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No fossil fuels in new or rebuilt city buildings, Wu says
By adamg on Mon, 07/31/2023 - 2:21pm
Mayor Wu signed an executive order that will ban the use of natural gas and heating oil for any new city buildings or existing facilities that undergo extensive repairs.
All new buildings will be planned, designed, and constructed so that HVAC, hot water, and cooking systems will not combust or directly connect to fossil fuels for all municipal buildings. In addition to applying to all new buildings, it also impacts alterations where structural work is planned in 75% or more of the building’s square footage. Any project that replaces a building’s heating, ventilation, air conditioning or hot water system, or cooking equipment must eliminate fossil fuel combustion in the affected system.
The city's current capital plan through 2029 includes $132.5 million for municipal building project that will now be built without natural gas or oil.
In a statement, Wu said:
Week after week, we see the signs of extreme heat, storms, and flooding that remind us of a closing window to take climate action. The benefits of embracing fossil fuel-free infrastructure in our City hold no boundary across industries and communities, and Boston will continue using every possible tool to build the green, clean, healthy, and prosperous future our city deserves.
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Comments
Great Goal. Have a few
Great Goal. Have a few questions:
1. Will the power grid be able to keep up with demand?
2. Is heat pump technology able to withstand the cold winters? Our heat pump installer recommended we keep our existing furnace as the current heat pump technology could not keep up with very cold winters.
Geothermal heating could be great here.
3. Could this be seen as a form of "greenwashing" making Boston clean at the expense of poor countries and people?
All the minerals to build green technology (solar, batteries, and wind turbines) are dug out of the earth often by child slaves in the Congo and South America, and built by slaves in China? China is building more coal plants yearly and producing more emissions than every other industral country combined to support this green revolution.
See book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.
New Engalnd power is generated by gas and coal plants.
So ya, Boston will be green, but be realistic and dont praise yourself thinking that this is a net benefit to the global climate issue.
Heat pump and cold weather
My heat pump, which I bought/installed for AC, stopped working when external temperature hit about 0 last February. I know this because my gas powered water system wasn't really up to it either.
What's your proposed alternative?
1. Yes, the grid will definitely be able to handle the load of a handful of new or renovated buildings.
2. Heat pumps have improved dramatically and continue to do so. Cold-weather heat pumps can handle Boston winters; in extreme circumstances they can augment with electrical resistance heating, especially if insulation is anywhere near decent.
3. No, because fossil fuels hurt the world more. Electrification is compatible with a future that does not require harm (better recycling of minerals, more ethical sourcing, etc.); fossil fuels are not.
The current grid mix is mostly irrelevant. Rooftop solar and offshore wind are booming, and we plan for the future, not the present.
I'm not saying we should stay
I'm not saying we should stay with fossil fuels. I just want politicians and people in general to be realistic on the impact of their decisions.
There are true environmental and social costs with our current green revolution that people are choosing to ignore in the discussion. Is permanently turning the Congo into a environmental toxic wasteland killing countless, an acceptable outcome to power our ev cars?
These are the questions that society needs to address.
Power generation in general is a dirty business. As for alternatives how about nuclear, geothermal, etc.
Almost everyone I know doesn't care
I've shared satellite images of beaches destroyed over a period of time due to sand mining for the semiconductor wafer industry. Zero F's given.
When Chilean miners got trapped in a copper and gold mine in 2010, some people expressed concern, many didn't even know that the mine collapsed, but several investors bought stocks in copper thereby profiting from human suffering.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/voices-covering-unforgettable-chilea...
As long a majority of consumers get their gold watches, Apple products, have access to clean water and clean air they won't care about the unseen costs of their chosen lifestyle.
That really is the issue.
That really is the issue. Wealthy societies can afford to go green. They can offshore (exploit) the environmental impact of mining, manufacturing, and very cheap (slave) labor to developing countries.
When people have constant food, shelter, and safety they can stop and look around and worry about the environment. People without these basic needs care more about where there food is going to come from that day.
