Beware the Ides of March!

"I am curious what you all think of this proposal. I am torn."

I'm not. This is a dumb idea. And the BAAQMD (that does not have to answer to/face the voters) needs to stop coming up with new things to ban and/or phase out for people trying to live a normal life/businesses trying to operate.

The state is already struggling to provide sufficient electrical power. We have rolling blackouts in the summer months. The people "in charge" still have not figured out that wind/solar are unreliable energy sources and can't supply the needs of residents. I guess we can now look forward to rolling blackouts in the winter as well when people turn on their electric furnaces? These will also be some of the same people charging their electric cars that California is mandating.

Instead of admitting failure and poor planning by getting rid of a reliable/abundant/low cost energy source, our "leaders" will predictably double down. People trying to prevent themselves from freezing to death in January will be lectured to "conserve", "flex their power", or avoid "peak hour" usage. If they object, they'll be labeled and shamed as "climate deniers".

History lesson: Germany lost in WW2 because they ran out of oil. Their tanks were mired in the snow and could not move. Fast forward to today - we were energy efficient with the Keystone pipeline coming on. WE were also able to send energy to Europe. Biden shut down the pipeline which greenlighted Putin. Putin now controls the oil and gas for Europe. And we are going around begging from foreign countries.

People keep hyping alternate solutions to energy with no real working system. The current technology depends on having fossil fuels. It is good to provide new alternate solutions but we alrady know that we do not have enough elecricity to keep the lights on in this city and state. Europe does not have enough self provided energy to keep the lights on and people warm. Germany is using coal.

A percentage of people keep hyping absolutes in goals with no real in-depth knowledge of how energy is produced. The goals are hypothetical until proven they can work.

Thank you Michael B and Resident 1.

I wish we still had like button.

Bad idea unless there are substantial rebates. Gas appliances create less than 10% of emissions. Just another mechanism to let the worst polluters continue to maximize profits and force residents to pay more for utilities.

A little reminder that very little of the problems with natural gas come from residential use, only 8% as recently reported, with the remaining 92% coming from industrial polluters.

Give that, why force all of this on home owners when all this virtue signalling won't make a dent. Why force us to bear the costs when the market is down, inflation is up, layoffs are up, utility rates are up and we can ill afford to pay for all of this.

Tackle the 92% first and then get back to us.

MichaelB expressed himself well. Getting rid of clean-burning gas is a dumb idea. It certainly isn't "clear" that gas needs to go, to solve a health problem that is de minimis.

For our particular home, there is an in-floor heating unit that can't simply be replaced by electric, and there is no excess capacity available for an electric water heater. Our electric service is 1949 vintage and thus has low capacity, so an all-electric makeover would be very expensive, particularly for a modest house that will be bulldozed when our time comes to leave. This is a real, personal, and expensive issue.

Couple other things:

1. It's striking that our country ships huge amounts of gas to Europe and Asia for their homes, yet we think it harmful in ours.

2. The current BAAQMD proposal doesn't include stoves and dryers. Just wait a while.

Not all emissions are created equal. For example, NOx from cars is directed right at other drivers/pedestrians etc so they are likely to breath it. NOx from home furnaces and water heaters is directed up and away through chimneys/vents so even next-door neighbors will be exposed to little of it.

I wonder if it will end up being cheaper to install a propane tank rather than rebuilding parts of an old house and installing new electrical service. Perhaps "equity" will consider only income and not assets (e.g. house value).

All for moving away from gas but....

Timing of that vote is atrocious when thousands of residents and schools are without power in the Mountain View/Los Altos area, won't come back for days.

Does the BAAQMD have a chart for health benefits for living without power for days?

Glad that BAAQMD is concerned about the grid. However, no one has a serious plan to improve that reliability and certainly not at the required scale.

re: true costs of electric heater, keep in mind that in most multi stories/multi family homes, heat pumps have to go on the roof (a few thousand dollars just to rent a crane and get necessary permits).

This vote is wonderful news for the hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area with asthma, and the scores that die every year *directly* from emissions from the water and space heaters that will be regulated by this rule. I really don't understand the commenters who seek to blame everyone else but themselves (well, ourselves) for this health crisis. Are you really so selfish that you want scores to die every year just to suit your 'need' for a gas heater?

