> The article makes the point that for heating Because the article has no clue what the discussion is in Germany. There is right now no cheap surplus clean el

> The article makes the point that for heating Because the article has no clue what the discussion is in Germany. There is right now no cheap surplus clean electricity for heating. The so-called 'free electricity' simply does not exist. What is free is SOMETIMES electricity traded on the spot market, which is not necessary available when the consumer needs it for heating and not necessarily in the amount that it would be useful. That heating is not done via electricity is because it's simply not currently a part of the energy policy in Germany to promote electrical heating on a large scale. It's also not seen as a useful consumption of surplus energy in the next decade. The topics which are discussed are heat pumps, combined-cycle power plants, better insulation, zero-energy houses (which don't need much heating, but need electricity for air distribution), centralized district-level heating, electrical heating from local PV installations, adding gas generated from electricity to the gas distribution, pellet heating, solar, ... The cost for a complete electrification of the heating market is estimated to be 2 trillion Euro. That's far away. There is a plan to disallow new oil heating from 2026 onwards, but there is no plan to support direct electrical heating with incentives. There will be incentives for heat pumps, but the achievable market share is not large in the next years. > Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market. Because it was/is not wanted. This may change, but there are many experts saying that it is currently not useful to promote direct electrical heating and heat pumps are currently not a large scale solution. Also: Currently the price (different from what is claimed in the article) for electrical heating is too high in Germany. The next main usage for electricity probably will be for electric vehicles and the infrastructure for that will be expensive to build. Thus investments will be needed for the electricity used to decarbonize energy in traffic. The main reasons why Germany isn't currently using electrical heating (besides heat pumps, etc), is that on a large scale electricity usage in other areas has a preference, electricity for heating currently is expensive (the 'free electricity' is a myth) and building the infrastructure would be very expensive.