Berkeley, CA becoming first city in U.S. to ban natural gas in new buildings

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danrjones said:
Sadly where I am the fixed fees are higher for SCE electricity than PG&E gas. Unless you go off grid, SCE charges a minimum fee of $10 every month. So if I owe $30, its just $30. In the spring if I net produce, they do net metering, but then charge me $10 for that month anyway.
Many months my gas is less than the minimum SCE fee.
You misunderstand. I am saying that getting rid of NG entirely leaves you with one fixed fee (electric) instead of two fixed fees (electric and NG.)
 
SageBrush said:
danrjones said:
Sadly where I am the fixed fees are higher for SCE electricity than PG&E gas. Unless you go off grid, SCE charges a minimum fee of $10 every month. So if I owe $30, its just $30. In the spring if I net produce, they do net metering, but then charge me $10 for that month anyway.
Many months my gas is less than the minimum SCE fee.
You misunderstand. I am saying that getting rid of NG entirely leaves you with one fixed fee (electric) instead of two fixed fees (electric and NG.)

According to my PG&E bill for gas, there is no fixed fee. They charge on a tier basis per therm and a PPP surcharge per therm. I can't say what would happen if I actually used zero therms though. But on my bill there is no fixed fee.
 
Here is CO there is a fixed access fee regardless of usage. I don't know if one would have to physically dig up and remove the lines and meter to get rid of that for existing buildings but in new construction it would be easy to avoid.
 
goldbrick said:
Here is CO there is a fixed access fee regardless of usage. I don't know if one would have to physically dig up and remove the lines and meter to get rid of that for existing buildings but in new construction it would be easy to avoid.
If you turn off access the fee goes away
 
danrjones said:
SageBrush said:
danrjones said:
Sadly where I am the fixed fees are higher for SCE electricity than PG&E gas. Unless you go off grid, SCE charges a minimum fee of $10 every month. So if I owe $30, its just $30. In the spring if I net produce, they do net metering, but then charge me $10 for that month anyway.
Many months my gas is less than the minimum SCE fee.
You misunderstand. I am saying that getting rid of NG entirely leaves you with one fixed fee (electric) instead of two fixed fees (electric and NG.)

According to my PG&E bill for gas, there is no fixed fee. They charge on a tier basis per therm and a PPP surcharge per therm. I can't say what would happen if I actually used zero therms though. But on my bill there is no fixed fee.
.
I have never seen a utility bill without an access fee. I suppose it is possible but it goes against the standard practice of somewhat separating out infrastructure cost from energy use.
 
Maybe someone else with PG&E in SoCal can verify. I'm not defending them, after all they have blown up city blocks, burned down entire towns... but I see no fixed fee. Maybe they have a minimum fee but since I can't really hit zero usage I'll never know.
 
danrjones said:
Sadly where I am the fixed fees are higher for SCE electricity than PG&E gas. Unless you go off grid, SCE charges a minimum fee of $10 every month.
It's the same minimum charge with PG&E electricity. IIRC, the CPUC allowed the IOUs to apply this fee this way. You can apply your California Climate Credit to this (see below) and the paltry overgeneration credits we get, for us at ~$0.035/Kwh.

The overgeneration economics on this don't work out well for the consumer, but we haven't paid anything to PG&E for electricity for this in many months.

danrjones said:
According to my PG&E bill for gas, there is no fixed fee. They charge on a tier basis per therm and a PPP surcharge per therm. I can't say what would happen if I actually used zero therms though. But on my bill there is no fixed fee.

You won't see anything on your bill unless you use very little to no NG.

We are PG&E and although it has been several months since we turned off NG at the meter ourselves, we keep street access on our account turned on (see below). This costs ~$3/month. PG&E calls it a "minimum transportation charge" and it's currently $0.09863/day.

SageBrush said:
If you turn off access the fee goes away

Yes, but here is where it gets weird. Twice a year, PG&E refunds some state cap/trade money to residents via their utilities via the "California Climate Credit".

The way it is currently implemented by PG&E, you get a refund assigned to your electricity account and separately your gas account. A few months ago for us, they were -$27.70 and -$25.45, respectively. Therefore, it was cheaper for us to officially not turn off NG access but just turn the valve off at the meter. This way we come out a few bucks ahead every 6 months.

