5 ms·

Electricity is a universal protocol - you can generate it with multiple different energy sources, ranging from gas to nuclear. I think this change future-proofs

Electricity is a universal protocol - you can generate it with multiple different energy sources, ranging from gas to nuclear. I think this change future-proofs constructions, and makes our infrastructure less fragile.

dadjoker 4y ago
As California has shown multiple times, dependence on electricity alone can be disastrous.
- 8note 4y ago
  Dependence on the electricity is fine, dependence on the grid alone can be disastrous. Depending on two different grid's is better whether the second one is gas or your own electricity generation
- blindriver 4y ago
  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. Everything is untenable. There is no strategy at all. It's just a mess of ideology and dogma but no science or logic, it's infuriating!
  - ricardobayes 4y ago
    Well, holy smokes, I thought electricity was cheap in the US.
    - annexrichmond 4y ago
      It could have been, but ideologues won’t stop talking about wind turbines vs fossil fuels. Over 30% of California’s grid comes from renewable resources, which seems great, but appears to have come at a cost.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      For most of us it is cheap. I don't know what is going on in California, but they are not typical.
    - jandrewrogers 4y ago
      California is not typical and their situation is largely self-inflicted. In many other parts of the US it is still very cheap.
    - thebiss 3y ago
      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.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now. California has had a grand total of four nuclear power plant, three are decommissioned, the fourth has is scheduled to have its two reactors be decommissioned in 2029 and 2030. The “on hold” description for the 5-year extension (the schedule used to be 2024/2025) is inaccurate: it was contingent on replacements being identified and operational, those have been identified but were delayed by factors including a temporary tariff on relevant components, but are expected to be operational well before the 2029 date.
  - px43 4y ago
    What's the rooftop solar situation where you're at? I live in Oregon and maybe a fifth of the houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar. A friend of mine in California mentioned that their rooftop solar setup fully covered all their usage and had them selling about 30% of their power generation back to the grid. Seems like an obvious win in California.
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    Reminder that pg&e is a for-profit monopoly. Reminder that this is the dumbest way of organizing an energy company imaginable. I literally can't think of anything so stupid. You know they make profit. They steal about 16 billion a year. Think about how much infra improvement we could do with 16 billion. We could nationalize those assholes today.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  Just because California sucks at something doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Just like with Texas and wind turbines that lacked basic winterization, implementation details matter.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    Please don't promote falsehoods. Texas power outage wasn't due to wind turbines. It was due to gas plants freezing and being unable to operate. Of course Gov. Abbot decides to blame green energy when that's literally what prevented even more blackouts. [1] "Power equipment in Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather.[44][45] Natural gas power generating facilities had equipment freeze up and faced shortages of fuel. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and some other politicians initially said renewable energy sources were the cause for the power outages, citing frozen wind turbines as an example of their unreliability.[46] Viral images of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine said to be in Texas were actually taken in 2015 in Sweden.[47] However, wind energy accounts for only 23% of Texas power output;[47] moreover, equipment for other energy sources such as natural gas power generating facilities either freezing up or having mechanical failures were also responsible.[46] " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
    - newZWhoDis 4y ago
      I wasn’t promoting falsehoods, I’m aware that the majority of the grid loss in the Texas storm came from frozen gas wells. Texas also screwed up with their turbines
- theshrike79 4y ago
  The US power grid is _literally_ ancient. That one huge fire a few years ago was caused when a thick piece of iron WORE THROUGH from 100 years of wear and tear. But the laws have specific exceptions for oil and gas pipelines (one permit and the land owners have to dealwithit), for new electric lines everyone who can even theoretically see them can (and will) complain.
tomp 4y ago
Electricity is also a centralized protocol, prone to catastrophic failures.
- analog31 4y ago
  My gas heat goes down if electricity fails.
  - briantakita 4y ago
    My gas stove can be connected to a gas tank which can be bought at a gas station for less than $30USD... I can also purchase a propane heater from Home Depot or Lowes which can run off the same gas tanks for less than $200USD.
    - 8note 4y ago
      How much is a generator though?
      - bluGill 4y ago
        $600 for one that will run your gas furnace. $15000 for one that will run your whole house. You probably want to spend more than the cheap end just so it is reliable. Or you can hook an inverter up to your car.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      Still won't work. If your home is sufficiently air-tight so that you won't die of cold with that paltry amount of gas, you're going to die from the carbon monoxide from your stove. The propane heater from Home Depot either has the same problem or it uses electricity for the air induction system. If your goal is to be prepared, a generator and a heat pump will last longer, it will be cheaper for you and society in the long run, it will have more utility, and we have far more gasoline stockpiled and ready for emergencies than we have natural gas.
      - 4y ago
blisterpeanuts 4y ago
How is an all-electric infrastructure “less fragile”? I don’t see any advantage for the end user. The only thing that works during a power outage is the gas stove. Regarding power generation, gas is cheap and plentiful and gas power plants are much easier to build than nuclear. Nuclear takes years to get regulatory approval. Anyway, no one’s building nuclear. Germany closed down their last three nuclear plants, for some reason, and California would love to close their last nuclear plant but simply can’t.
- realusername 4y ago
  You forgot one small thing, there's two orders of magnitude more emissions with gas plants which makes this technology unsuitable for any future development, it's basically legacy, regardless of what you think of nuclear.
  - freeflight 4y ago
    Afaik on an international level there's been a somewhat universal consent that natural gas is the "transition fossil fuel of choice" [0], due to being the fossil fuel with the lowest emissions. It also has the added bonus that gas infrastructure can realistically be retooled for green hydrogen, and related products. [0] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy...
    - realusername 4y ago
      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. Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise and suffers from its storage problems, the list of potential providers is also an issue in Europe as seen during the Ukraine war (and it's not like Qatar, Algeria or Azerbaijan are better than Russia)
      - freeflight 4y ago
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
There are about 3.5 million total housing units in NYC. Say half of them needed electricity to heat the space all winter. The grid simply cannot deliver on that load. That sounds pretty fragile to me.
- Panzer04 4y ago
  They clearly do just fine in summar, and heat pumps use basically the same amount of power in either direction. I don’t see why the grid would be overloaded.
nonethewiser 4y ago
But houses already have electricity. Banning gas just reduces coverage.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
idontpost 4y ago
[dead]
tpmx 4y ago
I think; for many of us: It's quite fascinating to see a debate between the benefits of electricity and gas in 2023. Energy technology is so weirdly unevenly distributed. This debate could have taken place in 1940 - with the exact same arguments.
- giardini 4y ago
  Which is why I still use a wood-burning stove to cook on and and heat during the winter.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Not sure if you’re serious or not, but Ben Falk does this. I love his setup. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNV6C7u9ipE&pp=ygUTQmVuIGZhbGsgd29vZCBzdG92ZQ%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNV6C7u9ipE&pp=ygUTQmVuIGZhbGs...
bluescrn 4y ago
Redundancy is good. If you can cook and keep warm on both gas and electricity, then an outage of one or the other is much less of an issue.

