If your bill is $700/month it's more than likely your fault. Either your house is quite large. Or you run it very inefficiently. In mild Northern California there's no reason for your bill to be that high.
It's pretty easy to get to $700/mo. There's a lot of old housing stock without good insulation, leaky windows, etc. Leaving a typical server on is like $70. I can see a 3bd 2ba apartment easily hitting $700/mo with an active family living in it. Add in an EV, that's another $50/mo right there, maybe more!
Thanks for the assumption. Its a rental victorian, with no insulation, and we have a newborn. We keep it at 68' (when occupied). Heat is not on all day. I have taped all windows to exclude drafts, and have draft excluders on all doors. I've done everything a tenant can do.
Just a few weeks ago there was a big power outage that lasted 24 hours because of a storm. I'm glad I have a gas stove because I could still cook and prevent food from spoiling. Making everything dependent on the power grid is just putting more strain on an already unreliable infrastructure.
I don't think politicians are thinking clearly about this. They seem to want net-zero energy at any cost, even if it means people will suffer. Meanwhile we can't control what other countries do so it might not even make a difference anyway.
Your gas stove isn't a heating appliance and therefore is probably exempt.
"In a vote held late Wednesday, the board of directors of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) adopted rules that will require new water heaters and furnaces to have zero emissions of nitrogen oxides, or NOx."
Looks like the AVG low in the Bay Area is about 45? I suppose that isn't that cold, however, in the event of an extended electrical outage, those with gas appliances can still heat their homes. Those without cannot. I think the merit of the parent comment still stands.
I live in New England and utilize heating oil primarily. Even that won't work without electricity.
True, but I could run my gas heat with a portable generator. Most of my neighbors with electric heat could not. Same with my pellet stove, it requires power for the auger and blower, but significantly less than an all electric system. I think the right thing to do is to ensure the public is aware of the tradeoff and if indoor air quality is a concern, then ensure proper ventilation in the building code. I worry about going all in on electric when reliability is not robust.
My furnace doesn't run if the electricity is off. The fan needs electricity. The safety circuits in the furnace need electricity.
If we want to talk about power outages causing loss of life due to freezing then we can talk about that problem. But I'm pretty confident that "put today's gas furnaces in everybody's home" is the appropriate way of attacking that problem. Especially in a place like the bay area where you just aren't seeing 10 degree lows.
When they said "those with gas appliances can still heat their homes," I assume they meant using the gas stove as a contigency heat source.
Recommended? Of course not. But a lot of (especially rural propane) users do it to avoid freezing pipes and people.
SF maybe not so much, but in climates where you can literally die without heat (often because you're simultaneously "snowed in"), you really really want dissimilar redundancy.
(obviously NEVER heat with a stove, because as we all know you'll burn down your house and/or asphyxiate from carbon monoxide)
This is it. I run oil mostly, but have a propane fire place insert in the event of a power outage. While it is insuficient to heat my entire home, and every pipe in my house may burst from the cold, at least my family will be able to stay warm.
My experience is that those duffel-bag-sized portable kerosene heaters are almost as common as pickup trucks, out in the sticks. At least in places that have real winters.
>But I'm pretty confident that "put today's gas furnaces in everybody's home" is the appropriate way of attacking that problem.
Did you mean "is not". And I never suggested this. But certainly there are vulnerable populations that should be considered.
If the purpose of this legislation is to improve "indoor air quality", as another poster suggested, why not educate the populace and allow them to make the decision for themselves?
It seems like a big deal to me to go from two redundant energy sources to one without discussing the trade offs in resiliency. I agree with OP, that there will be a large of human cost to giving up gas heat without making a corresponding investment in the reliability of the electric grid (which I have never seen mentioned). My impression is that the total cost to the decision to phase out gas has not been crunched.
Pushing it to individuals to be prepared for electric grid failure is pretty bad for carbon and pollution. All those generators (and other emergency backup appliances) manufactured and maintained. I personally prefer having gas and electric, I feel that gives me adequate reliability, so I don't need to own a generator: I have my gas heat (millivolt pilot generator requires no AC power), gas hot water, candles, and flashlights. And I like not owning a generator (or emergency propane heater (aren't these commonly implicated in structure fires? [0]), etc). Plus many people can't afford generators.
Now that you mention it, I also have a gas stove and that day the temp. was in the 30's. I was still able to stay warm at night. So it's the same problem.
You are describing an emergency scenario. Everyone should be prepared for emergencies but I don't think having a gas furnace or stove should be part of that plan. Using them during a power outage can be extremely dangerous.