I disagree with Sherry that we should move more slowly. These regulations don't even start until 2027 to 2031, so it will be 2050 before we have got rid of this deadly pollution. Babies born today will be off to college before the air here is clean to breathe.

I'm looking for a new water heater right now, I got two quotes for heat pumps. Including electrical and permits and everything, one is about $200 more than a gas heater and the other is about $200 less, so it's really no hardship to go electric. I reckon I'll save about $150 a year on my utility bills, and probably a lot more in the future, as gas prices are predicted to rise far faster than electricity.

Always more in the SF Chronicle concerning their battles with homebuilding. How about Berkley with People's Park? All of the big names in politics live in these cities which cannot get their act together. Yet they want to sue suburban cities to at least get some credit for their CA legislative house burnings. We always seen to be a target for progressive rabbit holes.
The SF Chronicle current editor-in-chief is Emilio Garcia-Ruiz. Under his leadership the full page weather report has no mention of Honolulu or Anchorage, and the map is east coast with Cuba and eastern Mexico highlighted. At least the SJM gets this right.

The color reporter Jason Phillips went to a tiki bar in SF and was insulted by societal appropriation. He comes from New Orleans. No one told him that Hawaii is a state and the Matson Ships are in port continually, as well as some pleasure ships.

So how are all of the big cities in this state going to convert all of the ancient houses to all-electric. A lot of people on the voting boards can see a lot of money to be made in this scheme. And we are just another rabbit hole to go down.

After reading the comment from Peter Davis, I looked at the table of Annual Health Benefits that Sherry cited. This table was taken from Slide 14 of the BAAQMD presentation. It assumes that all commercial and residential space and water heating has been converted to electric from natural gas, without discussion of whether residential use is a significant percentage compared with commercial, or whether the grid can take the extra load. But as Peter Davis noted, the table shows several several scores of premature deaths potentially avoided each year.

The Annual Health Benefits table has no citation other than BAAQMD itself, and no description of the model or whether the approach was peer reviewed or checked for reasonableness by an outside consultant. Since this modeling was a key basis for a multi-billion dollar decision, one would have thought these results would have been thoroughly reviewed and the approach carefully described.

Overall a benefit of several scores sounds quite high. We can't tell what "premature mortality" even means quantitatively--do these modeled people gain one year of life they wouldn't otherwise have had, or 50 years?

Sherry, it would be great if you could raise these questions with your BAAQMD contacts. Sounds like the Board just accepted it.

We should think about whether different expenditures of billions of dollars (our dollars!) by society would save more lives or more directly promote health. For example, providing free low-sodium salt substitute. Or hiring more traffic officers to enforce drunk driving, distracted driving, and seat belt laws. Or inspection of residences to ensure proper ventilation. Or widespread blood pressure and diabetes monitoring. Or flu shots and vaccination for all. Or hiring tutors for poor kids.

Society (again, you and I) doesn't have unlimited resources. If saving lives is a useful goal, how do we benefit the most people? An indirect attack on NOx and PM2.5 probably isn't what one would come up with.

"The Annual Health Benefits table has no citation other than BAAQMD itself, and no description of the model or whether the approach was peer reviewed or checked for reasonableness by an outside consultant. Since this modeling was a key basis for a multi-billion dollar decision, one would have thought these results would have been thoroughly reviewed and the approach carefully described."


Not surprising that the BAAQMD would use themselves as the "citation".

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Abraham Maslow.

How about all of the overhead heaters that are used in restaurants with tables on the sidewalk. Outdoor eating, overhead heating. A whole business venture that requires the heaters for the evening dining. And the outside bars and wineries that use the large heaters for their entertaining efforts.

Many businesses are struggling to keep open and need to step up to the current trend for outside dining. How about Cal Avenue that is lined with outside eating ventures.

On the news last night the city of Los Altos had no electricity and they were reporting from the downtown street that was dark, all of the buildings closed.

From where I am sitting if a child has problems then the parents rewire the house to address the issues. Most children are outside until called in.

But today in the papers the deed has been done. As usual they all are celebrating that they are the "leaders" trying to influence the rest of the country. The rest of the country is under water and has no electricity. But being a "progresssive" means that all ventures are challenges that require a victory dance when stuffed down everyone elses throats.

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts. I was hoping for more feedback from people who are excited about this, but at least one did weigh in (@PeterDavis), and I have a couple of comments on that, since my perspective has changed some.

