I built my house with solar, heat pumps, an EV charger... And natural gas service just for my stove and grill. It costs $500 for gas service, or $500 to put in the high amperage outlet for the stove, so it's a wash, cost-wise.
You can take my gas stove over my dead body. I'll happily pay whatever it takes for carbon neutral methane to come through my pipes. (Natural gas is mostly methane.)
The flame just makes everything taste better, and methane is pretty easy to produce without fossil fuels.
Nope. When you own your solar panels, they produce electricity at about the same cost per therm as gas. (After Federal tax incentives)
Meaning, running an electric oven / stove (edit: with appropriately-matched grid-tied solar panels) costs about the same as running a natural gas oven / stove.
The difference is that my loan never increases in cost, but the cost of natural gas is probably going to go up.
Anyway, I pay about $9-11 a month for natural gas to run my stove and grill. That's much less than the monthly premium to eat organic.
In an average house, there are no opportunities for an obviously winning 97% efficient gas burning appliance. A gas stove is nowhere near that efficient. A gas heater may be, but the competition is a heat pump that is far above 100% efficient (in the sense of heat delivered / energy consumed). Same goes for a water heater.
(Water heaters are odd. Where I live, there are no highly efficient gas-fired tank water heaters because no one makes one that meets the NOx rules. You can get highly efficient tankless heaters as well as indirect fired heaters. And you can get heat pump water heaters.)
Measured how? If you mean delivered energy / higher heating value of fuel, I’d believe it. But a good heat pump may have a COP greater than 3. And an increasing fraction of grid power comes from renewables.
(I’ve seen swimming pool heaters with heat pumps that quote a COP of 6 in mild weather. In appropriate climates, you can get a heat pump that pumps heat from your house to your pool, which can be extremely efficient.)
Induction stoves are unpleasant and ineffective to cook on, not to mention inefficient. And if you want to use a wok, well, you can't.
They are definitely better in appealing to first time buyers who may not know or care about their shortcomings. They look great and are easy to clean. But if you are into cooking, gas wins.
> Induction stoves are unpleasant and ineffective to cook on, not to mention inefficient. And if you want to use a wok, well, you can't.
With induction, ~90% of the energy from the electricity is used for cooking while only 40% of energy is used using a gas cooktop. Induction is more efficient, and you can use a wok if one is purchased that is designed for use with induction. Induction units can also regulate themselves based on feedback from the cooking device on the receiving end.
Induction is arguably superior to cooking with gas.
> On almost all counts, induction is faster, safer, cleaner, and more efficient than either gas or electric. And yes, we've done exhaustive oven testing in our labs to support that claim.
The electric grid tilts cleaner every year. Your stove will burn natural gas forever. A combined cycle natural gas generator is upwards of 50% efficient, already more efficient than your gas stove.
It's wasteful to spend money on gas infrastructure when it's clear electrical distribution is the future of home energy use. Infrastructure dollars are already in short supply. Just my two cents.
EDIT: You can stockpile energy with batteries, which is the likely outcome based on how much battery manufacturing capacity is coming online to build hundreds of thousands of EVs a year (which are also a great buffer for renewables and electricity in general).
It's wasteful to spend money on gas infrastructure when it's clear electrical distribution is the future of home energy use.
Maybe for cooking with a wok. But around here most homes are heated with natural gas. And that takes a lot more energy then heating chicken and vegetables.
New natural gas furnaces are up to 97% efficient. They're no longer allowed to sell furnaces that are less than 78% efficient.
You're only going to need a gas furnace (vs an efficient electric heat pump) in climates where it dips below 10F and an air or ground source heat pump would need to call on auxiliary heat to keep a dwelling warm (unless you live in a newer home with a very tight envelope and little unassisted air exchange occurs).
To your point, you can purchase very efficient gas furnaces, but they're more expensive and require a retrofit of the flue pipe to PVC due to corrosive properties of high efficiency furnace exhaust (not a concern in new construction).
They are more difficult to cook with than gas - I find it hard to get a sense of how much heat is going into the pan. But they are certainly not ineffective. If anything, the problem is that they are too effective!
We love our induction range. It gets both way higher and way lower power than any gas range I've used. It doesn't dump a crapload of heat into the kitchen, which if you live in Hawaii is a big feature. And we power it with our PV...
> Induction stoves are unpleasant and ineffective to cook on, not to mention inefficient.
They're none of that, although they are less flexible than gas.
> They are definitely better in appealing to first time buyers who may not know or care about their shortcomings. They look great and are easy to clean.
They're safe, efficient and convenient for people who want to make food.
> And if you want to use a wok, well, you can't. […] But if you are into cooking, gas wins.
If you're one of the people who believes they need gas to survive, you can buy bottled gas for your range.
Compared to heating oil, which is the other viable option in the Northeast US, natural gas is cheaper, generally more efficient, and largely idiot-proof. With heating oil, a big, very common problem is people not scheduling deliveries appropriately, so the tank runs dry, and sucks up sludge that has settled to the bottom, and then you have to do expensive maintenance to clean the system, bleed the lines, etc. Worse, if you lose heat in a cold snap in February or March, you have to worry about water pipes freezing up and bursting, which cause even more damage. Piped in natural gas is always on.
I'd love to use electric heat. Too bad electricity costs in my state are stupidly high. It's just beyond insane to heat with electricity here. If my state could do away with the ineptitude, graft and taste for purchasing energy based on political optics that cause those high prices I'd consider electric heat but there's still the always-on issue that would give me pause. Gas infrastructure is much more "always" than electrical infrastructure around here which usually goes out when you need heat the most.
In my state electricity is relatively cheap (~$0.10 per kWh) but gas is more like $0.01 per kWh equivalent energy yield. Given that the US (with fracking) is basically the Saudi Arabia of gas, it makes sense to bet on gas for the long run. Even with very efficient air source heat pumps (~300% efficiency) it still makes sense to go with gas heat, especially in a place that has many heating degree days.
As to the "always on" issue, you can purchase a fairly cheap generator that runs on natural gas or propane for backup - assuming that the gas is running, you can run your furnace fan to heat the house. And yes my experience is that gas never goes out but electricity sometimes does.
For cooking, induction, for heating, heat pumps.