A few weeks ago? HALF of Santa Clara County PG&E customers had no power a couple days ago. Yesterday was about 25% of all customers. As of right now it's about 10%.
> They seem to want net-zero energy at any cost, even if it means people will suffer.
I think you misspelled "net zero carbon."
And forget politicians, I want net zero carbon. Though I wouldn't exactly say "at any cost," I'm willing to pay more myself and see others suffer in order to get there.
Because people will suffer more if we don't.
I'm also getting increasingly skeptical of but-other-countries argument: America's chip war with China has demonstrated that nations are willing to cut off major trade partners if they decide it's a matter of national security. I'm giving less than ten years before carbon tariffs are everywhere.
Yes thanks. I probably confused it with green energy.
> I'm also getting increasingly skeptical of but-other-countries argument: America's chip war with China has demonstrated that nations are willing to cut off major trade partners if they decide it's a matter of national security. I'm giving less than ten years before carbon tariffs are everywhere.
We're doing it at such a pace that 10 years is way too late. If we had the time we would do the tariffs at the same time in order to at least have everyone make the same sacrifices. Instead only a few hundred million people will make the sacrifices in vain while the rest of the world keeps burning coal. I hope the market pressures them sooner because green energy will be profitable. I'm not convinced banning energy sources like this is effective.
SFBay doesn't have big freezes like Texas, but I have to wonder the wisdom of eliminating gas heaters entirely. The blower fan on a typical gas heater uses 120v and doesn't consume nearly as much power as a ~20a 240v heat pump. During a typical PG&E power outage a much larger back up battery will be needed to keep a home heated.
Over the last couple of years, I've had 4-5 power outages that lasted over 4 hours and I live in the middle of San Francisco. I do have a wood burning fireplace as a backup, but those have all sorts of restrictions on use and new ones aren't permitted. Imagine what a chilly 20 unit Tenderloin apartment is going to be like!
Unless cheap battery tech, microgrids, and major subsidies are put into place, it's going to be a cold winter when PG&E is out for hours at night in 2032.
Burying is a good idea and I'm a fan of it for sure. The issues I've seen on my block is the transformer out on the pole fails about every 7 years.
As an aside, it's an interesting failure scenario because there's a loud explosion outside my window, then I get 120v 50hz power from whatever is left of the transformer so half the house lights work at an odd warm glow. :D
My neighborhood has buried lines. We've lost power a handful of times in the last 5 years, usually due to extreme cold(Midwest), or animals getting into power station equipment. Admittedly not day-long outages though. So far the extreme cold cases have been luckily short, so it wasn't a big concern, but if they were longer then I would've been wishing for some sort of backup power for my gas furnace or for a wood stove.
You can bury local lines. But look around and I'm sure within a mile you'll see high-tension lines going across the land, those are very expensive (very) to bury, because they give off quite a bit of heat.
The sheer amount of third-world problems concentrated in a rich state like California just never ceases to amaze me. You will get better power supply in rural Bulgaria.
What’s your point? Nobody is discussing building new buildings with fireplaces or adding fireplaces to existing buildings when converting their heat from gas to electric (I’m pretty sure neither of these activities are even allowed in the Bay Area!)
I couldn't disagree more with most of the policies that California and the sfbay area have implemented in the past few years and this is one of the dumbest. You are now putting your housing(of millions) onto a non-redundant heating system(if power goes out you are totally out of luck like you mentioned). And lets look at the other blunders they are putting into place:
- Banning the sale of all gas cars by 2035(lets see how the grid handles by adding millions of electric cars to it). My guess it will fail spectacularly as the state now can't even handle a small heat wave(in 2022) with the current power grid pull.
- Shutting down perfectly safe and clean nuclear energy power plants which will strain the grid even more.
- Banning gas powered lawn equipment - have you ever tried to use electric alternatives, they are completely not up to the task of a yard larger than a room or two(I do alot of yard work and tried every electric alternative, they need to be recharged constantly).
- Banning gas powered backup generators - good luck when the power goes out on the new frail grid California has when nuclear power is shut down.
It seems like a very specific scenario you're concerned about, which doesn't necessarily force one to conclude we need to keep gas heating. I'm skeptical a 20 unit building would buy enough battery storage for long duration electric OR gas furnace heating during an outage. Probably not too difficult to do some napkin math on the cost of that system.
I live on the peninsula. We've had many more than 4-5 power outages the last couple of years. Usually they last 4-8 hours, but we've had several that lasted for days, including the most recent one which was 48-hours (and we had one a few weeks ago for 24-hours). They've re-routed power, not fixed the actual cause, so some of our neighborhood is still without power. The cause is a huge mess of trees, wires, and broken poles. We spoke to a PG&E worker and he said it will probably take about 36-hours to fix, it's not high priority (we still have traffic lights out in town), and they probably won't work on it over the weekend. So some of our neighbors are looking at a week-long outage.
