Natural gas is burned to generate electricity in the peaker plants near Reno that supply SF with their power needs.
That's hundreds of miles of power lines running through Northern California forest to get power to SF because of state regulations. Downed power lines are directly responsible for a pretty large % of wildfires.
Same thing in LA, where a significant amount of power is sent from peaker plants near Las Vegas.
These regulations can't do anything to lower demand, they'll only serve to make things even more expensive.
Gas cooking is still much better. I have both. Induction just isn’t as enjoyable and you can’t do things like move your pan and have it keep heating like with a flame. Not to mention, induction is rough on pans. Banning things is aggressive and uncalled for.
It’s really not. We built an all-electric ADU for my parents, then ended up living in it while renovating our house. As someone who cooks pretty much all meals, the induction range is better in almost every way than the fancy gas range that came with our house, so we’re replacing it with an induction cooktop in the renovation.
100% agree. Apart from breathing in the gas (which isn’t good) and combustion products (ditto), setting the heat is very imprecise with gas. How hot? Ah… a “medium heat”. What is that? Or “when the flames are smallish”. With induction you write your recipes with a solid number and get consistent results.
I use both for complex cooking. I find myself using induction 90% of the time. It heats faster, it heats more consistently and it's much easier to clean. The only time I find gas useful is when doing things that require a lot of moving the pan work(sauteeing food in the air, flambée, and similar).
Induction hobs with a temperature sensor are absolutely amazing to use for exact temperature cook. Also it is a lot safer with toddlers and children around.
I haven't found it to be rough on pans, but I only use thick stainless steel pans with aluminium/copper core.
PS: yes, gas is enjoyable as it gives you this primal heat feeling:)
+1 - there are just so many Asian recipes that can not be done anywhere near as easily on induction stovetops (high heat from direct flame for flatbreads, etc).
Plus a whole bunch of cookware doesn't work with induction (clay pots, non ferromagnetic bases, etc). I do wonder if any of these "environmental" estimates factor in the environmental cost of replacing a bunch of cookware just to satisfy induction requirements.
Yep - a gas ban basically bans major parts of various cultures. But also even for typical recipes, you can’t do things like tilt a pan to use the flame to heat different parts differently.
As for environmental costs - the thing that surprises me is that induction easily warps even higher end pans. But yes you’re right, you can’t use many different materials.
Simply not true.
There are induction woks available for East Asian recipies.
South Asian flatbreads like naans, rotis, dosas and parathas can definitely be made well with induction. Plus the precision control of heating opens up new possibilities with all cuisine types.
As for embodied replacement costs - that talking point has been used or rather misused to dismiss everything from solar panels to EVs to wind turbines. Just because there is a payback period doesn't mean that it's insurmountable. What's the payback period on fast fashion and other consumerist nonsense? Infinity right?
I would say that using a high-pollution method of cooking when cleaner options are easily available, simply because it's more enjoyable, is aggressive and uncalled for.
"Yes, this is bad for kids with asthma who have the misfortune of living in my neighborhood, but it's great for quesadillas! So you have to look at both sides."
It's not much better. It's slightly better at specific things and worse at most things. I've had plenty of gas hobs. I think I'd prefer normal electric over them just for being easier to clean and not having to deal or worry about gas. You learn to deal with the shortcomings of electric. Induction is great though. When we remodeled our kitchen we went from electric, gas for 3 months, induction. Life has improved.
The only thing I don't like about induction are those cooktops where they put the controls as touch buttons on the surface. I'm glad we rented a place in the past with that to learn how stupid it is so as to get one with proper knobs that don't you can't accidentally get hot.
The smell, worry about it being left on. I've got kids, they like to cook, I'm sure they'd be capable of dealing with a gas cooktop (we've got a bunsen burner for science stuff) but it's just nice not having that.
We don't get gas pipeline connections here, we get bottles that a company comes and replaces.
Compared to gas, I find induction just as responsive, more powerful on the highest setting. A nice feature is the auto heat which gives it more power until the pan is at the target level then reduces. I also think (but not sure) that the lowest level is far cooler than the lowest gas setting was, making it easier to use for baking - melting butter, chocolate, things that require gentle warming.
