What a gas stove ban means for restaurants
latimes.com
latimes.com
> Xie estimates that he pays around $500 to $700 a month on gas, and about $1,200 on electricity.
Since gas stoves are so inefficient, natural gas should provide no cost benefit. It's likely that much of that electricity use from higher AC and refrigerator compressors demand due to gas stoves heating up the interior space (commercial kitchens can get very hot).
It's interesting that Korean BBQ is mentioned since I already see many places using induction stoves for obvious safety reasons; customers are cooking their own food. Hot pot and Hibachi places also seem to either be using electric as well. IME doing KBBQ at home with a portable induction stove and it works very well.
I think overall its ideal for even commercial kitchens to move to electric, it would greatly improve indoor air quality and likely make the kitchen environment more comfortable due to less waste heat. That said there are some cases where having an actual flame is important so it would be nice to see some solution for those dishes - perhaps larger portable propane tanks?
I'm all for using an induction stovetop at home, but have people actually seen chefs fry over an open flame? They're moving the pan around, lifting it up and around, using it to toss the food, etc. That would basically be impossible with an induction stovetop.
It seems rather tone deaf to me to not address the issues that the chefs are actually concerned about.
Most pans section dishes are moved quite rapidly, lifting then off of the burner, to toss the ingredients(I could be cooking 5-6 dishes at once, so speed is very important), with a gas burner this doesn't matter as the radiant heat is there.
Now I'm assuming there are radiant stovetops that are designed for hospitality, but I've yet to see one, the only I have used the heat started dissipating rapidly when lifting the pan, and my wife was freaking out when the pan made contact thinking that I was going to break the cooktop.
I can say that for my own home cooking purposes, electric coils have always been acceptable, and that's really where my attention is with the ban - I already know I won't feel direct pain from it; whereas restaurant food as a consumer service is a case of "just make something good and I don't care how you do it if it's in line with laws and norms", and the rest is a matter of how much has to change in operations, cooking style etc to make a technology switch. Gas cooking has only been around since roughly the 1850's, following heating and lighting introductions; coal stoves remained popular well into the early 20th century, but coal in cooking today mostly conjures up backyard barbecue. It could easily turn out that the gas-centric styles become a "flash in the pan" niche if we make the switch.
I eat at a lot of high end restaurants (and usually a couple Michelin starred places per year), many with open kitchens, and in the last 5 years I've noticed a trend towards induction. From the high end cookery blogs that I've read, it's mostly about reducing heat in the kitchen. I have worked in kitchens in the past, and it's difficult to understate the quality of life improvement by a significant reduction in kitchen temperature.
At home I've also switched to induction, and it's been in general great.
Charcoal is actually the trickier one to replace in high end cookery since it's very difficult to simulate the amount of radiant energy with electricity.
If I wanted to stir the pot with a grenade, I’d say it’s like asking Vim users whether they should all move to VS Code.
If Vim was actively contributing to climate change and fouling the air of everyone around me, I'd switch tomorrow. VS Code has Vim bindings, I'm sure. I'll be okay. We're long past the point where everybody keeps being able to do their first favorite thing at all times, _and_ we somehow also solve this huge problem we've gotten ourselves into.
If you can see red coils on your mom's stove under the glass, it's not induction.
The other issue is that induction is invisible, there is no flame. But moving stuff around on x-y has the same effect as with a gas stove. On induction, the pan is the stove. Take it off the induction and the heat subsides. Move it off center and you heat only part of the pan.
One major pain point is that the number settings on electric barely provide insight as to what level of heat you're cooking with, and there seems to be a lack of consistency between one electric stove to another. Whereas with gas, you can just eye the flames and know what you're dealing with without resorting to the knob settings, regardless of which stove you're using.
Another thing that comes to mind is that with a gas burner the pot/pan is above an open flame, so if you need to go from high to low heat, you can do that in an instant. With electric, the pot/pan is resting on a heated surface that gradually cools down and can really ruin whatever's cooking.
Not the case. Our son cooks on some cheap-ass gas stove with burners about 2-3" in diameter. I cook on a Viking. There's nothing about the flames on either stove that will give you any idea how many BTU's are reaching the food. You have to learn to correlate the flame appearance with cooking results. First efforts will likely burn on the Viking and slow-cook on the el cheapo.
As noted by another comment, it really does sound as if you have not used an induction stove. And in particular, that you have not seen the latest "innovation" of surrounding the heating elements with variable brightness/size blue LEDs to simulate the flame effect.
Wouldn't know what that's like. I cook on what you call "el cheapos". Was speaking to those models, as they're pretty ubiquitous among most apartments.
> You have to learn to correlate the flame appearance with cooking results.
Dude, that's essentially what I meant. Sorry for not detailing that one should look for color, size, etc of flame, and how one's brain interprets what works and what doesn't.
And no I have not used an induction stove, but am curious.
The only two problems I’ve encountered are a) the heat stops instantly if you pick up the pan and b) you don’t get heat up the sides of a wok or other curved pan.
I’ll never go back to gas, and that’s not even considering the health risks of indoor combustion.
Sounds like you need to try an induction cooktop?
The wood charcoal experience is of course very unique.
In North America, the cost of gas is basically just the cost of transmission. It's so plentiful it's almost free.
Agree that the move to electric has tons of benefits though.
The cooktops you can buy here in Europe are limited to 3.7kW, and you can bridge two burners for up to 7.4kW. I rarely use one burner beyond ~70% power, anything above gets scorching hot (= burns everything) when using a good iron/steel pan. I heard the US has the infrastructure to deliver 240V so that should be possible.
In most cases wouldn’t you need to run a thicker wire to replace a 120v outlet with 240v?
In addition every gas to heat thing can't be decarbonised (electricity to gas won't work at this scale and would be hugely inefficient) to negative emissions.
Could a combination of induction heating and heat pumps be developed to be hyper-efficient for cooking? Such a system would have to include the vent hood as well, and require the cooks to don insulated gloves. The idea would be to also recover heat going up the vent hood, then concentrate the heat in a stream of hot air which would hit the pans/woks again. Is this even feasible or desirable?
The problem is the reliability of the system. The air going up the vent is incredibly oily. The oil in the air will gum up your heat pump or your HRV core or whatever you use. At a minimum, you destroy your efficiency. More likely, you destroy your equipment.
I'm all electric at home but using a wok on an induction stove is a pita and doesn't even resemble a wok. I have friends who cook as a hobby and swear by gas.
