Category: Power (Electricity, Gas)

  • Bay Area Air District: Out to lunch and to Turkey

    Let’s string two recent news reports together regarding the bureaucrats at the Bay Area Air District. First, somehow the SF Comicle editors let slip a piece about how “few” (meaning one!) of the BAAD members behind the gas water heater ban have actually made the switch themselves. The ban is scheduled to kick in this January unless they vote next month to delay it one year. When asked by the Comicle if the 24 members had made the switch, less than half bothered to respond and the only one with an electric water heater opposes the outright ban! 13 ignored the inquiry, three declined to answer, and four are still on the evil gas feed. All of them plus three more who are renters (who have no clue what is involved in making a switch) have no idea what it will really cost a homeowner. Their cost estimates are way off both for the units and for all the work needed to swap over. Furthermore, I recently had an HVAC tech call for something else and learned that the electric “heaters” draw in heat from their surroundings; so my indoor water heater on a service porch will actually chill down that part of my house. Fine on the rare hot B’game day. Not so good all the rest of the time.

    The Daily Post provides another view of these bureaucrats’ priorities. It found that BAADies like the Palo Alto mayor, a Sonoma County supe and her chief of staff as well as four BAAD employees are set to blow $92,000 on a junket to Turkey for a “climate conference” in November. Will they be absent for the delay vote? Apparently “it’s important for local agencies to attend the conference because the federal government isn’t addressing climate change.” Oh, and they are spending less travel budget than the last two years. We get the government we vote for, and we get it good and hard.

  • Gas Prices: A counterintuitive finding

    The travel intensive bookends to the summer — Memorial Day and Labor Day — find the press focussing on gas prices; and rightly so. We see the big numbers on every gas station sign and the pump reminds us constantly. My folks searched for the cheapest gas back in the ’60s and especially the ’70s during the OPEC oil crisis. And it feels like we are paying a lot these days, but I recently saw a data-driven view that bursts that bubble. From Gemini:

    The inflation-adjusted national average price of gasoline since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis fluctuates between $3.00 and $4.00 per gallon, indicating that when evaluated against the long-term purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, real fuel costs have remained remarkably stable. Despite sharp increases in the absolute numerical price at the pump over the last 50+ years, historical data tracking adjusted for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows that regular gasoline rarely strays from a long-run historical average of approximately $3.61 per gallon.

    Direct Comparison: Selected Historical vs. Modern Gas Prices

    Era / YearNominal Pump Price (Per Gallon)Inflation-Adjusted Price (In Modern USD)Economic Context
    Early 1973 (Pre-Crisis)$0.39$2.85Stable domestic production
    1974 (Post-Embargo)$0.53$3.60Initial OPEC shock wave
    1981 (Historic High)$1.38$5.18Iranian Revolution energy gap
    1998 (Historic Low)$1.06$1.98Asian Financial Crisis crude glut
    2008 (Commodity Peak)$3.27$4.77China economic boom & speculation
    2020 (Pandemic Low)$2.07$2.61Global COVID-19 lockowns
    Current (Sept 2026)$4.21$4.21Middle East conflict fluctuations

    Nationally, we are at the upper end of the long-run normal range, but tack on the California gas tax premium (just raised again by 2.2 cents on July 1st) and the costs of our oh-so-special blend plus refineries closing and the pain increases. But it’s still not enough to make me buy tires with inferior traction, lesser water/snow shedding and longer stopping times. Sorry, Gavin. Not gonna do it to.

  • Gas Water Heaters: Common sense missing

    We are officially in the last half of the year, and the burning question is are we also in the last six months for gas water heaters? It was more than six years ago when I first analyzed here what a stupid, expensive, complicated mandate this would be when B’game looked at it. I elaborated on more nitty-gritty problems in May here. More issues come to mind as I look at my water heater especially how much time and money it will take to patch the ceiling and roof where the deleted vent exits. Do the retired gas pipes under my house just lay there for eternity like a desiccated rodent’s skeleton? This ban is a plumber, electrician, roofer, and painter’s dream. More people are waking up to the impending implosion, and the San Mateo County Supes will be looking at it during their August 11th meeting. Will common sense make an appearance? The supes should memorize this letter to the Comicle.

    The Bay Area Air District’s plan to prohibit gas water heaters and furnaces needs to be scrapped.  Everyone is in favor of cleaner air, but how we get there needs thoughtfulness. Arguing that incentives for property owners and future higher costs for gas will ease the pain of conversion isn’t going to cut it.

    Converting from gas to electricity is not a simple process. One can’t just unplug the old unit and plug in the new. Designing the new systems, obtaining the appropriate permits, and coordinating with PG&E, if an upgraded electrical panel is needed, will take time.  Modifying the building to accept the new water heater and furnace takes money, budgeting and careful planning, especially if people are living in the building.

