A nice idea but I don't see how this is going to work given the age of a lot of California houses.
A good chunk of California houses built in the 20th Century don't have the upgraded electrical to make this a drop-in replacement. It's likely to move to an electric furnace or water heater most houses will have to drop in a new electrical panel and run a new to wire the furnace room. That's $2-3K right there before the cost of a furnace or water heater.
Given that you'll almost certainly pull permits, you'll probably then discover that your current furnace room doesn't match current building code, costing even more money to fix, if it's even fixable.
Not to mention the ridiculous cost of the onerous permit needed from some non-self-sufficient government agency, notably in a state that is highly hostile toward new housings.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly and that's not what this site is for.
I'm talking about comment quality. Even if we assume you're right about everything, your comment was still the kind of sensational-indignant rhetoric that is so common on the internet, but which HN users are asked not to post here. We want thoughtful, curious conversation—an altogether different animal.
almost all true, except for your last part. “they” and “useless eaters” were only mentioned in Dr. John A. Coleman’s “300 Committee”, book page 105, and no place else.
I'd imagine most of those homes already have air conditioners. Aren't the electrical requirements of a mini-split pretty close to a couple window units? I'm pretty sure our five-head 12K BTU Mitsubishi is on a 15 amp double pole breaker.
I have a small sample size, but I've lived in several dwellings in california with natural gas furnace, natural gas water heater and no a/c. If there were any window units, they were on 120vac.
So what is the alternative here? Keep on using natural gas and ignore the effects it has on the environment and air quality? If California - one of the richest areas in the world, which for the most part has a very mild climate - cannot switch away from natural gas, how is anyone else expected to?
Almost all at-home gas usage is after the sun has gone down, as a result the vast majority of the electricity used for the alternative would be generated from natural gas not just 38%.
>As long as 38% of electricity is being generated from natural gas, banning natural gas usage in homes is silly.
Generating electricity in a large gas power plant, transmitting that electricity over vast differences, and then turning that electricity into heat, motive power, or light is much, MUCH **MUUUUUUUCH** more efficient than piping gas all over the place and burning the gas in homes.
By, like, a lot.
With gas burners the vast majority of energy is wasted, blasted out into the ambient air. In a turbine it is almost all turned into whatever is desired. Once at the home immersed heating elements or inductive elements turn most of the electricity into what is desired.
Transmission losses are irrelevantly small compared to the astronomically huge increases in efficiency of the endpoints.
Same goes for cars. Even if power plants used gasoline, which they don’t, it would be more efficient to burn the gasoline to generate electricity in huge generators, transmit the electricity a thousand miles, and use it to charge batteries in EVs.
If a house doesn’t have the capacity to switch to electric, subsidize improvements. If the grid can’t handle it, fix it.
Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Greater than 85% of the heat generated in a water heater, and 95% in a boiler is captured. For electricity it's closer to 60%. Your "vast majority" is completely backwards.
Your info is utterly wrong about natural gas efficiency.
> Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
That's better than doing things that are known to be worse. Like electric water heaters.
Whoever told you electric water heaters are 60% was either mistaken or a gas lobbyist.
The minimum efficiency for electric water heaters, required by federal law, is 90%.
Electric heat pump water heaters have efficiency ratings in excess of 100%, often over 200% when measured by the same standard as “traditional” heaters.
The efficiency of an electric plant is 60%. Many are as low as 45%.
You have a serious blind spot, or wilful ignorance about natural gas vs electricity.
A natural gas water heater easily eclipses any electric one.
A heat pump water heater just barely is better, in some, warm climates, and only if you barely use water (their recovery rate is so low they basically only work in 2 person households). For most people it is NOT better.
Ah I see you googled "efficiency of a gas power plant" and ran with the first result.
Excellent!
The efficiencies of gas power plants are not measured in the same way as water heaters and the two numbers are not comparable. It is also not because turbines generate more power. They do, but most vessel's speed is limited by physics, not the amount of oomph they can put into the screws.
Think of it this way: if gas turbines were less efficient that boilers, why has every navy on the entire planet moved away from boilers? It ain't because maintenance is easier or costs are lower with turbines, that's for sure.
Gas turbines compress the gas. They are much more efficient than dribbling gas out of an orifice at 1 ATM and getting a nice blue flame out of it.
