Just a month ago, I encountered a problem my wife had previously experienced in April while I had been out of town. At that time, puzzled by why our gas oven seemed not to work, she had to wait until I returned from a conference in Minneapolis and teaching a FEMA training course in Madison, Wisconsin, before suddenly finding that the oven ignition was suddenly working again. When I got error signals from trying to preheat the oven on June 3, I consulted by phone with a repair technician who said the signal was telling me the “bake ignite,” that is, the ignition for the oven, needed to be replaced. I could contact an LG technician to come out and take care of this.
I chose not to take his advice. I had already been reading about the indoor pollution generated by gas stoves and decided that it was time to switch to an electric stove. When we built our house in 1994, the gas stove made sense to me. I knew nothing about the indoor emissions but did not want to power a stove with electricity mainly generated by coal and to some extent by nuclear power. That was the reality in 1994. Three decades later, a growing percentage of Illinois’s electricity is being generated by renewable energy, and legislation is in place in Illinois, especially the Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, to incentivize this transition. Climate change and air pollution have been the motivations, but the incentives are also rapidly changing the economics of electricity generation, especially when coupled with federal incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. We have come a long, long way from the old days of fly ash and dirty air, although we still have considerable distance to go.
New stove installed in kitchen
My wife and I quickly took advantage of the last day of a Memorial Day sale at Best Buy, using the advantages of existing credit and a Geek Squad membership. We purchased an electric induction oven. I soon learned that one obstacle to installing the induction stove is the need for a 220-volt outlet, which we did not have in our kitchen because the gas stove obviously did not need it. This is a challenge for owners of many existing and older homes. Federal and Illinois state legislation provide support for low-income homeowners, many of whom would be left out of the clean energy transition otherwise. We do not fall below the income level required to qualify, but I have no problem with such assistance because years of environmental planning work have made clear to me that the very neighborhoods suffering the greatest environmental impacts from industrial and other pollution will suffer additional impacts if left behind in the transition to clean energy.
Conduit reenters home for 220v outlet
Conduit under window
It so happened that our home did not facilitate a simple line from the fuse box to the other side of the kitchen, where the stove sits, so the line had to be run in conduit on the outside of the house at a cost exceeding $2,000. Had it been strictly an indoor job, the price would have been lower, but it all depends on the design of the home. One of the two installers who delivered the new stove, after realizing that we lacked the 220v outlet, tried to persuade me that hiring an electrician would be too expensive but was rather vague about what “too expensive” meant. I plunged ahead, and they left the new stove in the box, in the kitchen corner below the fuse box, until I got the outlet installed. I will admit I choked momentarily when an electrician assessed the situation and quoted the price, but I decided the transition to cleaner indoor air would not get any easier in the future, so I scheduled the work. Once that was done, I rescheduled the installers, who also hauled away the old gas stove. On July 2, everything was in place. We studied the user manual, got it all working, and have been enjoying using it for the last two days.
Still, the question is why do it? Clearly, a move is afoot, certainly here in Chicago but elsewhere as well, to encourage the transition to electric ranges. It is worth understanding the reasons.
One recent study found that methane emissions from gas stoves are comparable in climate change impact to the carbon dioxide emissions of a half-million cars. It is not just a matter of emitting methane when the stove is being used. Emissions continue even when the stove is off. The study found gas stoves “emit 0.8–1.3% of the gas they use as unburned methane.” Methane, although it persists in the atmosphere for much shorter periods of time, is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide by a factor of between 34-86 times.
But indoor air quality may be a bigger motivator for many people in avoiding gas appliances in the future. Gas stoves can produce elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas, which can result in several types of respiratory problems including asthma in children. Rates vary, but about 13 percent of childhood asthma cases are considered attributable to the use of gas stoves.
Concerns about the indoor environmental impacts of gas stoves have prompted some attempts at legislation to eliminate gas stoves in new buildings through building code changes. Dr. Juanita Mora, an allergist recently noted in a Chicago Tribune op-ed article that health burdens from exposure to pollution from gas stoves are estimated to result in 19,000 annual deaths and 200,000 cases of pediatric asthma. Electric ranges do not eliminate indoor air pollution, but they reduce it in kitchens by roughly half and by slightly lower percentages in other rooms of the house. The overall societal costs of such health impacts are substantial.
As a result, in Chicago, some aldermen have proposed a Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance (CABO) to require newly constructed buildings to be all-electric. This ordinance is still under consideration, but there is grass-roots momentum building for its passage, particularly from environmental advocates like Faith in Place and professional organizations like AIA Chicago, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In California, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute and other organizations, at least 30 communities have passed legislation or updated building codes to address the problem. While some critics on the right have screamed that the government is seeking to take away people’s gas stoves, this is fantasy. Even with CABO, owners of existing buildings will make the choice to keep what they have or switch—just as we chose to do for all the reasons stated above. But such hyperventilating anti-environmental hysteria is an all too common feature of right-wing discourse in the Trumpian Era.
What is true, however, is that government policy at the local level in some places is moving toward mandating electric appliances in new buildings. The rest will largely be up to the market, with its slow but inexorable march toward renewable energy, electric cars, and other environmental improvements. These are largely a result of changing economics, consumer preference for cleaner products, and public policy incentives that reflect public concern about climate change. Progress has never protected increasingly archaic products from declining market share.
Jim Schwab