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Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap f

Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap for too long, which have incentivized dependency on it despite the CO2 external cost. Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?

oarfish 4y ago
That does exist; In my street they are doing construction work for exactly that purpose, but this is one of the largest cities, no idea how widespread that is.
kuschku 4y ago
All of your suggestions have already been applied. They're already part of the Energiewende.
- landemva 4y ago
  I don't know if downsizing sq ft is part of the energy transition, though I was in a few multi-bedroom houses in Germany which relied on firewood for heating. Also, the book Cooking Without Electricity was published a year ago. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Strom/kochen-ohne-strom_node.html https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Stro...
NikolaNovak 4y ago
Fwiw - I moved to Canada and people basically don't understand there's any other way to heat a house than a basement gas furnace. I guess a combination of harsh winters and cheap gas?
- mh8h 4y ago
  Things are changing in Canada too. Heat pumps are much more common in the past few years.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  In rural Canada you'll find plenty of oil furnaces with their own tanks as well. Some of those are 30 to 40 years old and all of them are terribly inefficient.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    And they are expensive AF to run. I had family members who had an oil-heated house on the Northeast US, and it was close to $2k a month to hear in the winter months (the house was large, something like 3000-3500 sq ft, but that's still an astronomical cost for heating)
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      We're getting into similar territory in Europe with the current gas prices. 3 Euro / cubic meter at my supplier. I never thought that the cost of heating our house would become a factor again in my lifetime but here we are.
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      They need to get their windows fixed!
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Plenty of these old houses have much bigger problems than just the windows (which, in Canada at least in all but the very oldest houses always was double glass, even if it came in the form of an inner and an outer window). Crappy foundations without insulation, roofs and walls with poor insulation, front door directly opening into the house instead of a separate space, almost all of them freestanding (especially rural ones) and relatively large for the number of people living there. Heating in Canada is an interesting problem. -40 Celsius on the other side of a 4" barrier is nothing to take lightly. One elderly couple that I'm aware of had begun to dismantle their house on the inside and they were burning it all up bit-by-bit to stay warm, the two of them sitting around a shitty old pot bellied stove that moved the bulk of the heat generated straight out the chimney. Stuff like that breaks your heart.
- dogsgobork 4y ago
  Until fairly recently heat pumps didn't operate at the temperatures regularly seen in the northern US and Canada. Hard to shift a lifetime of the choices being expensive resistance electric heating or (comparatively) cheaper burning fuel.
- twisteriffic 4y ago
  Really depends on where you are. Parts of Ontario and BC you could probably get away with just a heat pump, but lots of places in the prairies you could only use a heat pump for maybe 1/2 of the winter months. It's just too cold the rest of the time, so you'd have to augment with electric or gas anyways. With the amount of flak raised about infrastructure not being able to handle electric vehicles I can't even imagine the chaos if the prairies went electric heat. I'd really like to see strong baseline energy efficiency standards put in provincially for new builds and a lot of investment in retrofit, but with the current political climate in the prairies that's impossible. Promoting anything that doesn't burn both oil and money is anathema.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    In Quebec, people heat issuing electricity.
- Germanika 4y ago
  Depends on where you are in Canada. In Québec where electricity is cheap, most homes rely on electric heating. Of course, in Alberta where gas is cheap and electric is ~2.5x more expensive it's not surprising gas furnaces are the default choice.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They sort of work now. Advocates usually don’t mention that the solution for the millions of houses with hydronic systems are usually mini-splits, which are both ugly and noisy. Lots of people who don’t have heat pumps are rabid advocates of them. In some cases trying to ban gas heat.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They seem to work okay in many parts of Alaska (down to about -20C): * https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-temperatures-air-source-heat-pumps-keep-homes-warm-from-alaska-coast-to-us-mass-market.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-tempe...
    - woodrow 4y ago
      Parts of Alaska (eg Fairbanks, Juneau) are not as cold as the Canadian prairies, where it frequently gets well below -20C in the depths of winter. In Winnipeg the average low in January is -21C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winnipeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winni...
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Heat pumps have only recently become economically in climates like Germany’s. Most people don’t want to replace their furnace until it breaks or needs expensive repairs.
- ImprovedSilence 4y ago
  It’s been economical for 30+ yrs for Germanys climate, they just have older housing that’s never been updated. Every heat pump has backup source of heat too. Which will be electric coils or gas usually, so you don’t even have to give up gas heat for the really frigid days.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    I'd say in UK heat pumps are only just down to affordability domestically. If capital is cheap for you then perhaps they've been affordable much longer, but baseline costs are only recently noticeably low enough for me to consider it ... possibly when I look next time it'll be out of reach again given the weak pound and massive cost of living increase. I'm hoping to get a heat pump next Summer.
    - ImprovedSilence 4y ago
      Yeah there’s no denying that it definitely helps that electricity is a good bit cheaper in the US, making gas v. Heat pump heat pretty much on par in the northeast at least.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Supply is a real problem at the moment. If you really plan on getting one I would order it well before you have the installation planned.
      - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to have time over Christmas to start looking, I've done a little preliminary research. There are, as ever, complications (possible extension?).
radelaine 4y ago
There was recently a NYTimes article about how there aren't enough Heat Pump installation technicians in Germany to meet demand, so some folks are learning how to do it themselves.
- sorenjan 4y ago
  That's understandable considering the sudden demand spike that's ultimately because of the war. People aren't extra interested now because they want something more environmentally friendly, it's pure economics. Using fossil fuel wasn't expensive enough before since the external costs aren't factored in, so now when Putler has driven up the price of gas and oil people learn that there are alternatives, and now many of them are cheaper as well. My question isn't "why aren't you switching now", it's "why haven't you switched during the previous 20 years, when we've all known about climate change"? And on top of that there's the strategic issue with relying on Russia.
fruit2020 4y ago
Yes, gas has been much cheaper than electricity. Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. Anyway, you still need fossil fuels for industrial processes and agriculture
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. But this is not the case for a heat pump.
  - phtrivier 4y ago
    In a disturbing chicken and egg problem, the heat pumps industry is not as installed and scaled up yet, which kinda refrain people from making the jump. Stories of heat pumps breaking up in November after less than ten years with no one left to fix them are not making the tech look good, whereas gas boilers routinely last 15/20 years while everyone forget them except once a year for maintenance - and once every couple decades because of geopolitics. This will definitely change in the next few years, as heat pumps will replace "fioul" (petrol ?) boilers, which are being slowly banned. Which will make our direct co2 emissions slightly better, and our electricity generation problems MUCH bigger... (Full disclosure : I bought a house with a 5-year old gas boiler that I haven't had the heart to trash yet, instead investing in insulation, and a good wood furnace. My goal for 2022-2023 winter is to use it half as little as last winter.)
ejb999 4y ago
>>Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. You do realize that in many countries - including the US - a very large portion of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels? Until there is enough electricity generated from wind/solar/nuclear, switching to an electric heat pump just switches where those fossil fuels get burned, i.e. it pollutes someone else's neighborhood instead of your own.
- Too 4y ago
  Heat pumps have efficiency above 100%, by exchanging and transporting heat, instead of generating it. 2-4x for air pumps and close to 5x for geo.
- sorenjan 4y ago
  Burning fossil fuel isn't primarily about polluting neighborhoods, it's about polluting our shared atmosphere. If 20 000 houses use electricity from one oil burning power plant it's relatively easy to capture the carbon emissions from that one plant, and to replace the plant with other power producers eventually.