Also, good job ignoring the fact that you were wrong about water heater efficiency and then dismissing my correction and then immediately changing the thrust of your argument.
It warms my heart to see that people never change.
Finally, your information about heat pumps is extremely outdated, from the 80s or 90s, I'm assuming you're older and don't keep up with technological developments? (or are an oil and gas lobbyist)
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Personal attacks, name-calling, and snark are not ok on HN. Your comment here is stuffed with them. Seriously not cool.
> Generating electricity in a large gas power plant, transmitting that electricity over vast differences, and then turning that electricity into heat, motive power, or light is much, MUCH *MUUUUUUUCH* more efficient than piping gas all over the place and burning the gas in homes.
> By, like, a lot.
Source?? Modern gas furnaces are 95% efficient. So only 5% of the energy in the fuel is lost.
You lose around 5% of your energy just transmitting electricity from the power plant to the home, let alone the pitiful performance of the turbine.
> Converting gas into BTUs by burning it in a power plant and transmitting it to a home is much better than burning it in the home.
This is utterly false, as multiple people, and multiple sources of data have shown you.
At this point you either have to update your knowledge and accept reality, or acknowledge that you are being willfully ignorant, and quit making false statements.
I understand you believe this, but can you explain this discrepancy between the water heaters? I figure by the least efficient electric heater you mean a resistive one, so it's close to 100% efficiency, right? There are plenty 90% and 95% AFUE gas heaters on the market, let's say 90% is the most efficient so it should be using 1.1x more energy than a 100% efficient resistive heater but in your numbers the gas heater uses 1.33x more energy. I.e. you claim the most efficient gas heater is 75% AFUE? I don't think these are even legal to sell in the US any more.
That cost is atypical. It’s usually $2-4k, and there are income based subsidies available in the Inflation Reduction Act (and no income limit if the panel upgraded is required as part of a rooftop solar install; it too is eligible for a 30% federal tax credit).
Atypical? Based on what? That's the normal cost to rewire a house and upgrade service in California unless you're talking about some podunk town in the Central Valley.
Just had a friend have the work done an hour out of Sacramento for the price I mentioned. I’m aware of the California tax, but $15k wildly deviates from the median unless your utility is requiring a service entrance upgrade under concrete.
It costs $3-5k for an electrician in that part of the country to get off their arse and sign off on an already completed installation. Throw in the permitting procedure and everything else involved, and I'm moderately surprised it's so cheap. There's a reason such a high percentage of homes in the area have illegal lofts/porches/bedrooms/stoves/....
Given the power required to replace a decent gas boiler, I hope Cali can afford to build 5x the current number of power stations and then have them sit idle for 22h a day...
Is a "space heater" (the official term) the same thing as a "furnace" (from the headline)? IOW, are they saying that a typical legacy "central air" HVAC system in a single family residence (or multi-unit building for that matter) with a gas furnace cannot be replaced after the cut-off date?
I wonder if you can make a heat pump water heater that can plug into a regular 20amp circuit as a simple retrofit. Performance will be poor/slow but landlords don’t care
How does California propose this will work? They already have grid/power problems, rolling blackouts, limits on EV charging. Are they so ideologically bent that they ignore reality and simply punish the residents of the state? The poorer, less mobile population will be hit the hardest. The Ellisons, Zuckerbergs, Newsoms, et al are flush and mobile, assuming the rules even apply to them.
Global warming isn’t going to go on hiatus for 50 years for new tech and power grids to be slowly foot draggedly adopted out of industry’s own volition.
California is being a climate leader and people are constantly naysaying and seem like almost like they hope CA fails.
What should we do? sit back and let the world burn or make an effort to prevent it?
The world is not going to burn if people use gas heaters. Not using gas heaters does not prevent anything bad from happening, or cause anything good to happen.
An electric water heater does NOT help the environment - quite the opposite, it makes things worse, since 38% of electricity is generated from natural gas, which is less efficient than just burning the gas at home.
What should we do? We should build nuclear plants, at least a hundred of them.
Heat pump water heaters are drastically more energy efficient. Also, there are immediate air quality improvements from not burning fracked gas in your home. Also, recent research has shown that methane leaks happen far more than previously realized at every stage of the natural gas ecosystem, from initial extraction to pipelines to refining to residential usage, and every gram of methane is equivalent to something like 30 grams of CO2, so you need to consider the massive savings in warming from reducing that systemic leakage.
