is electric heating likely to become cheaper than gas heating in future?

I'm wondering whether I should fork out for gas central heating in my new house. However, I wonder if elctric heating will be cheaper than gas heating after they build the new nuclear power stations. I think that's what happened in France, isn't it?

Al

Reply to
Al 1953
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It seems unlikely in the short to medium term. Electricity is a secondary energy source at the moment, and significant new nuke capacity is going to be some time coming.

Reply to
John Rumm

Not likely. Electric is 3x > 4x as expensive and that gap will not be closed for the lifetime of any current type of gas/electric system.

Reply to
ericp

I'd agree with that. I guess the current nuclear electricity cost must be similar to combined cycle gas turbine electricity, which gives you about 60% thermal efficiency.

But if it's heat you want, using gas direct gives you about 90%.

Reply to
newshound

Especially given that, for the next decade at least, most of the UK's electricity will be generated by burning gas.

Reply to
Bruce

In direct heating terms, probably not - as a large proportion of our electricity will continue to be generated from fossil fuels, even when more nuclear power stations come on stream (plus the costs of cleaning up emissions from both existing and new fossil fuel power stations).

However, electrically powered ground/air source heat pumps might become much more attractive, as they already have a considerable efficiency advantage over direct heating.

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initial costs are considerable though, and your site must be suitable.

Reply to
dom

I think the running costs are similar: the possible advantage of heat pumps nationally/strategically is that the electricity they use can in principle be sourced from non-fossil sources (if such are available) whereas GCH is of course restricted to fossil-fuel (unless one acquires renewable source of methane or similar).

Reply to
John Stumbles

Al 1953 wrote on 24/03/2010 :

You will be looking at a lead time of 10 to 15 years before any new nuclear stations were to come on line and it will take many of them, before they make any difference to the methods of generation. Costs will not come down until their build has been more or less paid for, so I would stick to gas and invest in good levels of insulation.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

My knowledge of these is not through practical experience of them, but...

This is heat pumping, *not* geothermal heat.

This:

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everything else I've read about them says they deliver at least 3 times the heating efficiency of direct heating, *because* heat is pumped.

Reply to
dom

No is the short answer, however...

#1 Insulation makes a huge difference. With 2009 levels of insulation very little heating is required.

#2 CO2 Heat Pump at gas boiler price will take time. CO2 heat pumps only hit parity (1kW out for 1kW in) down at -25oC and are thus ideally suited to the UK temperature climiate. Existing heatpumps are R410A and expensive (=A31k), not the much more expensive CO2 (=A34k). The economy of scale of CO2 Heat Pumps is some way off - probably 15yrs. The benefit of CO2 Heat Pumps is very high real-world CoP (4:1) from air sources avoiding the "dig cost" of ground source heat pumps. The long term risk of such heat pumps I suspect may be noise based - a neighbourhood of such pumps battling a heat island effect could get undesireable acoustics (as with windmills & geology/buildings).

#3 Storage Heaters are near parity with gas if 2009 insulation. That is to say 5p/kWhr isn't a mile off gas at 3.5kWhr when you factor in a) installation cost b) maintenance c) depreciation. The problem is storage heater comfort/usability does not have parity with gas re controllability & on-demand capability. To get true controllability you need commercial fan storage heaters which are very large and expensive (=A3750-1250), these leak very little heat and instead blow it out on demand. Essentially a fan heater which just happens to cost 5p/kWhr. Due to their cost they are impractical, good for shops and offices.

Nuclear will not come online and even if it did the cost will not be comparable to gas re debt.

A spanner is the potential for future gov't to essentially tax gas consumed by householders rather than by power generators for "green reasons", thereby bringing closer parity between gas & electricity. There is no logical reason for this to happen - except to fund bonkers windfarms & nuclear plant. It would be a dirty trick negating the benefit of insulation, alternatively it could be the reason for doing it "creating money out of nothing", quant-energy as it were.

Overall if you are buying a 2009 build flat, electric heating via say Dimplex Duoheat storage heaters works supposedly well. They are cheapish to install, no maintenance, minimal depreciation re long lifecycle. Storage Heaters also provide objects of high thermal mass, often missing in "minimalist apartments" when a door is opened. The benefit of insulation is that it somewhat undermines the "need" to have the high capital & maintenance & depreciation cost of gas boiler/ radiator system to "force enough kW in at low enough cost".

Vaillant boast their air, ground & gas heating options - it is likely we move to heat pumps at some stage, however that is going to be "New Build" no doubt by loony-regulation or loony-subsidy like PhotoVoltaic panels to meet some "carbon requirement".

Put another way, cheapest is insulation - that way whatever they do it makes screwing us harder.

Reply to
js.b1

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Al 1953 saying something like:

"Too cheap to meter", that rings a bell.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

And what effect do you think the introduction of Travelling Wave Reactors (TWRs) will have on the costs of nuclear electricity generation? TWRs can be fuelled on depleted uranium with a single charge lasting 60-100 years, they have higher thermal efficiencies than current technologies and produce less waste. It's estimated that current supplies of depleted uranium if used as fuel in TWRs would produce sufficient electricity for 80% of the world's population to sustain Western electricity consumption for >1000 years.

Very little CO2 emitted over that 1000 years either.

