One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
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Hardly the first time activists put something on a Berkeley ballot which is a nonstarter in the real world. Last year they had to abandon their Hopkins St. bike lane plan because it would stuff up a fire truck and evacuation route.
This measure would kill all large restaurant/kitchen business in Berkeley. Berkeley Bowl estimated it would raise their kitchen’s gas bill by 180%.
There are simply no good electrification options for large commercial kitchens.
So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.
So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.
It means running new higher-amperage electrical connections to them.
I'm willing to put up with slightly higher prices if it means people live longer as a result.
Commercial kitchens use natural gas. Period.
Yawn. Humans have been cooking long before natural gas became popular and will keep cooking long after we finally stop burning fossil fuels. We have electric ovens, induction cooktops/griddles, we can make hot water, steam, etc with electricity just fine. Even electric pizza ovens seem to be better.
Goodbye, Gas. The Future of New York City’s Pizza Is Electric. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/dining/new-york-pizza-electric-ovens.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
You should probably go tell the millions of commercial kitchens in places that don’t have natural gas that they don’t exist then.
Now you’re just making shit up.
You realize that natural gas distribution networks don’t exist everywhere and that even in the highly built up US they tend to only serve cities, towns, and nearby suburbs, right? Everywhere else uses propane or electric.
For this stuff when it comes to climate intervention, it just seems like there are so many other things to do before coming after gas stoves and ranges.
I get that people want to start small and start local, so that’s why residential gas bans are easier than applying it to businesses. Still, if you’re imposing a very costly mandate on people it won’t go over well without subsidies.
I don’t want to lose my cheap residential gas if I’m going to be forced to pay monopoly time of use prices for electricity.
It just sucks to go after the consumer. I hate it. I have a gas stove and love it. I won't change it out unless it's free. No chance.
Heat is actually the big one here; it's a big chunk of emissions.
Getting rid of gas heat makes the gas stoves uneconomic.
If you want to ban gas for residential heating because heat pumps are better, why are you banning it for comercial cooking which is a much smaller source of emissions, and lacks a good electrical replacement?
Three reasons:
- Without the use for space heating, very little gas will be distributed, making the distribution system totally uneconomic for small users.
- The distribution system leaks methane. It's ~3% of what goes through it when there is high usage, but the amount of leakage probably doesn't go down unless you start decommissioning it.
- You want to protect the workers who have to breathe the fumes
Heating is irrelevant for commercial kitchen gas usage.
You’re just trying to yoke this terrible idea to a more sensible one for residential heating.
No, it's relevant for the cost of distributing the gas. It's not cost-effective to run a gas distribution system just to commercial kitchens without the much larger distribution going to heating.
If that’s right, you don’t need to ban gas cooking, just ban residential heating and let the market take care of it.
Y’all just want to tear shit down to pat yourselves on the back.
Definitely could do it that way. But everybody is better off if we do it in a planned way instead of leaving people to deal with that kind of a mess.
What evidence do you have that it would be cost-ineffective to pipe natural gas to only businesses? The only thing they do these days when someone opts out of using natural gas is turn off the valve at the street. The gas still flows to other businesses and neighbors. It doesn't matter what Berkeley does because Oakland, Richmond, Hayward and every other town or city around Berkeley is not going to ban the use of natural gas. It's a non-starter. It's pointless to do.
There has been a ton of modeling on how declining numbers of ratepayers cause methane gas prices to skyrocket. If you actually get rid of almost all the people buying it, the last few are left paying a fortune for what was once common infrastructure shared by many people.
Right. And once it gets rolling, the disconnect (electrification) rate will undoubtedly increase. The sooner folks understand this, the sooner we can all get along to managing the wind down of the gas infrastructure in an intelligent way.
I'm not saying it's pointless but uh...https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-more-carbon-pollution-90-minutes-average-person-does-lifetime
There are only tiny numbers of billionaires, and we need to get emissions to zero to stabilize temperatures, so we're all going to need to pitch in, even if that means something like "change how we heat and cook" instead of "switch to sailboats instead of diesel mega-yachts and private jets"