Finally, it's important to get these processes started immediately. It's still going to take decades for this policy to result in the millions of houses updating their equipment, and we might be down to a far smaller percent of grid power coming from fossil fuels by then.
> Heat pump water heaters are drastically more energy efficient.
And also don't work in most of the United States. They are very slow, and only work in places with warm climates - in cold places they are dumping their cold into the living area, which then has to heat it.
On top of that the incoming water is cold, and they don't do a good job heating it.
I've looking into buying one, and they just don't work in cold climates. They could work in California, true, but are they mandating that? Nope. They are just eliminating gas.
Libertarian anti regulation think takes are not a reliable source for opinions on new regulation. It’s like going to a peta or vegan website to see their opinion on whether more meat eating would be good.
I have the same personal experience with those horrible CARB gas cans. You can google it if you need other experiences.
I spilled so much gas using one of those CARB gas cans I couldn't believe it. I then went online and bought a normal spout and have not spilled anything since.
Every since then I assume anything from CARB is going to be bad.
Quote from the starting paragraphs of an article on fee is like satire of libertarians “ I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice”
Omg my toilet doesn’t use several gallons of water any more, it’s the horrible regs!!! I remember toilets from the 80s/90s. The ones I saw clogged easier than modern toilets and even better, they used so much water that when they clogged there was a significant chance they’d over flow. Yay poop water!
There you go, one incident that shows the libertarian principle on regulations is terrible. If I use the logic from your comment that means all regulations are good, even although the example was niche. I’m not going to make that claim about all regs, there’s some bad ones but don’t get info from libertarians on what regs are good or not.
Okay throw the baby out with the bath water if you will. Carb as a whole is terrible because of gas cans, one of a large number of things they’ve done?? And because of that all regs they are now proposing are bad?
And for what it’s worth I used a new 5 gal gas can from CA recently and it was a little fiddly for sure but didn’t seem that bad … and I’ll admit it’s the first one I’ve used so I dunno. Maybe it is that bad and I had a good one but I’ll take a few missteps by Ronald Reagan’s regulatory agency since it means I can breath in LA. Where’s all that smog go?
Excellent advice, but in this case the libertarian anti-regulation think tanks are right: CARB compliant gasoline containers are a great example of how good intentions can have negative effects when decision makers are divorced from reality.
Walking freely into an alley with a mugger isn’t “being green”. Their foolhardy decision to become dependent on Russia is the cause of the current crisis, being green doesnt mean go buy Russian fissile fuels.
As Europe is demonstrating right now, in their case using fossil fuels means being prone to blackmail by dictators, and worse: subsidizing some of those same dictators to wage war against Europe.
Like so many people, the nations of the EU thought they still had time.
Now, belatedly, European governments see it as a direct national security imperative to switch to non-fossil sources as quickly as possible.
If as many people as possible switch, the price of fuel goes down (due to people not using it), and the cost of replacement systems also goes down (due to increased efficiencies of scale in production). This is thus also the best way to mitigate the consequences for the poor.
“The move will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower utility bills for consumers.”
I looked at my most recent PG&E gas bill. Electricity costs me about $0.35/kWh. Gas costs about $2/therm (which a quick internet search says is equivalent to $0.07/kWh).
How will switching from gas to electricity ‘lower utility bills for consumers’?
In many parts of the world, gas prices are going through the roof. Mostly because prices in Europe are over the moon and EU countries are buying every last wisp of gas on the international market (and thus driving prices up there too) .
Do you have a fixed contract or so? How have you managed to avoid noticing so far?
Unfortunately I get an access denied on that particular page.
If gas prices haven't gone up yet where you live, that's pretty awesome for you in some ways. But don't take it for granted. Enjoy it while it lasts, and maybe use the time to get a good price on replacements.
California utilities are just pass-through delivery agents for natural gas -- they just charge cost + % to service. Gas prices can vary greatly depending on demand.
What the current push against consumer access to natural gas ignores is that there is a lot of natural gas produced as a byproduct of producing other oil drilling products, and if not consumed for useful purposes it just gets burned off into the atmosphere directly.
Coming from the gas starved Europe of 2022 [1], I am somewhat discombobulated by the fact that someone can still be so calm and detached about natural gas! So I went and looked at some numbers.
