Burning gas (or, indeed, anything) to generate heat feels like something we should avoid doing. And if you're generating heat from (renewably generated) electricity then it's probably most efficient to do so in the home. Electricity -> heat can be done with 100% efficiency after all. Unless, of course, there's a centralising efficiency to be had from a heat pump point of view. One which is greater than the losses of transmitting heat directly and the costs of maintaining a heat transmission network.
Not sure about domestically produced electricity being the most efficient way of heating your home. I'm in favour of producing close to demand but I think the efficiency depends entirely on the trade off of economies of scale and technical considerations to transmission losses. A single 12MW offshore wind turbine with a capacity factor 60% is probably going to be cheaper per unit of heat than a 10,000 1.2kw units mounted on a house with a capacity factor of 25%.
But I think a heatpump connected to a 2030 priced solar panel on your roof might be cheaper than building other systems. Part of the problem is that different types of housing have different advantages and disadvantages. These were resolvable when the offer was almost free gas with no concerns about climate change. It's a harder issue to co-ordinate when you have different optimal solutions for city centre Victorian flats, and new build rural detached houses.
There is a policy arguement for solving most of the problem as cheaply and quickly as possible, even if this suboptimal for some people and then just compensating those left behind with cash. (But the cash in these situations never arrives.)
I've been wondering about communal heatpumps in Edinburgh tenements with shared drying greens and roofs.
Sorry, I wasn't clear - I don't think we should (mostly) generate the electricity locally, I think we should *use* it locally. Generate it wherever it's most efficient to, but when it comes to turning it into heat just do that in the room you want to be warmer. (Unless you happen to be generating the heat anyway, for a steelworks or similar, of course)
Oh yes. Sorry, that probably ought to have been obvious to me. It's one of those months.
Agreed. If you are using electricity for heating it probably makes sense to have the heating element locally, rather than having the heating element remotely heating some carrying liquid and then exchanging that heat in to a home or office.
What slightly complicates that is that there are some cases where you have an existing district heating scheme running mostly on waste heat or biomass but you also want to use electricity as either a back up or opportunistically to soak up over generation in a non-despatchable renewables heavy grid. In that situation you might be better off having 1 system inside each house, 1 system to carry heat from the heat sources to the housing and 1 or more systems putting heat in to that heat network.
Heat pump solutions are really prohibitively expensive to retro fit (looks like ideally you switch to warm air rather than radiators; and we'd need a water tank); but they aren't much worse than a gas fired system in new build (at least air source) and we should be be fitting them, along with much better insulation.
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Unless, of course, there's a centralising efficiency to be had from a heat pump point of view. One which is greater than the losses of transmitting heat directly and the costs of maintaining a heat transmission network.
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But I think a heatpump connected to a 2030 priced solar panel on your roof might be cheaper than building other systems. Part of the problem is that different types of housing have different advantages and disadvantages. These were resolvable when the offer was almost free gas with no concerns about climate change. It's a harder issue to co-ordinate when you have different optimal solutions for city centre Victorian flats, and new build rural detached houses.
There is a policy arguement for solving most of the problem as cheaply and quickly as possible, even if this suboptimal for some people and then just compensating those left behind with cash. (But the cash in these situations never arrives.)
I've been wondering about communal heatpumps in Edinburgh tenements with shared drying greens and roofs.
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Generate it wherever it's most efficient to, but when it comes to turning it into heat just do that in the room you want to be warmer.
(Unless you happen to be generating the heat anyway, for a steelworks or similar, of course)
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Oh yes. Sorry, that probably ought to have been obvious to me. It's one of those months.
Agreed. If you are using electricity for heating it probably makes sense to have the heating element locally, rather than having the heating element remotely heating some carrying liquid and then exchanging that heat in to a home or office.
What slightly complicates that is that there are some cases where you have an existing district heating scheme running mostly on waste heat or biomass but you also want to use electricity as either a back up or opportunistically to soak up over generation in a non-despatchable renewables heavy grid. In that situation you might be better off having 1 system inside each house, 1 system to carry heat from the heat sources to the housing and 1 or more systems putting heat in to that heat network.
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Insulation.
Insulation.
Insulation.