Eco darling natural gas gives way to wind, solar and battery electricity – and slave labor
Duggan Flanakin
When Berkeley, California last year became the first U.S. city to ban the installation of natural gas lines to new homes, Mayor Jesse Arreguín proudly stated, “We are committed to the Paris Agreement and must take immediate action in order to reach our climate action goals. It’s not radical. It’s necessary.”
Phasing out natural gas-fired electric power generation by 2030 is bedrock dogma in the Green New Deal. In fact, it’s become an unholy crusade. So it should be no surprise that climate alarmists would jump at the chance to ban new natural gas lines. Many other cities in California have already followed Berkeley’s lead, as has Bellingham, Washington. More gas bans are in the offing nationwide. Connecticut lawmakers actually want a law that would pressure insurers to stop insuring homes that have gas appliances or heating systems!!
But Takoma Park, Maryland, which proudly bills itself as “the Berkeley of the East,” wants to go even further. City officials have proposed to ban “all gas appliances, close fossil fuel pipelines, and move gasoline stations that do not convert to electric charging stations outside city limits by 2045.” The Takoma Park proposal also mandates all-LED lighting by 2022 for all buildings, including single-family homes. Composting would also become mandatory.
For hardliners whose only focus is ridding the world of carbon (dioxide), the moves are obvious and necessary. With wind and solar prices dropping, they argue, natural gas is no longer needed as a “bridge fuel.” They envision an all-electric future, magically, right away, co-friendly, sustainable. Or not.
The price claim is nonsense. It’s based on comparing operating costs for wind and solar installations. It deliberately ignores the far larger capital investment and environmental costs: building thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels, hauling and installing them across millions of acres, connecting them to the grid, backing them up with batteries or pumped storage (or coal or gas power plants), replacing them far sooner and more often that we’d have to replace coal, gas or nuclear plants, and disposing of broken and worn out panels, blades and other parts that cannot be burned or recycled.
The phony price parity claim also ignores the massive amounts of overseas mining for metals and other materials, which are needed in far greater amounts per megawatt for wind, solar and battery power than for stand-alone gas, coal or nuclear plants. And that mining is done under horrific conditions, with little attention to air and water pollution, workplace health and safety, fair wages, or rampant child labor.
That’s reason enough to rise up in anger. But natural gas companies, gas appliance manufacturers, restaurants and ordinary citizens have additional reasons for not taking these radical demands lying down.
If implemented , the Takoma Park proposal would force those with gas stoves, hot water heaters, clothes dryers, furnaces, outdoor grills and propane heaters (for outdoor winter dining venues) to replace them with electric units. That could double electricity demand – and turbine and panel numbers and impacts.
Homeowners, landlords and businesses that currently rely on natural gas would have to upgrade their electrical systems to handle the additional load from going all-electric. Estimates run s high as $25,000 per resident (not household) to make the switch.
Last November The California Restaurant Association filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, claiming that Berkeley’s action violates “long-established state and federal law.” The CRA further claims the action is invalid and unenforceable under the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act and under California’s Energy Code and Building Standards Code, and that it is an unlawful to use police powers to amend state building codes.
A CRA press release further explained that the natural gas ban would force higher energy costs on businesses and consumers alike and, wurst of all, “effectively prohibit the preparation” of flame-seared meats, sausages and charred vegetables, and the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok (the essence of Chinese cooking). Top chef Robert W. Phillips explains: “An overwhelming majority of chefs and cooks are trained using natural gas stoves, with pots and pans over a flame produced by natural gas.”
SoCalGas, whose service area covers half the state, is also a strong opponent of building electrification.
Alarm over this fast-spreading virtue signaling has spread to Washington and Oregon, where the Seattle Times says gas companies are forming a coalition of unions, businesses and consumer groups to tout the benefits of natural gas and help “prevent or defeat” initiatives that would inhibit or prohibit its use.
Comparisons between electric and gas appliances show that gas appliances often cost more up front (especially if you have to run a gas line) but save money while in use. More important in many parts of the country is the fact that gas stoves can operate even when the electricity goes out – and a small generator will allow gas furnaces to continue operating during power outages. (Prolonged outages have become frequent in California of late, due to efforts to reduce catastrophic wildfires associated with power lines but caused by the state’s failure or refusal to thin and manage brush, grass and trees.)
Until now, people have been able to choose between electric and gas. One energy choice service notes that gas water heaters typically cost about $30 a month, while electric heaters cost $42 on average. Gas units also heat water more rapidly and provide hot water during power outages.
Gas dryers average about 8 cents less per load to run than electric units, partly because they heat up instantly, whereas electric units use a coil that can make loads take twice as long to dry. Electric dryers can also be harder on clothes because of their longer drying times. Electric dryers do not require a gas line, can be installed wherever there is a 220-volt power outlet, and do not require vents for carbon monoxide. On the other hand, an improperly grounded electric dryer can be dangerous.
Gas stoves provide instant heat for top burners, but gas ovens heat up more slowly, according to TopTenReviews. Gas stoves may be harder to clean, and there is a risk of fire from the open flame. Both gas and electric stovetop burners remain hot long after the knob is turned off. Most importantly, gas stoves are cheaper to operate, because gas prices have fallen some 85% since their historic high in 2006.
