Natural gas stoves are bad for you and the environment

A few days ago, one of the people I was talking with at the coffee shop asked me whether a possible ban on gas stoves is real, or just another straw-man argument designed to rile up the public in search of television ratings.

It’s a real issue. Several cities, starting with Berkeley, California in 2019, banned new natural gas connections to residential and commercial buildings. The primary purpose of these laws is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating natural gas as a fuel supply for buildings reduces methane leaks related to natural gas production and delivery and reduces the carbon dioxide emissions that directly result from gas combustion.

The Berkeley ban on new gas connections was overturned in federal court earlier this year, on the grounds that it violates a law giving the federal government jurisdiction over energy efficiency standards for appliances. This ruling won’t end the debate, as it will be appealed. Nor does it address the question of whether gas stoves should be banned, or whether they can be banned in some other way. Debate for a few more years seems inevitable.

Aside from greenhouse gases, the principal argument for banning gas stoves is reducing health issues caused by indoor emissions, including natural gas itself (again, from leaks in the system) and combustion byproducts like nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. There is no question that health issues related to interior gas emissions are real, but further research and discussion are needed to determine how significant they are and what costs would be justified to address them. Do we ban gas or subsidize ventilation?

There’s another reason for banning new gas connections: Cost.

The cost of new gas infrastructure is significant and avoided entirely if buildings are powered with electricity only. Gas is used in homes for water heating, space heating and cooking. Heating water and rooms can be done with electricity. Even after transmission losses, heat pump systems that use grid electricity can use less fuel than traditional on-site combustion heaters powered by on-site gas, so heat pumps will gradually be favored over gas.

This leaves the gas stove as the appliance that effectively determines whether a gas connection is required at all. In other words, eliminating gas stoves would enable builders to eliminate the entire cost of new natural gas connections. Furthermore, gas is a finite resource that gradually becomes more expensive to produce, while the cost of electricity is likely to stay flat or fall as low-cost solar and wind power, storage and time-of-use controls are added to the grid.

In an unregulated world, it is likely that net total lower infrastructure and fuel costs would favor electric stoves so strongly that the result would be very few gas connections within about 20 years, even without regulations.

However, utilities are regulated. A gas utility that puts a new connection in today is allowed to recover the cost of that connection from its ratepayers, even if the cost of electricity eventually becomes so favorable that the gas connection is not used. Today’s regulators have an obligation to consider the question of whether new gas infrastructure costs can justifiably be added to future utility bills, in addition to considering greenhouse gases and health.