Korean BBQ could be probably done on electric as well. Takes more time though. If I'd open a KBBQ restaurant tomorrow I'd probably do it on electric anyway, for safety reasons.
Would hydrogen be a viable replacement for natural gas? Maybe mixed with sodium (table salt injection?) to have an orange flame instead of invisible.
I use an Iwatani 35FW tabletop butane burner for wok cooking which works much better than my gas stove. It claims 15,000 Btu vs my stoves 7,000. I suspect both claims are inflated, but the Iwatani will boil a pint of water in 1/4th the time of the stove. The wok is acceptably stable on it and the flame pattern is usable if not ideal. The butane cans are well under $2 and will make several meals per can. It's a bit pricey ($100-ish now) but mine has lasted six years of frequent use.
Electricity to Hydrogen has much more energy waste even in a carbon neutral world.
I definitely enjoy cooking with gas more, but a modern induction range will bring a full stock pot to a boil faster than the gas equivalent you find in homes.
If that were true, there would be no need to ban gas stoves. So we can conclude that electric cooking is more expensive than gas.
I miss gas stove over the induction because:
1. I have visual indicatation on how hot it is. The numbers is just not so good indicator.
2. I miss trashing pans around, specially when managin multiple things at once. Glass induction would not be able to withstand it. So suddenly I have to be gentle with machinery.
3. God forbid I spill something in the middle of cooking on induction. Suddenly I have to try to cleanup a hot glass and manage the whole mess. Gas, because it was raised, cleanup could be done later once food prep was over.
4. I'f there is powerloss (hi wars and other stuff) I don't really care. I used to run propane tanks 11kg, no pipes, refilled once-twice a year.
I think you’re overestimating how hot induction stoves get, the element itself doesn’t heat up at all.
When you have a significant spill on a gas stove, it can put the flame out partially or entirely, which is much more of a challenge than wiping off an induction element.
That doesn't sound like possible to me (I've never used those stove, so I've no knowledge). Although induction only heats the pan, wouldn't the pan simply heat up the stove by contact?
But my main sadness is I can't leave food on the cooktop to cleanup later. Imagine water boils over, suddenly I have to start cleaning cooktop in the middle of cooking. Gas might be extinguished but I can restart and deal with it later once I'm finished cooking.
1. Can partly be solved with LEDs
2. Should be solvable too. Just stop using normal glass. There's got to be an engineering plastic that's good enough. If Celazole is proven nontoxic that should work, perhaps with fiberglass reinforcement.
3. Can probably be solved too, with nonflat burners. The magnetic field should reach a centimeter up just fine, high enough to be above spills and not worsen messes.
4. Is why we need better battery technology.
They say all residential stoves in the US emit GHG equivalent to 500,000 cars.
There are 276 million cars in the US. So, this problem is about 1/500 of the car problem. If you eliminated all stoves today (eliminate, not replace with induction), you would make an impact equivalent to reducing driving by 0.2%.
Of course it only applies to new construction. If it disincentivizes construction, that's widely considered a feature, not a bug. California is the Land of Unintended Consequences.
A lot of the “electric is better” posts have an implied “gas stoves are bad for people and the environment so we should get rid of them but it’s fine because electric is better anyway”.
I mean, there's subjectively better ("I prefer to cook with it") but there are objectively better traits too.
Surely, secretly subsidizing harmful behaviour is twice as bad, first due to the subsidy itself and second for the harm it causes to other people.
Some things are inherently difficult to make electric, yet we need them to have what we'd call a "modern civilization". Planes are the biggest one: there is a drive to use more trains instead of planes, but should we give that up? It is definitely a step backwards in civilization, as large parts of the world are now impossible to go to and from. Some people admonish flight tourism as hedonistic and say it harms the planet: but should people not be allowed to travel intercontinentally? Is that the world we want?
I believe the investment in carbon capture and greenhouse gases abatement should be increased. Not just because we'll not meet our climate goals and need a way to clean our atmosphere, but because even if we do we still need some things that burn fossil fuels (possibly for hundreds of years).
In that sense, if all of our energy grid was renewable, heavy industries didn't burn coal, and all cars were also electric, would it matter that we have gas stoves and other modern conveniences? Maybe not.
Gas stoves are also generally used by gas companies to get gas lines drawn into buildings, so that they can easily sell gas to the bigger consumer of gas - heating. And indeed, in this aspect too, gas is _vastly_ inferior to modern heating technologies such as heat pumps.
There is no real convenience trade-off when it comes to gas. It's time for it to die, permanently.
Gas is very efficient. If you have the choice of burning gas at a power station (which is how a lot of electricity is generated now a days) and piping it directly into people's homes for the end goal of generating heat, piping wins every time. The inefficiencies of converting gas to electricity and transporting that electricity are significant and well known.
Additionally, I don't know how anyone who has cooked on gas and electric can claim electric is superior. I will grant that a very good electric (ie, induction) _might_ be superior to a very bad gas, but I have used a lot of examples of each and I would choose gas every time (and to demonstrate I am not ideological about this, I always prefer electric ovens over gas).
Heat pumps are also a vastly overrated technology which only work for very well insulated houses with an HVAC system which keeps the rooms ventilated artificially.
I am big on electrification - I'm a Tesla shareholder - but the carbon benefits of electric heating over gas are minute. The Green agenda should avoid battles where the perceived detriment to people's quality of life vastly exceeds the provable environmental benefit.
End-state will still have lots of economic processes that require releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, even new or novel ones. But these will be offset by the sequestering paid by their taxation.
Taxes will shift greenhouse gas emissions to no-emission alternatives where that's practical and desirable, probably meaning most of them in the end.
You know, using terra preta for soil improvement would generate basically infinite demand bio char which can then be sequestered into the soil.
If you wanted to get carbon out of the atmosphere this would not only sequester carbon, it would also improve the soil and reduce the need for synthetics in conventional farming.
There is no way this will happen. If we had the right economic system we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
If you have good trains it's not giving things up. Apart from long distance travel HS trains are just better is almost every way.
Anecdotes:
I've yet to live in an apartment/house that actually had a gas stove.
No one I know made gas a criterion when house/apartment hunting. They use whatever the place has. When leaving a place with a gas stove, none of them cared if the new place would be electric or gas.
On the flip side, I know quite a few people that exclude places with gas stoves when hunting for housing, because they're used to electric and are worried about fires (never mind if their worry is reasonable or not).
So I've definitely met more people who insist on electric than on gas.
Considering the extreme shortage of housing inventory in our most prosperous cities I doubt gas hookups kill any projects.