    Hardly anyone replaces a water heater or furnace before it breaks. When one does need to be replaced, the situation is tantamount to an emergency because the home becomes uninhabitable without hot water or heat. Mandating the replacement of the gas units with electric add to the cost and complexity. This flat-out ban on gas water heaters and furnaces will bring nightmares to many.

    Frank Lee, San Francisco

    Lost in all of this is just how much time a homeowner will need to spend to comply. I value my time pretty highly, but I don’t get a sense that our elected officials do.

  • High-Cost Rail – Part 169 Peak hubris?

    We may be approaching the point of peak hubris at the High-Speed Rail Authority. They are more than $100 billion short of what they need so their latest gambit is to lease out land on “their right of way” that they took by eminent domain to AI data center operators. Talk about “mission creep” from people who can’t even get the most basic part of their mission off the ground. The SF Comicle has a couple good quips on this from Central Valley politicians whose constituents are appalled at the idea:

    To pave the way for potential leases of land, fiber or electric transmission along the corridor, the rail authority has signed a co-development agreement with a consortium of infrastructure investors. They would act as a kind of intermediary for the rail line, helping match assets in the rail right-of-way with companies that would pay to use them. Within a few months CEO Ian Choudri expects to finalize a second agreement with another group of investors, this one focused on generating revenue from the solar arrays, wind farms, substations or batteries that will power the trains.

    That is called “spreading it around” in some circles. But not everyone is buying the idea:

    “Ian’s got big ideas,” Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto said, referring to Choudri. “He’s very plugged in with the Silicon Valley types. He’s a move-fast, visionary kind of guy, and he wants this project to pay for itself.” Serratto managed a dry laugh. “But really,” he said, “just build the train, dude.”

    Questions abound, at least in my mind. How can an agency take private property by eminent domain for one purpose and then start adding other, ostensibly profitable, uses without going back and compensating the original owner? If anyone is going to get a cut it should be the ranchers and farmer in the Central Valley who have had their lives disrupted. How much land would have to be leased to even put a small dent in the $100+ billion shortfall? Are the telecom carriers and electric utilities going to sit silently while some new competitor gets handed a sweetheart deal to undercut their decades of investment? Or the ratepayers? And there is the perennial question of where the water will come from? The Comicle notes all this needs to come together pronto if Newsom is going to try to claim some sort of successful exit from this disaster on the presidential campaign trail. Peak hubris.

  • Electric reality sets in? Not yet

    We had another big power outage Monday in B’game. At the start, the PG&E app said about 5,000 “users”, meaning service addresses, were out including long-suffering Broadway. Figure as many as 8-10,000 people lost power for some period of time. The area around City Hall was still out more than an hour after it was first reported. At this point it appears such outages don’t even merit a mention in the news–except here at the Voice.

    Therefore, now is the perfect time to recap the long SF Comicle article from Sunday titled “What to know about water heater changes“. Writer Brooke Park might be out of a job–or in line for a Pulitzer–because her piece actually got it right on about 80% of the problems with the impending gas water heater ban. It’s almost a full page long and hits on:

    Adding both a heat pump water heater and a heat pump furnace system could push more homeowners toward costly electrical panel upgrades. Older homes often have 100-amp panels, while newer or upgraded homes may have 200-amp panels or higher. Homes with multiple new electric appliances — such as two heat pumps and an electric vehicle charger — may be more likely to need electrical upgrades, especially if they have lower-capacity panels.

    While Park captured the basics, the time and delay to find an electrician, get them scheduled and get the work done along with the permitting isn’t captured in the estimate. Nor is any sort of removal costs for the “obsolete” gas plumbing, vents, roof repair, etc, etc.

    The Bay Are Air District said that an average natural gas water heater installation would be around $3,500 while a heat pump installation would cost about $7,000. At the high end, if for example significant electrical work is needed, the costs of a heat pump installation could rise to $38,800, the air district said.

    (One guy in Foster City), Mark Allen was expecting at least a $2,500 rebate from his electricity provider but is still navigating the reimbursement process. “No kidding, 16 emails back-and-forth, we still did not have a permit and almost 2½, 3 months had gone by,” Allen said. When he got the necessary paperwork and submitted the rebate, the electricity provider said he was past the deadline.

    Beyond the higher expense, heat pump water heaters can be larger, louder and slower to heat water than their natural gas counterparts.  “If you have the right setup for it, yes, it could be good. But I personally would never want to put one in my house,” said Chris Guslani, the owner of Bay Area Water Heaters, which installs natural gas water heaters as well as the occasional heat pump. “They don’t heat up as fast, they’re loud, they’re huge.”

