Gas, the Next Evil Element of Nature

 The gas stove uses methane to create heat. Just a note, so do cows when passing their gas. Lots of it. But alas, this is about stoves and not cows. 

It appears that some group of environmentalists from Stanford have created a new career for themselves bemoaning methane stoves. The NY Times reports that this band of methane stove destroyers are measuring willy nilly various gasses in apartments with gas stoves.

Now the problem is that methane, CH4, burning with the air, mostly nitrogen, and some oxygen, creates some outgasses like nitrous oxide etc. Also a small amount of cyanide gas if you will. 

I found the paper referenced above at best a shabby attempt to create a problem where there very well may be none. Outgassing occurs from hundreds of factors, especially in old poorly ventilated and unclean living circumstances. The Times shows an apartment which contains many sources of outgassing besides a gas stove.

The Stanford team appears in my opinion  as a 21st century set of Ghost Busters. Their approach in my opinion is not at all scientific since there are some many exogenous factors that attributing a gas to any one source is near impossible.

This is what "science" has become. In medicine we would call it witch doctoring. In engineering it could lead to real problems.

The Times states:

Change could be on the horizon. More than 60 percent of American households already use electricity to cook, and the Biden administration has proposed to expand gas stove efficiency rules, with an estimated $100 million in energy savings for people on top of the climate and health benefits. Several cities in mostly blue states have passed or considered bans on new gas hookups, effectively requiring electric cooking and heating in new construction, though some red states have moved to pre-empt such bans.

 The estimate is truly baseless in my opinion and based upon any real analysis. This is a quasi-religious movement driven by belief not science. Welcome to what we seem to be teaching students today.

Power Systems

 As we have note many previous times the power generation and distribution system in the US is frozen in the late 19th century. Edison and Tesla would feel at home there. No first rate university has any focus on power systems. Power companies employ mediocre at best employees. Con Ed for example is no more than an ersatz Government entity. The "grid" lacks any realistic elements of a reliable network. They all have single points of failure. More than twenty years ago I move one of my companies from New Jersey to Prague to get a more reliable electrical source. NJ failed monthly!

The NY Times reports:

Seven months after workers finished installing solar panels atop the Garcia family home near Stanford University, the system is little more than a roof ornament. The problem: The local utility’s equipment is so overloaded that there is no place for the electricity produced by the panels to go. “We wasted 30,000-something dollars on a system we can’t use,” Theresa Garcia said. “It’s just been really frustrating.”

This problem is universal. The system is not a distributed fault tolerant system. It is run by a  collection of generally mediocre people who have no idea what has changed in over a century. In contrast just look at the phone companies. Competition. There is no way we are going to be able to rely on electricity with this group of folks. The environmentalists are grossly clueless about what they propose. 

Well we can always hope.