No, this is quite wrong. You're not taking into account generation and transmission losses. Gas heat is actually much more efficient than electrical resistance heating.
Plus, as others are saying, using energy to move heat from one place to another allows you to move more heat than you could generate just by converting the energy to heat.
There is no real world scenario in a place that has a beating season where the cost to the consumer is better with electricity versus gas or oil. Electric costs about 4x for whole house heating in my neck of the woods, and houses quote electric only heat sell at a discount.
My guess is that your evaluation of electric externalities doesn’t include the health impacts of burning coal, ecosystem damage due to hydroelectric or long term storage and other capital costs incurred by nuclear generation.
I guess I live an unreal life. All of my heating and cooling is electric. My bills are lower than anyone I've compared with and in every case I'm heating and cooling more square feet. The magic? Ground source heat pump. Several people tried to talk me out of it and I'm glad I didn't listen.
In my area, you need to drill deep wells for heat pumps to work. Our local branch library did it and it cost about $40k.
I have electric resistance as a backup to my heat pump, only because they wouldn't install it without it. It would cost so much to run I have the breakers turned off just so it can't be shocked by my bill.
Heat pumps have a higher EER, but also higher parasitic losses, which is the source of confusion on the whole thread.
It's like claiming that rockets are "more efficient" than cars because they move you faster.
Narrow interpretations of definitions to support a point don’t actually provide much useful insight to the topic being discussed, and are seen as distracting. So these non-useful comments are being downvoted to make them less visible. It is not an issue of whether they are technically correct.
You could probably make an interesting point about the electrical efficiency of heat pumps, or you could make a comment about terminology and explain that “technically” the correct term is X, but instead you chose to interpret a term in a way that contradicts the contextually obvious meaning and then base an argument on top of that.
"arrow interpretations of definitions to support a point don’t actually provide much useful insight to the topic being discussed, and are seen as distracting. So these non-useful comments are being downvoted to make them less visible. It is not an issue of whether they are technically correct."
Except, I'm not arguing for or against a "point", only that the terminology was wrong. But it does matter, because it leads to confusion, and if you stop to think about it for longer than it takes to jab at the downvote button, the reason why it matters is interesting.
It's not that people here are thinking about the subject carefully, they're just disagreeing reflexively.
> Heating via electrical resistance is 100% efficient. All energy goes into generating heat. There is no loss.
This sounds a bit coy, doesn’t it? It’s a bit suspicious that heat pumps are completely omitted from your comment, and it’s also a bit suspicious that explicit discussion about terminology is omitted, and instead the definitions are included as a presumption. Putting the main point of your argument into a presumption of the actual text of your argument is nothing short of poor form (i.e. rude) if done purposefully, and the rest of the argument built on top of these presuppositions is boring and uninformative.
If you can imagine a better approach, consider discussing the terminology and definitions directly, and then explaining why sloppy terminology can cause confusion. You have still not explained why the terminology is so important here. Instead, you’ve made the following statements:
> …if you stop to think about it for longer than it takes to jab at the downvote button, the reason why it matters is interesting.
> It's not that people here are thinking about the subject carefully, they're just disagreeing reflexively.
Consider whether these statements make claims about the internal thought processes of people who disagree with you, and whether making claims about how other people think will further whatever goals you have commenting on this site.
The problem is, the terminology is only wrong if you take an extremely narrow approach of "heating" being "generating heat". But it's quite obvious that we are discussing heating of an enclosed space. And it doesn't actually matter at all whether that heat being placed into the closed space was generated from raw energy within the enclosed space, or moved from externally into the enclosed space. And if there is no difference between these two options, you can achieve greater than 100% efficiency between energy-spent and heat-provided by moving the heat.
Voting isn't specifically for correctness/incorrectness, but encompasses many things. In this specific case, I think the voting reasoning or on your comments can be likely be summarized as "is the comment contributing usefully to the discussion, or providing useful or insightful information in some other way". I think people aren't viewing your comments in this discussion as providing that, and some people may believe they are actually the opposite.
And the bottom line is that for the same unit of energy used to generate 1 BTU from resistance heating, we can move several BTUs.
EDIT: I'd also like to note that heat pump systems which include resistance heating systems will typically mark them as "emergency heating". Because they are less efficient, unless it's so brutally cold outside that the heat pump has dropped below 1 EER or can't even operate properly.
EDIT2: I forgot that the units in SEER are not the same on both sides of the ratio. (That is, it's not actually a ratio, since those are supposed to be unitless.) So my original "13+ BTUs" was high. Changed it to a non-descript weasel-word instead.
I often find that it surprised people to realize that a heat pump is effectively >100% efficient.
It is nice to know that the conversion from electricity to heat is effectively 100% efficient and we are really making a cost comparison instead.
Gas heating is something like 90% efficient now.
People, stop. Downvoting doesn't change facts.