It's been cold here, with temperatures down in the 30s some nights. The temperature in our house was less than 50 degrees this morning. We do have a wood burning fireplace, but we've never used it, so I'm hesitant to do so unless we really need it. Even then, it's not enough to heat the whole house.
We've finally decided to get some alternative power here. Probably solar+battery with natural gas generation as backup (before that's illegal). We can only sort-of afford it. I don't know what other people are going to do.
The gas prices recently have been sky high, but earlier that was not the case. Gas heaters are cheaper and are in general more efficient than electricity. My hvac was down this winter for a couple of weeks and despite the high prices of gas, it was still more expensive (orders of magnitude) to heat the whole house using electric heaters (that my landlord graciously arranged).
I lived in central SF for many years. I prefer a cool house (some visitors might say “cold”). I was able to go months at a time, winter and summer, without using gas heat at all.
Of all the areas that could manage this, SFBA seems up there in terms of feasibility at least.
A lot of people seem to think we can only accomplish a transition away from fossil fuels after alternatives for fossil fuel driven appliances are available, fully scaled up, and cheap. That won’t happen without demand.
Given that nobody cares about their furnace as long as it works, and that in the Bay Area these decisions are made by landlords about every 20 years, who are just trying to get the job done as fast as possible at the lowest price, just banning the gas burning version is a great way to create the necessary demand to accomplish this transition on schedule.*
*”on schedule” here means “in enough time to mitigate climate change enough to prevent the release of exotic diseases from permafrost”
probably need the full 20 years for the grid to catch up, no? this is think global act local taken to an absurd. is burning methane for heat in the bay area really going to melt permafrost? if doing this, why not at least tax the methane to make heat pump TCO seem lower and redirect the extra money into funding crumbling public transit which might actually reduce greenhouse gas from driving.
The only major problem I have with things like this is when you get electricity disrupted do to inclement weather. This is a common problem in my area, and not being able to heat your home or cook food is not great
I am on my second round of 5 days with no electricity and no heat in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is 50 degrees inside and trying to function is futile. Wood-burning stoves are banned, I am in an all-electric structure - no hot water, no way to cook unless I use a camp stove inside (horrible for health), no heat - we bought toe warmers for the 82 year-old I live with.
This makes no sense, if the grid can’t handle it, then it should not have been legislated this way. At the very least, an allowance for back-up systems during emergencies should be in place.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadYou either care about air quality or you don’t. This makes no sense.
That is very fixable. With $500/month of potential savings the return on investment is very high.
> Leaving a typical server on is like $70
1. That'll cut down on your heating bill.
2. How many people need a server that expensive? To do what?
I don't think politicians are thinking clearly about this. They seem to want net-zero energy at any cost, even if it means people will suffer. Meanwhile we can't control what other countries do so it might not even make a difference anyway.
This is about indoor air quality too, though.
I hope by then, we begin to have efficient home-energy storage solutions, for the purposes of outages.
"In a vote held late Wednesday, the board of directors of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) adopted rules that will require new water heaters and furnaces to have zero emissions of nitrogen oxides, or NOx."
I live in New England and utilize heating oil primarily. Even that won't work without electricity.
If we want to talk about power outages causing loss of life due to freezing then we can talk about that problem. But I'm pretty confident that "put today's gas furnaces in everybody's home" is the appropriate way of attacking that problem. Especially in a place like the bay area where you just aren't seeing 10 degree lows.
Recommended? Of course not. But a lot of (especially rural propane) users do it to avoid freezing pipes and people.
SF maybe not so much, but in climates where you can literally die without heat (often because you're simultaneously "snowed in"), you really really want dissimilar redundancy.
(obviously NEVER heat with a stove, because as we all know you'll burn down your house and/or asphyxiate from carbon monoxide)
Did you mean "is not". And I never suggested this. But certainly there are vulnerable populations that should be considered.
If the purpose of this legislation is to improve "indoor air quality", as another poster suggested, why not educate the populace and allow them to make the decision for themselves?
It seems like a big deal to me to go from two redundant energy sources to one without discussing the trade offs in resiliency. I agree with OP, that there will be a large of human cost to giving up gas heat without making a corresponding investment in the reliability of the electric grid (which I have never seen mentioned). My impression is that the total cost to the decision to phase out gas has not been crunched.
