Coincidentally, I have a crew from Enbridge coming today to remove the gas line and meter from my property. That service, which used to cost $1300, is free as of May 1 thanks to the OEB, whose ruling on this matter was thankfully not interfered with by Doug Ford. I'm living comfortably with a cold climate heat pump, cooking happily on an induction stove, and saving around $60 per month on my utility bills.
Well no, that's not true at all. Enbridge may be regulated by the OEB, but it's a private corporation. The cost of my meter removal was paid by the fees Enbridge charges its customers, of which I was a paying one for many years.
If there any 'culture' war' going on here, it wasn't initiated by Enbridge, it was initiated by various interested activists who falsely claim (via various 'scientific' studies) that NG as fuel in indoor stoves is a major source of pollutants and health problems.
There are no culinary advantages to gas cooking over induction cooking. In fact, induction is better in every respect. You can "fine tune" induction better than a gas flame. Old fashioned electric cooktops do suck.
Induction is superior technology, but an oven lasts a lifetime. It will be a hard ask to have all gas ovens replaced in a short period of time. If I want to switch to induction I need to hire a professional to cap the gas line. I would also need to replace my pots that are not magnetized. What I do to limit gas use is boil the water in an electric kettle and then pour that into a pot on the gas stove to make pasta for instance.
Our oven didn't last a lifetime; the electronics died after 15 years, so I made the change to induction. When we ordered the new one, Kitchenaid supplied a set of pots as part of the deal. But for years before that, we used a single burner plug-in induction unit to try it out. IKEA sells the TILRADA for $60 but there are better ones for a little bit more.
It's unreasonable, and not particularly climate friendly, to replace a working appliance unless you're concerned about the health issues. But eventually, replacing the stove with an electric oven/ induction cooktop is a good idea.
"There are no culinary advantages to gas cooking over induction cooking"
There most certainly is an advantage to gas. When the electricity supply is disrupted (falling trees / tree limbs, vehicle accidents, squirrels, et al), I can still cook on my gas stove. Lloyd has raged against monocultures in all kinds of areas over the years but is certainly in favor it in this case...
...as I tell my grandson there's no dinner tonight as the blizzard's snow and ice just separated us from the grid again.
This is true, although most gas stoves today need electricity for all their silly electronics. In the big blackout of about a decade ago the gas stoves kept us going. But some died because they tried to heat their house with it.
We now have a little portable butane burner that we use for backup in blackouts.
"But some died because they tried to heat their house with it."
There's no accounting for stupidity - there's a reason why the Darwin Awards exist.
Sorry, that's not really a reason for mandates to remove gas cooking (either by regulating the stoves out of existence (the hammer) or restricting the supply of NG or propane or your butane (the anvil).
And I point out that between the hammer and the anvil are the folks like me that just want govt to leave us alone so that we can make the best choices for ourselves.
If your electricity goes out, doesn't your food spoil? Your heat or A/C doesn't work. If it's fairly new, your gas oven doesn't work. Last night, our power went out just before we were about to cook dinner. We used our outside grill. When it was apparent that power was not going to be restored soon, I turned on the generator, which keeps our food cold and, if we had needed it, runs our induction cooktop.
Induction is better to cook with. An occasional outage is no reason to install gas.
My gas range does work when the lights don't. And it would be a competitive advantage for manufacturers to restore that capability if they've removed it (at least for the top burners).
Food spoilage is a deflector of the topic at hand - electric vs gas stoves. Lloyd might, based on your argument, start a new thread as to why all fridges should be dual fueled just for that concern (and destroy, once again, a monoculture!).
Newer gas ovens require electricity. You can still light the cooktop with a match. I mentioned food spoilage because, more than being able to cook, keeping your food safe is important in an extended outage. For short outages, make a sandwich or fire up the generator you need anyway to keep your food cold, or, in my case, to run your well pump. Keep cooking with gas if you want. Nobody is going to pry your gas cook top from your burnt fingers.😊
It’s time to think about a post on resilience, like why we should have chest freezer/fridges because they stay cold forever, and backups (I have folding solar panels and a battery but it won’t do much)
A huge advantage to living in a tight, well insulated home is that when the power goes out, you don't freeze or roast for quite a while. We were motivated to get a generator several years ago when power was out for six days in late October and early November in Maine. It was a colossal pain, because we couldn't cook or wash. But the house stayed warm enough to not need to go to a hotel and figure out what to do with the dogs. Without a battery, our solar was useless.
Actually, many turn off the gas (think deadman's switch) during a power failure so everyone needs to check for themselves (mine doesn't which is why I bought it).