Perverse incentive assigned to NG, no? Not sure the CPUC role in this.
 
I suspect the % of customers who've even looked at their bill, made the same calculation and taken the same step as iPlug to be approximately zero, so this doesn't even rise to the level of noise as to how well the cap and trade setup is working. On a list of things that need fixing, this would be about at the bottom.
 
It was funny more than anything, but it turns out the joke is on me.

This discussion triggered me to go back and do some more reading. When I called PG&E customer service a few months ago, they told me the gas portion of the climate credit was also twice a year as with electric service. Turns out, it is not:

The electric credit is applied twice a year in April and October, while the natural gas credit only applies once a year in April.

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/climatecredit/

So this means I instead lose about ~$10/year at the current climate credit rate by leaving gas service on my account. It's not much, but next week I will be calling PG&E to officially cancel my gas service.
 
iPlug said:
It was funny more than anything, but it turns out the joke is on me.

This discussion triggered me to go back and do some more reading. When I called PG&E customer service a few months ago, they told me the gas portion of the climate credit was also twice a year as with electric service. Turns out, it is not:

The electric credit is applied twice a year in April and October, while the natural gas credit only applies once a year in April.

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/climatecredit/

So this means I instead lose about ~$10/year at the current climate credit rate by leaving gas service on my account. It's not much, but next week I will be calling PG&E to officially cancel my gas service.


If it works for you go for it, but I'd consider $10/year ridiculously cheap insurance for prolonged power outages. How much storage do you have? My apologies if you've gone completely off all gas heating and appliances - you may have mentioned it way up in the thread, but the prolonged digression over cooktop and oven efficiency makes me disinclined to re-read it all :lol:
 
GRA said:
If it works for you go for it, but I'd consider $10/year ridiculously cheap insurance for prolonged power outages. How much storage do you have? My apologies if you've gone completely off all gas heating and appliances - you may have mentioned it way up in the thread, but the prolonged digression over cooktop and oven efficiency makes me disinclined to re-read it all :lol:
Storage? We never had that for NG. Are some people doing that? Most home gas storage is with large propane tanks for those who don't have NG piped in, no?

We do have a couple 20 lb. propane tanks for the ~5x/year BBQs and on hand for an emergency to boil pool water for drinking if needed. Suppose it could be nice to plumb NG to BBQ, but the most likely scenario for having a prolonged power outage here would be a major earthquake that would also most likely take out natural gas supply.

Our water heater and HVAC are each heat pumps, and cooktop is induction so can't switch back to NG for those. Utility room is plumbed for NG and 240V, but we use a non-heat pump electric clothes dryer. We still have a NG fireplace that we never used, which could be useful to warm the local area if power was out during winter, except I think the ignition is electric. IIRC, all NG main appliances these days don't work without electricity.

The economics of home batteries currently leaves much to be excited about. However, in a few years, hopefully we will have such "storage" that would allow us to decouple from the grid during power outages and buffer and recharge from our solar PV.
 
iPlug said:
GRA said:
If it works for you go for it, but I'd consider $10/year ridiculously cheap insurance for prolonged power outages. How much storage do you have? My apologies if you've gone completely off all gas heating and appliances - you may have mentioned it way up in the thread, but the prolonged digression over cooktop and oven efficiency makes me disinclined to re-read it all :lol:
Storage? We never had that for NG. Are some people doing that? Most home gas storage is with large propane tanks for those who don't have NG piped in, no?


I meant battery storage, if you were completely off NG.


iPlug said:
We do have a couple 20 lb. propane tanks for the ~5x/year BBQs and on hand for an emergency to boil pool water for drinking if needed. Suppose it could be nice to plumb NG to BBQ, but the most likely scenario for having a prolonged power outage here would be a major earthquake that would also most likely take out natural gas supply.


