While reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an important goal, it is not at all clear that banning the use of natural gas will really help. If I use my own utility bill as an example (and my home is well insulated), During the coldest month in the last 12 months, the bill reported about 45 therms for natural gas and roughly 300 kilowatt hours for electricity. In MKS units, the represents 4.75 gigajoules for natural gas and 1.08 gigajoules for electricity: a ratio of 4.4. The energy use for heating peaks at night and in the early morning: it is proportional to the temperature difference between inside and outside the house. At night in particular, there is no solar power, and the wind tends to die down. As we are on the west coast, it is dark everywhere else in the U.S. as well. If there aren't enough energy-storage facilities, or hydroelectric, nuclear, or geothermal sources to make up the difference, you will get the energy from power plants that burn fossil fuels. If you use the simplest form of electric heating, this can make greenhouse emissions worse - the most advanced power plants using fossil fuels are about 70% efficient, so you end up generating over 40% more greenhouse gasses than if you burned the fuel at home in an efficient furnace. To do significantly better, you will need to use heat pumps. In the best cases, these can provide 3 times the amount of heat as the electric power they consume, but unfortunately the performance drops as the temperature differential between inside and outside the home increases. Furthermore, technological advances can't fix that - there are limits that are a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. While you can buy "clean energy," it is really just a financial arrangement: electric power is actually transmitted by an electromagnetic field surrounding the wires and this field is not labeled by the power sources that help generate it. If we exceed the current capacity for "clean" sources, plants that burn fossil fuels will take up the slack. If you just buy "clean energy", they may just generate more during the day, which would then go to wherever power is needed at that time, and you'll get electricity generated by fossil fuel plants at night. You'll feel better but it is really "out of sight, out of mind." There is something else to keep in mind too. Since utilities like to minimize their costs, those running power plants preferentially use the most efficient plants, with the increment for peak loads being handled by the least efficient ones. If you phase out natural gas too quickly, we may end up burning fossil fuels anyway somewhere else, but with far less efficiency so we'll need to burn more of it. Regards, William Zaumen Palo Alto Received on Mon Sep 09 2019 - 16:49:06 PDT