Pushing it to individuals to be prepared for electric grid failure is pretty bad for carbon and pollution. All those generators (and other emergency backup appliances) manufactured and maintained. I personally prefer having gas and electric, I feel that gives me adequate reliability, so I don't need to own a generator: I have my gas heat (millivolt pilot generator requires no AC power), gas hot water, candles, and flashlights. And I like not owning a generator (or emergency propane heater (aren't these commonly implicated in structure fires? [0]), etc). Plus many people can't afford generators.
[0] https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...
And with no power, you may not be venting. Sure you know to open a window, but every year people die from not opening the window.
I think you misspelled "net zero carbon."
And forget politicians, I want net zero carbon. Though I wouldn't exactly say "at any cost," I'm willing to pay more myself and see others suffer in order to get there.
Because people will suffer more if we don't.
I'm also getting increasingly skeptical of but-other-countries argument: America's chip war with China has demonstrated that nations are willing to cut off major trade partners if they decide it's a matter of national security. I'm giving less than ten years before carbon tariffs are everywhere.
> I'm also getting increasingly skeptical of but-other-countries argument: America's chip war with China has demonstrated that nations are willing to cut off major trade partners if they decide it's a matter of national security. I'm giving less than ten years before carbon tariffs are everywhere.
We're doing it at such a pace that 10 years is way too late. If we had the time we would do the tariffs at the same time in order to at least have everyone make the same sacrifices. Instead only a few hundred million people will make the sacrifices in vain while the rest of the world keeps burning coal. I hope the market pressures them sooner because green energy will be profitable. I'm not convinced banning energy sources like this is effective.
Over the last couple of years, I've had 4-5 power outages that lasted over 4 hours and I live in the middle of San Francisco. I do have a wood burning fireplace as a backup, but those have all sorts of restrictions on use and new ones aren't permitted. Imagine what a chilly 20 unit Tenderloin apartment is going to be like!
Unless cheap battery tech, microgrids, and major subsidies are put into place, it's going to be a cold winter when PG&E is out for hours at night in 2032.
As an aside, it's an interesting failure scenario because there's a loud explosion outside my window, then I get 120v 50hz power from whatever is left of the transformer so half the house lights work at an odd warm glow. :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKuxfcSrEU
- Banning the sale of all gas cars by 2035(lets see how the grid handles by adding millions of electric cars to it). My guess it will fail spectacularly as the state now can't even handle a small heat wave(in 2022) with the current power grid pull.
- Shutting down perfectly safe and clean nuclear energy power plants which will strain the grid even more.
- Banning gas powered lawn equipment - have you ever tried to use electric alternatives, they are completely not up to the task of a yard larger than a room or two(I do alot of yard work and tried every electric alternative, they need to be recharged constantly).
- Banning gas powered backup generators - good luck when the power goes out on the new frail grid California has when nuclear power is shut down.
I live on the peninsula. We've had many more than 4-5 power outages the last couple of years. Usually they last 4-8 hours, but we've had several that lasted for days, including the most recent one which was 48-hours (and we had one a few weeks ago for 24-hours). They've re-routed power, not fixed the actual cause, so some of our neighborhood is still without power. The cause is a huge mess of trees, wires, and broken poles. We spoke to a PG&E worker and he said it will probably take about 36-hours to fix, it's not high priority (we still have traffic lights out in town), and they probably won't work on it over the weekend. So some of our neighbors are looking at a week-long outage.
It's been cold here, with temperatures down in the 30s some nights. The temperature in our house was less than 50 degrees this morning. We do have a wood burning fireplace, but we've never used it, so I'm hesitant to do so unless we really need it. Even then, it's not enough to heat the whole house.
We've finally decided to get some alternative power here. Probably solar+battery with natural gas generation as backup (before that's illegal). We can only sort-of afford it. I don't know what other people are going to do.
This makes no sense.
If you count heat pumps as electricity, this hasn't been true for a long, long time.
No longer true, especially in moderate climates such as the bay.
Of all the areas that could manage this, SFBA seems up there in terms of feasibility at least.
Given that nobody cares about their furnace as long as it works, and that in the Bay Area these decisions are made by landlords about every 20 years, who are just trying to get the job done as fast as possible at the lowest price, just banning the gas burning version is a great way to create the necessary demand to accomplish this transition on schedule.*
*”on schedule” here means “in enough time to mitigate climate change enough to prevent the release of exotic diseases from permafrost”
54% of emissions in the city are from burning gas for home heating so it's really the biggest way to lower emissions. Good for SF.
(the next biggest chunk of emissions is 39% from vehicles)
This makes no sense, if the grid can’t handle it, then it should not have been legislated this way. At the very least, an allowance for back-up systems during emergencies should be in place.