4 ms·

This is just electricity though right? A lot of (I assume most) homes in the UK are heated using gas.

• stoobs 3y ago
  Yes, but there's a huge push at the moment to move to heat-pumps which will remove the need for natural gas for home heating. I did hear that there were also trials to shift from natural gas to either straight hydrogen, or a hydrogen/natural gas mix - but according to the people I had a conversation with, much of the infrastructure will need upgrading as well as all the gas engineers/plumbers needing retraining, given that hydrogen is much harder to keep contained due to the tiny size of the H2 molecule vs that of natural gas (mostly methane), as well as it burning differently so needing different internals for heating systems. Answer is still roughly the same though, give it another 10 years or so and re-evaluate
• ben_w 3y ago
  Yes to just electricity, I think so for gas heating (I've also been in places in the UK with open hearth wood fires, oil heating, solar thermal, and pure electric, and that's just where I knew the heat source). Assuming the linked calculations are correct, this doesn't matter because all current power consumption can be electrified. Of course, even that's still not sufficient, as the chemical byproducts of several major agricultural and industrial processes also produce greenhouse gases. Fortunately, people are working on those too.