They’re not the coldest states. Does it have to do with infrastructure? Thanks. [http://nhenergy.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive.html?m=1](http://nhenergy.blogspot.com/2014_01_01_archive.html?m=1)
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My guess living here would be old houses, we have a lot of old houses here. It was one of the best/easiest/cheapest for good heating originally, so most of the older houses have that as their main source. Then as more houses came in, we had the infrastructure already in place. A lot of the newest homes are moving to other forms.
That being said, everyone I know has multiple heating options in their home. For instance we have wood stove, pellet stove, oil, and electric heaters. We use different ones at different times, but I’m a big fan of oil right in the coldest part of the season, because it heats the whole house evenly and doesn’t dry it out as much as the wood stove. I’m using the pellet stove right now to just take the chill out.
Most of my friends/family have at least two heating options, one for usual, and one that works when the power is out, and maybe a few others for other times.
combination of energy being expensive and old homes being built for oil based heating. the options for homeowners of older homes are to continue using oil or foot the bill to switch to gas, if gas is even available to tap off of in the street
Following world war ii, the northeast had some decent infrastructure and terminals for crude oil as the fuel was used for shipping and wartime effort from northeast shipyards. After the war, england owed the US a significant amount of money for our supplies, materials and support in the war. Brent sea crude was plentiful, possessed by england and easily transported to the northeast us. Many homes in the northeast were ready to be upgraded from wood and coal to a better (at the time) fuel source. Win – win for everyone.
Yes it does have to do with infrastructure! But also legislation.
If you look up a map of gas pipeline infrastructure in the United States (linked below), you will notice that all high-capacity has pipelines stop heading north in New York. This is largely due to their attempts to curb emissions and climate change, but causes significant harm to New England’s energy supply. In addition to this, the Jones Act makes it prohibitively expensive to ship Liquefied Natural Gas from another nearby state.
Since there is no pipeline-delivered gas reaching the region and it is not cost effective to ship the gas, there is a lot of drilling activity within the region for production of crude oil, which can largely be refined into Heating Oil with low losses. Canada also sells a lot of fuels to the region, but Canada does not produce a lot of natural gas, meaning that they are only able to really sell New England crude oil… which gets turned into Heating Oil.
Map:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/images/ngpipelines_map.png
Today, we use mostly natural gas, which is delivered by tanker to coastal terminal facilities and distributed from regional hubs. Home heating oil is second place these days, but it wasn’t long ago that it was king (we converted our house from oil to gas about 18 years ago).
At one time, coal and wood were the most common – up until about the 1930’s or so. Around that time, kerosene (home heating oil) became widely available and it had lots of advantages: you didn’t need to keep tending your furnace all day, it wasn’t as dirty (ash and soot everywhere), it produced quite a bit of heat, and it became really cheap. So, lots of people converted. The house I grew up in had an old coal furnace that was converted to oil. A tank-full could last months.
In the 1960’s we started building nuclear power stations in the New England, so it looked like electricity was going to be the way to go; it made last-mile distribution so much easier. Around that time, lots of new construction used electric heat, which was cheap and easy to install compared to hot-water baseboard or radiators that were popular before). The price of electricity went up with demand and we’ve even decommissioned the older nuclear plants without building new ones, so now electricity is an expensive option again (though it’s still favored in parts of New England).
Today, natural gas is the most widely used because, until recently, it was cheap. Natural gas lines were underground, so you don’t (necessarily) lose heat during storms like electric. It’s also distributed by pipes rather than fuel trucks, eliminating deliveries (though, rural areas of ME and NH often use liquid propane). The problem with natural gas really has been that it’s not available to everyone because lines don’t cover the entire region (and they can be expensive to install, it’s a very rocky region). My neighborhood was built in 1954 and didn’t get gas lines installed until 2004.
I didn’t know heating oil was a thing until I moved to Boston. It seemed crazy to me when I first encountered it. “You’re telling me there’s this huge tank in the basement, I have to keep track of how much oil is in it, and then pay a couple thousand dollars for a truck to pull up and fill it back up when it runs out?”
Plus the oil tanks leak, ruin the basement ground, and eventually rot and have to be replaced. It absolutely sucks. Needless to say, natural gas heating was on my “must have” list when we were house hunting.
Limited natural gas infrastructure combined with high electric cost so it leaves propane or oil. Bigger towns have nat gas but even there it’s a mix depending on age.
Infrastructure. I live in NYC in a secluded area. We have no gas or sewer lines to my mine or the surrounding houses. Reason given is its not cost effective for the city to run the lines from the mains to our spots. So we are left with oil/electric and septic. Same way in a house we got in Pocono’s area in Pennsylvania.
Because multiple reasons.
We have a large temperature differential, so condensation is a bitch
We have old tech Because our homes are old and its more expensive to upgrade than just keep using the old stuff
Electricity is not reliable in the winter months so fuel sources that work with out it are a must
Its readily available and sorta kinda cheaper/easy to get in a pinch when fuel companies don’t wana deliver.
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