So, as I say, other than the specific flames around a wok, it's better overall. I do have an induction wok, it's not as good. It's fine though, I wouldn't trade or bother with a separate gas cooktop just for that.
> I haven't found this to be the case, they both require effort to clean.
Electrics are (generally) a smooth flat surface. Of course you're not getting out of it entirely, but it's still a question of night and day compared to the mess of a gas stove.
China has a bunch of induction hobs that are wok shaped designed for high heat precise heat control wok cooking. I think they want to replace propane eventually as the primary stir fry cooking energy, which matches their moves to replace ICEs with EVs.
Gas cooking doesn't really have good temperature control though. Using a temperature probe, I can set my stock pot to 98°C on the induction cooktop and it'll stay exactly there for hours with no worrying about the burner set too high or low for the stock to gently simmer.
There's also no worrying about combustion gases in the house.
You described a completely different requirement from the post you replied to. A kitchen could accommodate both by having more than one hob type, or a gas hob and a plug-in dedicated slow cooker gadget.
Everyone should have a vent to the outside regardless of stove type. My folks got induction which replaced a top that had a built-in fan vent. Every time they cook its really terrible.
Thanks, this was going to be my main question here.
I haven't been in a commercial kitchen in years, at that time everything was gas. It was obvious that chefs preferred gas over electric, but at that time induction was still too new for commercial use.
I've seen it first-hand, too. Pastry chefs in particular seem to appreciate the stability and evenness of low heat that high-end induction brings to the table. You can often see Cedric Grolet use an induction burner on his channel, for example: https://www.instagram.com/cedricgrolet/
I don't see the biggest difference being about freedom, but what to maximise, individual or society as a group.
Individuals excel when there's absolutely no rule stopping them, but enough to not make others a threat, and groups excel when there's rules to prevent individuals from taking an advantage over the rest, be it not paying their fair share on maintaining society, ignoring costs that society pays as a whole.
Here the idea is that natural gas is a greenwashed technology and that society would be better off moving away from it, so through this ban you'll start the migration away from natural gas.
The individual standpoint is that natural gas is probably cheaper, so fuck the planet if that gets you a better price.
Are there other things to change if you care about the planet? Sure, but that's not the point and doing only one of them isn't going to make a dent on the upcoming climate catastrophes.
Not sure why the GP got down voted, you two are saying effectively the same thing.
Liberalism used to be about the individual and individual rights/freedoms. The term has been redefined (at least in the US) to focus on social and collective issues. When you focus on collective issues you inevitably ban things deemed worse for the collective and enforce those bans on anyone who doesn't conform.
> Are there other things to change if you care about the planet? Sure, but that's not the point and doing only one of them isn't going to make a dent on the upcoming climate catastrophes.
It's really interesting to me that this argument comes up often in environmental issues but is treated like the plague in other areas.
There was a thread a few days ago about the potential defunding of federal weather reporting services. I raised this same basic point, that we must do something about our deficit and even small cuts will help relative to doing nothing.
That landed like a lead balloon, the pain caused by any spending cuts just aren't acceptable to most people, unlike the pains caused by any regulations intended to help the environment.
Being able to use natural gas isn't a valuable public good.
I used to live in an area with regular tornadoes, having public weather data is life saving. People shouldn't have to die from tornadoes because they're poor.
What’re you doing to move the pan all the time? If you’re working with a wok and doing a lot of fast paced work you’d find in a restaurant, I’d understand because induction wok surfaces are hard to come by in the US.
But I don’t get it otherwise. I’m rarely moving the pan so much that induction wouldn’t be usable.
Totally sensible policy that the average American thinks is crazy because their overton window is so skewed.
In Australia they're looking to identify larger areas to remove from the gas grid at the same time. Otherwise the few remaining on gas bear the entire cost of upkeep of the grid.
The overton window is skewed? Do you think people 20 years ago would be more likely to agree or disagree with this policy, compared to people today? What about 40 years ago? What about 60 years ago? 80 years? If anything, the window has moved so far in the direction of your ideology that this is the first point in history where such a policy would have any chance of being implemented.
