Comment by thfuran
2 days ago
Building heating won’t see much increase in efficiency from going electric compared to a high efficiency gas furnace.
2 days ago
Building heating won’t see much increase in efficiency from going electric compared to a high efficiency gas furnace.
A 4x efficiency bump is fairly easy (.9 efficient gas to 3.6 COP heat pump). Older non-condensing boilers (or modern condensing boilers run too hot) are more like .8 when new and messured at .6 in real life circumstances.
Even at the high end efficiency, this is enough that you can burn the gas centrally in a generator, lose 40-60% of it as heat as is standard with fossil electricity generation, lose a few percent more electricity in transmission and still come out ahead overall.
And of course, that's a lower bound as you'd ideally be generating electricity from other sources like solar and wind and battery and keeping the gas generators for when needed, making use of the giant scale gas storage most countries already have.
Hrm? Heat pumps are multiples more efficient than gas.