And a word about gas refrigerators:  the full scale models, most popular in the US in the 1930s, were plumbed directly into household gas lines; they were terrific machines, especially when compared with the smaller, portable versions which run off propane tanks.

But specific to this situation, the reason that Ameren is as big as it is is that the previous CEO expanded it by looting the maintenance budget for money to invest in leveraged buyouts of rival utilities that (he argued) were less profitable than they could have been because they were still budgeting  for routine maintenance. Investors gobbled this up. It was the perfect example of privatized gain and socialized loss; he demonstrated that if you skip the routine maintenance, when the whole system fails, you can get federal disaster relief money to cover the maintenance you put off.

FWIW, a compresor fridge could be powered by a gas motor rather than an electric one.

It seems just as likely that the big companies went compressor because they had the research to show that they’d be more successful than GA. 

I’m also curious why to this day GA fridges remain such a nice product, particularly after the freon scares of the 80′s?

Umm…  Sounds like one of the reasons this country is messed up.  

Err, yes they do: http://autos.aol.com/article/car-design/

Single point of failure systems annoy me on a deep-seated level.

I took several of Professor Cowan’s history of science classes when I was getting my undergraduate degree at SUNY Stony Brook.

She would have written this at about that time.

Here in St. Louis, not that many years ago, we went through three city-wide blackouts in two years. (All caused by the same root cause, the previous electric company CEO had nearly zeroed out the maintenance budget.) All three blackouts lasted for multiple days, one over them over a week.

Having lived in an RV, it occurred to me at the time to wonder if there were kitchen-sized versions of what most high-end RVs have. It’s called a Two-Way Refrigerator. When 120v AC is available, it runs on electricity; unplug it, and it automatically switches over to propane. If people had those, only natural gas instead of propane (almost every home in the St. Louis area is plumbed for natural gas, most of our furnaces and water heaters run on it), they wouldn’t have lost the entire contents of their refrigerators three times in two years. I remember thinking, at the time, that the next time I had a chance to remodel a kitchen I’d look into that.

Gas-powered ammonia condensation refrigerators are the norm, not the exception, for boating and RV use. I spent a couple of years living with one in my ’89 Pace Arrow 37J, the “Libertalia,” and that gas-powered refrigerator may have been the least troublesome, most reliable component on that whole antique land yacht. And yes, it was way, way quieter than any refrigerator I’ve ever owned. I was just fine with it.

I knew a guy who bought one for his house, for energy conservation purposes, and he loved it, but the rest of his family hated it. If you have teenagers in the house, or anybody else with the atrocious habit of standing there dithering with the refrigerator door open, you’ll have problems with a gas powered ammonia-condensation refrigerator: if it gets warm inside, it’s much slower to cool down, and food will spoil. Break yourself (and your kids and/or spouse, if any) of that bad habit and it’s a lovely machine, especially if you keep it full for the extra thermal mass.

And yes, they hum.

And no, they don’t work very well.