It turns out that the USA hasn't felt the current natural gas situation as much because it's a major natural gas exporter itself, and likely maintains large strategic reserves besides.
Still, even in the US, at very least the price on the futures market has roughly doubled if we take say 2019/2020 as the baseline. [2]
[1] In eg Netherlands and Germany the majority of homes use natural gas for heating. Due to a combination of Covid instabilities and the Ukraine war, consumer gas prices have reached record highs. Different sources quote different ratios [3] but I could pin one source down on claiming a factor of 5* compared to a couple of years ago.
[3] Depending on if you factor in government compensation, whether it's a projection or a spot price, etc. And I can understand people wanting to hedge their reporting a bit, because the numbers are a little crazy right now.
In February Russia invaded Ukraine, and Europe and Russia responded by levying sanctions and counter-sanctions. However the EU was rather dependent on Russian gas, so they couldn't act as rapidly as they'd have liked.
If there had previously been an EU directive to "divest from natural gas by 2020-2025", the situation would be somewhat different. Even if the EU was only half-way, that would still have left them in a much better position.
* There would be less reason to invade Ukraine, since the gas infrastructure would have been worth less to an invader.
* Without a need to appease Russia, The European Union could have reacted a lot faster and sharper than it did.
* Russian analysts would have been able to predict some of this ahead of time, and possibly advised against war in the first place.
Thus: EU countries (especially Germany) would have been a lot better off if they had eliminated their dependency on non-renewable sources sooner. Especially for private use.
To be fair, they thought they had more time. Unfortunately it turns out they didn't.
So instead of using gas directly, we’ll convert it to electricity first? Will the extra efficiency of heat pumps counteract the losses from generating and distributing electricity?
Since a reasonable air conditioner or heat pump can easily hit a Coefficient of Performance around 3, I'd say the odds are good. And these systems can be used for both heating and cooling.
Of course, once you've switched to electricity, you then have the flexibility to (later) swap out the back end for something else that is cheaper/less polluting/some other optimization-du-jour.
Gas turbine power stations are about 50% efficient. So you need 2x on that heat pump just to break even. You might get that if it's the same temperature inside as outside. But for heating water in winter? Never.
76 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadA good chunk of California houses built in the 20th Century don't have the upgraded electrical to make this a drop-in replacement. It's likely to move to an electric furnace or water heater most houses will have to drop in a new electrical panel and run a new to wire the furnace room. That's $2-3K right there before the cost of a furnace or water heater.
Given that you'll almost certainly pull permits, you'll probably then discover that your current furnace room doesn't match current building code, costing even more money to fix, if it's even fixable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Almost had it.
As long as 38% of electricity is being generated from natural gas, banning natural gas usage in homes is silly.
Heat pumps at least help, but simply replacing with electric water heater and electric stoves actually hurts the environment more!
Generating electricity in a large gas power plant, transmitting that electricity over vast differences, and then turning that electricity into heat, motive power, or light is much, MUCH **MUUUUUUUCH** more efficient than piping gas all over the place and burning the gas in homes.
By, like, a lot.
With gas burners the vast majority of energy is wasted, blasted out into the ambient air. In a turbine it is almost all turned into whatever is desired. Once at the home immersed heating elements or inductive elements turn most of the electricity into what is desired.
Transmission losses are irrelevantly small compared to the astronomically huge increases in efficiency of the endpoints.
Same goes for cars. Even if power plants used gasoline, which they don’t, it would be more efficient to burn the gasoline to generate electricity in huge generators, transmit the electricity a thousand miles, and use it to charge batteries in EVs.
If a house doesn’t have the capacity to switch to electric, subsidize improvements. If the grid can’t handle it, fix it.
Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Greater than 85% of the heat generated in a water heater, and 95% in a boiler is captured. For electricity it's closer to 60%. Your "vast majority" is completely backwards.
Your info is utterly wrong about natural gas efficiency.
> Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
That's better than doing things that are known to be worse. Like electric water heaters.
The minimum efficiency for electric water heaters, required by federal law, is 90%.
Electric heat pump water heaters have efficiency ratings in excess of 100%, often over 200% when measured by the same standard as “traditional” heaters.
https://smarterhouse.org/water-heating/replacing-your-water-...
You have a serious blind spot, or wilful ignorance about natural gas vs electricity.
A natural gas water heater easily eclipses any electric one.