A couple of you worry about the ability of the grid to support this effort. That’s a reasonable worry, though the load from EVs is much bigger. The different thing about heating is that it often happens in the early morning, which is not when we have a lot of clean energy right now, and it’s not especially flexible. Off-shore wind will help, more geothermal will help, batteries will help. The people operating the grid are not unaware of all of this. BAAQMD cited an E3 report that they relied on, which you can find here.

I’ve written about the efforts to expand our grid before, for example here. The CPUC doesn’t appear to be taking its foot off the pedal. Just recently they announced a need for another 4 GW of net qualifying capacity, and the CEC announced the need to keep Diablo Canyon online. In the meantime, CAISO approved an extended day-ahead market across a wide area of the west. These are all big moves to shore up reliability. So it can’t be said that the agencies involved are not paying attention.

Grid capacity is not one of my worries. But the distribution grid (the lines to our homes), yes. We need to make better use of what we have (panels, transformers) and expand it where needed.

Some of you wonder about the analysis for the health impacts, and ask whether BAAQMD just made something up to serve their own purposes. BAAQMD mentioned in the meeting, and they write in this report, that they used models and analysis that the EPA recommends.

A couple of you wonder if this is the best, most cost-effective way to address NOx pollution or even health issues. @BarronParkDenizen says: “Society (again, you and I) doesn't have unlimited resources. If saving lives is a useful goal, how do we benefit the most people? An indirect attack on NOx and PM2.5 probably isn't what one would come up with.”

I think this is a good question. It might be easier and cheaper to electrify all diesel trucks or construction vehicles than it is to electrify all houses. That gets to a strange thing about this whole proceeding. BAAQMD is not responsible for regulating mobile sources of nitrogen oxides. And they seem to have omitted greenhouse gas reductions from their value proposition because of the possibility that people could choose zero-NOx gas appliances. So the analysis leaned entirely on NOx, but it’s not clear to me that they would have taken this same action without the other benefits from electrifying buildings. It is electrification that needs a long lead-time, not so much updating gas appliances. That doesn’t mean this action is wrong, but it may mean that the reasoning was more contorted than it needed to be.

Some of you worry about costs. That is in my opinion a big concern. Some electrification projects are straight-forward and others are anything but. My uncle is electrifying an older Menlo Park house, switching from a gas furnace to heat pumps. He had to upgrade his electric panel, then redo the attic insulation, then replace all of his ducts, but he is still having trouble getting the house sufficiently warm despite hiring an experienced contractor. It has taken a lot of time and a lot of money, and it’s still a work in progress. Certainly some of this was deferred maintenance, but the project keeps getting more expensive and he wasn’t prepared for that. One glimmer of hope is that the BAAQMD board said that they would lean on other agencies as needed, and in particular they can lean on the CPUC to lower electric rates for middle-class and lower-income people. (This would raise rates for wealthier people and people with solar. I’ll write about it more in a future blog.) But I think Mueller is right to worry about the middle-class, since much of the money and focus is on low-income households.)

In that vein, @Mondoman asks about propane and, in another thread, about buying and stashing away gas appliances for future use. BAAQMD also mentioned the possibility of a black market for purchasing and installing gas appliances if they don’t do this right, and they want to avoid that. It is not safe, among other things.

@PeterDavis, who supports this ruling, suggests that it’s selfish of people to want to hold onto their gas heater when it might exacerbate someone’s asthma. I think that’s a stretch. We all do all kinds of things that hurt people and animals and our planet every day. It doesn’t help the conversation to righteously call people selfish imo.

That said, he also says that he disagrees with me that we should move more slowly, and I am coming around to that. This ruling is not fast by any means. It just puts a stake in the ground that helps to attract money and encourage the industry to move a little faster. There are safeguards in place to adjust the policy as needed. If you believe, as I do, that we need to get gas out of homes, then this ruling can only help. It is never going to happen fast. These appliances last too long for that. But maybe now we can make real progress in my lifetime.

Again, thanks for the great conversation. This ruling is a very big deal. Now we need to understand the reality of building electrification in a lot more detail.

