you can centralize power storage to alleviate time of day spikes. Which many power grids already do.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#983

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't why the climate change aspect is so dismissed. In germany we are currently banning new gas heating installation as a general push to phase out gas. If you want to replace gas with electricity from green sources you have to start somewhere, otherwise everyone will just cry when being forced to replace it, even if announced that general Gas will shout down in 15 or 20 or whatever years. If you really want to ac…

What I have concerns over, honestly, is the climate science driving these thoughts. Nobody has explained to me sufficiently in plain language how carbon dioxide is bad for the environment. I've heard plenty of good explanations for water control, but my limited biology understanding has me presuming that more carbon emissions is advantageous to plants.

Come on, under how many rocks are you living?

The IPCC reports have it all. Their models include plant growth already. Google it.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing. This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem. As the fossil fuel reliance doesn't only extend to the energy sector, bu…

> This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem. Gas cannot be considered for a transition because of it's very high emissions, diplomatic issues and high infrastructure costs. It's a very polluting tech which should stay back in the 20th century along petrol. The stability problems of renewables m…

The accusation of hydrogen having bad efficiency is just something BEV companies came up with. It is basically marketing FUD. A more realistic analysis will show that there is very little difference between using hydrogen and direct electrification strategies. This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#985

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of "Empire State" did we not make clear.

What? I can't talk to the voices in your head, please forward their reply.

They demand an unconditional surrender from NJ.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#986
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im from a part of the country where we get hurricanes the power will go out and usually we also have a boil water notice for those days it is extremely helpful to have a gas stove, we can still cook and get clean water rather than just eating cold cans and hoping we have enough bottles

But you are, by definition, not from NY. So this shouldn't impact you.

i recall tales of sandy hitting NYC a few years ago

my guess is most people in this comment section aren't from NYC

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#987

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This change is being promoted as a critical step in the fight against climate change. 27 years from now, when we're supposedly going to be "net zero", do we really want to be supporting a bunch of natural gas infrastructure? Or should we start making that expensive infrastructure not necessary? 1. Most homes built now will be around in 27 years, and still in good shape. 2. Building and maintaining natural gas infra…

You have to have a gas backup in cold climates. You can't just dump NG. -22F is the limit for useful heat production from a heat pump.

There's nowhere outside of Alaska in the US that sees consistent temps below -22. Any place that gets that cold will only see it for a few nights at most, and could use resistive heating or portable gas to cover those brief windows.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#988

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course resistive heating doesn't stop working. Well except… > Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid Okay, yeah. That would pretty much be my concern. Having been without power for over two weeks in the past 12 months the propane tanks and propane stove / furnace / water heater have been a lifesaver. Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a…

Gas furnaces don't work without power by default. The fan that pushes the hot air through your house won't work. Many gas furnaces have electrically powered safety features that won't allow the furnace to function if the power is out.

Covered that already:

> Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.

My furnace runs on 120V power pulling ~8A when running. That's ~1kW. Comparable sized resistive heating would use about 9kW.

1kW for a few hours a day is easy to provide through a cheap generator, a couple small solar panels and a single marine battery, or apparently a ~$220 wind turbine I can order on Amazon that can output up to 1200W. 9kW is a whole different ball game.

And that's just heating. My stove uses in the order of single-digit watts for seconds at a time. It can also just be lit with a match without power. My water heater does run a small exhaust fan while it's heating, but again... we're talking hundreds of watts instead of kilowatts.

Yes, all these options pretty much still need power, but the smaller power requirements are a hell of a lot easier to provide than the power needed for resistive electric heating. I could run my water heater off of a desktop UPS.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#989
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what the cop is at -20C though, which is a fairly common winter temperature, and you really need heat at -40

I was responding specifically to this bit: "Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all." I've refuted that. If you want to discuss some more distant goalposts, I won't be able to offer firsthand evidence.

You are free to refute that.

Doesn’t make it wrong.

At -10C you are hardly pulling anything from the air, but you are spending electricity to keep your coils free of frost, as inefficiently as possible.

Do you not know how a heat pump works in cold weather?

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#990
post #984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem. Gas cannot be considered for a transition because of it's very high emissions, diplomatic issues and high infrastructure costs. It's a very polluting tech which should stay back in the 20th century along petrol. The stability problems of renewables m…

The accusation of hydrogen having bad efficiency is just something BEV companies came up with. It is basically marketing FUD. A more realistic analysis will show that there is very little difference between using hydrogen and direct electrification strategies. This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calcula…

The state of the art on the full cycle has 65% loss. No production ready tech goes below than that.

Once we said that, how you judge this very high losses depends of your personal opinion.

> This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.

Unless some better hydrogen tech is invented, that won't be useful towards this goal.

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