    Both (120V and 240V) models will produce noise comparable to a refrigerator, which is similar to the noise of a natural gas water heater. But the heat pump will often run for twice as long, Guslani said. Homes typically have 50- or 65-gallon tanks to hold hot water. Once that is exhausted, 120-volt models can typically heat from seven to 15 gallons of water per hour, while 240-volt water heaters can warm approximately 18 gallons to 23 gallons if its hybrid mode, which uses traditional electric water heater elements to warm water faster, is unlocked, installers said.  A gas-powered water heater can heat about 30 gallons of water per hour.

    Guslani said that in about 60% of cases he’s seen, gas water heaters operate in spaces without any wall sockets. And manufacturers warn against using extension cords for water heaters. Heat pump water heater tanks might need to be up to 15 gallons larger than those used with natural gas water heaters to account for slower heating times, according to the air district. Heat pumps, which are often a foot taller than natural gas models, also typically need to be installed in rooms with more than 700 cubic feet to allow for adequate airflow.

    There’s more that I will add as a comment, but it all reminds me of “Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” The bureaucrats are expected to vote on who gets exemptions in October, so let the virtue signaling begin. One of our County Supes, Ray Mueller, is tapping the brakes on the idea or at least the Jan. 1, 2027 start date.  

  • Transit Taxes: Beware the head fakes

    If it were not so sad, it would be humorous to follow the discussion at the SF Comicle about the forthcoming transit taxes for BART, et al and the SMART train up in Marin. The catalyst was a letter to the editor titled “If we’re willing to pay billions to maintain highways, why not fund BART?” I’m betting the author knows a half-dozen reasons why, but is playing the faux equity game to push the new taxes. Y’all come to this blog to see the onion get peeled, so let’s assess the “community value” of our “highways” and our city streets, such as they are, compared to BART, VTA, SMART, Caltrain, etc.

    Which bits of infrastructure enable police response? Fire response? Ambulance response? Utility (electric, gas, phone, internet) response? I am always impressed when the Safeway 18-wheeler makes the sweeping right turn at Howard, maneuvers the extra-long trailer into the parking lot and manages to back the thing into the loading dock. If you have never seen it, you’re missing out. And if we don’t see it every couple of days we will be missing out. Let’s not forget the Walgreen’s semi that got shoo’ed away from the big El Camino Project groundbreaking because it was noisy and inconvenient to the proceedings. You want your antibiotic? It ain’t coming on Caltrain or BART.

    Is a commuter rail line a good thing? Sure. Should it cover its costs at the fare box? No. But let’s dispense with the faux argument that transit can hold a candle to the streets and freeways that keep this whole show on the road. I’m not saying vote “no” on the tax–yet, but San Mateo County appears to be the tail that isn’t wagging the dog once again as the monies flow elsewhere.

  • Broadway: Gas Leak Lawsuit

    I was pretty sure a lawsuit would be filed over the extended closure of businesses on and around B’way. I didn’t see the merchants being represented by one of the top 25 plaintiff law firms in the country, but offering local merchants support is meritorious. From the DJ piece

    A class action lawsuit on behalf of merchants in Burlingame’s Broadway area has been filed against the owner and operator of A&A Gas & Mart, who were previously named as responsible parties in a gasoline leak that caused days of power outages and road closures in the business district. 

    Burlingame law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy chose to move forward with the suit, filed Feb. 23, to seek an undetermined amount of damages for businesses that lost customers, revenue and inventory as a result of those outages and closures, attorney Nanci Nishimura, who is representing the plaintiffs, said.

    The merchants mentioned range from Maverick Jack’s at the old train station to Bonne Sante at the other end of B’way. The total number is more than 100.

    In a real twist of fate, the A&A Gas website’s “About us” page shows the B’way station! They appear to have four of their six locations on the Peninsula. We’re not talking Shell or Chevron here so expect some sort of settlement as they realize what they are up against. In the meantime, Broadway is lovely shopping and dining district and there has been a lot of free parking as the city deinstalls the old parking meters and waits to install the fancy new ones.

  • PG&E: Unhappy New Year

    It’s been a rough start to the New Year for PG&E customers from EssEff to B’game and now to San Mateo. Fire in the city caused major problems including for the huge Waymo fleet. Here in B’game the multi-day outage on and around Broadway and California was especially tough for businesses and even more so if they happened to have perishable inventory. The news, like this report from ABC7, keep calling the leak into the utility vault a “petroleum product”. I suppose it could be diesel (does A&A sell diesel), but most likely it’s gas. ABC7 reported:

    Even though PG&E provided generators for those impacted, businesses were told they had to hire a private electrician to do checks before the utility company would hook them up. “To be able to certify that it’s okay to turn on the power and use the generators so we don’t have explosions,” said John Kevranian of the Broadway Burlingame Business Improvement District.

