I don’t understand why gas is still used in some countries. It’s 1800s tech and induction stoves are superior in every way. For heating geothermal + electric or pellets is also better.
In Belgium residential electricity costs 0.35 €/kWh, gas costs .08 €/kWh.
You need a very, very good heat pump to overcome this enormous price difference. “Geothermal” gets thrown around as a magic catch-all, but industry experts disagree; I was just discussing this with an engineer this weekend, and in Belgium which is very seismically inactive, drilling several hundred meters deep will only yield maybe a 50 °C temperature gradient, which makes it unsustainable (except in some cases like an old mineshafts which can be more readily reconverted to heat an apartment complex, but obviously that is highly situational).
And that doesn’t even get into the “holy shit we need to retrofit everything” part of the deal. Virtually every house uses high-temp radiators, which work great with gas/diesel stoves, but terribly with heat pumps. For good efficiency you need to rip all the radiators out and replace them with low-temps radiators or an HVAC system (which aren’t cheap to route through 40cm+ thick brick walls).
Pellets aren’t magic, they are becoming more common but this is likely to get them banned sometimes soon in big cities like Brussels because while cleaner, they still emit way more fine particulates than a condensation boiler AFAIK.
Of course in my house I’ve switched to an induction stove for cooking because the price difference doesn’t matter as much, and induction is superior in every other way, but it’s not hard to see why, with a gas pipe RIGHT THERE for heating anyway, most existing housing has used gas stoves as a default. It’s only in the last 15 years or so that induction became good and cheap enough to be worthwhile, because everyone who has used a resistive electric stove will KNOW just how terrible it is to cook with one of those (and people who have had a bad experience with a resistive stove are usually hard to convince that an induction stove is totally different, so that’s slowing down their adoption as well).
I live in the Philippines where gas is still primarily used for cooking. I think the problem here is a mix of a lack of government support thanks to gas company lobbying and the lack of affordable electric heating.
Personally I hate induction, or more the implementation I have been exposed to of it, no physical buttons and 1 drop of water will zero out everything :-/
Problem with geothermal is that it costs like 20k EUR all-in to get it installed. Regular air to air heat pumps are better for your average person because they’re way cheaper, work most of the time, and also work as air conditioning.
Either way it’s better than gas though. But power grids in many countries haven’t been built to handle it, so the change from gas to heat pumps needs to be gradual (though I do wish it was faster).
I don’t understand why gas is still used in some countries. It’s 1800s tech and induction stoves are superior in every way. For heating geothermal + electric or pellets is also better.
In Belgium residential electricity costs 0.35 €/kWh, gas costs .08 €/kWh.
You need a very, very good heat pump to overcome this enormous price difference. “Geothermal” gets thrown around as a magic catch-all, but industry experts disagree; I was just discussing this with an engineer this weekend, and in Belgium which is very seismically inactive, drilling several hundred meters deep will only yield maybe a 50 °C temperature gradient, which makes it unsustainable (except in some cases like an old mineshafts which can be more readily reconverted to heat an apartment complex, but obviously that is highly situational).
And that doesn’t even get into the “holy shit we need to retrofit everything” part of the deal. Virtually every house uses high-temp radiators, which work great with gas/diesel stoves, but terribly with heat pumps. For good efficiency you need to rip all the radiators out and replace them with low-temps radiators or an HVAC system (which aren’t cheap to route through 40cm+ thick brick walls).
Pellets aren’t magic, they are becoming more common but this is likely to get them banned sometimes soon in big cities like Brussels because while cleaner, they still emit way more fine particulates than a condensation boiler AFAIK.
Of course in my house I’ve switched to an induction stove for cooking because the price difference doesn’t matter as much, and induction is superior in every other way, but it’s not hard to see why, with a gas pipe RIGHT THERE for heating anyway, most existing housing has used gas stoves as a default. It’s only in the last 15 years or so that induction became good and cheap enough to be worthwhile, because everyone who has used a resistive electric stove will KNOW just how terrible it is to cook with one of those (and people who have had a bad experience with a resistive stove are usually hard to convince that an induction stove is totally different, so that’s slowing down their adoption as well).
I live in the Philippines where gas is still primarily used for cooking. I think the problem here is a mix of a lack of government support thanks to gas company lobbying and the lack of affordable electric heating.
Personally I hate induction, or more the implementation I have been exposed to of it, no physical buttons and 1 drop of water will zero out everything :-/
And unless you have a couple thousand to drop on a special induction setup, good luck cooking anything with a wok.
Problem with geothermal is that it costs like 20k EUR all-in to get it installed. Regular air to air heat pumps are better for your average person because they’re way cheaper, work most of the time, and also work as air conditioning.
Either way it’s better than gas though. But power grids in many countries haven’t been built to handle it, so the change from gas to heat pumps needs to be gradual (though I do wish it was faster).