Find a small problem, propose drastic measures to counter it, end up making the problem worse.
Then, later, accuse everyone of impeding progress, and that there is an urgent need for even more drastic measures.
Actually, most of the interest I see is in the indoor air quality impact rather than in the global environmental impact.
Gas stoves emitting particulates wasn't a big deal back when houses were drafty as hell. However, now that everything is sealed up for insulation, indoor air quality is a much bigger deal.
And gas stoves are terrible for indoor air quality.
When you add in gas water heaters, heating, etc. then gas becomes a more significant contributor to GHG. Whereas switching all of those with heatpumps and induction cuts off the gas lobby from fucking with everyone.
Best way to get gas lobby to stop winning? Get rid of gas stoves. Climate Town has a good video on this subject. https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
But I still reach for my Iwatani butane stove and copper saucepot sometimes. These are still significantly more responsive even than a top of the line induction cooker, and I don't have a gas line.
Gas still has a place in cooking. It has all sorts of drawbacks, from air quality issues for humans, safety issues, etc., but as of right now, there are thermal properties around materials like copper which will not work with induction that mean there are things that simply can't be done with them, and resistive electric is horribly non-responsive. At least with current materials science, there's no true alternative.
As it happens, the latest installment of Technology Connections [1] does direct comparisons of the time required to boil a volume of water on various cooktop technologies. The winner was a cheap electric kettle, followed closely by an electric cooktop. A gas stove fared far worse.
This surprised me, but there's the evidence. In retrospect, the efficiency of the gas stove is significantly impaired because it's not able to transfer as much of its energy into the pot - much of it escapes around the sides.
To be fair, that's not quite the same thing as what you're saying: in car terms I'm comparing 0-60 acceleration times while you're comparing handling. But if I can stretch an analogy, a significant power advantage can cover a lot of sins in handling, see the famed Shelby Cobra for example.
You can’t get this with a stove that only heats the cooking vessel, even if it has the ability to boil water faster than the same gas stove.
Heating a pan up to temp is much faster on induction than gas.
That's an asterisk you can drive a truck through. "Not quite"? What you're saying has absolutely nothing to do with what the parent is saying.
Flip side is that cookware maintenance is now higher, and I spend a lot more time ensuring my pans have a good seasoning on them. But good food is worth the effort!
For certain sauces though--especially acidic ones--I'm not sure there's a better option than a gas hob just yet.
Classic resistance on aluminum alloy and non-stick PTFE coating on contrary can regulate temp far better BUT can't really heat much more than a bit.
Combining them I can cook at home like with gas, but definitively not the same experience, it's surely comfortable the ability to move gears anywhere, to have simple systems to clean etc but that's is. Cooking quality is far from being the same. For me, at home, suffice. For a pro, for someone who really want good cooking I doubt.
Not saying there isn't a need for it, just trying to figure out what percentage of homes (or more to the point of this article, restaurants) needs that level of precision.
Air quality issues aside, I just prefer cooking on induction to gas. My inlaws have a nice gas range, I'd guess it's in the $5-10K price. I prefer my induction:
- Less heat going around the pan, heating up the kitchen, the handles...
- I'd say the induction is as fast as the gas (gas has more BTUs, but dumps a lot into the kitchen?)
- Clean up is SOOO much easier. The cooktop doesn't get very hot and is solid surface. You can move a pan, wipe up a spill, and go right back to cooking, without turning the burner off. Or after cooking, just wipe it up. Resistance solid surface and gas both really burn spills on.
- As fast as gas.
Okay but devil's advocate, bringing it back to the original topic, wouldn't restaurants also have more demanding needs than the average person?
Having built a new home I do not have gas at all and I have a p.v. system so no interest in gas "extra comfort/regulation", in air quality I have a VMC so...
Perhaps there exist such pro versions.
Theoretically I can imaging an induction plate made of many very small coils stitched together in a matrix so it's possible power only some of them using the metal of the pot and round-robin rotation of powered coils to keep the heat well spread and a constant transfer of little heat as needed, but so far I do not see anything like that on sale. I only see some pot with small steel inserts in an aluminum alloy to spread better the heat in the pot, some others mix different stratus of materials to achieve something similar but all can't compensate the irregular source of heat much.
Theoretically I suppose IR plate can do the same, so classic resistance instead of a single bend costantan-alike "pipe" (sorry for my English, not my motherlanguage) can be a set of smaller ones with a controller to power just some, but again I do not see anything similar on sale.
Perhaps having a thermometer inside the pot instead of in the plate might be of help to mitigate the effect, but it's hard to achieve, similarly tie a plate with specific pot to ensure a certain behavior can mitigate, but definitively not solve the issue. We have apparently no way to compensate heat dispersion - heat generation...
Just try yourself: put a pot on a plate, with a very thin stratus of cooking oil (<1mm) or just a thinker (<4mm) of water and set the plate to the minimum, you'll see alternation of frying/boiling moment and "low heat" ones. An optical thermometer can easily confirm. For induction even noise can confirm the origin, a power meter can equally certify that.
Even in todays time of massive construction the percentage of actual new buildings is incredibly small. This is a necessary result from the high cost of construction. I am trying to remember if I ever stepped in a genuinely newly built (i.e., less than a year old) building this year, and I cannot. And I live in a city with massive construction and cranes everywhere.
In a city like LA, where most of the area is already built up, there is are so many existing buildings, that it will be many decades before anyone has any difficulty finding a fire grilled meal.
Now about cost. They talk about how expensive it will be to rip out all the gas stoves and put in electric. Again completely irrelevant. If you already have gas stoves, then you are in an existing building, then you will not be affected by the proposed ordinance. The theory about how there will be a glut of used gas stoves on the market is equally stupid.
The part where a restaurant owner compares his gas bill to his electric bill is especially dumb. What does that have to do with anything? He has no electric stoves, his electric bill is mostly for air-conditioning, lighting and ventilation. (Ironically a lot of it I am sure goes for air-conditioning to remove the heat from his kitchen and ventilation to remove the smoke from his gas appliances.)
What the article does not say is that if you stick to the actual proposed ordinance, everyone's costs will go down significantly. When you are talking about new buildings, avoiding the need to build the gas infrastructure results in significant savings and so does skipping all the chimneys, vents and fans needed to remove the smoke from the kitchens. Gas pipes are much more expensive to build than electrical wires, considering they have to move gas under pressure and ensure there are no leaks.
