This makes no sense, other than maybe for preventing fires during earthquakes or creating a disincentive for developers to lobby the proliferation or expansion of existing gas lines?

Otherwise, not using natural gas for heating hot water, cooking or heating homes is moronic since it's one of the most energy efficient means of doing so. Electric stoves and water heaters are hilariously inefficient and still pale in comparison to electric furnaces. As an environmental measure this is almost as dumb as Dubai deciding to use monumentally sized heat pumps to chill their beaches... But seriously, this will just result in orders of magnitude of more electricity usage and waste.

Thank goodness I will never live in SF.

What exactly is your point? Induction stove are way more efficient than gas stove, heat pump are more efficient than gas furnace... However I think that banning all natural gas is not tge best way as natural gas can be CO2 neutral (like biogaz etc.)

Forgetting co2 for a minute... If you include the losses in the power station and the transmission lines then it's really not that much better to use the gas in the kitchen than to send it to a power station then send the power to the kitchen etc...

California gets a non insignificant amount of power from renewables (10-11GW peak solar generation during the day, per CAISO and electricitymap.org). Natural gas emits CO2 regardless of where it’s burned. Just as an EV displaces combustion vehicles, induction stoves displace combustion stoves. As the grid gets cleaner, everything else that uses it gets cleaner.

In Australia, commercial buildings can no longer receive the highest sustainability score if they have natural gas service.

These regulations are just the beginning of a path to ending residential and commercial natural gas consumption and its distribution network (which leaks non insignificant amounts of methane).

That's fine, except that cali currently o ly gets about a third of its power from renewables. Once that number is higher you could turn gas off, but banning its use now actually increases emissions.

It also ignores the fact that some household appliances currently cannot be replaced with electrical models. Notably boilers: there is no way you can replace a simple and efficient combi boiler with an electrical model of the same output on a residential circuit, the equipment is too big and the electrical load is huge.

And that's without addressing the fact that we have basically decided NOT to cut our emissions and so doing any of this for Co2E reasons is a waste of time...

Agreed, however your claim that 240v (single phase) power isn't readily available in residential homes is false. Large electric boilers / hvac heaters etc and appliances like washing machines and refrigerators use 240v.

However, it's important to note that for those claiming "oh just use a heat pump" that simply is not an option for high density residences or high rise buildings. Also, the efficiency of heating water with electric heating elements does NOT improve with scale, hence forcing buildings to purchase enormous electric boilers will again, just increase energy consumption AND net carbon emissions. But god knows that in CA, the gov't will just use tax payer money to pay rich developers and building owners to replace multimillion dollar hvac equipment (because "muh environmental impact").

Are you referring to an hvac boiler for heat? That can be replaced with efficient air source heat pump. Have a link to one of these example combi boilers?

I have an Ecotec Pro 24. It's rated to 30kW. That's so I can have a decent shower. You could maybe run 2 showers off it, if you both don't mind low pressure and the heating is off.

I'm a brit in a small 3 bed 2 bath terrace house (I think you call them row houses in the US? Assuming you're American, apologies if that's wrong!).

30kW at 120V is 250A (it's actually more because of ACs power function). That's way above what a standard house or a domestic supply is designed to sustain.

Now add to that that this huge peak power is very synchronised. You, your neighbours and everyone else in your neighbourhood shower around the same times. And those aren't times renweables are most available. This is no problem for gas because you can store gas and pump it out as needed. But for electricity? You'll need to revamp your grid, forget non-constant renewables like wind or solar (I'm a fan of both but they're not suitable). And you need to build a tonne of capacity that won't be used 90% of the time.

This is the killer app for gas.

Thanks for describing your use case, this is helpful! The problem with gas is, of course, that it emits CO2 when burned or leaks methane in distribution pipelines when not burned at a consumption point. For electrical use, you absolutely do not have to revamp the grid. Before heat pump hot water heaters, and even today, there are mechanisms where hot water heaters were/are turned on when there is cheap or excess power on the grid [1]. We would do the same today: the hot water in an insulated tank is the battery. We can keep hot liquids hot relatively affordably.

For the vast majority of use cases, heat pump hot water heaters are a reasonable solution [2] (unless you've got enormous demand within a short window of time, our heat pump hot water heater holds ~80 gallons at 120F). There is of course still work to be done for use cases where boilers are superior (high rises), but that doesn't mean it isn't solvable. I'm aware of a lot of folks in row homes in Australia who are successfully using heat pump hot water heaters!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=load+shifting+water+heaters

[2] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-w...

Gas is actually astoundingly clean to burn, especially given how much energy it stores. It's why farmers use huge tanks of it to burn weeds before seeding / forklifts use propane indoors as fuel.

Once you start looking at the emissions incurred by transmission loss, extra "peak" power purchased from states like Nevada and Oregon this stupid fantasy of electric everything solving the world's problems sans dealing with the production side fades quickly.

Also relevant: https://rmi.org/all-electric-new-homes-a-win-for-the-climate... (All-Electric New Homes: A Win for the Climate and the Economy)

"The new all-electric, single-family home has a lower net present cost than the new mixed-fuel home in every city we studied: Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Minneapolis, MN; New York City, NY; and Seattle, WA."

"In every city we analyzed, a new all-electric, single-family home is less expensive than a new mixed-fuel home that relies on gas for cooking, space heating, and water heating. Net present cost savings over the 15-year period of study are as high as $6,800 in New York City, where the all-electric home also results in 81 percent lower carbon emissions over the mixed-fuel home."

Agree to disagree. Clean energy transmission losses are always preferable to more carbon emissions (as we're already over our carbon budget). Nevada has a lot of clean solar potential, and the PNW is mostly clean hydro.

Enough sunlight hits the Earth in an hour to power all of humanity for a year; electrification of everything is therefore quite reasonable.

That's fine, but we just got through removing hot water tanks from people's house because they're so inefficient. So again, you're gonna need a lot of renewables to power all this extra demand.

i'm so glad I don't live in san francisco. Every time i read about these types of edicts, it just blows my mind. How long until they ban the sale of meat? methane from livestock is the 3rd largest producer of greenhouse gases.

I’m sure people rued coal and wood stoves being sidelined too. I know they did with incandescent lightbulbs.

It’s always easy to misjudge what one is unfamiliar with. Have you personally tried a home that used induction stoves and heat pumps for water and house heating?

Not only that, is global warming suddenly not an issue because it might inconvenience people who are reticent to try new things? Putting gas in a new construction means those emissions are essentially locked in for several decades. We don’t have that time. Don’t hate on something that one hasn’t tried.

"The ordinance would affect the planned development of more than 54,000 homes and 32 million square feet of commercial space"

I find the planned development of more than 54,000 homes very surprising: I thought San Francisco was basically all built up along with an anti-growth attitude in San Francisco. [Commercial space is not surprising with new skyscrapers...]

54,000 includes projects at all stages of the pipeline, including ones that are basically proposals. The average net increase over the last 10 years was about 2,800 per year, or roughly 0.7% increase in total housing stock per year.

Source: https://default.sfplanning.org/publications_reports/2019_Hou...

This could have an unintended consequence where the gas ends up being flared instead, or worse released as unburned methane.