As long as they don’t cut off gas to the PNW. Almost all the natural gas we use comes from Canada, and the majority of the voters there didn’t vote for this.
That would be fucking brutal, no heat or cooking gas.
This is another one of those stupid feel-good statements where it feels good to say but completely hand waves away all the complexities of actually achieving this.
Never mind the massive financial barrier to get people to switch away from gas in the first place (which the majority of everyone is not going to be able to afford so how do you expect that to work?) where does this money come from?
But you now need to contend with electrical infrastructure changes to support that extra load. Where does this money come from?
Sure in theory this is a great idea I would love to switch to heat pumps as I’m sure many others would as well. However the cost is egregious ($30-50k). And unless it’s supported with massive government subsidies (remember the US government just cut all subsidies for these sorts of things) then it’s not going to happen because people just can’t afford it.
That’s excessive compared to the extremely low risk of a blackout in developed countries (excluding the United States which has regular blackouts). To illustrate:
US households spent 5.5 hours without electricity on average in 2022. Excluding major events like hurricanes, the number drops to 2.1 hours.
German households spent a whopping 12.2 minutes without electricity on average in 2022.
A portable gas heater, blankets and a camping stove are completely sufficient for the average person considering most longer power outages last for a couple of hours at worst. Exceedingly rare longer blackouts will always have a government aid program, such as a heated gym with free food, near your location.
The only one’s who should really prepare for blackouts are:
the government
people who live hours away from civilization with very limited infrastructure connecting them
We’ve had a couple storms this winter. One of them I lost power for 4 hours, but a friend of mine in the next town over was out 4 days. And some didn’t lose at all, so it varies. Power outages like this aren’t too rare every year.
It doesn’t bode well for our freezers, but we don’t get cold enough to be anything other than cold and inconvenient. Easily remedied by temporary solutions you mentioned.
Until you discover that the gas infrastructure and your home heather need electricity to function. You better have an old fashion gas stove as backup that you can use until gas pressure drops too much. You could get bottles of gas and a camping heater but every year people die because they use these indoors and get CO poisoning so be careful.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of generators? All the popular propane heaters in the US have CO shutoffs. There’s not really a point to using a heater outdoors in the first place unless it’s one of the huge ones that take a 20 pound tank and very obviously shouldn’t be used indoors.
Trust me, I would love to get ride of gas, but my stove does work fine without power. Also, utilities generally don’t go down because of weather, since they have backup power on site.
Normally they should have backup, but places like Texas saved a few bucks on backups and their maintenance so their gas lines went down too. That was in the 2021 power crisis. Deregulations and increasingly weird weather is a bad combination.
As long as they don’t cut off gas to the PNW. Almost all the natural gas we use comes from Canada, and the majority of the voters there didn’t vote for this.
That would be fucking brutal, no heat or cooking gas.
worst comes to worst, they would.
Oh I’m sure. And Trump and other MAGA would look on with glee because they hate the PNW.
It’s always the right time to switch to heat pumps and induction stoves. Gas is terrible.
This is another one of those stupid feel-good statements where it feels good to say but completely hand waves away all the complexities of actually achieving this.
Never mind the massive financial barrier to get people to switch away from gas in the first place (which the majority of everyone is not going to be able to afford so how do you expect that to work?) where does this money come from?
But you now need to contend with electrical infrastructure changes to support that extra load. Where does this money come from?
Sure in theory this is a great idea I would love to switch to heat pumps as I’m sure many others would as well. However the cost is egregious ($30-50k). And unless it’s supported with massive government subsidies (remember the US government just cut all subsidies for these sorts of things) then it’s not going to happen because people just can’t afford it.
Gas is terrible until the power grid goes down in the middle of winter.
Electric should definitely be the main go to but we should all have gas hookup for a backup heat source in my opinion.
That’s excessive compared to the extremely low risk of a blackout in developed countries (excluding the United States which has regular blackouts). To illustrate:
US households spent 5.5 hours without electricity on average in 2022. Excluding major events like hurricanes, the number drops to 2.1 hours.
German households spent a whopping 12.2 minutes without electricity on average in 2022.
A portable gas heater, blankets and a camping stove are completely sufficient for the average person considering most longer power outages last for a couple of hours at worst. Exceedingly rare longer blackouts will always have a government aid program, such as a heated gym with free food, near your location.
The only one’s who should really prepare for blackouts are:
I agree, though here’s my anecdote from the PNW.
We’ve had a couple storms this winter. One of them I lost power for 4 hours, but a friend of mine in the next town over was out 4 days. And some didn’t lose at all, so it varies. Power outages like this aren’t too rare every year.
It doesn’t bode well for our freezers, but we don’t get cold enough to be anything other than cold and inconvenient. Easily remedied by temporary solutions you mentioned.
Until you discover that the gas infrastructure and your home heather need electricity to function. You better have an old fashion gas stove as backup that you can use until gas pressure drops too much. You could get bottles of gas and a camping heater but every year people die because they use these indoors and get CO poisoning so be careful.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of generators? All the popular propane heaters in the US have CO shutoffs. There’s not really a point to using a heater outdoors in the first place unless it’s one of the huge ones that take a 20 pound tank and very obviously shouldn’t be used indoors.
Trust me, I would love to get ride of gas, but my stove does work fine without power. Also, utilities generally don’t go down because of weather, since they have backup power on site.
Normally they should have backup, but places like Texas saved a few bucks on backups and their maintenance so their gas lines went down too. That was in the 2021 power crisis. Deregulations and increasingly weird weather is a bad combination.
Just the thing to enrage the masses. It’ll be hard but the only thing that might change the mind of of MAGAt is suffering.
The MAGAts know that the PNW doesn’t like them, and will happily watch the PNW suffer, unfortunately.
Oh, good idea. I’ll pass it to my MLA.