That seems incredibly short-sighted. Currently, using electricity for heating generates significantly more CO2 than natural gas and you can always switch to electric heating when the sources become more renewable.
In Berkeley you can probably slap a small number of solar panels on the roof to produce more electricity than you need for heating (and cooling).
Where I live, Norway, a lot of houses have gotten these retrofitted.
My parents recently added an air heatpump to their existing (wood) heating system without changing radiators. They Installed a new boiler (water tank, not sure about the translation) where the top half is heated by the heat pump and they can optionally heat the whole tank using the old wood heater.
Finally, burning natural gas inputs additional heat energy into our atmosphere, with the gas-burner inputting 3x more heat into our atmosphere compared to the electric heat pump. A solar panel solution doesn't add more heat to the atmosphere. It takes energy that was going to get absorbed by the atmosphere anyway and concentrates it inside a building for localized heating. Except for the second hand effect of some of sunlight that would have reflected off from the roof back into space, now being dispersed as high entropy heat into the atmosphere.
Not to mention that if you use solar
[1] This is assuming that the power plant is a hybrid natural gas one (60% max efficiency) so 5*0.6 = 3. And the in-building natural gas heater is 100% efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump#Thermal_e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-source_heat_pumps#Efficien...
These numbers don't account for transmission losses or power plant inefficiencies. But even if you low ball things you likely save some CO2 over just burning the gas for heat, e.g. take the power plant and transmission efficiency to be about 0.4 and even with a poor heatpump efficiency of 2.5 you break even. Not to mention that the heatpump runs on renewable energy without further investment once the power grid is modernized.
This is a function of how big the radiators are and how cold the heat reservoir is, so if you plug an air->water device into some normal radiators its performance won't be good on a really cold day, whereas if you plug a ground->water or water->water device into underfloor heating it'll probably be pretty good.
The big question (in the UK) for per-dwelling heat pumps is whether the distribution network has enough capacity to meet the winter peak load - if everyone gets a heat pump the cost might have to include replacing a lot of substations and distribution wires.
I am interested in the question of whether you could have PV cells on your roof with a coolant loop that goes into a heat pump, and a thermal store in the house for buffering. Then when it's sunny you can dump some electrical heat into your thermal store whilst also use your heat pump to chill the PV cells, keeping them at high efficiency. When it's not sunny you can draw off your thermal store giving a high efficiency for the pump.
If the numbers came out right you might be able to be self-sufficient for heat using something like this, just by making good use of the radiation already falling on the house.
Also if you're running a heat pump having one big central heat pump with a big thermal store can allow you to get better conversion ratio from electricity to heat.
I love the sense of class humor in Berkeley weather. Down in the affordable flats, the fog often clears. Up in the "four bridge view" hills, not so often. Annual sun striking the entire roof would still generate more electricity than needed, but there's that storage problem.
Do you have a source for this? It may vary per locality I guess. From the article: " in Berkeley, electricity is cleaner than gas: at least 78% carbon-free."
So it's important to use the best technology at the consumption side.
This new policy, on a global level, will cause the emission of more co2, and is thus incredibly shortsighted.
All this law does is promote the dirty energy industry.
I don't follow this statement at all. There's not a limit[0] on the amount of energy that can be supplied from renewable sources.
Preferentially purchasing green or greener energy sends a signal to the market to develop more green energy generation capabilities to meet those demands.
[0] within reason. Obviously there's limits to the amount of energy we can harness from renewable sources, but those limits are far higher than our total energy needs.
Yes there is, the limit is how many power plants have been currently built.
So this new ban by Berkeley is very very foolish and counterproductive. Right now, today, by making people heat with electricity instead of natural gas, they force additional electrical generation with coal or natural gas, and since there is a ton of transmission waste, it's even worse.
Well that's obvious nonsense.
Usually I laugh when the Berkeley City Council tries to save the world (broadcasting its deliberations would make a great reality TV show), but in this case, it makes sense: the imbecile heaters used in the Bay Area seem designed to heat the outdoors. It boggles my mind they can't figure out how to buy gas heaters from the East Coast where they're designed to heat the inside of the house.
There's no net-zero carbon options on the market for natural gas. So installing gas-fired options for heating/cooling means that you don't have the option of choosing from a green energy source.
Installing electrical heating means that you do have that option - you can reduce the amount of energy you need through local energy production (solar PV, solar hot water), you can store energy locally reducing the need for off-site generation, and you can choose to purchase power from off-site generators that are cleaner.
coal is always kind of lurking in the background though.
It's all mixed together.
[1] https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/ho...