Furthermore, if this ordinance is passed, it will result in savings not only for the developers of new buildings but for all people with gas hookups. This is because the way things currently stand, all gas company customers pay for any new capital outlays of the gas company. Thus, when the gas company has to put in a pipe to feed a new building they charge all their existing customers for that, and include a nice profit margin in their charges. Well, with this new ordinance these charges will be avoided. By the way, this is why the gas company is paying for articles like this.
Regarding quality of food, all of the issues are solvable. You can make an electric wok to heat up fast. If you absolutely need a gush of hot gasses, you can create that with electricity and heat pumps. If you need the smoky smell of barbecue and grill you can achieve that by heating up wood chips with electricity while controlling their temperature without combusting them. This will actually smell and taste better. Gas smoke is not pleasant at all. The pleasant smoky smells and tastes come from chemicals in the wood that evaporate without combustion. Thus, for example, wine that has been casked in wooden barrels is often said to have a pleasant smoky smell, even if the barrels are not actually burned.
All of this is possible and it will be created once there is demand. But there has to be some demand, or at least a promise of demand. And to create initial demand in new buildings, where you are actually making significant savings by not hooking up gas at all, is just an easy slam dunk decision.
I agree that skipping the gas infrastructure will save some money. However, you can't skip all the chimneys, vents and fans for the kitchen because heating foot produces particles and sometimes smoke.
> Thus, for example, wine that has been casked in wooden barrels is often said to have a pleasant smoky smell, even if the barrels are not actually burned.
Those barrels are always burned. There are various levels of "toast": light toast, medium toast, heavy toast.
> And to create initial demand in new buildings, where you are actually making significant savings by not hooking up gas at all, is just an easy slam dunk decision.
I mean, it saves money for the builders, but will probably cost more money for the people who live or work there. Unless electricity prices go down drastically, which doesn't seem likely.
On the plus side, it's nice not to have gas lines around if there is an earthquake.
The other reason is that it is better! You can actually get an induction stove to heat up faster than a gas stove, if it is wired properly
They're more expensive, though, and it's harder to find ones without 100% terrible touch controls (especially if you're also trying not to pay a ton of money).
If you have a cheap gas range and want an electric replacement at roughly the same price, your options are all garbage, not high-quality induction ranges.
[EDIT] Oh, they also seem to be more fragile and harder and/or more expensive to repair if they do break, making lifetime ownership cost even worse than what the up-front cost alone implies, and that's already not great.
They're more expensive, but amortized over the cost of the lifespan, it's not a big difference. And because it's more efficient, it's oftentimes going to be cheaper in the long run, depending on the relative price of gas and electricity in your area.
The touch controls issue is real, and I'm sympathetic to that because I really despise them myself. That said, there's no inherent reason that induction stoves have to use these - it's just a style choice - and I suspect as induction stoves get more widespread, if enough people prefer tactile controls, more options will become available. It's not a good enough reason to hold up local public policy that will have a measurable, positive climate impact.
If it is truly a "life or death" situation, then what you want to do is slow down and carefully evaluate your options to ensure you're not actually going to make things worse.
If California truly is the "land of unintended consequences" then why would we presume that will suddenly disappear just because we're doing the "right" thing?
The rhetoric and the actions do not match. Particularly here.
You're just taking some customers off of gas. Isn't the most obvious outcome that there will be alternative uses found and those industries will buy the glut? Shifting usage from one end of the stack to the other doesn't seem to do anything important in the face of this "life or death" scenario.
Existing infrastructure is emitting CO₂. The stuff we replace it with won't. The gas pipes that are shut off will no longer leak methane.
The next century will be dominated by how we deal with the last century's monumental carbon emissions. We went from 300 to 400 ppm by burning immense amounts of fossil fuels. To go from 400 back to 300 will take a bit of effort. No single policy—in isolation—will "reverse climate change". But all of them will.
It will take a generation to upgrade every kitchen. These sort of "start the incremental change" ordinances need to happen at some point. Might as well start now.
Burning gas at a power plant to generate electricity is still much more efficient than burning gas at home generate heat for cooking.
It's probably so insignificant that it's purely a point for virtue signaling. I've had a gas stove for years and I still haven't needed to refill the tank, and it's not even that big of a tank. Shipping your new induction stove will probably use more gas than you will in a decade of cooking.
Induction stoves can't be used for things like Woks since you need the heat to come up to the sides of the wok, not just in the part that touches the stove. Many other cuisines need gas stoves to properly work.
The amount of greenhouse gas emissions due to heating is not insignificant.
While in general, heat is heat, and hot water is hot water, disallowing gas hookups means no more gas stoves, which a lot of people and chefs have strong attachments to. Hence the focus.
That's such huge coincidence! During a break I started to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 (still on the first few minutes) and the author talks _exactly_ about that, where a gas company (industry?) is paying people to post #cookingwithgas videos.
> skipping all the chimneys, vents and fans needed to remove the smoke from the kitchens.
Every kitchen needs ventilation, even if it's fully electric. And if a restaurant is doing a lot of frying this ventilation needs to go somewhere it won't be a nuisance to the surrounding.
This probably remains almost unchanged for a kitchen with the same capacity. The food creates a ton of vaporized oils, smoke, and steam regardless of how it's heated.
Ignoring the environmental debate, purely for your own benefit I see light-to-medium-confidence evidence that gas stoves should be avoided just because they decrease the quality of air inside your home while you're cooking.
It's not something I'm willing to make a strong claim about, but if I was buying a house or redoing a kitchen I personally would not put in a gas stove, and if I was renting I would avoid an apartment that has one.
Again, I'm not going to make a strong claim increased particulate count during cooking is even something that's worth worrying about in the first place, but I do think the evidence is strong enough to at least warrant additional attention, and assuming that it turns out that gas stoves really do significantly lower air quality nearby during use, I could see a somewhat reasonable argument to be made that they shouldn't be allowed in newly constructed homes just on that basis, or at least a requirement that there be better ventilation attached to them than often currently is.
In the summer my gas bill was $30. In the winter my gas bill would go up to about $200. One extremely cold January in 2015 nearly cost $300.
So, yeah, space heating uses much more gas than cooking.
Exterior though, obviously the furnace is worse since its all going outside.
The furnace vented outside.
Perhaps there are some allowances for restaurants as well. I think that would make sense to me.
I recall reading at the time when these policies were announced that home builders felt that it would be pretty bad with money for a home to pay for a gas hookup purely for cooking, so in the future the only people that would probably do it would be rich cooking enthusiasts that have money to throw away. Regular people would probably decline gas altogether.