A heat pump water heater just barely is better, in some, warm climates, and only if you barely use water (their recovery rate is so low they basically only work in 2 person households). For most people it is NOT better.
Excellent!
The efficiencies of gas power plants are not measured in the same way as water heaters and the two numbers are not comparable. It is also not because turbines generate more power. They do, but most vessel's speed is limited by physics, not the amount of oomph they can put into the screws.
Think of it this way: if gas turbines were less efficient that boilers, why has every navy on the entire planet moved away from boilers? It ain't because maintenance is easier or costs are lower with turbines, that's for sure.
Gas turbines compress the gas. They are much more efficient than dribbling gas out of an orifice at 1 ATM and getting a nice blue flame out of it.
Also, good job ignoring the fact that you were wrong about water heater efficiency and then dismissing my correction and then immediately changing the thrust of your argument.
It warms my heart to see that people never change.
Finally, your information about heat pumps is extremely outdated, from the 80s or 90s, I'm assuming you're older and don't keep up with technological developments? (or are an oil and gas lobbyist)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> By, like, a lot.
Source?? Modern gas furnaces are 95% efficient. So only 5% of the energy in the fuel is lost.
You lose around 5% of your energy just transmitting electricity from the power plant to the home, let alone the pitiful performance of the turbine.
[1] https://iwae.com/resources/articles/95-afue-gas-furnace-work...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
The AFUE rating for electric baseboard heating is 100. The AFUE for heat pumps CAN EXCEED 100.
The MOST efficient gas water heaters use 11.9MMBtu/yr.
The LEAST efficient electric water heaters use 8.9MMBtu/yr.
The MOST efficient electric heat pump water heaters use 4.2MMBtu/yr.
Converting gas into BTUs by burning it in a power plant and transmitting it to a home is much better than burning it in the home.
Energy Efficiency Design Options for Residential Water Heaters: Economic Impacts on Consumers
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Environmental Energy Technologies Division
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1016713
This is utterly false, as multiple people, and multiple sources of data have shown you.
At this point you either have to update your knowledge and accept reality, or acknowledge that you are being willfully ignorant, and quit making false statements.
He paid something like $15,000 to upgrade to a 200amp panel.
Not cheap.
This ain't the mid-West.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rheem-introduces-12...
https://www.hpacmag.com/features/heat-pump-interest-growing-...
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/29/120-volt-heat-pump-wate...
California is being a climate leader and people are constantly naysaying and seem like almost like they hope CA fails.
What should we do? sit back and let the world burn or make an effort to prevent it?
What should we do? We should build nuclear plants, at least a hundred of them.
> almost like they hope CA fails.
The California Air Resources Board (CARBS) is responsible for forcing everyone to use special gas nozzles that spill tons of gasoline, while pretending to prevent spills. See: https://fee.org/articles/the-epic-failure-of-the-government-... and https://fee.org/articles/how-government-wrecked-the-gas-can/
The do not exactly have a reputation for intelligent decision making, rather they have a reputation for emotional decision making.
Finally, it's important to get these processes started immediately. It's still going to take decades for this policy to result in the millions of houses updating their equipment, and we might be down to a far smaller percent of grid power coming from fossil fuels by then.
And also don't work in most of the United States. They are very slow, and only work in places with warm climates - in cold places they are dumping their cold into the living area, which then has to heat it.
On top of that the incoming water is cold, and they don't do a good job heating it.
I've looking into buying one, and they just don't work in cold climates. They could work in California, true, but are they mandating that? Nope. They are just eliminating gas.
I have the same personal experience with those horrible CARB gas cans. You can google it if you need other experiences.
I spilled so much gas using one of those CARB gas cans I couldn't believe it. I then went online and bought a normal spout and have not spilled anything since.
Every since then I assume anything from CARB is going to be bad.
Omg my toilet doesn’t use several gallons of water any more, it’s the horrible regs!!! I remember toilets from the 80s/90s. The ones I saw clogged easier than modern toilets and even better, they used so much water that when they clogged there was a significant chance they’d over flow. Yay poop water!
There you go, one incident that shows the libertarian principle on regulations is terrible. If I use the logic from your comment that means all regulations are good, even although the example was niche. I’m not going to make that claim about all regs, there’s some bad ones but don’t get info from libertarians on what regs are good or not.
