{"id":29955,"date":"2023-05-12T21:15:55","date_gmt":"2023-05-13T01:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=29955"},"modified":"2023-05-13T20:24:15","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T00:24:15","slug":"natural-gas-and-hot-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2023\/05\/natural-gas-and-hot-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural Gas and Hot Air"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I hope to make this post short and efficient, so let’s get right to the point:\u00a0 I’m skeptical of the recent decision by New York State to ban new (2026 or later) residential hookups of natural gas<\/a> for the sake of climate change.\u00a0 After a brief look-see of my own, I am left to wonder whether any engineers were called to testify about the net environmental effect of home heating and cooking.\u00a0 New York State’s new law feels like a political statement to me, not a scientific one.<\/p>\r\n

I’ll start with what I learned in my tedious college thermodynamics class, namely that the efficiency of generating electricity via steam turbine maxes out at 40%.\u00a0 (Meaning, if you put 100 units of energy into the process, you only get 40 units of electrical energy out.)\u00a0 Newer combined-cycle turbines<\/a> are 60% efficient but they are less common.<\/p>\r\n

Overall — and this is my main point — as of today, electricity generation in the U.S.<\/a> from all sources, coal, gas, uranium, wind, solar, hydro and others, is still barely 40% efficient<\/a>.\u00a0 “In 2019, U.S. utility-scale generation facilities consumed 38<\/em> quadrillion BTUs (quads) of energy to provide 14<\/em> quads of electricity.”\u00a0 [Italics mine.]<\/p>\r\n

Compare this to the efficiency of natural-gas home heating — 80% (older models) to 95% (newer ones).\u00a0 Even in old systems, homeowners get more heat per BTU when they burn natural gas in their own furnaces vs. buying utility-generated electric heat.\u00a0 This means that the typical home natural gas furnace currently creates less, not more, greenhouse gas than if the same heating load were provided by electricity.<\/p>\r\n

This will remain true until all of our traditional fossil-fuel electricity-generating plants are shut down — and specifically, until half of U.S. electricity is generated by zero-emission renewables with the other half generated by combined-cycle natural gas steam turbines.<\/p>\r\n

Currently, only 40% of our electricity is generated by non-fossil-fuel sources<\/a> and only 35% is generated by combined-cycle natural gas<\/a>.\u00a0 So clearly, we have a ways to go until banning natural gas hookups in residences makes sense from a greenhouse gas standpoint.<\/p>\r\n

But what about safety?\u00a0 There has been a spate of alarmist articles about the dangers of natural gas cooking appliances<\/a>, some focused on the harmful effects of nitrogen dioxide byproducts and others on the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.\u00a0 Certain studies<\/a> showed associations between gas appliances in the home and asthma symptoms in women, but it is not clear to me that other socio-economic factors (for example, are gas appliances more likely to be found in more polluted cities?) are not in play.<\/p>\r\n

With respect to carbon monoxide (CO):\u00a0 About 9 deaths in the U.S. a year are attributable to CO leaks from defective natural gas furnaces; 3 from natural gas cooking; and 2 from natural gas water heaters.\u00a0 For comparison, 90-plus deaths a year<\/a> are caused by the CO from gasoline-powered generators and engines, but that issue does not seem to energize many interest groups.<\/p>\r\n

In any case, my take is that the political powers-that-be in New York State needed to score some friend-of-the-environment points, and so they got ahead of the game — even though their new law may, perversely, cause a near-term increase in greenhouse gas emissions.\u00a0 But who, other than an ex-New-Yorker engineer, would bother to point that out?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hope to make this post short and efficient, so let’s get right to the point:\u00a0 I’m skeptical of the recent decision by New York State to ban new (2026 or later) residential hookups of natural gas for the sake … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29955"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29986,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29955\/revisions\/29986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}