I've been looking into getting a heat pump in the northern US and for heating it doesn't seem to be worth it quite yet. The problem where I'm at is that it gets very cold and natural gas is pretty cheap but electricity is expensive. I hope this changes soon. It would be a no brainer if I were replacing a resistive heater though.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Not to discount your experience, but heat pumps are remarkably efficient. It would actually use less gas to convert it to electricity at an industrial scale, and then use that to locally power (recent) heat pumps, than it would be to burn the gas inside your home for all of its heat.
It sounds like your area has some politics in play that are either subsidizing gas or surcharging electric. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does put a thumb on the scale.
Stockholm decommissioned its last coal-fired plant in 2020, and its giant heat pumps are a major supplier of heat to the city, along with power plants that burn waste and scrap wood from Sweden’s forestry industry that would otherwise be left to rot. Levihn contends that generating heat and electricity from incinerated waste is more efficient than dumping it in a landfill, although these plants still emit carbon dioxide. Stockholm Exergi is working to install carbon-capture technology in the plants in hopes of making the system net carbon negative, he told me.
"We don't use coal, we just burn waste rather than turning the wood scrap into something useful." Greenwashing at its finest. I suppose the angle is it's "almost" recycling carbon rather than releasing old buried carbon into the atmosphere?
What an odd guilt-laden non-article. It's non-trivial to install underground piping systems in neighborhoods, they then also need a source/sink of heat to power the mechanism, not every neighborhood would have that, not all topographies would support that. Cities already have centralized heating systems that have been around for decades in some building groupings.
Seems it'd make more sense to just install a house-grade heat pump on each home the next time the AC needs to be replaced and some grid-scale solar and/or wind and/or hydro and Bob's your uncle. Toss in some base-load nuclear for good measure. Build out the energy infra enough that resistance or baseboard resistance electric heat can be used for when it's too cold to use a heat pump in the meantime, and then sunset gas furnaces the next time those need to be replaced.
This avoids polluting with big diggers tearing up streets, moving dirt around, possibly destroying gas (causing methane leaks), water, power, Internet infra, and laying new asphalt. No carbon creation by building the piping systems/energy plant and avoids trucking those parts around.
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