Same here as far as prolonged outages, although we do seem to get a couple lasting at least a few hours every winter, usually because someone took out a power pole with their car (had one of those last night a couple of blocks from me). And there was an un-related semi-major fire nearby a couple of hours before that which forced PG&E to shut off power for that block while it was being fought, and that seemed to cause cascading intermittent failures for a few hours afterwards, including on my block. But as you say, if you've got a gas BBQ you can still heat water and cook even if you've otherwise have all-electric appliances; I rely on my backpacking stove for that.


iPlug said:
Our water heater and HVAC are each heat pumps, and cooktop is induction so can't switch back to NG for those. Utility room is plumbed for NG and 240V, but we use a non-heat pump electric clothes dryer. We still have a NG fireplace that we never used, which could be useful to warm the local area if power was out during winter, except I think the ignition is electric. IIRC, all NG main appliances these days don't work without electricity.


My understanding is that you can still manually light the burners but not the oven on gas ranges with electronic ignition - I was able to do so this past winter for my neighbor in the main house, when she couldn't light it electrically when our power went out for most of a day. If this source is current that still applies:
GAS RANGE OR COOKTOP - LIGHTING ELECTRIC IGNITION DURING A POWER FAILURE

In the case of a power outage, you can light the surface burners with a match on your electric ignition gas or dual fuel range or gas cooktop. Hold a lighted match to the burner, then turn the knob to the low position. Use extreme caution when lighting the burners this way.

The oven of your gas range is lit by electric ignition, eliminating the need for standing pilots. 1990 and newer gas ovens cannot be lit without power supplied to it.
https://products.geappliances.com/appliance/gea-support-search-content?contentId=19226

My own range is older and has pilot lights (I shut them off from about April to November), so it isn't an issue for me.


iPlug said:
The economics of home batteries currently leaves much to be excited about. However, in a few years, hopefully we will have such "storage" that would allow us to decouple from the grid during power outages and buffer and recharge from our solar PV.


I think they're getting close, but in areas like both of ours where prolonged power outages aren't routine but 'the big one' will likely take electricity and gas out for days if not weeks, storage is hard to justify unless you've got enough to disconnect completely, and that's fairly big bucks, although you can obviously reduce your loads to essentials during that period. The systems I used to design normally had 3-10 days of autonomy, stretchable to infinity depending on just how much demand reduction and load-shifting the owners were willing/able to do. PV has come down a lot since I was selling off-grid systems 25 years ago, but batteries haven't (much) on a $/kWh basis, although they have gotten better technically (Li-ion instead of L-A, NiCd or NiFe).
 
Air sourced heat pumps are a no brainer for new residential construction in the very moderate climates of coastal CA cities.

All new residential construction will already be net zero electricity with mandatory solar PV. So besides being an environmentally friendly choice, it will also save the home owner in install + lifetime operating costs compared to NG.
 
iPlug said:
Air sourced heat pumps are a no brainer for new residential construction in the very moderate climates of coastal CA cities.

All new residential construction will already be net zero electricity with mandatory solar PV. So besides being an environmentally friendly choice, it will also save the home owner in install + lifetime operating costs compared to NG.


Agreed.
 
Here is some “fuel” price modeling for a new California house built starting in January 2020, which will have mandatory net zero electricity use from solar PV:

PG&E Prices:
Natural Gas (NG): ~$1.70/therm (assuming ~50% mix of both tiers)
Electricity: $0.20/kWh (baseline price on standard E-1 rate plan)

Modern NG furnace: 95% efficient
Modern ducted air sourced heat pump (ours, for example): 3.8 COP

29.3kWh in 1 therm of NG
So PG&E NG costs $0.055/kWh:
(($1.70/therm) / (29.3kWh/therm) ) x 0.95 efficiency = $0.055/kWh

A modern heat pump as above would cost $0.053/kWh effectively to generate the same amount of heat:
($0.20/kWh) / 3.8 COP = $0.053/kWh

Despite the high cost of electricity with PG&E and other non-municipal California utilities, the “fuel” costs are not more for air-sourced heat pump heating compared to NG.

But since these new homes will have enough PV solar to net zero out electricity use, we would need to find the size of the PV system required to do so, estimate a 25+ year PV life span, reasonable opportunity cost, then be able to calculate generation price/kWh of that system. Lots of variables there. Regardless, the end result would be that a modern heat pump would cost <<$0.053/kWh effectively to generate the equivalent amount of heat as NG with the net zero PV system. And that doesn't even account for the significant cost savings described earlier in this thread of not plumbing a home for NG.
 
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