The day is coming when every fossil fuel-powered appliance n your home is going to be outlawed.
Your stove. Your furnace. Your hot water heater. Your clothes dryer.
Emissions from natural gas, oil and propane systems are bad for the environment, spewing greenhouse gases and leading to catastrophic climate change. Or so we’re told.
And that’s not all. It’s gotten so crazy that they’ll tell you that your gas stove is a cause of health-damaging indoor pollution. This after we’ve all been using them for decades without any appreciable ill effects on our health.
So what do New York lawmakers want us to do instead? They are demanding that we install electricity-based systems, like electric heat pumps, to heat our homes, cook our food and dry our clothes.
Get ready for a huge bite to be taken out of your budget when it comes time to retrofit your house for one of these new systems.
A review by the Empire Center for Public Policy said that the cost to install a heat pump and to weatherize a home could come to between $14,600 and $46,200, as reported by the New York Post.
Who has that kind of money? Not me. I’d have to take out a bank loan. Or rob a bank.
But here’s the real gotcha: the study by the Empire Center for Public Policy says that electrification will only have a negligible impact on greenhouse emissions. So all that money will be spent to little effect.
On top of that, the study says, homeowners may instead chose to buy electric furnaces. Those units are cheaper but use a lot more electricity.
And there’s the true rub. Going all-electric is going to put an enormous strain on an electrical grid that already struggles to meet peak demand during the summer cooling months, when everybody is running their air-conditioners around the clock.
Think of how much the grid will be strained if all of us – in every private home, office complex, apartment building, school and shopping mall – were using only electric appliances. The demand would be colossal and never ending all year long.
Wind and solar are in no way, shape or form able to satisfy that huge demand. And nuclear is ridiculously a no-go in green New York State.
So where is most of that energy going to come from? Electricity plants powered by fossil fuels.
And we’ll likely need a lot more generating capacity until wind and solar can truly be relied on. So all you’ve done with this dash to electrification is moved the source of emissions from the home to the power plant. But you’re still creating emissions.
And consumers will be over a barrel because alternative power sources like natural gas and propane will have been eliminated for us.
My advice? If your gas furnace needs to be updated a few years down the road, do it now and you’ll hopefully get another 30 years out of it. Swap out your stove and your hot water heater now as well.
Better to pay the plumber a couple hundred bucks to do the work than to have to take out a second mortgage to install “green” equipment that isn’t even really green.
$14K to upgrade to a ‘green’ NY heating system? I’d rather freeze (opinion)
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1
10.12.2023
The day is coming when every fossil fuel-powered appliance n your home is going to be outlawed.
Your stove. Your furnace. Your hot water heater. Your clothes dryer.
Emissions from natural gas, oil and propane systems are bad for the environment, spewing greenhouse gases and leading to catastrophic climate change. Or so we’re told.
And that’s not all. It’s gotten so crazy that they’ll tell you that your gas stove is a cause of health-damaging indoor pollution. This after we’ve all been using them for decades without any appreciable ill effects on our health.
So what do New York lawmakers want us to do instead? They are demanding that we install electricity-based systems, like electric heat pumps, to heat our homes, cook our food and dry our........
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