It's not just "direction of ideology," it's direction of science. We know now that stoves are bad for the environment and extremely bad for public health. 60 years ago the environmental impact was seen as minor compared to coal or wood stoves, and the public health impact totally unknown. This is no longer the case.
During the post-war period in the states, natural gas displaced coal and oil for domestic consumption in part because it burnt cleaner. So yes, people in the past did agree with displacing inconvenient fossil fuels for modern alternatives.
What are you even talking about? Not everything has to be interpreted in the context of some cataclysmic battle of ideologies. And this sort of policy is not uncommon in other parts of the Western world.
I’m guessing you’ve never been to SF? The quality of housing in SF is really poor, with most affordable homes being decades behind in renovations and upkeep. This requirement adds unnecessary costs in an already overheated market.
The very big issue in San Francisco is the severe lack of affordable housing. When renovations become significantly more expensive, those costs inevitably get passed on to renters: making the crisis even worse.
If regulations like these are necessary, they should be applied in areas without a housing affordability crisis. But somehow, it’s always the high-cost cities that get hit with even more burdens.
Yes, it is an issue that SF doesn't have affordable housing. Any price increase by requiring induction stovetops is a rounding error compared to inflation, or is an excuse for greedy landlords to increase rents heavily.
Also, any desirable part of the country with jobs is facing a housing affordability crisis. High rents are caused by greedy landlords and the protections given to them by the government, not because of regulation requiring them to spend a little bit more on an electric range.
San Francisco home prices have increased approximately 2.5 to 2.6 times over the past 25 years after adjusting for inflation [1]. Nominal prices in San Francisco grew by over four‑fold in 25 years.
I bet the reason for this rule that house price in SF are finally in step with inflation.
Anyway Im not against doing this but let’s be honest here: this is going to make houses just less affordable. The are some benefits of this rule but affordability is not the one.
I'm in another state with a liberal, climate-oriented govt, and I just got a fresh gas range and new gas car. Felt like my last chance to do so given how long I hold onto such things. Carpe diem.
Given that (the better) EVs are cheaper to operate, cheaper to maintain, accelerate faster than ICEVs, and don't create as much net pollution, these should be the preferred option rather than using the sky as a sewer. The problem right now is most of America is fixated upon ancient and harmful technologies and isn't do enough to incentivize buying EVs. And it's actually limiting consumer choice by slapping giant tariffs on international EV options that are surpassing the capabilities of domestic ones. EVs should be (re)incentivized such that they are significantly cheaper to buy than ICEVs.
But I like driving ICEVs! Always have, and they're still more fun to drive and deal with. Figured I'd get one last hurrah. Mileage is good and this car will probably last me the next 10-15y. Zoom zoom til 2040, buddy :)
driving is partially an activity for fun, yes. my car isn't just a point A to point B tool. when I go A to B, I like to be delighted. And my new car does do that! Zoom zoom :)
This is on top of other reasonable, practical considerations. My choice of car was the best imo in its price range and class overall. Great interior, stylish and sporty, Japanese car. longterm reliability, I can keep my mechanic and do routine stuff myself, I live super near a gas station.
No EV blew me away so why suffer when I can have my car delight me and be a solid price stretched over a bunch of years at 0%? I don't think it's villainous to buy gas in 2025 and it's p out of touch to act like it is (in America)
What about for low mileage vehicles? As I get older I drive much less and have way less income so I do all my own vehicle work. Is an EV just sitting in the garage going to be ok? Can I work on it without needing new tools? I have 3 generations of car tools. One of my cars is my moms old Jeep Cherokee that was dead in her garage for years. My and my neighbor talk about EVs but this (maybe our last) car cycle we both still went ICE.
When I was looking for an apartment in SF, it seemed like half the places we viewed smelled a bit like gas in the kitchen. And then the apartment we ended up renting turned out to have leaking gas pipes basically throughout the entire plumbing run. (Fortunately, the landlord was able to coordinate a brand new gas line installation in a matter of days.)
I think a lot of people live with gas leaks without even knowing, especially in older buildings. This is a good change from a public health and safety perspective.
And that's why dozens of homes go boom every year. My dumbass aunt nearly blew up her 100+ year old house because of 60+ year old under-maintained gas lines that caused a minor fire.