Reply to
Steve Firth

I don't have gas, I have domestic oil heating. However, this winter I have used a small fan heater to heat only those parts of the house I'm actually using and I reckon it's worked out cheaper than oil.

Consider:

My house is not fitted with a CH thermostat, even though the house was only built in 2004. Dunno why the builder didn't fit one, since he wasn't into cutting costs. A thermostat wouldn't have cost a lot during construction, but there ya go. It's only this winter that it has been very cold for a long time. In previous very cold winters heating wasn't so expensive, relatively speaking. Since 2004 the winter heating bill was only a little higher than normal. I can remember one winter a couple or three years back when the outside temp barely got down to zero, it was that mild.

Anyway, back to the non-existent CH thermostat, and instead of this each radiator is fitted with a Honeywell thermostat, so you can adjust the temperature of each rad. That does, of course, mean that you have to constantly monitor the setting, which is a PITA.

Next, when the CH comes on you have to wait some considerable time (20 minutes) before a cold room starts to become warm, whereas a fan heater is instantaneous. The fan heater does have a thermoswitch, so it constantly cycles on and off as the desired room temperature is maintained. Most importantly, only the room I'm using is heated. Okay, on VERY cold nights I've switched on the CH during the early hours merely to avoid pipe damage.

I have just paid my winter electricity bill. £218 for 110 days. This is roughly £100 more than the previous bill which was for 92 days.

BUT.....! How much targeted heating would I have got from a £100's worth of heating oil over the same 110 day period? £100 would have bought approx 267 litres of oil back in early December and I don't think 267 litres would have lasted 110 days! Of course, the price of oil has since increased (latest price I have 42.27 pence per litre

16/Mar/2010), whereas the electricity went down last year from 12.74 to 11.51 pence a unit.

I may spend up to 8 hours a day in my computer room (although retired, I dabble in software development), so what's the point of switching the CH on to heat (even on a low setting) the rest of the house? Sure, it's a bit nippy taking a dump, but I grew up in houses without any form of CH, so I can take it! And if it's REALLY cold I'll take the fan heater with me into the bathroom. We're only talking a few minutes here, anyway.

Most recently I purchased a small oil-filled radiatior for one room (Argos £24.99) and it is even better than the fan heater. One should not leave a fan heater unattended, but it's far safer to leave a room with one of these oil-filled rads. Now, once the temperature of the room comes up I can turn down the thermostat on this little radiator to half or a quarter and it keeps the room quite comfortably warm for very few pennies per hour.

I do, of course, have a considerable amount of oil left in the tank! I use the oil boiler mainly for hot water, but that doesn't consume anything like as much as the CH. I can get a bathful of piping hot water and do this for days and days without the level on the oil tank barely dropping. Just heating hot water using oil isn't expensive, I reckon. It's the CH that whacks up the costs.

MM

Reply to
MM

electric is about twice as expensive NOW, unless you go 'heat pump'.

Remember lots of it is gas generated anyway, or bought off windmills at

5 times the price.
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Its about 1.somethng p per unit, but varies tremendously with the interest rates, since to an extent, its all in the cost of the money you borrowed to build the thing.

A complete contrast to a gas set, which is cheap to build but expensive to run.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

1 litre of 28 sec. Kerosene = 10 kWH = 43p 10 kWH electricity = 115p

That's an impressive saving you're making there, bub, paying about three times more to heat your home using electricity than the cost of using CH oil.

The way that you are making savings is to heat less of your home. You could reduce your bills further by turning off all the CH rads in the rooms you don't use and by restricting your CH to the same times that you use your electric heater.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Oddly enough it was at a point last year cheaper to use electricity than OIL. taxation accounts for some of it. The heat pump calculations I did

- because the 'effective' efficiency of a heat pump is 300-400% typically, meant it was very comparable with direct fuel burning as far as burn to heat output conversion efficiencies and costs went. Possibly even better. . At one point, cheap rate overnight electricity got cheaper than oil too.

Even without the heat pump.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Make it more expensive mainly.

Fuel costs are currently so low in a Uranium reactor as to be almost irrelevant.

Build cots are everythung.

No one has ever built a TWR

THERTEICALLY.

Theoretically a fusion reactor could use distlled seawater and be even cheaper. Don't see any about though.

The figures are even better for fusion, but no one has built a practical unit yet either.

And with the Losers Party running everything, its unlikely anyone is educated to a standard to allow them to, either.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Similar to what? certainly not to straight electrical heating!

Well, quite, although all 'renewable' energy (as opposed to nuclear) is vastly more expensive (apart from hydro) than fuel burning.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

There's talk of extending the 'feed in tariffs' to heat pumps from

2011:

.... in April 2011 and guarantee payments for those who install technologies such as ground source heat pumps, biomass boilers and air source heat pumps. Under the proposed tariffs the installation of a ground source heat pump in an average semi-detached house with adequate insulation levels could be rewarded with =A31,000 a year and lead to savings of =A3200 per year if used instead of heating oil.

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for DIYers you probably have to be a member of a Special Guild to install one of these things to get the incentives.

If you aren't planning on selling soon, and aren't dying of frostbite, it might be worth waiting 6 months-1 year before coming to a final decision.

If you're planning on selling soon, put in gas c.h. as buyers generally want it.

Owain

Reply to
Owain

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