4 ms·

The makers of high power battery stoves maybe? For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period o

by api 4y ago

The makers of high power battery stoves maybe? For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period of time, far more heat than an ordinary house circuit would be able to power. This replicates some of the advantages of gas. But honestly I think the ban gas stoves thing is brought to you by the same people who gave us bans on plastic straws. "Let's maximally inconvenience people for extremely tiny environmental gains while ignoring huge contributors to pollution and climate change. That way we alienate as many people as possible and drive them into the arms of the far right." See the problem is that the far right is so ridiculous and repellent that the left is having to work really hard these days to lose. They're having to push for things like banning gas stoves or the word "field" to have any chance at losing to the people who brought you Qanon and January 6th.

fvdessen 4y ago
The reason why there’s a battle about gas stoves is that people care a lot more about the way they cook than the way they heat their house, but if they cook with gas, then they heat with gas. So if you want to push people away from gas heating towards electric heat pumps, then you need to attack gas stoves
- Philorandroid 4y ago
  That would be the pragmatic solution; but in states like CA, where rolling blackouts are already commonplace to reduce the strain on the grid, the implications of mandating the use of more electricity seem dire.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  Huh? The reason people have been talking about stopping use of gas stoves is that they put out pollution inside people's homes, which is pretty separate from the overall dialogue about fossil fuels or how to heat homes.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Approximately a year ago several jurisdictions banned gas hookups in new developments. The pushback was significant and severe, and it was all focused on how awesome gas stoves were. Now we're seeing the pushback for the pushback. fvdesson is right.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    It's both, the climate impacts are absolutely part of it too.
  - ufmace 4y ago
    Since when is there pollution inside homes from gas stoves? How have all of the millions of gas stove users been cooking multiple meals with them on a daily basis and nobody noticed this supposed pollution?
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      https://oem.bmj.com/content/60/10/759 https://oem.bmj.com/content/60/10/759 There's an article from 2003 so this isn't exactly new.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      Because establishing a direct link to childhood athsma takes many data points, especially with a dirty sample group, such as parents who may or may not have had athsma also caused by gas stoves.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If you want to push people away from gas heating, just tax the shit out of gas. No household uses enough gas for cooking that it would matter that much to them. (We cook a fair amount and heat domestic water with gas. In the summer, our bills are around $30/mo, including about $12 in fixed charges. Quadruple the usage charges [add a 300% tax], and if I want to cook with gas, I still will, but I sure as hell will get rid of my gas water heater and boiler.) If you roll out the tax as 25% starting in July, increasing 25% every 3 months after that until it hits 300%, people have some time to plan for it and you don't hit them this winter. Maybe you need to return 1/3 of the tax money to low-income households who are having a hard time getting their equipment upgraded in a timely fashion and 1/3 of the tax money in incentives to that same group [and landlords of affordable housing] to help them cover the capital costs. Trying to backhand it by making people "not want" gas stoves seems like a longer and less certain path than just giving people economic incentives to do the thing that you want them to do.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Two things: - That would have an immediate financial impact on people with gas boilers in a way that banning new gas appliances does not. This kind of thing would need to be rolled out very slowly over time if you want to avoid extreme backlash. Constraints on new construction don't have the same effects. (EDIT: Ah, you edited your comment to address this one - sure, if you can reliably distribute funds for lower-income people to replace their appliances then maybe. I bet you still get a lot of backlash from people who can afford it but don't want to though. Unless it's rolled out very slowly.) - Ultimately we need to get rid of the infrastructure piping all that gas around too, as that's where a lot of the climate impacts come from. Any new gas usage at all, whether for cooking or heating, makes it harder to do that.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I just installed a new gas boiler (I wanted to go electric but it was massively economically disadvantageous). That thing is probably going to run for 20 years. If you have patience to wait a handful of decades, attacking gas stoves and waiting for trickle-up in consumer preferences to happen could be a good play. If you want faster change, tax and rebate is probably a better plan. Utilities already have the means to bill and tax fuel. Most already have conservation rebate schemes in place. Many already have low-income billing plans and rate cards (probably all have multiple rate cards). I think you could reliably administer a tax, rebate, and capital credit scheme using mostly existing mechanisms.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- astura 4y ago
