Bay Area Gas-Furnace Ban Expected to Gouge Residents, Strain Ailing Electric Grid

As seen in National Review

A vote last week by the Bay Area’s air-pollution regulators to phase out and eventually ban the sale of new gas furnaces and water heaters in the Northern California region will be costly for residents, will further burden an already stretched electric grid, and will have minimal environmental impact, energy experts and economists told National Review.

The move is emblematic of California’s approach to energy, which involves ramping up the demand for electricity while gutting the state’s ability to meet its electricity needs, they said.

And requiring Bay Area residents to replace broken gas furnaces and water heaters with all-electric systems, which are harder to install and can require expensive home retrofits, could also be dangerous, potentially leaving people without heat for weeks during the winter.

The vote by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to ban the sale of new gas furnaces and water heaters, is “a regressive policy that’s going to increase costs in a state that is already unaffordable, it’s going to do minimal in terms of reducing [greenhouse-gas] emissions, and it’s going to stress a problem that we already have no plan of addressing, which is [that] our grid is going to be unable to provide reliable electricity,” said Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow in business and economics at the California-based Pacific Research Institute who is studying the state’s electricity shortfall.