This decision makes absolutely no sense at all. First it was getting rid of gas stoves because of NOx issues inside the house. But that didn't go very well with gas stove people. Now you are saying we need to get rid of NOx outside. This is new. In 2021 natural gas power plants were required to supply more than 35% of California's GRID needs. In the Summer of 2021 natural gas supplied more than 50% of our electricity on some days. What you are saying since the Peninsula has no natural gas power plants, let other cities that have those power plants let them get more NOx. Is this what you really mean? When the GRID gets down to requiring only 10% natural gas, then we can talk about getting rid of natural gas appliances. What is required is economical energy storage technology and it is not available now. But many companies are working on it.

This ruling is much, much more than just a stake in the ground. I suspect the stake will, to some extent, get moved to the future, like Diablo Canyon--even our governor saw the need to delay closure. Reality is a tough mistress.

I've been peripherally involved with modeling during my career in the environmental field. In essence, an exposure is estimated using a dispersion model. Then this concentration is multiplied by a factor that estimates the risk associated with the exposure, for an estimated duration of exposure.

The dispersion modeling is approximate. The risk factors are very loose, typically based off studies with rats and mice assumed to be representative of human risks and incremental risk of death, often adding a large safety factor. Multiply these two numbers together, and you get a very, very rough "answer."

To report that the risk assessment used approaches approved by EPA is hardly comforting.

Hi Sherry, there are many of us who are thrilled that this passed but you'll have to excuse them - many people I know spent hours and hours in community trying to get people to write letters to their local board members, and they are taking a much needed rest. Me, I just wrote my own letters as a community member, so I am plenty rested. I wonder if you could ask Vicki Veenker what kinds of letters she got in support? I know we were supposed to add a personal anecdote and here's mine: I explained how air pollution exacerbates my sister's chronic health condition, and said I am in favor of anything that helps her and people like her have decreased symptoms.

@Paly02, that's a good point, there were many people from our area who spoke at the meeting. I took very brief and very incomplete notes from speaker comments, but here are a few thoughts that people from our area shared:

Debbie Mytels (was Acterra): very excited to have a strong signal to the home electrification market

Stanford/PaloAltoForward working on climate tech: also excited to have a strong signal (e.g., helps with funding)

Diane Bailey (Menlo Spark): excited about "crucial benefits" this will bring, emphasized importance of one-stop shop programs like Peninsula Clean Energy will soon offer county-wide

CEO of SVCE: Talked about their investment in this space, about the importance of a signal to the market, and said the timing is right ("Delaying the inevitable makes it harder to do later.")

Bret Andersen (Carbon Free Palo Alto): mentioned his son has asthma and wishes only that we did this earlier, thinks it will be very effective

Tom Kabat (Menlo Park): talked about the new 120-volt Rheems being straight-forward to install

There were many others from here, but I think that gives a flavor.

FWIW, one thing I learned from this meeting is that often asthma and eczema go together. My brother has both. I understand the impact these can have on kids and adults. We all should have access to clean air. My brother doesn't live in a dense area, so this ruling isn't likely to help him much, but it can help others. The map below shows where it is projected to have the most positive impact on health outcomes -- in San Jose, Oakland/Berkeley, East San Francisco, and southeast San Mateo County.

If you are interested, they have posted the video of the meeting. Some timestamps that might be of interest:

2:49:07 -- a citizen speaking up about why they are supporting this (1 min)
2:50:10 -- a PG&E spokesperson sharing their concerns about the remaining gas appliances (1 min)
2:56:22 -- an apartment manager sharing his concerns (1 min)
3:24:50 -- a senior in an old home saying why she supports this (1 min)
4:14:05 -- BAAQMD Director Tyrone Jue (San Francisco) sharing his thoughts, especially about PG&E (4 min)
4:33:30 -- BAAQMD Director Juan Gonzalez (San Leandro) sharing his thoughts (8 min)
5:11:12 -- BAAQMD Director Ray Mueller (San Mateo County) sharing his thoughts (13 min)
5:40:28 -- BAAQMD Director John Gioia (Contra Costa County) sharing his thoughts (10 min)

If there are other specific board members you would like to hear, let me know and I am happy to share the timestamp.

"I'm not. This is a dumb idea. And the BAAQMD (that does not have to answer to/face the voters) needs to stop coming up with new things to ban and/or phase out for people trying to live a normal life/businesses trying to operate."

THIS

Thank you, Sherry for posting the video, I will probably watch the whole thing when I get the chance. Posting timestamps is a feat, I don't know if anyone will appreciate the effort that it took you to do that, but I commend you!! I know I want to focus in on Ray Mueller's concerns