In sum, both gas and electric appliances have their pluses and minuses. However, “choice” (for women or men) is not high on the list for many virtue-signaling politicians today, except in one other acrimonious arena, which Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently addressed in the context of a pending Supreme Court case. They therefore push the envelope every time – and sometimes get their way. Yet in the process, they make new enemies of people who previously were not politically motivated at all.
In Takoma Park, which four decades ago became the nation’s first “nuclear-free city,” sustainability manager Gina Mathis says, “Yes there are ways that we could soften” these policies, “but we know that voluntary programs are not going to get us to net zero.” As in net-zero plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions.
The mandates tend to generate anger. According to the Washington Post, one Takoma Park resident complained that “the number of times the word ‘require’ is used in this [proposal] is stunning.”
It could get far worse. Socialist Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is committed to 100% “renewable” energy for electricity and transportation “by no later than 2030.” His plan would also take our entire energy system out of the private sector, and put it in government hands, with more mandates.
Meanwhile, China already has 900,000 MW of coal-fired power plants and has another 350,000 MW under construction or in planning. It’s also building or financing hundreds of coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India likewise has hundreds of coal-fired units and is planning nearly 400 more. They will not stop using fossil fuels to build their economies, create jobs and improve living standards.
So even if manmade CO2 is a major factor in climate change, these scattered, silly natural gas bans might reduce future warming by 0.0001 to 0.001 degrees 80 years from now. But the con goes on.
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many articles on energy, climate change and environmentalism.
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The proponents of these insane energy policies must know the only possible outcome of their efforts will be civil war. I do not use that term lightly.
The people will rise up. There will be armed conflict in civil society as the political elite attempt to force the limited resources of the people, to be deployed in ways that the people can not afford. The end result will be civil disobedience. If the elite continue to press on denying the basic survival needs of individuals then conflict will happen. There will be no choice. The people will be literally dying, from the policies being progressed by green fixated establishment figures. The people will consider their options. Either go along with unaffordable, unreliable life destroying political decisions, or rise up and say no.
No man will stand by. as his family is being starved and frozen to death due entirely to green political dogma.
The second amendment was not put in place by accident, or because the founding fathers of an American free society, thought they might need arms to repel a foreign invader. It was put in place to safeguard the needs of the citizens against the excesses of over arching authority.
Every time you convert energy there is loss. That mean gas appliances will always be more efficient than electric appliances. While electric has made a lot of progress with efficiency, with combined cycles which use combustion turbine waste heat to generate more power with the steam produced, they are still less efficient than burning the gas yourself.
So, no back-up generators for homes or municipalities either. I shudder to think how much I have saved over my 68 year lifetime by never heating a home with electric. But they can have my gas grill tongs when they pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
Again, mandates and prohibitions aren’t necessary for superior technology. The End.
The World Bank administered Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP – see their website) has instituted a Clean Cooking Fund in the amount of $500 million with the intention, in part, of getting millions of people to switch from biomass to gas products.
So the low income countries get to have gas cooking just as the Americans lose it.
Incidentally, for clothes drying, it is quite possible to use a heat pump instead of resistive elements to provide the elevated temperatures needed to dry clothes. It would cut the electricity consumption by a factor of 3 to 10 depending on the weather at the time.
In Southern Africa heat pump water heaters are saving a great deal of energy with a reduction factor of 2.5-4 being typical.
The only thing that could be good from this utter stupidity is if one of these small areas goes full stupid so that the rest of the world can watch the disaster unfold and depending where you live it won’t take long. I’m in Canada and it would be beyond insanity to enact such stupidity here unless you actually mean to freeze your citizens to death. When it finally gets to life or death from freezing then there will be bloody uprising of common sense.
It’s even worse in the UK. The government proposes to ban new installations of gas fired home heating boilers from 2025. Currently electricity costs 3 times as much per kW/h as gas. Because electricity prices keep rising sharply as more renewable energy comes on line, by 2025 it’s likely to be 4 times as much. So an annual cost of £800 for home heating will rise to £3,200 in 2025. The government has also been conned into believing that air source heat pumps could replace gas boilers. That is simply not true because they do not work in the UK’s cold and damp winter climate due to frosting up of their heat exchangers. Below freezing they fail entirely. In new houses already built with these devices, residents have been faced with £3,000 a year electricity bills because these units switch to an electric backup when they fail.
Derek, I’d like to track something on lie about that failure and direct energy backup, if you could please post a link to any relevant story in a local paper or protest site.
Heap pumps are being touted as the universal solution to air quality and energy shortages where resistive heating is common, which is to say, central Asia. What is the MTBF of these UK installations?
Well I can tell you that my experience with heat pumps is that it has a MTBF of about 6-10 years. The compressor and the exchange coils are the parts that can and do fail and essentially require a full replacement of the entire system. Compressors are only warrantied for a year. Exchange coils will corrode and fail within a decade. The biggest issue is that heat pumps can only handle 20 degrees or so of temperature difference between indoor and outdoor, without having to depend on a massive resistor for backup heat. And below freezing they also need a defrost cycle for the outdoor compressor. Finally the switch to non-CFC coolants has meant units that now run almost non-stop, due to the lower efficiency of the non-CFC coolant
Use of natural gas lowers carbon dioxide compared with almost all other energy sources.
