Climate change is an existential crisis and of course we have to take action to slow it down. But one of the moves being taken by many municipalities and being contemplated elsewhere is just really dumb — literally counterproductive. It is virtue signaling of the worst kind, creating inconvenience for the sake of pretending to do good.
I’m referring, of course, to the war on gas stoves. Some places have banned gas hookups from new builds. Some are attacking the cooking part directly. This poses a number of problems. In moderate climates, like say the Carolinas and south, the most efficient home heating system is an electric heat pump, so a gas hookup for heating is not necessary. Up here around Boston, however, those numbers don’t add up. My heat pump is really a central air conditioner, 36,000 BTU. The gas boiler is more like 80,000. It’s under 20 degrees today. The heat pump would not heat the house by itself. What actually happens in such installations is that the heat pump is accompanied by electric resistance heating, hidden in the air handler. So you are using the most inefficient kind of heat at a time when demand is greatest. Not ideal. Gas is better in such circumstances.
But it’s cooking where the real hit occurs. If I heat the house with heat pumps, gas, oil, geothermal, wood, or anything else, then it is warm. Cooking, though, is usually better on gas. Some of the anti-gas propaganda tells stories about how, in the 1930s when gas stoves were really taking off (“now you’re cooking with gas!”), asthma and other air-related problems got worse. But what did gas replace? Not “clean” electric — it replaced coal and wood! It was an improvement.
To be sure, electric ovens are good. Some prefer them to gas. It’s the cooktops where all the differences come to the fore. I strongly suspect that the “liberal” young virtue signalers calling for gas bans don’t actually do much cooking. If you take out your dinner from restaurants, they’re usually using gas, but you don’t know the difference, and it’s not a huge deal if you just heat water for tea or ramen.
Nowadays there are essentially three types of cook tops available, gas, electric — thermal, and induction. Electric — thermal comes in a couple of flavors. The older open coil kind is only found in low-end stoves. It heats up relatively fast though. The more popular kind is a smooth-top. That has glass above the heating element. It looks good, and passes the HGTV “not a slum” test. It is supposed to be easier to clean. But it takes forever to heat up and cool down, because there’s an extra thermal mass in between the heater and the cookware. It is frankly awful to cook on. I’ve replaced them with gas in my most recent two homes.
Induction is supposed to be best of all. It uses electricity (a 24 -100 kHz oscillator and coil) to induce current flows in iron-bearing cookware. It doesn’t heat the cooktop directly, and it doesn’t heat incompatible (all-copper, glass, aluminum, tin, etc.) cookware. Fortunately most today does have some iron, even if it’s stainless clad with copper or aluminum. There are nutters out there who think the induced electromagnetic fields, which do slightly reach a person standing near the stove, will hurt them, but like Wi-Fi, “5G”, and other regulated sources of EMF, induction stoves are pretty safe. So sure, sounds great, and anti-gas promoters point to them.
But of course there is a catch. Take a jaunt down to your local Best Buy, Lowes, or other big appliance dealer. Do you see any induction stoves there? Probably not. They may show up at luxury kitchen showrooms, and a few models can be special-ordered at the big stores, but they are mostly very expensive or made of unobtanium. The industry simply does not produce many. So in practice, if you are stuck with electric cooking, it’s likely to be one of those infernal smooth-tops.
Now the whole point of this exercise is to move from carbon-bearing natural gas to “clean” electricity, right? Because we’re moving towards renewable electric power, right? Well, not so fast. Let’s look at how the electric grid really works. And remember, even if you buy “clean” power in a state that allows you to choose your “generating company”, it is merely an accounting trick; all grid power is the same, coming from whatever sources are available.
Generating capacity basically comes in three flavors, from a grid perspective. Base load is generally power that either has a low cost or is hard to start and stop. Nuclear plants, for example, take days to start and stop. Coal can take hours. Hydro is also often base load. Here in Mass., much of it is imported from Hydro Quebec. Peaking capacity can be started more quickly and is used both for short-term peaks and when there isn’t enough base load. Gas-fired plants are peakers. Opportunistic power is available when it is available, and displaces peakers or base load when it can, but can’t be relied on. Wind and solar are opportunistic. We will need more grid-scale storage capacity before they can be base load.
Here in Mass., we have some solar and a little wind, but peaking power comes mostly from gas-fired plants. And since we can’t even get a transmission line through Maine to Quebec, that supply (let’s set aside the environmental consequences of their James Bay hydro project for the moment) is limited. We use every last bit of solar and wind we have, and it is far, far from displacing gas. So whenever we increase the demand for electricity, we are actually increasing the usage of gas.
Now compare a gas stove to an electric one. A gas stove turns on and off at will, and puts about 100% of its heat in the kitchen, under the pot. An electric stove’s heat begins miles away in a gas-fired power plant (remember, it’s incremental power) and then goes through transmission lines and distribution lines to your house, losing some along the way. Then you have to warm up the stove before it actually starts cooking. Not a big deal for baking or a long simmer, but for many short cooks (fried eggs, for instance) warm-up can be almost as long as the cooking, thus wasting power. And after you’re done cooking that waste heat is still cooling off from the stove top, which in the summer adds load to your A/C (harmless in winter though). Bottom line: Electric stoves burn a lot more gas than gas stoves.
Now maybe 10-20 years from now there will be lots of wind, solar, grid-scale heat pumps, LFTR, whatever. And we’ll have plentiful clean electricity. But a stove nowadays is built for a 7-10 year lifespan, not like the old ones. (I had a 7 ½ year old Amana stove break, and owner Whirlpool would not supply replacement parts; the 7 year support was up and they were out.) So going all-electric now is essentially buying something that is not helping at all during its likely lifetime.
So let’s stop demonizing gas cooking. It uses only about 1% of the total gas supply, after all. The big problem with gas is leaks from the distribution pipes, and that isn’t dependent on load, just maintenance. And until the last house doesn’t use gas, we’ll need the pipes. Let’s concentrate on things that do good without doing harm.
And let’s do some healthy home cooking.