(Personally when my ancient gas stove recently broke I replaced it with a new induction stove and I'm finding it exceptionally great)
You can then speed it up later by paying for houses to be upgraded to electric.
If all our electricity came from renewable power then sure, I agree. But most does not. So, this seems like putting the cart before the horse. Why not focus on improving how we generate electricity before we tear out all the gas?
My undergrad degree was electrical engineering. Basically, it seems visible to everyday people, and theatrical, but not that helpful or practical. Happy to hear how I'm wrong. I am certainly very concerned about the environment.
What percentage should be from renewables before we start switching? What if it takes 10 years to get 90% of stoves replaced? It's surely not a "wait until the grid is 100% clean" situation.
Then add in the fact that induction stoves (and I believe electric stoves) are significantly more efficient than gas. With gas stoves, a ton of the heat just goes out into the kitchen, whereas induction gets much more directly into what you're cooking.
There's also the climate impact of unburned gas leaking into the atmosphere, though I don't know how significant this is. Ideally, we want to get to a place where we don't have to build gas transmission infrastructure to every building. This will take ages, so if it's important, we should start now, not after everything else is in place at the generation side of things.
Outside of climate concerns, there are also some significant negative health effects of gas stoves. e.g., much higher rates of asthma in households with gas stoves[0]
I have a strong preference for cooking with gas, mostly due to familiarity, but there are major downsides to the technology.
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/gas-stoves-hazardous-as...
Regarding, the timing of it all, I guess at the root my attitude here, is one of frustration, where ... we have known about this for literally 100 years, but we just don't care. Now we make theatrical laws, but current events are more of the same: warmongering and blowing one another up is more interesting than actually addressing our biggest problem: climate change.
But by all means I am all for whatever we can do and I agree we should do all the helpful things ASAP.
My concern with the law was that I honestly wasn't entirely convinced it's actually the right thing to do. But I certainly appreciate those three points you made above.
Do you feel this law makes sense as well for colder areas that require homes to be heated?
(setting aside tiny losses from heating the pan, etc...)
You have to shift the demand side while you are shifting supply, in order to keep the incentive for investment going.
At the same time that cities are updating the building code and zoning to phase out CO2 intensive home heating, the state and fed governments can be moving to shift electrical generation away from CO2 intensive methods.
It's incredibly simple. We can, at will, change how the "single" source of energy is generated. There is no time that is too early to have all energy consolidated to one source.
Not only because the plants that generate the electricity are more efficient and cleaner than everyone burning their own fuel (even when they are gas or coal), but because if we are prepared already, as SOON as we make the change to renewables or nuclear, suddenly everything is more clean.
I don't want to be rude here, but I HAVE to assume fully functioning adults are arguing from bad faith here, rather than "not understanding" this concept.
Don't be coy, tell us why you really don't understand this.
http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
However -- thanks to the free further education I have received here, I now understand the argument for electric stoves (gas stoves less efficient due to heat loss around the sides of the pot and also unhealthy due to combustion in a living space).
Going a step further, do you think that heating houses (e.g. furnaces) as well should be exclusively done via electricity?
I am aware that these laws are for urban areas in California (which don't require much heating). But, I am curious to what extent the argument for greater efficiency & health holds up for the heating of houses and for colder geographic areas, considering that quantity of heat required is much higher, and also that the furnaces are vented much more aggressively.
This argument seems to assume that all power generation has equal impact on climate change, which clearly isn't true. Am I misunderstanding?
Eating a wholesome non-processed diet and staying active are going to be much more impactful on my health. Worrying about micro optimizations like gas stoves just seems like small potatoes when people are eating processed junk food and are horribly out of shape.
Something like this: https://www.amazon.ca/Commercial-Countertop-Induction-Cooker...
Honestly I don't see why you couldn't make a curved emitters anyway.
Or just several emitters.
This seems needlessly dramatic.
Personally I wonder if shutting down the gas network for cooking, and backup generators, is short-sighted. It seems to make more sense to push for mixing in carbon neutral gas sources and letting cost be more of a motivating factor.
IE: I pay about $20 a month for gas in the summer when I just use it for cooking and grilling. They could swap in carbon-neutral gas and double my bill and I wouldn't care. BUT, if I was paying for gas to heat my house, you betcha I'd switch to a heat pump if my cost of gas doubled. (I have solar and heat with a heat pump. I only have gas for cooking and a backup heater.)
Carbon-neutral gas: Figure out how to harvest methane from decaying plant matter.
The very opposite is true. Gas cooking surfaces waste 75% of the heat into air.
And I don't think it's only Korean chefs that are worried, most professional kitchens use gas stoves.
There are advantages to all this regardless. And for exceptional cases, it’s worth noting gas can be bought by the canister… this is how my mother uses her gas stove in Athens, no gas distribution network reaches her.
All of this ignores that electric cooking can use renewable sources and that gas fired plants can control NOx emissions.
Meanwhile producing a pound of beef causes 22 pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions. So, if you order a 16 oz steak that was cooked for 15 minutes on a gas stove, the stove was responsible for <3.5% of the emissions.
So yeah, seems like a feel good measure that doesn't actually make much of a difference. But maybe that's the point?
Yes, that is also the plan, and we can work on more than one thing at a time.
Where are the people interested in new ways to prepare compounds for digestion? Is anyone charring surfaces with a laser? Retuning microwave antenna to target lipids? Levening with organisms other than yeast?
I understand this article is aimed at the effects this will cause on restaurants, but I think this could have much larger implications for everyone in the area. This sounds like it's going to put an artificial larger load on an aging electrical grid that is already failing due to lack of generating capacity, without adding any additional generation capacity. So more brown/blackouts during peak loads while increasing the chances of hitting the peak simultaneously by increasing load. Where are they going to get this extra power from?
Can't imagine all that gas was great for my health though.
Of course, this comes with other issues like the potential liability of a server dropping hot coals on a customer.
Induction can also do that i know but I’m not really a fan of my stovetop being basically not user serviceable and a sealed box of electronics and glass.
The way people cook on gas stove is just one of many ways it can be, and I'm sure in year 1900, cooking on coal was rather different, and gas must have been an improvement, but also met with skepticism, and probably laments about the lack of charcoal smell or taste.
Gas isn't a tradition written in stone. It has serious issues like hot surfaces and higher chances of burning your skin, scurf on the pans, benzopyrene in the air, and risk of suffocation, heating of the indoor air, etc. Personally, I switched to induction for all these reasons.