  >if they cook with gas, then they heat with gas Not true, at least not by definition. I heat with oil and cook with gas. My gas stove is fed by an outdoor propane tank that's filled once a year. When I was house hunting there were plenty of houses with gas ranges but I didn't see a single one with gas heat, that's really uncommon here.
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    Same. My neighborhood has lots of gas stoves, but no gas service. Nearly every house has propane for cooking and oil for heating.
yetihehe 4y ago
> For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period of time, far more heat than an ordinary house circuit would be able to power. Depends on ordinarity of a house. My ordinary house has 3phase power and my pretty cheap induction stove outperforms all gas stoves I had. When I was living in a flat, I only had single phase power, but 4kW should still be enough for a stove. In USA you typically only have 110V (or 220v for those daring), so anything electric is straining your circuit breakers.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The US has 240VAC though it's just not a common household appliance circuit. My induction cooktop (in Australia) draws 7kW and is supplied by a dedicated 20A circuit for it (because that's what you over-spec the wiring too). It was put in to replace a gas cooktop which was there when we bought the house, and vastly out-performs that unit in speed and heat output. If you converted you'd be pulling a dedicated circuit through anyway - no one's tying induction cooktops off to just whatever line you already have. The one area gas can be better is if you're doing wok cooking, but that's more to do with how wok's are shaped and heat up then any limitation on the ability to get heat into them (I've not been able to find one of the adapters which apparently exists to solve this).
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    You can find wok ready induction cooktops in China. It’s not an adapter so much as it is a bowl shaped induction surface. Also, if you are really serious about wok cooking, you’ll go with propane rather than natural gas. https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-temperature/dp/B077GL6BJY/ref=asc_df_B077GL6BJY/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=241996626851&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6900705816115204770&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9033311&hvtargid=pla-535785773470&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-...
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > In USA you typically only have 110V Surely stoves are connected to the 220 V connection? Same for washers and dryers. 110 V in the US is one arm of a centre tapped secondary.
cinntaile 4y ago
I don't think this is similar to the plastic straws at all. The focus for banning gas stoves is on the (respiratory) health issues associated with gas cooking of the household. It is not about climate change.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  So says the climate change institute who funded the study. The real reason seems to be elsewhere: people care about cooking with gas, but they use gas heaters if they have gas. If you can stop people from cooking with gas, you can switch entire houses to electric more quickly.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    Somebody else mentioned the same argument but I'm not buying it. Gas use for heating has a much bigger impact on your personal finance than just a gas stove, but you're saying gas stove cookers have an almost religious devotion to using gas because it's so much better? The problem is... If it's almost religious then rational arguments won't reach them anyway.
rsynnott 4y ago
Gas stoves aren't a significant _environmental_ problem, certainly in terms of CO2 (in fact, unless your electricity is almost entirely renewable or nuclear, they're probably marginally better than electric from a CO2 perspective). There is a concern that they're a health risk, though (though the evidence that there's a large effect is somewhat weak). Personally, I like my gas stove, though I expect to have to adapt to something else in my lifetime (the big push in Ireland is towards heat pumps, and once gas heating goes it will not be economic to maintain the home gas network just for stoves).
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  A CCGT is about 60% efficient, and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove. So cooking directly with gas uses over 50% more gas than cooking on an induction top using electricity generated from gas.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > A CCGT is about 60% efficient Depends exactly where you live, but it's unlikely that all the gas generation is by CCGT; a lot of places would use far less efficient plants for peaking at least. > and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove Hmm, where are you getting this? From a quick look, gas stoves are about 40-50% efficient, induction about 85%. You also have to consider transmission loss, and the possible (in many places likely) presence of coal in the electricity supply. In any case this is all pretty irrelevant; stoves just aren't a big enough piece of peoples' energy consumption.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      It was a quick Google that I can't find again. Efficiency numbers vary widely, since the size of the pot makes a big difference in the efficiency of gas or conventional electricity. In one experiment, using coal fired electricity to boil a pot of water on induction released 0.29 pounds of CO2. Using natural gas to boil a pot of water released 1.16 pounds. https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-better-gas/ https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-bet... As you said, it's fairly irrelevant. The point is to reduce natural gas heating and methane leaks. Natural gas cooking is a side effect.