How do San Francisco homes get heat? As I understand it, it gets cool enough in SF to require heating a lot of the time. If gas is banned, a lot of people switch from gas to electric heat? Straining an already strained grid?
While SF has microclimates, the weather goes from barely cold to barely warm. It doesn't really need heating or A/C very much. The thing though is that PG&E's (traditionally) lower costs for natural gas than electricity incentivize(d) the consumption and use of gas water heaters, clothes dryers, and stoves. If the city-county of SF or state wanted to address this as a policy level, they could slap a tax on natural gas. The thing though is they should help people afford the change to electric and on-going higher costs of electricity because people on fixed incomes cannot afford any changes.
> As I understand it, it gets cool enough in SF to require heating a lot of the time.
Definitely not "a lot of the time". The coldest it gets is maybe 40°F on a particularly chilly winter night - with a well-insulated house you hardly even need central heat.
They could easily get more public support if they pushed this as a seismic retrofit initiative rather than continue to gaslight the public and doubling down on their environmental foolishness. A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity. And now bureaucrats (not plumbers) made them illegal.
SF is probably the only place in the country where this makes sense, solely because of the earthquake problem. (Do you know how to shut off your gas meter in an emergency? Probably not.)
Yet same people who insist hopscotching amongst piles of human feces is part and parcel to living in the city, not the public health hazard it is, want you to believe your gas stove is killing you.
"A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity." I won't address the legality issue, but: First, I'm not sure about the no electricity; if the heater has a pilot light, then I suppose no, but otherwise it requires electricity at least for the igniter.
Second, you're missing another reason for getting a heat pump water heater. We just last week replaced our 13 year old (and therefore on its end of life) gas heater with a heat pump water heater. It requires no gas :). One reason for doing that is that using electricity to run a small heat pump is far cheaper where we live than gas. (We have solar panels, which makes it still cheaper--in fact, free.)
The only things remaining in our house that use gas are the stove and a gas log fireplace. We've used the latter twice during the 13 years we've lived in the house. If we replace the stove (which we'll need to do some day, it's almost 25 years old) with an electric one, then I'd be easily persuaded to turn off the gas fireplace, and end the delivery charge on gas.
As an electric appliance owner, I'll take that chance.
I had a hybrid electric heat pump water heater, and I didn’t like that it made my house cold in the winter. In winter I’d switch to purely resistive mode. Later on, I moved into a house with a gas water heater and at least for me the gas operating cost is lower.
Is the water heater just in time? I’m guessing not because the heat pump would need some time to startup? Also is it 120V? I have a gas JIT hot water heater that will need to be replaced in a few years and I’m wondering where the tech is at right now.
Generally the electricity for the safety and other minor electrical parts is generated by a thermocouple, and a battery or capacitor provides automatic reignition, with a piezo style BBQ igniter as backup
With electricity hitting rates around $0.70/kwh with PG&E - gas isn’t usually a more expensive way to heat water.
PG&E in CA is criminally expensive. If you’re lucky to be in one of the cities in the bay that isn’t on it, you get incredibly cheap energy in comparison.
There are plenty of water heaters that use a pilot light. I’ve been in many homes where they all use pilot light based gas water heaters.
I’m not sure where you live, but in my case, I wasn’t even able to get home insurance without an automatic gas shutoff valve. Our policy also required an automatic shutoff for water. So in that sense, earthquake safety is already being addressed through insurance requirements.
Ultimately, mandates like this just make housing even more expensive. Which, frankly, seems to be the real goal. God forbid home prices actually decline or even stop rising.
That's not really sufficient for seismically active regions like the SF bay area. The mains are more likely to develop leaks from the frequent tremors and no amount of at-home shutoff valves will change that.
If you allow new construction dependent on existing natural gas distribution lines, they increase the pressure to accommodate the increased demand. This makes explosions from pipes leaking/catastrophically failing more likely.
I thought it was obvious the long-term goal was to reduce if not completely eliminate the need for natural gas distribution _especially_ in these regions.
Only if they have fixed wiring, or specially wired sockets with the according plugs going into them. I should know, because I had my house partially remodeled, including ripping gas pipes out of living-, kitchen-, and bathing rooms. To be replaced by that.