There is no such thing as Net Zero. Power generation in any form is dirty. It's just the wealthy countries that can afford to push that dirty business on countries and people that are so desperate they need the money at any cost.
I say all this as someone who is about to lease their third EV in a row. That is 90 pounds of cobalt in total, refined from thousands of pounds of ore, dug out of the ground by hand, from people that will be lucky to live to 30 years old.
Nuclear and geothermal don't really help here
Nuclear plants put electricity on the grid, not heat/cooling directly into buildings, so we're back to your questions about heat pumps and grid capacity. And they require mining and disposal, which create massive problems "over there somewhere", just like mining of anything else, except now it's also radioactive.
But even if you are entirely for electrification of the grid and think that the mining and disposal costs aren't significantly worse than the other options, nuclear has a really long lead-time compared to solar and wind.
Geothermal is great, but can't be used to retrofit a building, unless you're using district heating. For brand new construction they can be a nice option, especially horizontal installations that sit under an insulated basement. Is that actually an option here, though? And I'm fairly sure you still need to supplement that with heat pumps. (Geothermal is the one I'm haziest on.)
"Geothermal" is ambiguous
In practice it's used to describe two different things:
- Ground-source heat pumps, where you have loops of tubes with fluid in the near ground, taking advantage of the steady temperature a few feet below ground to source heat in the winter and sink it in the summer. More efficient than air-source heat pumps, also more expensive because of the drilling and other installation, and kind of a tough sell as air-source heat pumps have gotten better and better.
- "Real geothermal", where you run a loop of pipes to really hot rocks and do something with the heated return fluid (usually generating electricity or heating some stuff directly). Not an option in most geographies because hot rocks aren't close enough to the surface. It works well in Iceland and some other places with hot springs and the like, though some use of fracking technology can make it an option in more places. Not really a small-scale, individual-building option.
Yeah, I imagine they mean ground-source heat pumps.
That's the only thing you could actually build in Boston. The horizontal under-the-basement ones are a neat idea -- you can effectively do seasonal energy storage -- but I don't know how ready that tech is for wide deployment.
(I'm also curious about whether "district cooling" could be done with pipes that go out into the harbor...)
I'm impressed
I didn't realize I could see the harbor sea lions from my place in Dot.
The irony, of course, is you are posting on either a smartphone or computer of some sort, on an internet forum hosted on a server somewhere, all of which have the same issues you are claiming "green revolution" has. Well, worse I guess: at least solar, wind energy, and others actually produce something useful and directly reduce greenhouse emissions and generally have an overall net-negative effect on greenhouse gases and pollution.
Electric water heaters are pretty much useless
Love our natural gas tankless with recirculation system
Dunno where you get that
I've heard from multiple people with heat pump based water heaters and they love them.
I have a couple of friends with electric tankless systems
And they’re terrible
Sorry to hear
about your friends.
(OK, actual response: Electric tankless is probably a bad combo, yeah. Resistance heating is... not good.)
So, when the grid goes down
So, when the grid goes down due to a solar event that knocks out the power, then what? The 1859 Carrington Event would certainly have taken down our grid system if it occurred today.
I'd be kinda surprised if it didn't take out the gas system too.
Unfortunately, a lot of utilities are dependent on other utilities. Can our gas distribution system function without internet and electricity? Doubt it. I really don't think it has its own power plants etc.
Society in general does not seem to be interested in the kind of resilience required to accommodate such an event. Individuals who want some kind of protection in those scenarios should look into:
- Solar roof with an isolation mode that allows it to keep working when the grid is down. (Most are configured to shut off when the distribution line dies!) Or at the very least, a sizeable power pack (battery + inverter).
- Camp stove and fuel, and some understanding of how to use them safely.
- Water filters, and a few gallons of drinking water stored up.
- Good insulation.
- Knowledge of how to shut off the water if the house is going to go below freezing.
People out in the country could also consider having a propane tank and/or wood stove that they test periodically.
But the solution is not "well, better keep burning fossil fuels".