It looks like the only downside to induction is that some users need walls hot (I don't) and need cooking to continue if they raise the pan up. I think this is doable with different forms of the oven, and with thicker iron pans: iron absorbs EM waves, it conducts heat well, and it will add thermal inertia. These pans will be heavier, but IMO that's a small price for all the benefits of induction.
Now there are “radiant” cooktops but for some dumb reason they encase them in glass which I’m sure is for safety or efficiency but also makes them annoying because, again, pan aren’t flat. We are perfectly capable of making literally a gas stove but with electric coils just like ovens but we don’t. It would solve basically every issue with them except the speed to adjust temperature but I could live with that.
Restaurants and anyone else wanting gas in a new construction can go and use bottled gas.
That's like trimming someone's beard when they're currently bleeding out from five stab wounds to the chest.
You shouldn't even be thinking of that yet, unless you've already given up.
Yes. It is entirely sootless[1]. There are no health concerns with gas cooking. There are certainly related concerns, like gas leaks leading to fires or CO poisoning - but of course this isn't the reason for the ban.
[1] Kind of ... all cooking (i.e. the act of applying heat to particles) results in some level of 'harmful' emissions either from the burning of fuel itself, or from the act of heating food particles. In the grand scheme of things, gas stove emissions are just not a big deal.
I thought it would be due to some sort of safety issues, but no, it's a lot dumber than that. This is nothing more than a costly performative action that does NOTHING for climate change.
It means nothing for restaurants except they'll need to get electric appliances and grills will be slightly less common (since electric grills aren't great and solid fuel grills require their own hood vent).
Are you in the restaurant industry? Maybe you know more than me, but about 3/4 of restaurants I go to in Europe have open kitchens, and I mean it's completely obvious that every single one of them is using gas, as you can literally see the flames, and I guess those with closed kitchens it's similar, so I can't square what you're saying with my own eyes.
Depending on the restaurant, i'd go as far as to say "all" of them use it. At least the ones worth mentioning. Heating up hotdogs can probably done one something other than gas.
Fewer natgas stover in Germany, more in Italy. Netherlands has like 92% of households hooked up to natural gas. Restaurants are mostly gas or induction.
Here's some stats.
And yes I'm in the restaurant industry.
Also keep in mind in Europe you can buy large cooking suites that look like traditional ranges that are all electric. You can get electric "French top" ranges. Most combi ovens sold are electric.
In homes most built-in ranges are electric/induction. Freestanding ranges are slightly in favour of gas but most ovens are electric, even in freestanding applications.
I think it's ineconomical, takes too long to cook for a restaurant, just fucking sucks. It fucking sucks. Big gas ranges are the best, especially if they produce a huge flame and you can cook your bacon quickly and really get it nice, crispy. With electric the bacon ends up slimey.
Plus it takes for ever to boil anything, no more soup.
I'll take my chances.
Subtitle, emphasis mine: "Chinese and Korean chefs in Los Angeles are worried that a ban on future gas stoves may alter their kitchens forever."
* You need to conserve the water, California peasant! Ignore the fact that 80% of water in California is consumed by agriculture and we are not going to do anything about it.
* You need to stop using your gas stove, peasant! Ignore the fact that we are going to switch off Diablo Nuclear Power plant and replace it with gas plants.
That's a bit disingenuous. Those units were brought online in 1985 and 1986 and are licensed to operate through 2025. That's forty years - which is the life span of a power plant, especially a nuclear power plant. So, they're not being "switched off", they've hit end-of-life. Building a new nuclear power station is logistically impossible. Without getting into it, in essence the U.S. has lost the ability to construct nuclear power stations. People cite the regulatory nightmare, but that's not the real issue - that's an excuse. The real issue is much more complicated.
Note: I work for a U.S. utility that tried to build a nuclear power station due to go online in 2009. We had to abandon the effort and turned the plant into a Integrated Coal Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plant. It was brought online shortly after President Obama made the statement there will be no more coal plants opened in this country. I still get a chuckle out of that (we've since shuttered several of our coal units and have reduced our CO2 output by 50%). I know of at least two other U.S. utilities that ended up building IGCC plants for the same reasons. All of us already had nuclear generators in our fleet, so we all know how to work with the NRC. Given all the problems we've experienced trying to build new nuclear generation stations I seriously doubt we'll see any new nuclear generation stations built for some time. The last nuclear generation station brought online was in 2016 and took 43 years to build! It also cost billions of dollars. Nobody has the appetite for that kind of endeavor.
I doubt that is true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#2021... talks about a report that states "that keeping Diablo operating until 2045 would save the state a cumulative $21 billion," and I doubt they'd make a projection like that if the plant would be worn out in 2025.
It's probably not end of life, it probably just needs maintenance and recertification. This nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_Point_Nuclear_Generatin...) has some reactors that were built earlier, and are apparently now licensed to operate for a total of 80 years.
> Building a new nuclear power station is logistically impossible. Without getting into it, in essence the U.S. has lost the ability to construct nuclear power stations. People cite the regulatory nightmare, but that's not the real issue - that's an excuse. The real issue is much more complicated.
You make this claim, but you don't really support it. Why is this a "lack of ability" rather than a lack of political will?
But that's not necessarily accurate, either. My dad worked in the nuclear industry all his career and specifically within the licensing group for maybe five or ten years. His job was, for a time, to relicense the plant that he worked at so they could continue after their 40 year initial licensure period.
Maybe Diablo happens to be end of life due to other issues, but saying that the license is up is not the same as it being end of life.
Here in Europe eyes seem to have been wrenched open and the resistance against nuclear power is being seen for what it is by many, a form of Luddism which is partly pushed by fossil fuel industries. Several countries - the Netherlands and the UK among them - are now planning to build new nuclear power stations. France seems to have been saved from the brink of switching their mostly nuclear power fleet to non-nuclear and is now planning to continue its reliance on nuclear power. Then there is Germany, the black sheep (probably due to it grazing next to a coal-fired power station) of Europe where 'die Grüne' (the Green party) and their ideological allies have managed to increase Germany's emissions substantially by forcing the closure of all nuclear power stations. Germany is one of the better examples on how not to manage power production and distribution.
Come on now, don't leave us hanging like that!
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Anybody who says it does should not be allowed near anything in even the lowest levels of government/bureaucracy
Gas being burned to heat something is way more efficient than gas being burned to turn turbines to make electricity to be transported hundreds of miles to a restaurant only to be used to heat coils at 1500 watts to boil water. I am guessing at least 15 times more gas would be used.
