Thanks for feedback, everyone. Just to clarify a few items:
1.
I am only worried about the logistics of the (unlikely) multi-day no-natgas, no-electric scenario.
If we have natgas but not electric, we can use our stove which gives us lots of options for keeping ourselves and our pipes (which come in through kitchen wall) warm, in addition to cooking food. Natgas furnace (our secondary heating source when temps are very low) would not work without electric though.
If we have electric but not natgas, we can keep our home warm with our ASHP (even inefficiently at lower temps) and warm up food with various appliances.
If both are non-functional for a few hours, that’s an inconvenience but not that big a deal.
The issue comes when we’re talking about multiple days without either at sub-freezing temps. My worry is that in the event of natgas supply shortage, it may lead to both natgas and electric being offline, since about 35% of electric generation in the Northeast is from natgas. I don’t know how fungible these are with one another in practice nor how much is allocated to reserves for each bucket.
Based on the proportion of regional natgas imports that comes from LNG vs existing pipelines though (many thanks to @Chris for pulling those numbers), this scenario seems unlikely. Further, given that the Northeast is linked to the rest of the US east grid, there should be some mechanism to pull power from other regions in emergency scenario (unlike in the Texas case from 2021). And the US as a whole is fairly energy-independent and secure.
2.
Keeping baby warm.
I’m due to give birth in January. The worst winter weather out here tends to happen mid-Jan through early April.
We plan to baby wear, so I feel like if we can keep our core body temps warm enough, we should be able to keep baby warm enough. But obviously it would not be ideal to deal with newborn during a multi-day blackout. Doing this for days without break could be dangerous from higher likelihood of us making a deadly mistake, like falling asleep ourselves with baby strapped to our chest, which could lead to accidental asphyxiation. And we’re already going to be tired. But in a pinch I think we could make it work.
3.
Isn’t this basically the same as preparing for a multi-day blackout due to blizzard?
In my opinion, what I’m imagining is a pretty different circumstance, because:
- Blizzard blackouts that we’ve experienced have mostly been due to power line failures, we’ve never really had to worry about losing natgas at the same time.
- Since we’re in a dense area (city), we’ve never in my 10 years here had a blackout more than a few hours since there are too many (frankly, very affluent) people affected for utility to ignore. So even a multi-day blackout would be pretty unheard of.
- Blackouts tend to be super duper localized and we have a lot of friends in the broader region, so usually it’d be easy for us to bug out to our in-laws an hour a way or any number of friends if we needed to get outta dodge. This wouldn’t be an option if this was a regional issue.
Honestly, if we lived in a place where we’d expect frequent blackouts, we’d probably have a whole-home generator by now.
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For what it’s worth, after some reflection, I think my central worry (multi-day no natgas/electric) is fairly unlikely. There are some steps I plan to take to make ourselves more emergency-resilient, e.g. getting us either portable or installed backup solar batteries, low-wattage electric (or propane/kerosene) heating sources like electric blankets as backups, have some more high-volume no-cooking-required shelf-stable foods on hand (we already have a few tins of olive oil and my has-freaking-everything prenatals that can get us calories/vitamins in desperate circumstances), extra gasoline for the car if we need to bug out, refresh our emergency water in storage, etc. Also: get our friends and family to take stock and figure out their emergency plan in case of a blackout. But, in general, I think we’ll be okay.