People seem to think Natural Gas just magically makes its way down the lines. NG requires power as well. If power is out for any period of time you lose natural gas soon after due to compression stations going offline unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones who lives off a branch that is self-powered.
Oh, sorry, I didn't actually mean "natural gas that comes from a magic pipe" -- I meant propane that sits in a big tank in the backyard. I know intellectually that they're different gases, probably with different numbers of carbons in the molecule, but I have the bad habit of using them interchangeably....
In the "rural" areas I spend the most time in (cape cod, not exactly rural but also with sketchy utilities) people mostly have generators running off of big (well, probably medium sized) propane tanks that I imagine may also be used for cooking / heating as well.
I'm more curious about the stability of the fuel over the long term if it isn't cycled often, where I imagine propane / NG has an advantage, but I guess if you're using it as backup to solar and wind, there's an expectation that you'll go through a couple tanks a winter regardless so stability isn't as much of an issue.
Propane and methane are very different, and you should be careful about the differences if you use either. Propane is almost always sold as liquefied propane gas (LPG) at a relatively low pressure, whereas natural gas is almost always sold in its pressurized or compressed gaseous form. The most important difference is that if you have a natural gas leak, it will 'float' in the air, and dissipate; propane will (dangerously) 'sink', and pool around the source, and is liable to explode. Indoor propane installations should always have at least one propane detector.
That article is from 2015. The bulk of natural gas infrastructure is self powered these days because declines in gas prices since then have made that a comparatively better option in more places and the natural attrition and upgrade cycle of equipment.
It does make sense - just not by the metrics you're judging it. If what you care about is carbon emissions, electrical power is better. If what you care about is system reliability native fuel power is better.
A lot of times when people say 'Thing thing makes no sense' what they mean is 'This thing doesn't agree with my priorities'
> That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the Permian Basin — the state’s most productive oil and natural gas basin — had unwittingly shut off some of the state’s power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages.
> When Texas deregulated its electricity market in the early 2000s, making supply and demand the primary forces for the price of power and increasing competition, wholesale power prices fell. That made it cheaper to electrify natural gas compressor stations and other equipment rather than the traditional method of using the natural gas produced in the field to run the compressor’s turbines or engines, energy experts said.
> Much the the state's natural gas production and processing were struggling during the storm even before they lost power because of the weather, causing problems at the wellhead and the plants. But the failures were exacerbated by widespread power outages in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale, creating gaps where the gas could not be delivered to the gas-fired power plants that desperately needed supplies to generate electricity.
> At the peak, more than half of the state's natural gas supplies were knocked offline by power losses, according to ERCOT, causing at least 20% of the total power outages during the week.
https://geekprepper.com/how-long-will-natural-gas-last-witho...