The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Consumer do emit significant amounts of carbon, and whatever someone else does, we need to reduce it. Pointing the finger at someone else and saying, 'well they do it', doesn't help climate change; it just throws around blame - generally a useless distraction in life - and adjusts our standards to the lowest denominator.
you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
Also this criticism fails to take into account how people actually live. When I was in Menlo Park, California it was discovered that pool filter pumps draw lots of energy over time because they get left on and old designs are extremely inefficient. This news spread and all over town older boomers who of course lived a lifestyle with pools in their backyard had their pool filter pumps upgraded to modern designs and often changed to have them powered by solar and allowed to stop overnight. The savings from a neighborhood of rich folks converting pool filter pumps all in a short period of time was significant and now a huge constant draw from the local grid has been eliminated. There is no way that is a plot by dirty industry, just a big victory that gets overlooked because of carelessness and political projection.
Would keeping Diablo nuclear plant and focusing on replacing other plants with clean energy help global warning? Yes! But that is hard.
Anyway, this stove one is sad, it really removes one of those tiny luxuries. Like no more quick roasting of some greasy naan bread on the stove. That's a real loss.
Carbon study from 2017: https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.123...
Any time this comes up I love to singe the praises of induction!
Funny story and rather infamously, the researchers who studied the fumes from gas stoves almost immediately ripped out their gas stoves after the results came back from the studies. Several states are passing or have passed copy-paste laws, written by gas companies, making ripping out gas stoves cost a fee even if the gas company isn't ripping out the gas stoves themselves.
Ah, that's lovely. :)
- - - -
Also pilot lights: older gas ranges have tiny flames burning 24/7 just in case you want to cook something in the middle of the night. (Most newer models use electric sparks "on demand" to light.)
the one way in which they surpass induction stoves is the only thing that counts, instant control of the heat applied to the pan.
They are slower to heat.
They are more expensive to operate.
They are more fragile.
They rely on complex electronics vs. simple mechanics.
They require specific cookware made out of only certain materials.
They require direct contact with the "burner" to work.
In what possible way are they superior?
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
80% of human consumption is by agriculture and most of that agriculture is not satiating the needs of Californians. It's also important to note that farms are doing significant work on this:
> Higher-revenue perennial crops—nuts, grapes, and other fruit—have increased as a share of irrigated acreage (from 16% in 1980 to 33% in 2015 statewide, and from 21% to 45% in the southern Central Valley). This shift, plus rising crop yields, has increased the economic return on water used for agriculture. Farm production generated 38% more gross state product in 2015 than in 1980, even though farm water use was about 14% lower.
The rest of the economy is outpacing these efficiencies though, so it pales agricultures value to the GDP year over year.
Urban water usage is also falling:
> The San Francisco Bay and South Coast regions account for most urban water use in California. Both rely heavily on water imported from other parts of the state. Total urban water use has been falling even as the population grows. Even before the latest drought, per capita water use had declined significantly—from 231 gallons per day in 1990 to 180 gallons per day in 2010—reflecting substantial efforts to reduce water use through pricing incentives and mandatory installation of water-saving technologies like low-flow toilets and shower heads. In 2015, per capita use fell to 146 gallons per day in response to drought-related conservation requirements. Much of the recent savings came from reducing landscape watering, which makes up roughly half of all urban water use. Per capita use has since rebounded slightly, but a new state law will require further long-term reductions.
Big takeaway here, large urban centers are not in our best interest.
Environment use is split into four categories:
- Water in rivers protected as “wild and scenic” under federal and state laws
- Water required for maintaining habitat within streams
- Water that supports wetlands within wildlife preserves
- Water needed to maintain water quality for agricultural and urban use
> Half of California’s environmental water use occurs in rivers along the state’s north coast. These waters are largely isolated from major agricultural and urban areas, and their wild and scenic status protects them from significant future development. In dry years, the share of water that goes to the environment decreases dramatically as flows diminish in rivers and streams. At the height of the 2012‒16 drought, the state also reduced water allocations for the environment to reserve some supplies for farms and cities.
I think environment needs to be split out into its own categories, one is very farm adjacent, two have to do with maintaining habitats that (our own) interactions have devastated or made dependent on artificial means, and the last is basically "untapped" water.
Fixing water in California isn't going to be as simple as sweeping changes in agriculture, though that is needed as well. It also means dismantling dense urban centers and making them more sustainable and establishing criteria for when we support a habitat artificially and for how long.
This is not true, it will be replaced with zero carbon generation, including geothermal. For intermittent zero carbon generation, there needs to be matched storage, which will consist both of "regular" lithium storage, and some newer less tested tech for longer duration storage.
This is mandated specifically by law, so if it doesn't happen then somebody is violating the law. It was senate bill 1090, passed in 2018:
https://www.powermag.com/press-releases/california-gov-brown...
And two years before the law mandating it, the zero carbon replacement was part of the original closure announcement:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pge-to-replace-...
However, I see this false claim repeated again and again, and some weird nuclear lobbying group has performed SEO to have their misinformation be high up on the search results:
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3835/four-clues-that-diablo...
I spend most of my hobby time researching energy, and find that nuclear proponents are often the lowest information contributors on forums, repeating dates talking points, and in the rare cases that they have data, it's far out of date. I really wonder where these whisper campaigns come from, because its really clear when a new bit of talking points has been released through the propaganda networks.
No. It will be replaced by gas, because we've pretty much tapped out on sources of geothermal and hydroelectric power, and wind/solar are intermittent. So the only thing that's left is gas or coal.
>which will consist both of "regular" lithium storage, and some newer less tested tech for longer duration storage.
No. Lithium for long-term grid scale storage (let's say, on the order of even a day, though in reality we need a few weeks of storage) is never going to work. Outside of pumped storage (for which you need the right geography), there are no other options.
You're going to be burning gas or coal if you shut down Nuclear. Germany is finding that out the hard way.
>so if it doesn't happen then somebody is violating the law. It was senate bill 1090, passed in 2018:
Congress can pass any bill they want, but physics wins every time.
>I spend most of my hobby time researching energy, and find that nuclear proponents are often the lowest information contributors on forums, repeating dates talking points, and in the rare cases that they have data, it's far out of date.
In all your research around energy, did it ever strike you as odd that no region in the world is powered by renewables (outside of hydro and geothermal)? How about the fact that Germany, at the same time they are touting wind energy, is building multi-billion dollar pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades? Should raise some questions on the viability of solar and wind - no?
