Costs of Banning Natural Gas Appliances

 As we have heard in the news, there are both federal and state proposals to ban the installation of natural gas appliances in new construction and to require the retrofit with electric appliances in existing properties.

The costs of banning and requiring the replacement of natural gas appliances has many layers.  The direct and most obvious cost is replacing the physical, gas furnace, water heater & cooking range.  The thousands these purchases and installations will be only the beginning of the cost.

The house will have to be rewired to enable the greatly increased current requirements of these new major electric appliances.  The rewiring will be from the incoming service circuit breaker panel.  This cost will vary greatly depending on the location of the new appliances and the main service panel. 

The problems continue; electric service coming into the home is rated by the anticipated load of the appliances, lighting and electrical outlets.  The electrical service load requirements of the electric replacement appliances will be very significantly greater.  This is likely to require new service lines to the house.  This also requires an upgrade of the main house circuit breaker panel.  The cost will vary greatly depending on the situation but will be very substantial.

The problems are still far from over.  As the house wiring and breaker panel is designed for the anticipated load, so too is the main wiring to the streets.  The utility’s main power stations and transformers were also carefully engineered for the expected load.  There may not be available generation capacity to service so many appliances retrofitted in thousands of homes.  We have electrical power outages as things are now. 

The costs of operating an electrical appliance is about 75% higher than natural gas. 

This whole madness is driven by constant cries of “Global Warming” causing “Climate Change.”  This is driven by a religious commitment to a belief in “computer model” predictions.  Predictions that observations have proven to be very wrong.  In fact, there has been no global warming since 1998 (Google: global warming pause.)   This should not be surprising since CO2 is only 0.04% of our atmosphere (Google: percentage of CO2 in air)  The primary greenhouse gas is actually water vapor!   Water vapor in air can be as high as 4%.

Ancient ice cores reveal that CO2 levels have been as high as 0.8% (20X current levels) and we must assume that the world survived!

Mark Fernwood