Comment on In California, plans to move low-income neighborhoods off of gas advance

• Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah, this is a case of me assuming things are common knowledge which I really had no business assuming.

  Here’s the best source to use, the CEC’s data reports. FWIW, cali still generates 43% of their power using natural gas - and has added a truly pitiful amount of renewables over the past 5 years. While the end-goal here is absolutely the way to go - induction stoves and heat pumps are undeniably more efficient than their gas alternatives (often 400%+ for heat pumps) - any money here would be much better spent on updating the electrical grid to the point that the kind of losses which plague California’s truly neglected power infrastructure are addressed.

  If the natural gas power plants were all CCGT running desulfurized gas on decent transmission infrastructure, this would absolutely be a positive move. But right now, your substation is running a 1970s dry-loop stepdown transformer on the transmission lines (and every poor area is running at least one, thanks PG&E) and that alone is eating any potential energy savings this could achieve. Plus, adding load to this already overtaxed system (anyone else remember the summer brownouts?) before its updated is just shifting the responsibility for the environment onto the consumers, again, pretty blatantly greenwashing the whole broken system. And also it’ll force the decrepit standby gas powerplants back into more regular operation to keep up with the increasing power demands. (This is just ignoring the greenhouse emissions present in the supply and disposal chain for which I cannot find concrete numbers)

  Right now this is a pilot project, and it’s investigating strategies to get people to switch their appliances and the feasability/impact of neighborhood decarbonization. That’s great, but it’s spectacularly not the problem that actually needs to be addressed, and just taking the funding for their dumbass “block party” and putting it towards transmission infrastructure would have a larger impact than all three blocks switching from gas could ever have. The emissions from the already failing infrastructure are far more critical, and are not being addressed, and I can’t understand why nobody is talking about this more. Assuming the best case, that all the current trends hold but power consumption plateaus (and you can check the math for yourself if you want), california is going to miss their 2045 deadline by ~10 years. Switching to an induction stovetop (which nobody in a poor neighborhood is going to be able to afford anyways) or a heat-pump (which many low-income multi-units will require structural updates to be able to install the new equipment) are good things to encourage, but it’s not going to actually help anything until we youtube some PG&E executives and overhaul the system.

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