oarfish 4y ago

That does exist; In my street they are doing construction work for exactly that purpose, but this is one of the largest cities, no idea how widespread that is.

kuschku 4y ago

All of your suggestions have already been applied. They're already part of the Energiewende.

landemva 4y ago
I don't know if downsizing sq ft is part of the energy transition, though I was in a few multi-bedroom houses in Germany which relied on firewood for heating. Also, the book Cooking Without Electricity was published a year ago. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Strom/kochen-ohne-strom_node.html https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Stro...

NikolaNovak 4y ago

Fwiw - I moved to Canada and people basically don't understand there's any other way to heat a house than a basement gas furnace. I guess a combination of harsh winters and cheap gas?

mh8h 4y ago
Things are changing in Canada too. Heat pumps are much more common in the past few years.
jacquesm 4y ago
In rural Canada you'll find plenty of oil furnaces with their own tanks as well. Some of those are 30 to 40 years old and all of them are terribly inefficient.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  And they are expensive AF to run. I had family members who had an oil-heated house on the Northeast US, and it was close to $2k a month to hear in the winter months (the house was large, something like 3000-3500 sq ft, but that's still an astronomical cost for heating)
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    We're getting into similar territory in Europe with the current gas prices. 3 Euro / cubic meter at my supplier. I never thought that the cost of heating our house would become a factor again in my lifetime but here we are.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    They need to get their windows fixed!
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Plenty of these old houses have much bigger problems than just the windows (which, in Canada at least in all but the very oldest houses always was double glass, even if it came in the form of an inner and an outer window). Crappy foundations without insulation, roofs and walls with poor insulation, front door directly opening into the house instead of a separate space, almost all of them freestanding (especially rural ones) and relatively large for the number of people living there. Heating in Canada is an interesting problem. -40 Celsius on the other side of a 4" barrier is nothing to take lightly. One elderly couple that I'm aware of had begun to dismantle their house on the inside and they were burning it all up bit-by-bit to stay warm, the two of them sitting around a shitty old pot bellied stove that moved the bulk of the heat generated straight out the chimney. Stuff like that breaks your heart.
dogsgobork 4y ago
Until fairly recently heat pumps didn't operate at the temperatures regularly seen in the northern US and Canada. Hard to shift a lifetime of the choices being expensive resistance electric heating or (comparatively) cheaper burning fuel.
twisteriffic 4y ago
Really depends on where you are. Parts of Ontario and BC you could probably get away with just a heat pump, but lots of places in the prairies you could only use a heat pump for maybe 1/2 of the winter months. It's just too cold the rest of the time, so you'd have to augment with electric or gas anyways. With the amount of flak raised about infrastructure not being able to handle electric vehicles I can't even imagine the chaos if the prairies went electric heat. I'd really like to see strong baseline energy efficiency standards put in provincially for new builds and a lot of investment in retrofit, but with the current political climate in the prairies that's impossible. Promoting anything that doesn't burn both oil and money is anathema.
- ant6n 4y ago
  In Quebec, people heat issuing electricity.
Germanika 4y ago
Depends on where you are in Canada. In Québec where electricity is cheap, most homes rely on electric heating. Of course, in Alberta where gas is cheap and electric is ~2.5x more expensive it's not surprising gas furnaces are the default choice.
Spooky23 4y ago
Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They sort of work now. Advocates usually don’t mention that the solution for the millions of houses with hydronic systems are usually mini-splits, which are both ugly and noisy. Lots of people who don’t have heat pumps are rabid advocates of them. In some cases trying to ban gas heat.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They seem to work okay in many parts of Alaska (down to about -20C): * https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-temperatures-air-source-heat-pumps-keep-homes-warm-from-alaska-coast-to-us-mass-market.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-tempe...
  - woodrow 4y ago
    Parts of Alaska (eg Fairbanks, Juneau) are not as cold as the Canadian prairies, where it frequently gets well below -20C in the depths of winter. In Winnipeg the average low in January is -21C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winnipeg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winni...