dadjoker 4y ago

As California has shown multiple times, dependence on electricity alone can be disastrous.

8note 4y ago
Dependence on the electricity is fine, dependence on the grid alone can be disastrous. Depending on two different grid's is better whether the second one is gas or your own electricity generation
blindriver 4y ago
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. Everything is untenable. There is no strategy at all. It's just a mess of ideology and dogma but no science or logic, it's infuriating!
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Well, holy smokes, I thought electricity was cheap in the US.
  - annexrichmond 4y ago
    It could have been, but ideologues won’t stop talking about wind turbines vs fossil fuels. Over 30% of California’s grid comes from renewable resources, which seems great, but appears to have come at a cost.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    For most of us it is cheap. I don't know what is going on in California, but they are not typical.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    California is not typical and their situation is largely self-inflicted. In many other parts of the US it is still very cheap.
  - thebiss 3y ago
    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.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now. California has had a grand total of four nuclear power plant, three are decommissioned, the fourth has is scheduled to have its two reactors be decommissioned in 2029 and 2030. The “on hold” description for the 5-year extension (the schedule used to be 2024/2025) is inaccurate: it was contingent on replacements being identified and operational, those have been identified but were delayed by factors including a temporary tariff on relevant components, but are expected to be operational well before the 2029 date.
- px43 4y ago
  What's the rooftop solar situation where you're at? I live in Oregon and maybe a fifth of the houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar. A friend of mine in California mentioned that their rooftop solar setup fully covered all their usage and had them selling about 30% of their power generation back to the grid. Seems like an obvious win in California.
- danny_codes 4y ago
  Reminder that pg&e is a for-profit monopoly. Reminder that this is the dumbest way of organizing an energy company imaginable. I literally can't think of anything so stupid. You know they make profit. They steal about 16 billion a year. Think about how much infra improvement we could do with 16 billion. We could nationalize those assholes today.
newZWhoDis 4y ago
Just because California sucks at something doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. Just like with Texas and wind turbines that lacked basic winterization, implementation details matter.
- r00fus 4y ago
  Please don't promote falsehoods. Texas power outage wasn't due to wind turbines. It was due to gas plants freezing and being unable to operate. Of course Gov. Abbot decides to blame green energy when that's literally what prevented even more blackouts. [1] "Power equipment in Texas was not winterized, leaving it vulnerable to extended periods of cold weather.[44][45] Natural gas power generating facilities had equipment freeze up and faced shortages of fuel. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and some other politicians initially said renewable energy sources were the cause for the power outages, citing frozen wind turbines as an example of their unreliability.[46] Viral images of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine said to be in Texas were actually taken in 2015 in Sweden.[47] However, wind energy accounts for only 23% of Texas power output;[47] moreover, equipment for other energy sources such as natural gas power generating facilities either freezing up or having mechanical failures were also responsible.[46] " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
  - newZWhoDis 4y ago
    I wasn’t promoting falsehoods, I’m aware that the majority of the grid loss in the Texas storm came from frozen gas wells. Texas also screwed up with their turbines
theshrike79 4y ago
The US power grid is _literally_ ancient. That one huge fire a few years ago was caused when a thick piece of iron WORE THROUGH from 100 years of wear and tear. But the laws have specific exceptions for oil and gas pipelines (one permit and the land owners have to dealwithit), for new electric lines everyone who can even theoretically see them can (and will) complain.

