Some of you may remember when the electric industry was promoting itself rather aggressively. Reddy Kilowatt was their mascot, created in the 1920s by Alabama Power. By the 1960s, with nuclear fission power plants under construction, the industry moved to another phase, the “Gold Medallion Home”. Your ticky-tacky suburban tract house would get a little fake-gold medallion above the door if it had no other fuels than electricity. Heating, hot water, and cooking would all be electric. The idea was that nukes would make electricity “too cheap to meter”, so you might as well use it up.
Later, starting with the 1973 Energy Crisis, we learned better. Reddy was retired. Electric heating is usually more expensive than alternatives. Good insulation became more important than big fat space heaters. And electric cooking just sucks.
But he’s back. Not in person, but now disguised as a green liberal. You may remember Phil Ochs’ definition of a liberal, someone who’s ten degrees to the left of center in good times and ten degrees to the right when it affects them personally. Nowadays this applies to carbon as well.
Reddy’s new incarnation is virtue-signaling laws that prohibit new houses from having any heating or cooking fuel except electricity. The idea is that it is possible to generate electricity from renewable wind and solar, so therefore all energy should be electric. Some cities and towns have already passed these laws. Brookline, Mass., for instance, just did, and its fellow limousine-liberal neighbor Newton is talking about it too. These cities are, of course, fully built up nowadays. The only new construction is tear-downs (mostly for McMansions) or platform (6-story wood) apartment projects. The burghers who run the towns already have their single-family homes with garages and gas hot water and stoves (though often oil heat). Not a gold medallion in sight. So these rules won’t affect the people who are behind them, just newcomers. Housing demand is high so they can get away with all sorts of stuff and still sell the house at a ridiculous price.
Now you might think, hey, we’re moving towards more wind and solar, so why not encourage it? Here in Mass., about ¾ of the total electric power is generated by gas-fired power plants. Some hydro is imported from Quebec, but getting a new transmission line across Maine or New Hampshire is proving rather difficult (NIMBY). Under 20% is renewable. We have some wind projects, and solar keeps getting added, but it’s a tiny share.
The real gotcha here is the difference between base load and peaking capacity. A source that provides power whether or not you need it is base load, the part you use all the time, even when demand is minimal. Nukes are like that, though the nukes in New England are basically history. Wind and solar are base load. Any additional demand is met by power sources that can be turned on and off. Coal plants (we have none in Mass.) take hours to start up. Gas can be turned on and off, though, quite quickly. It’s ideal for peaking, even if only used sporadically. Since we have so few alternatives to gas, though, we still have gas in the base load as well as in the peaking.
If you use gas-fired electricity to heat water or cook, you’re wasting about half the power. The power plant itself has inherent inefficiencies (ah, physics, the laws that even Congress can’t change). Then there are losses in the transmission and distribution network. So gas-fired electric stoves put around twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as gas stoves. Same with dryers.
Heating with electricity is not so bad any more because of heat pumps, which are far more efficient than the old resistive heaters. But it still usually costs more than gas, which suggests a higher net carbon use. At least that one part of the equation comes close to break even when electrified, and the best heat pumps might actually come out ahead.
But we are literally decades away from having a grid that doesn’t use carbon to generate electricity. Every kilowatt-hour of solar and wind is essentially base load, and it doesn’t always come when needed. And the gas pipelines can get some renewable gas from garbage and manure fermentation. So saying that houses can’t have gas stoves does nothing to help with global heating. In fact it worsens it. All of this incremental electric use is effectively peak load. Besides the waste in burning gas remotely to generate additional electricity, electric stoves are by necessity so bad that they discourage home cooking. So people will take out and eat out more, or get more meals delivered. And an electric stove takes so long to heat up that it wastes a lot of energy doing so, which gas stoves don’t. (Puh-leez don’t tell me how wonderful induction is until you can buy it at a reasonable price at ordinary appliance dealers. Not a $3000+ luxury cooktop. Not to mention the special pots and pans.)
This reality is put aside by virtue signalers who want to show that they’re ready for the bright future world of plentiful, renewable electricity. (Just don’t put the windmills where it might impact their sight lines.) We need to aim for that, of course. But the appliances we buy now will be replaced a few times before that happens. Fusion power plants are 30 years away (this statement is always true), and until then, we’ll be burning additional carbon for the additional juice. Reddy Kilowatt is not our friend.