by api 4y ago

fvdessen 4y ago

The reason why there’s a battle about gas stoves is that people care a lot more about the way they cook than the way they heat their house, but if they cook with gas, then they heat with gas. So if you want to push people away from gas heating towards electric heat pumps, then you need to attack gas stoves

Philorandroid 4y ago
That would be the pragmatic solution; but in states like CA, where rolling blackouts are already commonplace to reduce the strain on the grid, the implications of mandating the use of more electricity seem dire.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Huh? The reason people have been talking about stopping use of gas stoves is that they put out pollution inside people's homes, which is pretty separate from the overall dialogue about fossil fuels or how to heat homes.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Approximately a year ago several jurisdictions banned gas hookups in new developments. The pushback was significant and severe, and it was all focused on how awesome gas stoves were. Now we're seeing the pushback for the pushback. fvdesson is right.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  It's both, the climate impacts are absolutely part of it too.
- ufmace 4y ago
  Since when is there pollution inside homes from gas stoves? How have all of the millions of gas stove users been cooking multiple meals with them on a daily basis and nobody noticed this supposed pollution?
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    https://oem.bmj.com/content/60/10/759 https://oem.bmj.com/content/60/10/759 There's an article from 2003 so this isn't exactly new.
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    Because establishing a direct link to childhood athsma takes many data points, especially with a dirty sample group, such as parents who may or may not have had athsma also caused by gas stoves.
sokoloff 4y ago
If you want to push people away from gas heating, just tax the shit out of gas. No household uses enough gas for cooking that it would matter that much to them. (We cook a fair amount and heat domestic water with gas. In the summer, our bills are around $30/mo, including about $12 in fixed charges. Quadruple the usage charges [add a 300% tax], and if I want to cook with gas, I still will, but I sure as hell will get rid of my gas water heater and boiler.) If you roll out the tax as 25% starting in July, increasing 25% every 3 months after that until it hits 300%, people have some time to plan for it and you don't hit them this winter. Maybe you need to return 1/3 of the tax money to low-income households who are having a hard time getting their equipment upgraded in a timely fashion and 1/3 of the tax money in incentives to that same group [and landlords of affordable housing] to help them cover the capital costs. Trying to backhand it by making people "not want" gas stoves seems like a longer and less certain path than just giving people economic incentives to do the thing that you want them to do.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Two things: - That would have an immediate financial impact on people with gas boilers in a way that banning new gas appliances does not. This kind of thing would need to be rolled out very slowly over time if you want to avoid extreme backlash. Constraints on new construction don't have the same effects. (EDIT: Ah, you edited your comment to address this one - sure, if you can reliably distribute funds for lower-income people to replace their appliances then maybe. I bet you still get a lot of backlash from people who can afford it but don't want to though. Unless it's rolled out very slowly.) - Ultimately we need to get rid of the infrastructure piping all that gas around too, as that's where a lot of the climate impacts come from. Any new gas usage at all, whether for cooking or heating, makes it harder to do that.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I just installed a new gas boiler (I wanted to go electric but it was massively economically disadvantageous). That thing is probably going to run for 20 years. If you have patience to wait a handful of decades, attacking gas stoves and waiting for trickle-up in consumer preferences to happen could be a good play. If you want faster change, tax and rebate is probably a better plan. Utilities already have the means to bill and tax fuel. Most already have conservation rebate schemes in place. Many already have low-income billing plans and rate cards (probably all have multiple rate cards). I think you could reliably administer a tax, rebate, and capital credit scheme using mostly existing mechanisms.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
astura 4y ago
>if they cook with gas, then they heat with gas Not true, at least not by definition. I heat with oil and cook with gas. My gas stove is fed by an outdoor propane tank that's filled once a year. When I was house hunting there were plenty of houses with gas ranges but I didn't see a single one with gas heat, that's really uncommon here.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  Same. My neighborhood has lots of gas stoves, but no gas service. Nearly every house has propane for cooking and oil for heating.

yetihehe 4y ago

> For those who don't know these are stoves that have on board batteries allowing them to generate, for a period of time, far more heat than an ordinary house circuit would be able to power. Depends on ordinarity of a house. My ordinary house has 3phase power and my pretty cheap induction stove outperforms all gas stoves I had. When I was living in a flat, I only had single phase power, but 4kW should still be enough for a stove. In USA you typically only have 110V (or 220v for those daring), so anything electric is straining your circuit breakers.