tomp 4y ago

Electricity is also a centralized protocol, prone to catastrophic failures.

analog31 4y ago
My gas heat goes down if electricity fails.
- briantakita 4y ago
  My gas stove can be connected to a gas tank which can be bought at a gas station for less than $30USD... I can also purchase a propane heater from Home Depot or Lowes which can run off the same gas tanks for less than $200USD.
  - 8note 4y ago
    How much is a generator though?
    - bluGill 4y ago
      $600 for one that will run your gas furnace. $15000 for one that will run your whole house. You probably want to spend more than the cheap end just so it is reliable. Or you can hook an inverter up to your car.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Still won't work. If your home is sufficiently air-tight so that you won't die of cold with that paltry amount of gas, you're going to die from the carbon monoxide from your stove. The propane heater from Home Depot either has the same problem or it uses electricity for the air induction system. If your goal is to be prepared, a generator and a heat pump will last longer, it will be cheaper for you and society in the long run, it will have more utility, and we have far more gasoline stockpiled and ready for emergencies than we have natural gas.
    - 4y ago

blisterpeanuts 4y ago

How is an all-electric infrastructure “less fragile”? I don’t see any advantage for the end user. The only thing that works during a power outage is the gas stove. Regarding power generation, gas is cheap and plentiful and gas power plants are much easier to build than nuclear. Nuclear takes years to get regulatory approval. Anyway, no one’s building nuclear. Germany closed down their last three nuclear plants, for some reason, and California would love to close their last nuclear plant but simply can’t.

realusername 4y ago
You forgot one small thing, there's two orders of magnitude more emissions with gas plants which makes this technology unsuitable for any future development, it's basically legacy, regardless of what you think of nuclear.
- freeflight 4y ago
  Afaik on an international level there's been a somewhat universal consent that natural gas is the "transition fossil fuel of choice" [0], due to being the fossil fuel with the lowest emissions. It also has the added bonus that gas infrastructure can realistically be retooled for green hydrogen, and related products. [0] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy...
  - realusername 4y ago
    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. Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise and suffers from its storage problems, the list of potential providers is also an issue in Europe as seen during the Ukraine war (and it's not like Qatar, Algeria or Azerbaijan are better than Russia)
    - freeflight 4y ago

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

There are about 3.5 million total housing units in NYC. Say half of them needed electricity to heat the space all winter. The grid simply cannot deliver on that load. That sounds pretty fragile to me.

Panzer04 4y ago
They clearly do just fine in summar, and heat pumps use basically the same amount of power in either direction. I don’t see why the grid would be overloaded.

nonethewiser 4y ago

But houses already have electricity. Banning gas just reduces coverage.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

idontpost 4y ago

[dead]

tpmx 4y ago

I think; for many of us: It's quite fascinating to see a debate between the benefits of electricity and gas in 2023. Energy technology is so weirdly unevenly distributed. This debate could have taken place in 1940 - with the exact same arguments.

giardini 4y ago
Which is why I still use a wood-burning stove to cook on and and heat during the winter.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Not sure if you’re serious or not, but Ben Falk does this. I love his setup. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNV6C7u9ipE&pp=ygUTQmVuIGZhbGsgd29vZCBzdG92ZQ%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNV6C7u9ipE&pp=ygUTQmVuIGZhbGs...

bluescrn 4y ago

Redundancy is good. If you can cook and keep warm on both gas and electricity, then an outage of one or the other is much less of an issue.