The announcement of the permanent closure of The Ontario Science Centre was made at 2:00 on Friday June 21st. Not many people around to take note - except maybe the kids who were still inside running around looking at the delights a- as is normal on a hot end of the year school day
The Ford Government has little interest in fight for climate reseilient communities
I’m all for electrify everything, but this week during a heat wave here in NYC the local electric supplier emailed us to limit air conditioning and heavy appliance use due to high demand. How is that going to work if we are using electricity to heat our water boiler, electricity for cooking, electricity to fuel our car, electricity for every single appliance in the house? Aren’t we putting too many eggs in one basket?
Someday our electric cars will feed energy back into the grid at peak times; that is a huge amount of storage. Someday our homes will be properly built and act as thermal batteries, and our AC and water heaters will dial back in peak times, without the home warming up. If everything works together and we reduce demand with better buildings, I believe this can be managed. I wrote about this: https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/why-fabric-remains-first?utm_source=publication-search
Lloyd, California is already in the throes, if not already passed, of doing a bill that makes it mandatory that the State, in effect, owns your car battery - there will be no "voluntariness" about it. You plug in your car in the evening to charge only to find that the battery has been drained to "serve the common good".
Oh, and do you think that the State, for using the most valuable part of your car, is going to help pay that car loan or if the car battery goes wonky that it's going to pay up?
Of course not! That's private property - YOU are on the hook for that.
Maybe it will all come together as you predict and it will work perfectly fine, but things don’t usually turn out as we imagine them. For example I remember in the early 2000s here in NYC Bloomberg expanded bike lanes. We all thought this would lead to less people driving and more people biking. Fast forward 20 years and the bike lanes we built became a way for the government to subsidize door dash, grub hub, and Uber eats. People have been working in midtown for 200 years but they never ordered so much food delivery before. E-bikes completely changed what we envisioned bike lanes in NYC to be. I wonder what the unintended consequences of a smart grid will be.
Coincidentally, I have a crew from Enbridge coming today to remove the gas line and meter from my property. That service, which used to cost $1300, is free as of May 1 thanks to the OEB, whose ruling on this matter was thankfully not interfered with by Doug Ford. I'm living comfortably with a cold climate heat pump, cooking happily on an induction stove, and saving around $60 per month on my utility bills.
Remember, free to you, not the taxpayers.
Well no, that's not true at all. Enbridge may be regulated by the OEB, but it's a private corporation. The cost of my meter removal was paid by the fees Enbridge charges its customers, of which I was a paying one for many years.
If there any 'culture' war' going on here, it wasn't initiated by Enbridge, it was initiated by various interested activists who falsely claim (via various 'scientific' studies) that NG as fuel in indoor stoves is a major source of pollutants and health problems.
There are no culinary advantages to gas cooking over induction cooking. In fact, induction is better in every respect. You can "fine tune" induction better than a gas flame. Old fashioned electric cooktops do suck.
agreed!
Induction is superior technology, but an oven lasts a lifetime. It will be a hard ask to have all gas ovens replaced in a short period of time. If I want to switch to induction I need to hire a professional to cap the gas line. I would also need to replace my pots that are not magnetized. What I do to limit gas use is boil the water in an electric kettle and then pour that into a pot on the gas stove to make pasta for instance.
Our oven didn't last a lifetime; the electronics died after 15 years, so I made the change to induction. When we ordered the new one, Kitchenaid supplied a set of pots as part of the deal. But for years before that, we used a single burner plug-in induction unit to try it out. IKEA sells the TILRADA for $60 but there are better ones for a little bit more.
It's unreasonable, and not particularly climate friendly, to replace a working appliance unless you're concerned about the health issues. But eventually, replacing the stove with an electric oven/ induction cooktop is a good idea.
"There are no culinary advantages to gas cooking over induction cooking"
There most certainly is an advantage to gas. When the electricity supply is disrupted (falling trees / tree limbs, vehicle accidents, squirrels, et al), I can still cook on my gas stove. Lloyd has raged against monocultures in all kinds of areas over the years but is certainly in favor it in this case...
...as I tell my grandson there's no dinner tonight as the blizzard's snow and ice just separated us from the grid again.
This is true, although most gas stoves today need electricity for all their silly electronics. In the big blackout of about a decade ago the gas stoves kept us going. But some died because they tried to heat their house with it.
We now have a little portable butane burner that we use for backup in blackouts.
"But some died because they tried to heat their house with it."
There's no accounting for stupidity - there's a reason why the Darwin Awards exist.
Sorry, that's not really a reason for mandates to remove gas cooking (either by regulating the stoves out of existence (the hammer) or restricting the supply of NG or propane or your butane (the anvil).
And I point out that between the hammer and the anvil are the folks like me that just want govt to leave us alone so that we can make the best choices for ourselves.