XorNot 4y ago
The US has 240VAC though it's just not a common household appliance circuit. My induction cooktop (in Australia) draws 7kW and is supplied by a dedicated 20A circuit for it (because that's what you over-spec the wiring too). It was put in to replace a gas cooktop which was there when we bought the house, and vastly out-performs that unit in speed and heat output. If you converted you'd be pulling a dedicated circuit through anyway - no one's tying induction cooktops off to just whatever line you already have. The one area gas can be better is if you're doing wok cooking, but that's more to do with how wok's are shaped and heat up then any limitation on the ability to get heat into them (I've not been able to find one of the adapters which apparently exists to solve this).
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  You can find wok ready induction cooktops in China. It’s not an adapter so much as it is a bowl shaped induction surface. Also, if you are really serious about wok cooking, you’ll go with propane rather than natural gas. https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-temperature/dp/B077GL6BJY/ref=asc_df_B077GL6BJY/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=241996626851&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6900705816115204770&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9033311&hvtargid=pla-535785773470&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Induction-14-inch-tempered-precision-...
kwhitefoot 4y ago
> In USA you typically only have 110V Surely stoves are connected to the 220 V connection? Same for washers and dryers. 110 V in the US is one arm of a centre tapped secondary.

cinntaile 4y ago

I don't think this is similar to the plastic straws at all. The focus for banning gas stoves is on the (respiratory) health issues associated with gas cooking of the household. It is not about climate change.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
So says the climate change institute who funded the study. The real reason seems to be elsewhere: people care about cooking with gas, but they use gas heaters if they have gas. If you can stop people from cooking with gas, you can switch entire houses to electric more quickly.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Somebody else mentioned the same argument but I'm not buying it. Gas use for heating has a much bigger impact on your personal finance than just a gas stove, but you're saying gas stove cookers have an almost religious devotion to using gas because it's so much better? The problem is... If it's almost religious then rational arguments won't reach them anyway.

rsynnott 4y ago

Gas stoves aren't a significant _environmental_ problem, certainly in terms of CO2 (in fact, unless your electricity is almost entirely renewable or nuclear, they're probably marginally better than electric from a CO2 perspective). There is a concern that they're a health risk, though (though the evidence that there's a large effect is somewhat weak). Personally, I like my gas stove, though I expect to have to adapt to something else in my lifetime (the big push in Ireland is towards heat pumps, and once gas heating goes it will not be economic to maintain the home gas network just for stoves).

bryanlarsen 4y ago
A CCGT is about 60% efficient, and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove. So cooking directly with gas uses over 50% more gas than cooking on an induction top using electricity generated from gas.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > A CCGT is about 60% efficient Depends exactly where you live, but it's unlikely that all the gas generation is by CCGT; a lot of places would use far less efficient plants for peaking at least. > and an induction stove is about 3x as efficient as a gas stove Hmm, where are you getting this? From a quick look, gas stoves are about 40-50% efficient, induction about 85%. You also have to consider transmission loss, and the possible (in many places likely) presence of coal in the electricity supply. In any case this is all pretty irrelevant; stoves just aren't a big enough piece of peoples' energy consumption.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    It was a quick Google that I can't find again. Efficiency numbers vary widely, since the size of the pot makes a big difference in the efficiency of gas or conventional electricity. In one experiment, using coal fired electricity to boil a pot of water on induction released 0.29 pounds of CO2. Using natural gas to boil a pot of water released 1.16 pounds. https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-better-gas/ https://zeroenergyproject.com/2016/10/24/induction-cooks-bet... As you said, it's fairly irrelevant. The point is to reduce natural gas heating and methane leaks. Natural gas cooking is a side effect.