this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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How is this fucking poor people? They’re providing them free infrastructure upgrades.
I am in the process of electrifying and it saves me money. The electrical options are much more efficient and gas is expensive.
Don't know if you're in California and poor, or not. I am. Gas is way cheaper. Don't misunderstand me, I think things have to move in this direction, but unless it comes with a big subsidy (something along the lines of the heat pumps mentioned in the article), make no mistake, it's fucking poor people.
How much cheaper is gas? In the UK gas is 1/3 the cost of electricity per mw, but gas boilers are less than 1/3 as efficient so heat pumps are still cheaper to run.
Right now in California natural gas is about $14-15 per thousand cubic feet (yeah it's a stupid unit), which is about 1 million BTUs (another stupid unit of energy). That translates to about 290 kWh.
The average residential price of electricity in California is about 30 cents per kWh. So the same amount of energy in electricity would be about $87, about 5.8 times as expensive as gas per unit energy.
If a heat pump is 4 times as efficient at heating than a gas furnace, then we're still looking at higher heating costs for heating a home.
And things like stoves and hot water heaters tend not to be as efficient as heat pumps, so you're still looking at a 4-6x cost difference from electrification on those.