One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
One California City Wants to Get Rid of Gas | Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
Residents of liberal Berkeley will get to vote on a second attempt to curb use of the fuel in buildings.
Along with the health benefits, induction cooktops as an alternative are objectively better at cooking stuff than gas: they’re faster, more easily and precisely controlled, heat is limited to the bottom of cookware so it’s safer and easier to handle your pots and pans while cooking, they’re easier to clean and keep clean (no nooks and crannies for shit to get stuck in, just a smooth glass surface to wipe down), oh and you don’t ever have an open flame in your kitchen, which takes one massive safety hazard completely off the table. I can’t really think of any downsides other than the short adjustment period of using anything that’s new. I’ve rented places that had electric coils, electric plates, gas, and induction cooktops—so I’ve tried all common types of ranges/hobs—and induction wins every time for me.
I've used both induction and gas. If you are finding induction cooking better than gas, the gas ranges you've used suck.
Huh, entirely possible, could also just be personal preference, maybe it’s not as objective as I thought. I’ve got a brand new seemingly high quality samsung gas range that came with my current apartment, and I completely prefer using my plug-in double induction cooktop. I even set up a wooden cover over the gas burners so I can use the induction plates on the range.
One downside is I can't use all this copper and aluminum cookware people are giving me.
Because it won't work on their new range.
Yeah, that is a pain. There are conversion disks you can buy to make your non-magnetic cookware compatible with induction, but you’re right, people are very attached to their cookware so this could be an impediment for some folks.
I’m seeing average $2-2.50 /therm
The tax is $2.964 /therm
So this measure slightly more than doubles the gas cost? Goodness Berkeley is a NIMBY hell hole amongst all its other beauty.
The mommy knows best attitude that this law comes from is why Berkeley is so frequently made fun of in so many places. You guys have your heads so far up the darkest depths that you can't see that this doesn't offer any sort of meaningful change in the overall problem with climate change. 3% reduction in methane emissions is nothing when every other city and town in the state is still burning gas for heating and cooking. You may as well throw shovelfuls of sand on a raging inferno. Not saying you shouldn't do anything but this is just dumb.
Hardly the first time activists put something on a Berkeley ballot which is a nonstarter in the real world. Last year they had to abandon their Hopkins St. bike lane plan because it would stuff up a fire truck and evacuation route.
This measure would kill all large restaurant/kitchen business in Berkeley. Berkeley Bowl estimated it would raise their kitchen’s gas bill by 180%.
There are simply no good electrification options for large commercial kitchens.
So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.
So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.
For this stuff when it comes to climate intervention, it just seems like there are so many other things to do before coming after gas stoves and ranges.
I get that people want to start small and start local, so that’s why residential gas bans are easier than applying it to businesses. Still, if you’re imposing a very costly mandate on people it won’t go over well without subsidies.
I don’t want to lose my cheap residential gas if I’m going to be forced to pay monopoly time of use prices for electricity.