Just came across this new rule, via this article: https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/california-electric-19563602.php
2027 is when they ban sale of new replacement gas water heaters.
They talk about a few solutions, like low voltage electric heaters, and load sharing plugs to share a dryer plug among the water heater and a electric dryer. So that could do it for a lot of people.
But I’d guess a surge in panel replacements will happen within the next 2 years.
Especially since new gas furnaces will be banned in 2029.
Also, obligatory Fuck PGE. We have higher rates than most of the rest of the world and it’s all the fault of the corrupt PUC and PGE.
Here in Sweden, gas is pretty much obsolete and not a lot of places even have the option of using gas. Afaik only really the old buildings in the big cities has gas.
Furnace heating is pretty rare in Sweden so we generally use electricity. Our grid is also very stable and renewable.
Average electricity prices including fees, taxes and all that was apparently between 0,17 EUR and 0,19 EUR per kWh in December 2023. Don’t you guys have geothermal and heat pumps?
The majority of our generation here in CA is PV during daylight hours and nat. gas generation plants (plus the odd nuke plant here and there) to cover any shortages. We have some battery storage to convert that PV generation capacity into night time power but not nearly enough. We have very little geothermal or tidal generation here.
Most of the abusive cost of electricity here is PG&E offloading their $20B+ wildfire liability from 2015-2019 onto customers.
Every single home I’ve lived in since the late 90s has used nat gas for water and central heating. Electric is becoming popular over time but gas is still very common.