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Yes they are. You get more heating from an heat pump running from electricity coming from gas plants than what you get by just burning the gas. Including losses

by pjerem 4y ago

Yes they are. You get more heating from an heat pump running from electricity coming from gas plants than what you get by just burning the gas. Including losses on the grid.

nashashmi 4y ago
I cannot imagine this in anyway. Heat pumps work like ACs do. They do compress a medium till it heats up, and then spread that heat around. And then they decompress until it cools down and dump that cold until outside heat brings up the temperature again. Those compressions and decompressions take up immense amounts of energy. They are less efficient than simply burning gas. On the flip side, could we not create electricity generation and heating from Natural gas?
- baxuz 4y ago
  That's the whole point. For most modern systems you get >4x of the energy in heat exchange compared to the energy you put in. You don't produce heat, you exchange it. https://www.wolf.eu/en-de/advisor/cop-heat-pumps https://www.wolf.eu/en-de/advisor/cop-heat-pumps
- elil17 4y ago
  I think you are misunderstand where most of that energy comes from. Say I have some refrigerant in liquid form at a low pressure. That refrigerant will have a boiling point of say, -20 degrees F. I use the ambient air, which is say 0 degrees F, to boil the refrigerant into a gas. The internal energy of the refrigerant goes up significantly, but it's temperature does not change. Then, I compress the gas so that it goes up in temperature. This change in temperature does not correspond to a large change in the internal energy of the gas. The same energy is pushed closer together, resulting in a higher temperature[1]. Then, I condense the gas at it's new boiling point, say 100 F, into a liquid. Then you decompress the resulting liquid and the cycle repeats. Most of the energy is coming from the ambient air, only a small amount of electricity is used to change what temperature that energy is available at. [1] A very simple mental model you can use to understand the difference between temperature and energy for a gas is that temperature is the number of times the gas molecules bump into each other in a second, while energy is how fast the gas molecules are moving. So if you have a very low pressure gas, even all of those molecules have a ton of energy in the form of motion, the temperature of the gas will be quite low because the gas molecules won't interact often. But compress that gas down to a small volume, and the molecules will bump into each other all the time even though they don't have much more energy.

by pjerem 4y ago

Yes they are. You get more heating from an heat pump running from electricity coming from gas plants than what you get by just burning the gas. Including losses on the grid.

nashashmi 4y ago

I cannot imagine this in anyway. Heat pumps work like ACs do. They do compress a medium till it heats up, and then spread that heat around. And then they decompress until it cools down and dump that cold until outside heat brings up the temperature again. Those compressions and decompressions take up immense amounts of energy. They are less efficient than simply burning gas. On the flip side, could we not create electricity generation and heating from Natural gas?

baxuz 4y ago
That's the whole point. For most modern systems you get >4x of the energy in heat exchange compared to the energy you put in. You don't produce heat, you exchange it. https://www.wolf.eu/en-de/advisor/cop-heat-pumps https://www.wolf.eu/en-de/advisor/cop-heat-pumps
elil17 4y ago
I think you are misunderstand where most of that energy comes from. Say I have some refrigerant in liquid form at a low pressure. That refrigerant will have a boiling point of say, -20 degrees F. I use the ambient air, which is say 0 degrees F, to boil the refrigerant into a gas. The internal energy of the refrigerant goes up significantly, but it's temperature does not change. Then, I compress the gas so that it goes up in temperature. This change in temperature does not correspond to a large change in the internal energy of the gas. The same energy is pushed closer together, resulting in a higher temperature[1]. Then, I condense the gas at it's new boiling point, say 100 F, into a liquid. Then you decompress the resulting liquid and the cycle repeats. Most of the energy is coming from the ambient air, only a small amount of electricity is used to change what temperature that energy is available at. [1] A very simple mental model you can use to understand the difference between temperature and energy for a gas is that temperature is the number of times the gas molecules bump into each other in a second, while energy is how fast the gas molecules are moving. So if you have a very low pressure gas, even all of those molecules have a ton of energy in the form of motion, the temperature of the gas will be quite low because the gas molecules won't interact often. But compress that gas down to a small volume, and the molecules will bump into each other all the time even though they don't have much more energy.