Canary Media has a story about Lexington, Mass., doing what more towns should do – banning new nat-gas hookups in buildings – and the result on housing construction. Surprisingly, perhaps, it had no effect. Whether this is translatable everywhere is uncertain, since Lexington is a pretty well off town in an area with a ton of built-up demand for housing, but it’s intriguing.
Speaking of gas, Gov. Ayotte not surprisingly wants to revive the Constitution Pipeline to bring more NY and Pennsylvania fracked gas into New England. Good luck with that even with Trump around.
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I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t buy a place that doesn’t offer a hookup for cooking with gas. Until someone makes an induction cooktop that is as rugged as a steel grating on a gas cooktop I am not interested. I don’t want to be babying pans to avoid breaking a glass surface. Also, I need a big enough heating coil to evenly heat big pans. Induction is so promising, but fragility and little induction coils just make them a no for me. Regular electric cooktops are a double no.
What is the point here? The claim by Canary Media is that housing construction rates were unaffected by Lexington’s ban on new gas hookups. Probably electrical hookup in housing construction would cost in the same ballpark as gas hookup. What matters is how much electricity costs to heat a house or stove compared to gas. Right now, the cost advantage overwhelmingly goes to gas. To substitute electricity for gas, its costs must be lowered by vast improvements and alterations to its generation and distribution grid. If a sizable fraction of communities adopted Lexington’s example before fully addressed, already high rates will skyrocket. The supply-demand curve is a warning when planning for the future.
Some significant improvements have been accomplished in the use of mini split heat pumps. I’ve noticed I spent less heating my well insulated recent addition in electric costs for the mini splits than previously spent using the floor radian heat that is fired by natural gas for the same space.
Lexington certainly doesn’t represent the country. But still, opponents are looking at short term costs vs long term disaster. Apparently we can’t look more than a decade ahead. In my life, the skyrocketing costs of switching to electric did not happen. For everyone, solar panels on the roof would save money. The technology is already here, we just need to adopt it.