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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Penalty for using natural gas for space or water heating in commercial buildings

This is especially dumb and culture-wars because natural gas at point of use is almost inherently more efficient than burning natural gas to generate electricity and then converting it back to heat.

It depends on the heating system I think. Heat pumps rival gas furnaces in overall efficiency because they move the heat rather than create it.

This is true for water heating (and natural gas cooking surely), but for space heating you can do better with a gas electrical plant (45% average efficiency, 60% in the most efficient) powering a new heat pump (300%+), because with the heat pump you're not just getting the electricity converted back to heat you're also stealing more heat from outside.

The catch is that your heat pump has to be overdesigned for your climate most of the time if you don't want it to be underdesigned some of the time. My old house had two modes, one "normal" mode that worked at heat pump efficiency for most of the mild winters here, versus one "emergency heat" mode that was necessary if the daily high got abnormally low for long. I presume "emergency heat" was just resistance "convert it back to heat" heating, 100% "efficient" instead of 250% or whatever, but the effect on our electric bill made "just freeze until the cold snap passes" seem like a reasonable alternative. Fortunately I'd moved to a new gas-heated house before we had a week-long cold snap...

This is true for water heating (and natural gas cooking surely), but for space heating you can do better with a gas electrical plant (45% average efficiency, 60% in the most efficient) powering a new heat pump (300%+), because with the heat pump you're not just getting the electricity converted back to heat you're also stealing more heat from outside.

Induction might actually be more efficient than a gas stove because there's no heat loss to the surrounding area, but it's true.

Of course in practice heat pumps usually don't have enough horsepower to keep up with commercial demand(I'm technically an HVAC tech- heat pumps are simply too weak to keep up with commercial needs, even on high tonnage systems). It's more or less a binary choice between emergency heat and gas. Particularly commercial buildings use a lot of hot water and heat pump water heaters are simply incapable of performing well enough for commercial use.

I presume "emergency heat" was just resistance "convert it back to heat" heating,

Emergency heat is straight electric, yep.

It's like the natural gas stove stuff. Ostensibly, it's for health and safety reasons related to insufficient ventilation; in practice, it's obviously motivated by decarbonization that expects the electric versions to be powered by clean renewable energy, which they'll never implement in sufficient scale or scope.