I sure would hate to have to heat with electricity and no natural gas! My bills would be over the moon! And no oil tanks, either?

I've lived in NE where there is little natural gas (not banned, pipelines just never run) and most people use a combination of oil and wood stoves with an electric baseboard heat in the bathrooms.

I live in a fairly warm climate (Central Texas), and it's awful being without natural gas. :-( Most years, we have frequent thunderstorms, and when the power goes out for half a day, it's nice to still be able to cook for my family.

I guess if we didn't have natural gas, I'd have to get a wood stove or build a house with a wood burning fireplace. In the kitchen.

Yes, times are changing.

Only 4 per cent of Quebec homes are heated with n.g. Hydro (electricity) is used to heat 78% of homes. Meanwhile renewable natural gas is predicted to represent 66% of the province's natural gas supply by 2030. Oil furnaces for home heating are banned in Montreal starting in 2030; industrial and commercial oil heating will be phased out by 2025.#

The premiers of Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have committed to working together to reduce fossil fuel dependence by producing small modular reactors for hydro.

But it's all pretty much pointless as long as China fuels its economic growth with 226GW of new coal power projects. Not to mention India.

If only Thanos were real, the world would be saved!

A number of chefs were voicing objections in Seattle as the city council considered a similar ban.

NG is a natural resource in SW PA. Most homes have it. We have an all electric house. We have a heat pump with back up heat. Our electric bill per month is the same as the bill for our last house for electric and NG. And our last house had less sq footage.

Our electric rate is the same all times of the day.

I've spent a lifetime designing single family and multi-family dwellings as well as offices, dormitories, hospitals and hotels in New England and all of them were heated with natural gas or propane.

I just completed two multi-family renovations in Brookline, MA that were converted from oil to gas. The gas company rebates for high efficiency gas-fired equipment has made it the best choice for decades.

The new ban on natural gas is for heating; it will still be allowed in residential projects for hot water systems in large buildings and for cooking in all buildings.

That makes the heating system of choice electric heat pumps which might have been the best choice if there had never been gas company rebates.

My concern is the availability of electric power and the increase in fossil fuel required to generate it.

Fossil fuels = "climate catastrophe."

REPENT BOOMER!

*******

My concern is the availability of electric power and the increase in fossil fuel required to generate it.

In my little part of the world, as of yearend 2018, Ontario produced 93% of its electricity from non-greenhouse gas producing sources: nuclear, hydro, wind and solar. (As to the need to safely store nuclear waste for a minimum of 100,000 years: not our problem!)

All electric is now more economical than NG here in climate zone 5 & 6.

A code minimum house with air source heat pump HVAC will about break even as heating with natural gas when you factor all costs, like the ~$20/mo just to be connected to the gas line.

A better than code minimum insulated & air sealed house, in general, will out perform and cost less to home owners when you factor both mortgage and utility costs.

If you factor in having a photovoltaic system, NG doesn't stand a chance, economically. You can't make your own natural gas on your roof top.

People will get hung up on the higher mortgage and not realize the true, lower cost of ownership with all electric.

Matt, can you explain your middle points. It seems that you are setting up a relationship where the more efficient a house is, the more economical an all electric system over a gas heating system becomes, The logic then follows that a fairly leaky or lesser insulated house (like any of us out there who have 100 year old solid brick houses with no wall insulation would currently be more economical to heat with gas?

Of course a more efficient house will use less energy in general saving money in both cases, but why are greater savings seen with electric?

There are a couple of cities in CA that have enacted the ban. An attempt to “get off fossil fuels”. CA has time-phased goals for using renewable energy.

@A Fox In a nutshell, you've got it right. There's lots of factors, but the biggest is that air source heat pumps have lower capacities than combustible fuel heating systems are able to provide for residential installations.

That 100 year old house might have a design heat load of 100,000 btu/hr. You can get that out of a typical sized (physical dimensions) furnace or boiler sitting in your basement.

Getting that capacity out of air source heat pumps (ASHP) would require 2 or 3 large exterior units, and a whole lot of electricity. The cost to run it might still be comparable to that 100,000 btu/hr furnace or boiler, but the installation and equipment costs would be silly.