    That sounds odd and not very customer centric. If that is different skill set than PG&E electricians, then shouldn’t PG&E have hired a commercial electrician on the customers’ behalf? (kudos to John for stepping back in after his BID term ended to keep everyone up to date with many texts, etc).

    And of course, all of this happened right as the Little Big Dig started halving the capacity on El Camino and thinking vehicles could reroute to California. As one of our regular, shrewd commenters pointed out on the Drop the Green Flag post, post-holiday rainy season wasn’t the best time to start taking down massive trees and figuring out power line routes.

    ABC7 noted “PG&E is still working to extract all of the petroleum product from the vaults and identify where it’s coming from. They say it’s not something they use with their equipment.” Transformers use heavy oil as an insulator, but this isn’t that. Eventually we will find out if A&A gas was up to date and up to code on the tanks. Note that the station at the other end of B’way did theirs a couple years ago. And both the Chevron (finished) and the Shell stations on Peninsula are doing the same. The Google machine spit out this timely tidbit:

    Older, single-walled tanks face strict deadlines for upgrades or permanent closure (e.g., by Dec 31, 2025, for many systems) due to corrosion risks.

    Here’s a pic of the big generators that got people back online. Reports are they are just as noisy as the folks in the Richmond district reported. Caterpillar stock is up 75% in the last 12 months……

  • No Mo Waymo: Power outage chaos

    Social media is brimming with photos, videos and commentary about the on-going power outage in EssEff from a sub-station fire. It peaked at about 130,000 customers and the last 20,000 or so might get power back tomorrow morning (that would be two days of no power). Aside from all the other inconveniences and possible dangerous situations, we can now add confused and disabled Waymo’s to the list. Per the Comicle:

    Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service remained suspended Sunday morning after a sweeping power outage knocked out traffic signals across large swaths of San Francisco.

    On Saturday, videos shared widely on social media showed Waymo vehicles stopped mid-intersection with hazard lights flashing, forcing other cars to maneuver around them. Waymo halted service citywide around 8 p.m. Saturday.

    The outage started “late Saturday morning” but Alphabet didn’t take the robotaxis fully out of service until 8 p.m. even though the software can’t treat a missing traffic light as a four-way stop. And some cellular internet service was affected which Waymo needs to work. Go figure.

    I took my first Waymo ride three months ago with a couple non-dangerous wrinkles as noted here. But we have very erratic PG&E power in town. Just this morning I got a Citizen app notice of two outages in the B’game-H’borough area. There was a major outage about a week ago as well and we don’t particularly handle failed traffic lights well in town either. Putting a sawhorse in the middle of ECR with no lights or a flare that went out an hour ago is standard protocol.

    You may have read about a woman who gave birth in a Waymo on the way to the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Better to stick with Uber or Lyft if it’s urgent.

  • Smelling smoke in Sacramento: Is there fire?

    I’m smelling smoke in Sacramento and wondering how big the fire might get. When the SF Comicle decides to do a full-page piece on a corruption indictment of a very senior Newsom ex-staffer you know they are getting in front of something that blew up on X just a day or two ago. The SacBee led four days ago, and the WSJ was on it two days ago when one Dana Williamson appeared in court, but the Comicle has a way of ignoring or burying these stories on A10. Before anyone’s TDS gets triggered the WSJ writes:

    A federal investigation involving prominent former aides to Democratic politicians could generate uncomfortable questions as California pols seek higher office. The feds allege a conspiracy among former aides to raid a campaign account by billing it for bogus services. Since the investigation began during the Biden administration, it won’t be easy for Democrats to dismiss it as Trump lawfare.

    Apparently the Feds first reached out to Williamson asking questions about the Gavinor but she told them she Knew Nothing. She now sees where that got her. The smell of smoke is strong because all the support Newsom gave Biden before his TV crack-up. It couldn’t be retribution.

    Williamson was Newsom’s chief of staff until last November when she alerted Newsom of the investigation. Her little team is accused of (and two have plead guilty to bank and wire fraud) skimming $10K a month out of a dormant Xavier Becerra campaign account totaling $180K. The would-be governor Becerra called it a “gut punch”. But wait, there’s more from the SacBee:

    The charges also accuse Williamson of filing false tax returns, claiming more than $1 million in business deductions for personal expenses, including trips to luxury resorts in Mexico, designer handbags, jewelry, home furniture, and travel on private jets. The indictment also alleges that Williamson provided government information to a company involved in litigation with the state and lied about it to the FBI.

    All sorts of money has been sloshing around Sacramento for a long time. High-cost rail is billions over budget. Lost EDD money totalled $31 billion and Williamson is also accused of filing a fraudulent PPP claim. Non-profits and NGOs get grant money all the time for all sorts of things. The Newsom tab to solve homelessness is somewhere between $24 and $37 billion. And Williamson worked as director of public affairs for PG&E from 2006 to 2011. I bought extra popcorn today.

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