Eli5 if electric vehicles are better for the environment than fossil fuel, why isn’t there any emphasis on heating homes with electricity rather gas or oil?
In: Physics
> why isn’t there any emphasis on heating homes with electricity rather gas or oil?
2 big reasons:
1 – Cost effectiveness
2 – Efficiency
Cost Effectiveness:
It is cheaper to burn gas than it is to use electricity. There wouldn’t need to be any social pressures if everyone was acting selfishly and doing what’s cheapest. Gas just happens to be significantly cheaper. By about 50%.
Generally if something is cheaper, it means there are fewer resources used to do it, which means a smaller carbon footprint. Generally the price of something relates to all the things that had to be done to get that product to market.
I.E. Electric cars are more expensive because more industrial activity goes into making them. Off the assembly line, they’re worse for the environment than gas vehicles. Electric vehicles then play catch up, because electricity is generated more efficiently at a powerplant than a gas engine in a car can propel itself, and they eventually in their lifetimes pass gas vehicles for efficiency.
Efficiency:
If your goal is to make heat, the most efficient way of doing that is to directly make heat. Heat is the reason why everything else is not efficient, because some is always lost as heat. If you’re only making heat, ta da, you’re done.
So for your home, if you directly burn natural gas to make heat, it goes like this:
1 – Burn gas in furnace, 2 – House is warm.
But if you heat with electricity, it goes like this:
1 – Burn gas in powerplant to generate electricity (60% efficient). 2 – Transmit power to house (98% efficient). 3 – Run electric heaters. 4 – House is warm.
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One additional thing that tips the balance towards electric are “Heat Pumps”. Heat pumps are air conditioners that work backwards. They take advantage of compression to create a heat difference from the ambient temperature, and are more than 100% efficient (not in terms of physics, but they get “free” energy by taking it from the “free” ambient temperature). This is effective when moderate amounts of heat difference are needed, (it doesn’t accomplish much in Canadian winters for example, but Kansas winters would see gains), and in worst case is only as bad as only having an electric heater without a heat pump.
Another consideration is that electricity is as clean as it’s generated. If it’s from solar or hydro, then no gas or oil is being burned. It’s still not cost effective though, which means it’s still net-negative for the environment (until solar power is cheaper, some combination of it requiring resources to have those panels is worse than just burning gas). Solar panels have nearly bottomed out in terms of theoretical maximums for scientific improvements, so there is no change on the horizon there, but they haven’t bottomed out for manufacturing efficiency yet, so there’s still room for improvements to be made.
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In the DIY EV scene, because batteries are so expensive (and, by extension, bad for the environment), guys who need heat will install a small diesel heater under the hood instead of wasting precious battery reserves to make heat. It’s amazing how little fuel is needed for heat compared to how mammoth an impact electric heat has on your range.
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