Actually, you can. I know a few people in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and upstate New York who use coal stoves to heat their homes.
I'm not sure what the efficiency on those is today. Article from 1980 [1] mentions 74% for a good quality stove, it's possible they've improved, but I doubt there's been as much development work on coal burning stoves as there has for gas fired furnaces.
I can't wait to get rich and be warm this winter.
I was actually just being tongue-in-cheek from the get-go.
But I would never be cold for a whole year.
1-https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6cf1wn/i_mined_bit...
Assuming that the fossil fuel to electricity conversion is about 1/3 efficient and the heat pump CoP is 3, then on-site combustion heating is effectively as "efficient" as a heat pump.
I guess the main point is that "fossil fuel -> electricity -> grid -> heat pump" cycle seems crazily inefficient in terms of losses, especially when heating is a large portion of electricity consumption in many households.
There are other reasons electrical heating isn't great, heat pumps aside. An average coal plant (in the US in 2015, I'm using EIA numbers) was about 34% efficient in turning the energy in coal into electricity. Then you lose about 5% of that in transmission, so from the heat released by burning coal you're only getting 32% of that as electricity at your house. Converting 100% of that into heat is pretty unimpressive in the big picture, you'd get 3x more heat by buying some coal and setting it on fire.
Obviously you can't do that, but a high efficiency gas-fired furnace will get 90%-98% of the combustion heat into your ducts, with the much smaller remainder going up the chimney. Unless you're on solar power (or some other renewable), burning fossil fuels on-site does better than resistive electric heating.
Of course that may also not apply to Siberia. If the ground is frozen all the time it's harder to run gas lines compared to putting in an electric grid. Mostly I'm trying to dissuade anyone in most of the US from stocking up on mining machines thinking it'll be a great heating system.