That gives away the game —
It’s about power & control.
The rest of it is just fig leafs.
I have an induction range, and I like it much better than my old gas range. It doesn’t have as much waste heat getting my hands hot when I fry, and the air is much cooler.
Everyone I know with electric heat around here uses geothermal heat pumps, but I don’t know anyone who has gas service who does this. I think the drawback is the pipes in the ground only last about twenty years, and it is expensive to maintain. Will green virtue signalling cities ever have community geothermal wells?
Fascism in it’s finest form: superior overlord race in ‘government’ deciding what subhumans must do, or else….
Benjamin Thompson was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1753 & because he was a Loyalist, he left (abruptly) for Britain in 1776. He spent much of his life as an employee of the Bavarian government where he received his title, “Count of the Holy Roman Empire.” Rumford is known primarily for the work he did on the nature of heat.
Back in England, Rumford applied his knowledge of heat to the improvement of fireplaces. He made them smaller and shallower with widely angled covings so they would radiate better. And he streamlined the throat, or in his words “rounded off the breast” so as to “remove those local hindrances which forcibly prevent the smoke from following its natural tendency to go up the chimney…”
With a little effort & adequate research, it’s possible for homeowners to build their own Rumford fireplaces. We constructed two Rumfords 8 years ago, following the guidelines provided by Jim Buckley at Buckley Rumford Co., 1035 Monroe Street, Port Townsend, WA 98368. http://www.rumford.com/contents.html
The outdoor Rumford is the essential component of our summer kitchen as it extends the BBQ season to 12 months. The indoor Rumford enables us to run our gas fired central heating at its lowest setting. However, our house is much better insulated than most British homes!!
IMO, a Rumford wood burning open fireplace is a better proposition than a closed stove, because it burns brightly & radiates tremendous heat. Any volatile gases from freshly added fuel are burned within the firebox rather than passing up the chimney as smoke. Burning coal or smokeless fuels requires a grate; logs stacked vertically do not. Construct a Rumford, you know it makes sense. Pallets are grate (sic) fuel.
Perry
It is interesting that virtually all new high performance high mass (retained heat) masonry heaters have no grate, even when burning wet wood.
In the past 20 years there have been many advances on wood-fired heating systems that involve no automatic controls. Single bell and double bell heaters are amazing. There is a Masonry Heaters Association in North America – see their website.
A typical installation has a staged air supply and a flat base interior made from insulative bricks. Any of the modern ones are extremely clean-burning, producing lower PM emissions than is required by the EPA’s updated NSPS regulations (from May 2020).
I have a little quibble with this statement: ” Both gas and electric stovetop burners remain hot long after the knob is turned off”. Electric burners on a stove remain hot much longer after the power is turned off than a gas burner. If a pot of water starts boiling so fast that the froth level rises on a gas stove, turning off the gas can usually prevent any froth from overflowing, while with an electric burner, the cook must move the pot off the burner to prevent overflow.
The (metal) gas burner may remain hot, but since the cooking utensil is not in direct contact with the burner, there is little heat transfer once the flame is out. On an electric stove, the cooking utensil is in direct contact with the heated coil, which remains hot for a few minutes after the power is turned off.
The main problem with cities trying to ban gas pipelines (even small ones to individual homes) is that it’s self-defeating from an emissions point of view. A home that is supplied with natural gas will probably use between 50% and 80% of the total natural gas usage on heating the home during the cold season (depending on the outdoor climate, natural gas bills are 2 or 3 times higher in winter than in summer), and relatively little on cooking, water heating, or clothes drying.
A well-maintained natural gas furnace can transfer 85 to 90% of the heat of combustion of natural gas to the air in the home. If there are no gas supply lines to the home, an oil-burning furnace is slightly less efficient (80 to 85%), but emits nearly twice the CO2 for the same heat of combustion. If a natural-gas furnace is replaced by electric baseboard heating, the heating elements themselves are nearly 100% efficient, but the process of generating the electric power is less efficient (about 60 to 65% for combined-cycle natural gas, 30 to 35% for a coal-fired power plant).
The net effect of banning natural gas service to homes, where the lion’s share is consumed by heating the home, is to generate MORE CO2 emissions and transfer them from the home’s chimney to a power plant, likely less than 100 miles away. But CO2, once it gets into the air, tends to diffuse everywhere (unless it is absorbed by trees or other green plants), so that banning natural gas service to homes will INCREASE the total CO2 emissions to the air.
For both carbon dioxide and real pollutants (SO2, particulates, NOx, etc), natural gas is by far the cleanest of the fossil fuels, so we should use it as long as there is a reliable supply available. If the greenies in Berserkley and Takoma Park really want to decrease emissions from homes heated by natural gas (or any other means), maybe they can offer property-tax reductions for homeowners who install double-pane windows and weather-stripping around their doors, which is where most of the heat is lost during cold weather.