When you get to the other end of the house efficiency spectrum with well performing, or even just code-minimum houses, your design heat load is considerably less, and should be able to be handled by 1 exterior unit.

This saves money with:

-Less HVAC equipment costs, 1 system does both heating and cooling

-Lower installation costs from less or no ductwork

-No NG lines to dig, no hookup costs.

-No monthly connection cost. This is where the savings is most apparent. At around $20 a month, or for me at $25 a month/$300/yr, my heating costs with gas would be about $800 total for the year. With only electric, it's about $650 total for the year.

This isn't a ton of money in either case because of the higher efficiency of my house.

At a code minimum level house, the yearly heating cost would be closer to the same, but you should still have a lower total installation cost making the electric ASHP more economical.

With any possibility of solar power, you should essentially just write natural gas off completely.

You can get into non financial reasons like comfort from ASHP's able to run steady state down to 10% capacity that conventional AC and fired heating equipment just can't touch.

Safety reasons with no potential for gas or exhaust leaks.

Low maintenance.

I digress, if you have any more questions feel free to ask or message me directly.

There are plenty of electric utilities that charge $20 or more per month as a monthly connection cost.

@ulisdone Where we live, the electric provider charges between $60-70 monthly for the connection. Plus, of course we have to pay for the usage. Electricity is not cheap and the $60-70 per month charge on top of the rate per KW is rather high.

The actual connection costs don't matter much. All electric means 1 connection costs vs 2.

I do think in most areas, the NG connection cost is higher but obviously not true everywhere.

In my area - $10 a month for NG. $14 a month for electricity. The electric one is fairly new and not nearly as noticeable as the NG since it is a small percentage of the electric bill.

There is a pretty good analogy. Think gasoline cars vs EVs. Environmentally, similar comparison. But people are stuck in their ways and resist change. That being said, driving an EV is so much better where as having a heat pump doesn't really have an advantage over a furnace is day to day practicality and experience. It is just better for the environment in most situations and gets better every day (as the use of coal plummets).

Sometimes, government needs to ban things to get people to realize the advantages of newer tech. Can't wait to be in an all EV European city (most have bans on fossil fuel cars over the next decade).

The ban in Brookline applies to natural gas service to new construction and new hookups to substantial remodels. I haven't driven through Brookline in more than 20 years, but I didn't think there was much space for construction of new homes back then. That said, banning natural gas may simply be trading off one set of carbon emissions for another depending on the fuel source used by the local electric utility and the transmission losses. Politically correct? Yes. Effective? Probably not so much.

In response to 'Electricity has a connection cost, too': Yes, and I think everyone here is already going to be paying it regardless of their heating system.


If your electricity is expensive, I'd wager that your other fuel options are as well but it would be worth a calculation. I'm basing my math off of 0.13/kWh and 1.03/NG Therm


As for connection cost not mattering much: Personally I'd rather not pay for something I don't need, but I agree it's a small amount.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's basically awash and there aren't many good reasons to stick with gas fired heating. Electric is beating it in the economics alone.

Data shows that even purely coal fired EV's and also ASHP equipment are better than their gas fired equivalents, though marginally. This data factors the 'big picture' from raw material extraction, to delivery.

We don't have to wait for the future, the present is electric.

"I'm basing my math off of 0.13/kWh and 1.03/NG Therm"

Wells there's part of the difference that some of us may be seeing. Where we live the natural gas rate is only $.022 per them whereas electric is $.011 per kWh. The monthly service charge is $14 for both utilities. The math doesn't make as much sense here. Electricity is 16 times as expensive per unit of energy than gas.

@A Fox You're neglecting to account for delivery charges.

Okay, yes I am missing something, I'll have to pull up one of our bills when I get home. But we most definitely don't pay anywhere near $1 per therm, otherwise our Feb/March bill would have been close to $1000 rather than just over $500.

We have an all electric home. We don't have a monthly connection charge, but a distribution charge on kWh used plus the cost per kWH. Our house is 2470 sq ft and our average monthly bill for a year is just a little under $200. We are zone 6.