That may be different for professional gastronomic equipment, but I have no experience with that. I think a pizza-oven or larger cooking range could have some sort of thick CEE-plug/coupling like you sometimes see on construction sites.
In Germany that fixed wiring for stoves was/is at 380/400Volts.
Since this was about a Wok initially, I assumed mobility and no fixed installation.
Why this matters in daily life(If you don't want to have gas anymore), everything takes longer to heat(with standard mains electricity), even boiling water for brewing coffee or tea in the US.
Leading to such strange contraptions like induction cooking tops with integrated Liion-battery, to at least be able to compensate for a while for the lack of oomph.
This is an excellent way to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco: sarcasm fully intended.
Stories like this just reinforce the obvious: the housing crisis is a problem of our own making. Wealthy residents and NIMBYs consistently show they have no interest in helping the poor, the homeless, or working-class people who simply want a place to live. The ones hit hardest are usually younger generations.
This should not be a political issue. Whether on the left or the right, rich people will always find a reason (legal, aesthetic, environmental, religious, etc.) to avoid fixing the housing problem. The excuses vary, but the outcome is the same.
> This is an excellent way to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco: sarcasm fully intended.
At least for new dwellings, building without gas piping is _cheaper_ than building with it. It's very cheap to run additional 240V/60A lines from the load center to the kitchen and laundry/utility room.
Depending on the renovation, it can be even cheaper to go all-electric, for example, if the kitchen/laundry/heating is being moved.
However, renovations don't have much effect either way on the housing affordability crisis in San Francisco, because renovations don't generally increase housing capacity. Most renovations in SF are done for the purpose of converting existing lower end homes into higher end homes.
> The ones hit hardest are usually younger generations
Reminds me of prop 13. If you challenge grandma having a $3M house paying peanuts for property taxes you are a monster.
If you defend young people that are ready to start a family, "they can kick rocks and move to Bumfuck, Middle-Of-Nowhere, no one is entitled to live in the Bay Area".
CA Prop 13 was an unfortunate, short-term bandaid in 1978 that didn't address excessive property taxes for elderly, disabled, and poor people who came after them. It truly was another boomer selfishness moment. The solution is to expand Prop 13 to all who meet low income requirements to make property taxes progressive rather than unreasonable "flat" taxes that punish the poor far more than the rich and moderately rich.
PS: I grew up in south San Jose, graduated from Leland, but can't afford a home anywhere near where I grew up because rich people from all over the world gentrified the Bay Area and boomers went full NIMBY on new developments.
boomers were just coming of age politically when prop 13 passed in 1978. the main culprits were actually the silent generation and older greatest gen homeowners—think postwar suburbanites who had bought in cheap and were now watching their property taxes spike in a period of wild inflation + ballooning home values. boomers were still mostly renters or too young to own, especially in california’s pricey metros.
I won't go that far, but it's a distraction from larger problems, and it makes housing more expensive. These are the same cities charging $0.10 for paper bags at grocery stores because marginal environmental benefit?
This doesn’t have much to do with the cost of building housing. If it did, the south east where natural gas is non existent through out much of it wouldn’t have such cheap housing. Yes, they have propane (king of the hill style), but this wouldn’t get rid of propane cooking outside either.
In Sunset (San Francisco), most houses still have 100–150 amp electrical panels. To support full electrification these panels typically need to be upgraded to 200 or maybe 300 amps.
That upgrade alone costs around $10,000, including labor, permitting (which is surprisingly expensive), and inspections. If rewiring the house is also required (which is often the case) that can push the total to $30,000.
But it doesn’t stop there. PG&E’s infrastructure in many areas like Sunset is already maxed out. If your upgrade triggers a red flag, PG&E may require additional capacity upgrades. However, they won’t pay for them (they’ll just refuse the work until you do). These utility-related infrastructure upgrades can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000, and yes, those costs fall on the homeowner.
So in total, you could be looking at $60,000 or more for this.
> Wealthy residents and NIMBYs consistently show they have no interest in helping the poor, the homeless, or working-class people who simply want a place to live.
What if there was a way to help the poor and boost a crypto coin at the same time? Win/win. See this idea for "WordPay" .. giving people funds with a few words.
