Gas alliances are significantly cheaper to run. Also perform better. Gas dryers are awesome compared to electric for example. Plus electric goes out often. Gas doesn’t.
Most gas appliances also require electricity to run, and in addition the broader gas infrastructure itself requires electricity to compress the gas so that it reaches the consumer. There's no getting around the need for reliable electric infrastructure; centralized gas infrastructure won't save you from unreliable electricity.
> centralized gas infrastructure won't save you from unreliable electricity
It absolutely will and the gas infrastructure is far more reliable than the electricity one.
My gas fired boiler can heat my house for days running off my Yeti battery pack.
That same Yeti couldn't put a dent in the cold weather we had this year.
Running my generator (on LP or NG or Gasoline) would allow me to keep my boiler running effectively indefinitely. Heating my home directly would be way more dangerous.
While you're correct that it's possible that NG supply can be disrupted, it's far less vulnerable to disruption than electricity. The natural gas supply is entirely underground and the natural gas infrastructure you're talking about that requires compression to pump to consumers has a built-in supply of fuel for running generators to generate electricity to run those compressors in an emergency.
There were innumerable electricity disruptions where I live in the almost 40 years I've lived here. Mostly short ones (under one hour) but several much longer ones (12+ hours). Without NG heat in my home I would have been forced to evacuate on a number of occasions. I've had one, single, disruption to my NG supply in 40 years. PSE&G found a leak in the gas lines in our street, this didn't cause a supply disruption however but put us (and a lot of our town somehow) on an expedited list to have all of our NG lines replaced. PSE&G came around and trenched in new high-pressure gas lines along the streets (still not disrupting our supply) and then a few weeks later they individually came and swapped each home to utilize the new high-pressure gas by fishing a smaller HP PEX pipe down the old gas pipe from our old service. No new trench from street-house, just a pit in the street and a pit alongside our foundation and a new exterior meter and pressure regulator. Exceedingly well done process and incredibly smooth. They even had a cool soft-tracked excavator so it didn't damage our lawn! Total outage was about 2 hours. How many nines of reliability is two hours of outage in 40 years?
Even in extreme cold environments, assuming your home is properly insulated, a 12 hour power outage means you might have to put on a sweater. Yes, multi-day outages are a problem but I think I’ve experienced two of them in my 50 years of life. Not worth worrying about.
My in-laws use their gas stove whenever the power goes out. I don’t use my electric stove when that happens. It happens maybe once a year, so I don’t really care. But if you’re in a place where outages are more frequent, it’s definitely a point in gas’ favor. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to use gas without my hood fan properly working, so… I’m not sure what my point is anymore.
Stoves aren’t particularly expensive to run, but gas stoves are hilariously inefficient and induction is nearly 100% efficient. And gas stoves plus the heat loss due to required ventilation in a cold climate are even worse.
Gas heat and hot water may be cheaper or more expensive than heat pumps depending on utility rates and climate. Too bad residential gas-fires cogeneration isn’t really a thing.
I found the excess heat from gas stoves really hard on my hands while cooking. I thought I’d hate switching to an electric resistive one, but not having all that extra heat in the kitchen has been really nice during summer months.
That's because when gas lines fail, which they obviously do, they leak instead. And leaking natural gas into the air of densely populated areas is of course a bad idea.
And since those leaks are just small pressure drops and everything keeps "working" there's much less urgency or incentive to fix it. Unlike circuit breakers & other protective circuits that cut power which prompts immediate action to correct.
This is not something that should happen in urban/sub-urban environment often in a first world country. In rural areas building up the infrastructure to that point can be too expensive but not in built up areas.
In the last ~15 years of living in cities/suburbs in Finland I have not had a single power outage that lasted more then 5 minutes. And even those have been super rare.
If that really is a problem in a first world country (and you are not riving in a really remote area) talk to your politicians as your system is seriously broken and needs fixing.
Also, most rural homes don't have piped gas? You have a big old propane tank instead.
It's not clear to me that this legislation would do anything to stop you from throwing a 250gallon tank on your house to run a generator in upstate NY.
I live in the us east coast and we lose power every year just about. Last summer it was 3 days in a row during a heat wave. It’s not large blackouts that would make the news but rather local outages. They happen all the time.
>and the price of electricity is plummeting thanks to renewables.
Not according to sources I can find. EIA forecasts for the long term project continued increases through 2050 [1] Maybe in locations elsewhere in the world? Or specific states in the US? Certainly not where I live, which is aggressively pursuing renewables and despite this prices continue to increase, and were doing so before the spike in natural gas prices.
Good point, I missed that. But that is still very far from plummeting. It’s a very gradual decline that assumes inflation stays above 2% (though that is probably a reasonable assumption)
I hope they will plummet, I just don’t see much pointing in that direction right now.
I live in NYC, and my UPS has been on battery for a total of 520 seconds since 2020 - that includes its regular self-testing. I don't think it's actually had a real drop-out since installation.
