Your pedantry only works in a closed loop where all externalities are accounted for.

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.

> There is no real world scenario in a place that has a heating season where the cost to the consumer is better with electricity versus gas or oil. Electric costs about 4x for whole house heating...

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.

That’s awesome — it tends to be a capital cost that people cannot afford to retrofit.

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.

That's great — really, it is; if I ever get to build a custom house, I want to use a ground source heat pump — but we were specifically arguing over electric resistance heating.

I guess I missed that. Yes, electric resistance heating is horrible on the wallet.

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.