> This is stupid. Burning gas on-site for heat is far more efficient than burning something far away, turning it into electricity at max 60% efficiency (usually

> This is stupid. Burning gas on-site for heat is far more efficient than burning something far away, turning it into electricity at max 60% efficiency (usually more like 30-40%), transmitting it through the grid, and then putting it through a resistance heater. Since I read your comment I've been trying to do the math on this. Obviously modern houses aren't going to use resistance heaters, they're going to use efficient heat pump/AC units. So let's assume (worst case) that the entire CA grid burns gas (i.e., no nuclear or renewables), and that only 40% of the energy from each unit of gas burned at a power plant actually reaches a home in the form of electricity. Let's also assume a fancy 90% efficient gas furnace vs. a standard 300% efficient heat pump. So by my napkin math, for every unit of gas burned at the power plant the electric solution is getting us 40%*300%=120% of one unit worth of heat energy pumped into our home. Whereas for the same amount of gas (and assuming gas distribution consumes no energy, which is obviously silly), the gas furnace is getting us 90% of one unit of heat energy into our home. I'm probably not computing this correctly, but my naive understanding is that this means 33% more heat for a given fuel usage (and CO2 emissions production) when using a heat pump vs. burning fuel in the house. But on top of that, CA's electric grid isn't burning just natural gas. It's burning a mix of different fuels, some of which are dirtier than natural gas, and some of which are low- or zero-CO2 emissions. This is before we consider the mandate to add solar to new houses. So presumably even today, using an electric-based system will give even better CO2 results than the mere 33% improvement in heat-per-unit-CO2 would seem to give us if we assume everything is powered by natural gas. Maybe this is wrong, but I'm really struggling to see why we would pump gas into our house and burn it under these conditions.