Unfortunately the politics are completely attached to dirty energy transmitted from other states, due to jobs and weird Union personalities.
The relative sea level trend is 1.04 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.22 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1923 to 2021 which is equivalent to a change of 0.34 feet in 100 years.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....
You can't have Korean BBQ in LA if there's no LA ;-)
Just like the paper straw debacle, I find it comical that legislators waste so much energy on ridiculously trivial things instead of putting that energy into something with larger returns.
https://jalopnik.com/lufthansa-group-admits-to-flying-18-000...
If they tell those of us that live in a cold climate that we can’t have gas furnaces and gas water heaters, they are going to be rudely awakened by our response.
Also, in California, less than half of the electricity is produced by natural gas.
I totally understand doing this once we've phased out burning natural gas for electricity.
But we are not there today, today we are burning natural gas for electricity. So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful.
And yes I'm well aware that induction stoves are a thing. But induction stoves of today cannot run all four burners and the stove at the same time.
We would need to basically double the electric supply to the range to do that.
The standard 50 amp plug is not enough. And a lot of homes go with the cheaper 30 amp.
Each burner needs around 15 amp and then the stove needs maybe 30. Basically you need around 100 amp supply, or more realistically two 50s.
Of course homes typically max out at 200 amp service, so 100 amp for the stove plus 50 amp for the car plus 30 amp for the dryer plus 30 amp for the water heater plus 30 amp for the AC, and you can see we're in trouble.
I've been thinking about this in Europe. How to wean oneself off of gas.
The big wins are electric generation, and those can be done within a reasonable timeframe by states with largely unilateral decision making.
But the long tail... Domestic use of gas. That's hard.
How does one ask an entire populace to rid themselves off of gas hobs, gas heated water, gas heated radiators?
It takes time, maybe with concerted effort in only one generation could it be achieved.
Weirdly it makes sense to start banning things on the long tail and seed the idea that this all comes to an end and early adopters need to be on electricity already.
As ridiculous a drop in the ocean of banning a BBQ grill... That long tail has to be addressed.
I'd love to see a ban on all gas combi boilers and gas hobs in the UK as soon as 5 years time. I'm more surprised this isn't seen as an opportunity to innovate in this space and open multiple new markets and leaps in what can be done with electricity.
Upgrading old homes is less urgent. Make the first step first, the rest will come.
As you said, it's a hard problem.
Luckily, politicians and bureaucrats are passing more and more legislation that will force the fossil fuels out of heating over the next decade. We see it as our job to make sure it's going to happen in real life by being the glue between all parties in the value chain (consumers, OEMs, installers, utilities, governments, financial institutions).
And we're looking for great people ;) careers.lun.energy
Also gas is familiar and popular perception for electric tends to be poorer than gas. Admittedly anecdotal but when I hear someone who I know choosing gas over electric, that is often their primary justification.
Like I don't let Joseph Biden tell me how to talk, what to think, who to blame, whom I should stand by or do in. I'm not going to let him tell me how to cook.
Plus it looks counterproductive, like an uneconomical reduction in gas usage leads to a higher gas usage in the profitable part of the economy to make up for it.
Heat pump water heaters and heat pump air heaters solve that problem and save money.
Heat pump dryers on the other hand are a bit rubbish (take a very long time to dry clothes, but they do save money).
They are especially bad in northern climates since the incoming water is cold, and they put cold air in your house - which then has to be heated by the home heater.
An A/C is already a heat pump.
They should make a car that's basically a generator charging a medium sized battery, and everything else is electric. (Don't directly power the wheels from the engine, that makes things too complicated.)
Kind of like a diesel-electric train, but with a battery to capture energy from regenerative braking, and for surge power.
Depends entirely on what you use it for. For heating, burning gas is very efficient: everything gets turned into heat. For cooking, a lot of heat gets lost, because you heat the air, the air heats the pan, and the pan heats the food. An induction stove heats the pan directly, which means less heat is lost, which also makes cooking more comfortable.
> But induction stoves of today cannot run all four burners and the stove at the same time.
Yes they can. Mine does. Of course your electricity supply needs to be powerful enough, but that's easily upgraded. In NL, 3x25A is extremely common. Our house had 1x35A which wasn't enough, so we had it upgraded to 3x35A, and that's plenty.
Of course switching from gas to electricity will mean changes in infrastructure, but that's not a blocking obstacle. It would make sense for any new homes built today to have a better electricity connection and no gas. Heating? Heat pumps are even more efficient than gas heating.
If you want to have the most effect on usage, you'll worry about space heating not cooking. As long as your home is warm, you don't care. My wife specifically wanted gas for the stove instead of electric when we redid the kitchen, so we went through the effort to get propane.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...
These laws are about removing the need for gas lines entirely.
I think that restaurants count as commercial so the impact would be even higher. It's nonsense to claim that these changes won't have an impact.
One other issue with gas stoves which I believe some California gov agency recently discovered is that even when you're not using them they may contribute to methane gas leakage.
induction stoves are far more efficient in terms of heat transferred to food vs gas, which mostly heats the air instead
and yeah it's a bummer the one time every 2 years you go to use all 4 burners at once you won't be able to max amp it
You must not cook very much.
It's not hard: boil water for pasta, potatoes, make a soup, and then cook a protein, and bake a cake. That's not a complicated meal - you could do than on any random day.
> which mostly heats the air instead
That isn't actually true, which you can tell for yourself by simply putting your hand near a fire, and a fire with a pot on it.
I concur. This is the same thing as blaming Climate Change on road vehicles when most of Climate Change is caused by energy, shipping, construction, concrete manufacture, glass making, etc. Mostly, Climate Change isn't caused by the People. It's business and industry causing it. IOW, greed causes Global Warming.
So they're focusing on a space that has negligible effect or no effect whatsoever on Climate Change, while there are massive methane and ethane leaks in Bakersfield and Aliso Canyon, the later of which dumped 100K tons of methane into the atmosphere. Pay no attention to most of the stupid oil rigs all over SoCal that are probably leaking mountains of methane and expressly not benefitting CA residents with fuel less than $8/gal.
Why does everything have to be so stupid?! Just shut it all down, every contributor, ban it all, bite the energy bullet now, and stop Climate Change before the dang Thermohaline breaks and Europe freezes over. Well, I guess that will stop it, but we'll all be half asleep and asphyxiating from so much CO2.
Do you have data on how much each of those sectors contributes? IIRC, road transportation contributes a relatively large amount.