https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/08/in-these-new-catskills-homes-no-fossil-fuels-are-allowed/
The all-electric, solar-powered homes are designed using passive house principles.
That's where local battery storage/EVs come in. Also passivhaus in and of itself is a form of resiliency - if the power goes out during a cold snap, the house will stay warm for quite some time, and the dozen kWh in a battery or the several dozen in an EV go alot further. Efficiency has a multiplying effect.
Absolutely, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
One of the current benefits of having natural gas piped into a house is having a completely distinct power supply system, where one could cook, heat the home, heat water (sanitation), power a generator (plumbed in line), etc.
I'm not saying this is a bad project, I'm just saying that is an adoption challenge to be addressed (resiliency, failover)
Right, but remember only like 60% of homes have gas anyway, so that's not necessarily the baseline from a resiliency perspective. And a huge chunk of those aren't actually prepared to operate without electricity either. So while I agree that resiliency is worth focusing on, we should also look holistically about what gas can/cannot do and the associated costs relative to electrification/solar/storage. A modern gas home will still need a backup generator to run condensing hot water/furnace and there's a significant cost to whole home generators, so it's not all fun and games just having gas appliances.
Yep. We just installed a small generac to support us during increasingly regular power outages, with automatic failover. 7k all in.
This is in addition to a small thermal solar array, and a small pv solar array with 5kwh (but expandable) storage that we previously had.
So as you can imagine, resiliency is high on my mind lol
It's a fascinating topic. It's top of my mind too - we have had very reliable power historically (Colorado) but in the last year had a major preemptive wildfire shutdown and a few other shutdowns (whereas literally less than 5 minutes of outage the last decade). I also got rid of my gas service last year and fully electrified. I have solar, but was waiting until battery prices dropped before going that route. Figured I'd yolo in the meantime, but that assumption has me increasingly on edge. From a climate perspective, I do hate to see a renewed interest in gas but I get why. We need cheaper batteries and standardized V2H/V2G asap.