alt Hacker NewsIt’s only x4 more expensive to use electricity with old methods like immersion / resistance heaters
Heat pumps are 400% efficient or more, so have parity or better with gas prices
Replies
enlyth • yesterday at 3:21 PM
That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps? The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.
Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.
Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.
https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electri...
With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.