Now I know. Looked it up. The ban would be tentatively for new installations. The place I've lived for 35 years is all electric (built in the '60s when all electric was the BIG thing). It's also a region that often has blackouts due to weather. When the power is out for a day or more, I have to find another place to stay.
When I was a kid, our house was heated with coal. My mom cooked on a coal stove. They eventually upgraded to natural gas. There's no perfect solution.
This post was edited by NYAD at February 13, 2023 5:26 PM MST
Personally, I like having a gas fireplace, gas hot water heater, and gas (propane) grill. If electricity goes out, I can still have heat, take a shower and cook.
It most likely can't because it will probably have various safety-devices to ensure it can only turn on via its internal control circuit that monitors such actions as water-flow, fan and finally verifying ignition and continuing flame.
My central-heating and hot water to the taps and shower uses a gas-fired combination-boiler, but if we have an electricity power-cut, it will not work for either function! I could still heat kettles of water, and cook, by gas-stove... unless the power-cut would also turn the gas off at the so-called "smart"-meter. Luckily, power-cuts are rare where I live, and don't normally last more than a few hours.
Personally, I have an electric stove. But think anyone who wants gas should be able to use it. It is better for the environmental than electricity which is mostly derived from coal.
This is not to ban gas appliances per se, but to no longer fit gas-mains into homes built from a certain date in future, possibly 2035, but that may change.
Meanwhile, trials of blending natural-gas with hydrogen are underway, and I am told by a friend who is a registered gas-fitter, that the domestic boiler manufacturers are now making them simple (for an accredited professional) to adjust to burn the blend or even, in future, just hydrogen.
The policy was formulated a few years ago, and part of cutting down on using mineral fuels for purely environmental reasons; nothing to do with the war in Ukraine.
Nor with those rather specious claims about health, since if the gas is burning properly, its products are carbon-dioxide and water. Also, gas-stoves have been so universal for so long in so many countries, that any illnesses from using them in properly-ventilated kitchens would likely have been identified long ago.
Not as far as I know; but it an air-gas mixture that is "explosive" and each flammable gas need its own ratio mix.
Hydrogen is not intrinsically any more dangerous than natural-gas, town-gas (which was toxic as well as flammable) or vapours such as from petrol; but all flammable materials need air as well to burn.
Its problem is that people will still keep waffling on about the Hindenburg and R101 airship disasters to show how awful hydrogen is, instead of asking what might have caused those accidents. That use of hydrogen was indeed extremely risky, but the Hindenburg fell in flames after something ignited a lot of leaking hydrogen: the awful newsreel of the disaster is often foreshortened to the fire only, so does not show what was happening before the fire first broke through the hull fabric. The R101 flew too low and crashed into a French hillside - then caught fire - on its maiden flight, because for political reasons its contemporary government rushed it into service poorly-designed, not properly tested and not properly airworthy. There were no survivors. That flight was to have been to India, and the illustrious passengers who lost their lives included the Air Minister responsible for it.
It's like saying no-one should use ocean-going liners because the Titanic ripped herself open on an ice-berg, and sank. Or railways should not cross rivers thanks to the Tay Bridge Disaster. Or that the Fukushima incident shows why nuclear power is wrong. The Press, many politicians of all flavours, and most of the public conflate the effects of such disasters, which are indeed terrible, with the failed system's principle; want only revenge, and ignore learning why the specific system failed.
. Nowadays, too, we are not building huge airships buoyed by enormous rubberised-canvas bags of hydrogen. We are making or converting modern industrial and domestic heating systems, and various forms of transport; to store, move and use hydrogen in very different ways.
Hydrogen has one safety advantage in being lighter than air so if it leaks it dissipates more readily than a heavier-than-air gas that can collect in "pools".
On the other hand it is more difficult to contain than methane because its molecules are far smaller so will squeeze through much tinier gaps.
Trials are already underway in Britain with mixing hydrogen with natural-gas for domestic and business supplies, with the eventual aim of hydrogen only. These tests do include designing new supply equipment or finding ways to make the existing mains, which are fine for natural-gas, leak-proof against hydrogen.
The gas can be obtained from natural-gas with the CO2 by-product captured for storage or uses that would lock it up in other compounds. It can be obtained by electrolysing water but that needs a lot of electricity!
This post was edited by Durdle at February 17, 2023 3:10 PM MST
NYAD 