Okay throw the baby out with the bath water if you will. Carb as a whole is terrible because of gas cans, one of a large number of things they’ve done?? And because of that all regs they are now proposing are bad?
And for what it’s worth I used a new 5 gal gas can from CA recently and it was a little fiddly for sure but didn’t seem that bad … and I’ll admit it’s the first one I’ve used so I dunno. Maybe it is that bad and I had a good one but I’ll take a few missteps by Ronald Reagan’s regulatory agency since it means I can breath in LA. Where’s all that smog go?
Far better to provide incentives to switch to green sources and let people make their own decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
Fissile fuels are definitely starting to look better and better by the month.
Like so many people, the nations of the EU thought they still had time.
Now, belatedly, European governments see it as a direct national security imperative to switch to non-fossil sources as quickly as possible.
If as many people as possible switch, the price of fuel goes down (due to people not using it), and the cost of replacement systems also goes down (due to increased efficiencies of scale in production). This is thus also the best way to mitigate the consequences for the poor.
It's still going to be an interesting winter.
Somewhere along the lines it changed, and it doesn’t look like it’s going back unfortunately.
Maybe we get more use out of the (natural gas powered) peaker plants we have?
I looked at my most recent PG&E gas bill. Electricity costs me about $0.35/kWh. Gas costs about $2/therm (which a quick internet search says is equivalent to $0.07/kWh).
How will switching from gas to electricity ‘lower utility bills for consumers’?
In many parts of the world, gas prices are going through the roof. Mostly because prices in Europe are over the moon and EU countries are buying every last wisp of gas on the international market (and thus driving prices up there too) .
Do you have a fixed contract or so? How have you managed to avoid noticing so far?
The current PG&E tariff information is here: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/Res_Current.xlsx
If gas prices haven't gone up yet where you live, that's pretty awesome for you in some ways. But don't take it for granted. Enjoy it while it lasts, and maybe use the time to get a good price on replacements.
What the current push against consumer access to natural gas ignores is that there is a lot of natural gas produced as a byproduct of producing other oil drilling products, and if not consumed for useful purposes it just gets burned off into the atmosphere directly.
It turns out that the USA hasn't felt the current natural gas situation as much because it's a major natural gas exporter itself, and likely maintains large strategic reserves besides.
Still, even in the US, at very least the price on the futures market has roughly doubled if we take say 2019/2020 as the baseline. [2]
[1] In eg Netherlands and Germany the majority of homes use natural gas for heating. Due to a combination of Covid instabilities and the Ukraine war, consumer gas prices have reached record highs. Different sources quote different ratios [3] but I could pin one source down on claiming a factor of 5* compared to a couple of years ago.
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas.
[3] Depending on if you factor in government compensation, whether it's a projection or a spot price, etc. And I can understand people wanting to hedge their reporting a bit, because the numbers are a little crazy right now.
In February Russia invaded Ukraine, and Europe and Russia responded by levying sanctions and counter-sanctions. However the EU was rather dependent on Russian gas, so they couldn't act as rapidly as they'd have liked.
If there had previously been an EU directive to "divest from natural gas by 2020-2025", the situation would be somewhat different. Even if the EU was only half-way, that would still have left them in a much better position.
* There would be less reason to invade Ukraine, since the gas infrastructure would have been worth less to an invader.
* Without a need to appease Russia, The European Union could have reacted a lot faster and sharper than it did.
* Russian analysts would have been able to predict some of this ahead of time, and possibly advised against war in the first place.
Thus: EU countries (especially Germany) would have been a lot better off if they had eliminated their dependency on non-renewable sources sooner. Especially for private use.
To be fair, they thought they had more time. Unfortunately it turns out they didn't.
So instead of using gas directly, we’ll convert it to electricity first? Will the extra efficiency of heat pumps counteract the losses from generating and distributing electricity?
Of course, once you've switched to electricity, you then have the flexibility to (later) swap out the back end for something else that is cheaper/less polluting/some other optimization-du-jour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance
This is one necessary piece of that jigsaw puzzle.
I mean, expanding electricity generation capacity is not dependent on the existence of electric furnaces.
Unless they plan to generate the additional electricity with the gas that would otherwise have been used to power consumer furnaces.
Then again, you can place the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle down in any order, so perhaps it's not completely wrong?
The analogy wasn't really the important part of my post.
What methane is not sold is flared off.