Heat pumps sounds like a good way forward. I haven’t looked into the cost to replace a heater in a home, but I guess new homes could just have them installed by default.
What about natural gas use in home cooking/restaurants? Surely, you can’t just replace that easily.
EDIT: And what about heating water? I mean, natural gas is used for more than heating the space in a home.
Surely you can. Modern electric stovetops use infrared radiation from a wire coil to heat cookware. The stovetop is covered with a ceramic that allows infrared radiation to pass through, and if you put something on it, it’ll absorb the radiation as heat. The technology is also scalable to industrial applications.
I’ll let Brown Jacket Man explain the principle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff04ecF9Dfw
(edit) My house has an electric water heater that was built in the Soviet Union. It uses a ~200-litre tank with a large heating element inside.
Those ceramic/glasstop ovens are shit. An old school coil will always be better, or modern induction.
Induction stovetops are fast, efficient, and safe. (but regular electric is fine as well)
Water heaters are similarly available in electric and heat pump configurations.
I have a 200v induction cooktop. My only complaint so far is that I don’t quite have as fine-grained control as I did with gas, but that doesn’t matter most of the time. It also isn’t heating up and around the pan. In any case, I have a portable casette gas stove if I really want to make Chinese in a wok with high heat and the flame coming up the sides.
My water heater is an eco-cute and does quite well for energy efficiency. It was a bit of a change coming back from instant on-demand gas water heaters, but it’s fine now that I’m used to it.
And what about heating water?
A heat pump water heater is pretty great, if my basement ever gets too hot I run the dishwasher or take a shower and the water heater cools things down nicely. In winter I close the door and vent to the utility room and it doesn’t hurt the heating very much. It’s smaller than my previous gas water heater but it lasts significantly longer and heats up faster if you do end up using all the hot water. My house of 4 uses about 50kWh of hot water a month, which works out to about 5bucks a month. I’ve messed with it a bit so it runs mostly during off peak hours.
I replaced my water heater, got a heatpump and improved insulation at around the same time (through the greener homes loan program) and on the whole saved about 50bucks a month overall, and will save another 30 when I cap off the gas pipe and get to stop paying all the bullshit fees for just having it connected. I live in southern Ontario, away from the lakes, so -30 - 30 weather typically. (All this week has been 40+ though, wonder why…).
Oh and fwiw, I would take my current induction stovetop over a gas stove anyway, much more consistent, easier to clean and heats up faster, and doesn’t heat up the whole house to run.