HDThoreaun 4y ago

Heat pumps have only recently become economically in climates like Germany’s. Most people don’t want to replace their furnace until it breaks or needs expensive repairs.

ImprovedSilence 4y ago
It’s been economical for 30+ yrs for Germanys climate, they just have older housing that’s never been updated. Every heat pump has backup source of heat too. Which will be electric coils or gas usually, so you don’t even have to give up gas heat for the really frigid days.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  I'd say in UK heat pumps are only just down to affordability domestically. If capital is cheap for you then perhaps they've been affordable much longer, but baseline costs are only recently noticeably low enough for me to consider it ... possibly when I look next time it'll be out of reach again given the weak pound and massive cost of living increase. I'm hoping to get a heat pump next Summer.
  - ImprovedSilence 4y ago
    Yeah there’s no denying that it definitely helps that electricity is a good bit cheaper in the US, making gas v. Heat pump heat pretty much on par in the northeast at least.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Supply is a real problem at the moment. If you really plan on getting one I would order it well before you have the installation planned.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to have time over Christmas to start looking, I've done a little preliminary research. There are, as ever, complications (possible extension?).

radelaine 4y ago

There was recently a NYTimes article about how there aren't enough Heat Pump installation technicians in Germany to meet demand, so some folks are learning how to do it themselves.

sorenjan 4y ago
That's understandable considering the sudden demand spike that's ultimately because of the war. People aren't extra interested now because they want something more environmentally friendly, it's pure economics. Using fossil fuel wasn't expensive enough before since the external costs aren't factored in, so now when Putler has driven up the price of gas and oil people learn that there are alternatives, and now many of them are cheaper as well. My question isn't "why aren't you switching now", it's "why haven't you switched during the previous 20 years, when we've all known about climate change"? And on top of that there's the strategic issue with relying on Russia.

fruit2020 4y ago

Yes, gas has been much cheaper than electricity. Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. Anyway, you still need fossil fuels for industrial processes and agriculture

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. But this is not the case for a heat pump.
- phtrivier 4y ago
  In a disturbing chicken and egg problem, the heat pumps industry is not as installed and scaled up yet, which kinda refrain people from making the jump. Stories of heat pumps breaking up in November after less than ten years with no one left to fix them are not making the tech look good, whereas gas boilers routinely last 15/20 years while everyone forget them except once a year for maintenance - and once every couple decades because of geopolitics. This will definitely change in the next few years, as heat pumps will replace "fioul" (petrol ?) boilers, which are being slowly banned. Which will make our direct co2 emissions slightly better, and our electricity generation problems MUCH bigger... (Full disclosure : I bought a house with a 5-year old gas boiler that I haven't had the heart to trash yet, instead investing in insulation, and a good wood furnace. My goal for 2022-2023 winter is to use it half as little as last winter.)

ejb999 4y ago

>>Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. You do realize that in many countries - including the US - a very large portion of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels? Until there is enough electricity generated from wind/solar/nuclear, switching to an electric heat pump just switches where those fossil fuels get burned, i.e. it pollutes someone else's neighborhood instead of your own.

Too 4y ago
Heat pumps have efficiency above 100%, by exchanging and transporting heat, instead of generating it. 2-4x for air pumps and close to 5x for geo.
sorenjan 4y ago
Burning fossil fuel isn't primarily about polluting neighborhoods, it's about polluting our shared atmosphere. If 20 000 houses use electricity from one oil burning power plant it's relatively easy to capture the carbon emissions from that one plant, and to replace the plant with other power producers eventually.