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Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants. Domestic heating is a completely decentralized problem.

Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants. Domestic heating is a completely decentralized problem. If you wanted to change everyone over to electrical heat, yes it could be done. But not rapidly. And swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly. There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist. Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long. Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.

golemiprague 4y ago
jupp0r 4y ago
I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.
- dbrgn 4y ago
  Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious. There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    As a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.
    - j0057 4y ago
      I don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
        a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere. b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months. c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Actually, for most of Europe, it should be fixed specifically for the purpose of enabling electrical heating.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
- withinboredom 4y ago
  Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Where is your house located? It's not up to electic code in any country I've lived in.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!). This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
      - jupp0r 4y ago
        The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
        withinboredom 4y ago
        Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget. The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating. Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      > The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up. > Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil. > I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy. OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
- fomine3 4y ago
  Please don't. Heat pump FTW.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps. Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
- bcrl 4y ago
  No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil. In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough. At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump. TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.
yongjik 4y ago
Well, I don't think anyone's suggesting it can be done overnight. So, of course, we will need a stopgap measure (of LNG terminals). For now. IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
- cycomanic 4y ago
  France is using the same percentage of gas, why is nobody calling out France for decades of bad energy policy? Even more their nuclear reactors despite massive subsidies are in such a state of disrepair that they had >60% off during the summer, and Germany had to take up the slack.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
> swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly Something like €5000 plus labour in Lithuania, around half days work. Gov subsidises good portion of it.
slowhand09 4y ago
Now, replace the word "heat" with "cars".

golemiprague 4y ago

jupp0r 4y ago

I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.

dbrgn 4y ago
Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious. There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  As a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.
  - j0057 4y ago
    I don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
      a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere. b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months. c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Actually, for most of Europe, it should be fixed specifically for the purpose of enabling electrical heating.
- jupp0r 4y ago
withinboredom 4y ago
Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Where is your house located? It's not up to electic code in any country I've lived in.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!). This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget. The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
cycomanic 4y ago
As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating. Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    > The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up. > Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil. > I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy. OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
fomine3 4y ago
Please don't. Heat pump FTW.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps. Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
bcrl 4y ago
No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.
- trashtester 4y ago
  My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil. In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough. At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump. TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.

yongjik 4y ago

Well, I don't think anyone's suggesting it can be done overnight. So, of course, we will need a stopgap measure (of LNG terminals). For now. IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"

cycomanic 4y ago
France is using the same percentage of gas, why is nobody calling out France for decades of bad energy policy? Even more their nuclear reactors despite massive subsidies are in such a state of disrepair that they had >60% off during the summer, and Germany had to take up the slack.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

> swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly Something like €5000 plus labour in Lithuania, around half days work. Gov subsidises good portion of it.

slowhand09 4y ago

Now, replace the word "heat" with "cars".