The more infrastructure they lay and the more customers they connect, the harder to shut them down. The more bail-worthy they become.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Yeah they're trying hard to achieve the "too big to kill" status, like shamu.
Shamu would have succumbed to a .308 to the brain pan. There ain't shit that is "to big to be killed", just those unwilling to do the killing.
Because we live in Canada and our design day heating energy requirement is typically far greater than our design day cooling energy requirement. Add in the fact that best pump efficiency falls way off at design day heating (to half or less of design day cooling) and you end up with equipment that may be able to do heating and cooling but is way oversized for cooling, so lots of people opt to save capital (and potentially maintenance) money by relying on gas heat for the coldest days.
Because water heating with heat pumps is currently garbage on the residential scale... the heat pump capacity on residential water heaters is quit low, which is fine for keeping the tank warm but not for dealing with a half decent draw, so they all include full electric capacity which means you need the service size and associated operating costs to go along with it. Commercial heat pump water heating isn't much better, it may get better once CO2 or propane take off as a refrigerant here.
Because more and more buildings are putting in emergency generators, which require either natural gas, propane or fuel oil. One of those is significantly easisr to install and maintain than the other two.
Although this might be accurate, what would be the true cost of gas if you removed all the subsidies and added the cost of fossil fueled warming from the continued GHG release? What will be the cost of gas if climate change really starts to pop and we undergo radically accelerated decarbonization? What is the projected cost of renewables + batteries + electric heating in 5, 10 or 20 years?
These are more relevant details regarding the building of infa that should be built to last, and is costed to last, for several decades.
I just had to buy a new gas furnace and air conditioner, so, with my mind on global warming, I asked the furnace guy what it would cost to put in a heat pump. He said he has put in quite a few, but the costs have gone way up. He also said that in our climate I would need an electric back-up furnace for winter because a heat pump loses efficiency quickly at temps below -15C. The cost was going to be around $30,000, compared to $15,000 for the new gas furnace and AC. Also, electricity in Ontario is an incredibly expensive way to heat, so that would be a big extra monthly cost in the winter. An in-ground geothermal system would be about $65,000, he said.
It isn't hard to see why gas is still popular, and that it will continue to be far into the future unless we undertake some kind of national project to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure with nuclear for the needed electricity and then convert our cars and homes over to full electric.
Did you asking about getting a heat pump to run the AC coil above the gas furnace instead of just a regular outdoor AC unit? The cost difference in hardware is only a few hundred dollars at most (for same sized unit, maybe $500-$700 if you are going up a size to hear for longer into the winter), installation cost should be the same and while it doesn't eliminate gas burining you can reduce it by probably 50% - 70%.
This is basically what I'm in the process if doing, except rather than a furnace replacement I'm only doing it to add AC because I currently don't have AC on my furnace.
No, I didn't know that was an option. Cool idea, though. No pun intended, but I'll take it.
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The boat salesman says you need a boat.
YOU pay for the infrastructure, YOU pay for the maintenance, YOU pay for the gas. Why would they stop now?
"Growth at any cost" is a great motto for corporations, and cancer.
Because number has to go up. Always. Forever. Unending.
Because money.
That's great for climate goals, but can someone tell me how we're supposed to heat our homes? Electricity?
- Better insulation.
- Heat pumps.
- By the time gas heating is eliminated, climate change will have solved that problem.
Climat change won't magically remove heating needs. It will bring hotter summers, colder winters, bed weather etc.
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Um, yes? Heat pump until -15C, baseboards for the relatively fewer days that go below that. Plus good insulation.
In Quebec we have cheap hydroelectric of course, but I mean, between nuclear power, renewables and hydro, that's basically how.
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The problem is, they aren't going anywhere. They'll just funnel money to politicians to stop any attempt to stop them.
Annnnnd this is exactly why we need the carbon tax.
Probably same reason as here in Australia.
The gas companies have managed to create a multifaceted cult where they've brainwashed people into thinking electricity is unclean (despite things like heat pumps being 500% efficient), unreliable and expensive.
Also, it helps that people who paid too much for their ICE cars are scared and they know that their cars will increasingly drop in value as people transition away from gas and fossil fuels.
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Natural gas infrastructure and heating could be transitioned to hydrogen or biogas.
Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas so would not really be a replacement for the foreseeable future. Gas infrastructure is not designed for transporting hydrogen so leaks would be significant. Hydrogen can also penetrate into steel piping and cause it to crack and deteriorate more rapidly.
Biogas, sure if there were enough production available.
No reason we can't produce hydrogen from solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal.
Add carbon dioxide to the hydrogen, and you get methane that you can transport through existing gas pipelines without the issues of hydrogen
A perfect Electrolysis reaction takes about 39kwh to produce 1kg of hydrogen that if burned at 100% efficiency would yield 33kwh of power. More realistically it takes 50-60kwh to produce 1kg that is burned to produce ~25kwh of usable energy.
I'm not too sure about converting hydrogen to methane but that will have energy overhead as well, and then you have to deal with the fact that 6% of natural gas production today is leaked into the air, which both further hurts the efficiency of synthesizing it and also has a significant climate impact.
I think it willl almost always be cheaper to just provide electricity directly except in cases where energy density is far more important than efficiency, which is not the case for stationary homes.
It doesn't have a negative climate impact if the source is renewables. That's the point. Its basically free gas.
Solar energy doesn't run at night. Wind doesn't always run. Hydro doesn't work during droughts.
This is a battery that solvers these issues.
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