If your electricity goes out, doesn't your food spoil? Your heat or A/C doesn't work. If it's fairly new, your gas oven doesn't work. Last night, our power went out just before we were about to cook dinner. We used our outside grill. When it was apparent that power was not going to be restored soon, I turned on the generator, which keeps our food cold and, if we had needed it, runs our induction cooktop.
Induction is better to cook with. An occasional outage is no reason to install gas.
My gas range does work when the lights don't. And it would be a competitive advantage for manufacturers to restore that capability if they've removed it (at least for the top burners).
Food spoilage is a deflector of the topic at hand - electric vs gas stoves. Lloyd might, based on your argument, start a new thread as to why all fridges should be dual fueled just for that concern (and destroy, once again, a monoculture!).
Newer gas ovens require electricity. You can still light the cooktop with a match. I mentioned food spoilage because, more than being able to cook, keeping your food safe is important in an extended outage. For short outages, make a sandwich or fire up the generator you need anyway to keep your food cold, or, in my case, to run your well pump. Keep cooking with gas if you want. Nobody is going to pry your gas cook top from your burnt fingers.😊
It’s time to think about a post on resilience, like why we should have chest freezer/fridges because they stay cold forever, and backups (I have folding solar panels and a battery but it won’t do much)
"It’s time to think about a post on resilience"
PERFECT!
A huge advantage to living in a tight, well insulated home is that when the power goes out, you don't freeze or roast for quite a while. We were motivated to get a generator several years ago when power was out for six days in late October and early November in Maine. It was a colossal pain, because we couldn't cook or wash. But the house stayed warm enough to not need to go to a hotel and figure out what to do with the dogs. Without a battery, our solar was useless.
"You can still light the cooktop with a match"
Actually, many turn off the gas (think deadman's switch) during a power failure so everyone needs to check for themselves (mine doesn't which is why I bought it).
And I was trying to stay on topic.
While not a perfect energy source, I am sure it is the lesser of several evils.
Let's stop calling it natural gas, which is incredibly misleading, and call it what it is: methane gas.
I have been saying that for years, but since every link and reference I had was to Natural Gas, I went with it. https://www.treehugger.com/methane-sounds-worse-than-natural-gas-5089697
It was a general comment - not directed at you!
The announcement of the permanent closure of The Ontario Science Centre was made at 2:00 on Friday June 21st. Not many people around to take note - except maybe the kids who were still inside running around looking at the delights a- as is normal on a hot end of the year school day
The Ford Government has little interest in fight for climate reseilient communities
I’m all for electrify everything, but this week during a heat wave here in NYC the local electric supplier emailed us to limit air conditioning and heavy appliance use due to high demand. How is that going to work if we are using electricity to heat our water boiler, electricity for cooking, electricity to fuel our car, electricity for every single appliance in the house? Aren’t we putting too many eggs in one basket?
Someday our electric cars will feed energy back into the grid at peak times; that is a huge amount of storage. Someday our homes will be properly built and act as thermal batteries, and our AC and water heaters will dial back in peak times, without the home warming up. If everything works together and we reduce demand with better buildings, I believe this can be managed. I wrote about this: https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/why-fabric-remains-first?utm_source=publication-search
Someday, someday...
Lloyd, California is already in the throes, if not already passed, of doing a bill that makes it mandatory that the State, in effect, owns your car battery - there will be no "voluntariness" about it. You plug in your car in the evening to charge only to find that the battery has been drained to "serve the common good".
Oh, and do you think that the State, for using the most valuable part of your car, is going to help pay that car loan or if the car battery goes wonky that it's going to pay up?
Of course not! That's private property - YOU are on the hook for that.
Such a "someday", eh?
Oh, and what about those smart thermostats? Learn about your daily routines, they said. You won't need to adjust it - it will do so itself, they said.
Let us give you a bit of money and we'll change it during a brownout, the electric companies said. Totally voluntary, they said.
And then a CA legislator broached the breech in having the State be able to reset your 'stat (either directly or via the PUCs) without your consent.
And one wonders why the SPLC says that I'm "anti-government" (and conveniently forgetting about the "Big" part before "government".
Maybe it will all come together as you predict and it will work perfectly fine, but things don’t usually turn out as we imagine them. For example I remember in the early 2000s here in NYC Bloomberg expanded bike lanes. We all thought this would lead to less people driving and more people biking. Fast forward 20 years and the bike lanes we built became a way for the government to subsidize door dash, grub hub, and Uber eats. People have been working in midtown for 200 years but they never ordered so much food delivery before. E-bikes completely changed what we envisioned bike lanes in NYC to be. I wonder what the unintended consequences of a smart grid will be.