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Comment by mikorym | Hacker News Reader

Electric heating can be a pain when compared to gas heating. Gas heating in Europe is rather efficient and I expect it to continue for a long time even as other energy uses are switched to renewables. In the comments someone mentioned that electricity in "East Bay Community Energy [gives the option of 100% renewable energy]".

I would conclude that this is a move that is specifically useful and possible for Berkeley, but not necessarily for e.g. European countries at the moment.

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> Electric heating can be a pain when compared to gas heating

How? I've never used gas, but electricity is plain simple. Just plug whatever in any outlet and turn it on, how is that a pain?

The pain is in the form of a far higher monthly bill.

In the UK, gas is ~ £0.03 per kWh whereas electricity is ~ £0.13 kWh.

Additional data point for Belgium: €0.04 KWh for gas and €0.30 KWh for electricity. You'd need a COP of 7.5 in order for a heat-pump to be at cost parity of natural gas.

And yet, the Energy Saving Trust suggests that it can save 100 pounds a year even compared with a modern gas system, and much better against all other alternatives.

I'm not sure if those numbers include government incentives but if they do then they're still a good proxy for the actual costs with a reasonable carbon tax included to internalize externalities.

> And yet, the Energy Saving Trust suggests that it can save 100 pounds a year even compared with a modern gas system, and much better against all other alternatives

By switching to a heat pump system?

Yep.

https://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/renewable-energy/heat/a...

See the section headed: "Potential annual savings of installing a standard air source heat pump in an average sized, four-bedroom detached home:"

Also details the carbon saved, which some people might consider important as well, depends on the relative weight you place on "saving money in the near future" vs "causing the end of civilization as we know it".

What is the principle at work behind a heat pump?

It's a fridge running backwards. Gasses expand soaking up heat, then you compress them and it ejects the heat. Then you repeat the cycle.

You dump the heat outside if you're cooling (fridge or AC) or inside if you're heating.

The slightly unintuitive bit is that you can still extract heat even from something that would feel "cold" to a human as long as there's enough of it. Making a big volume slightly colder can make a small volume much warmer (or vice versa).

You don’t just “plug in” the type of electric heater that can heat a large space such as an entire home. It’s wildly inefficient and there are safety concerns with constantly plugged in space heaters.

Well, frankly one does. A heater on some of the walls has been enough for our family home in Norway for decades. Not sure how it's "wildly inefficient". Could always install a heat pump if so.

And if it were true that one cannot just plug in some heaters, one would then have to integrate something better into one's home... how is that still more pain than having to exactly that for the gas to work? Not sure about the safety concerns are anything compared to burning gas, either.

This law is for new buildings, and it makes complete sense to only install heat pumps instead of resistive heaters in new buildings.

I asked a friend in Florida what she has to heat her house. She has a heat pump with an air handler. For both heating/cooling. And that's just gob standard in her area because, no city gas.

I feel like because this regulation is for new construction it'll have essentially zero negative effect on anyone.

Perhaps the electrical standards in Europe allow for it, but in the US, a normal plug outlet is not designed to safely transfer the kind of power needed to heat a home for long periods of time. I’ve also never dealt with a situation where a place needed to be retrofitted with a heating solution, in which case running electrical wires might be just as much work as gas lines, but way more expensive in the long run in the US as gas prices are super cheap.

Two problems:

- main fuse would blow up

- your head would blow up from electricity bill

I belive the Netherlands passed a similar law recently.

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