Yes. I can't remember the exact source but this charity covers it well. Up to 30% of Africa still burns kerosene for light.
https://solar-aid.org/news/black-carbon-and-the-kerosene-lam...
Lots of municipalities own gas grids or companies partly owned by the municipality own them. Your local major probably doesn't like the idea that this gas distribution grid which is a source of income for your town is likely worthless scrap in the not so far future.
This is also the reason why some grid operators push for hydrogen heating, with the idea that at some point in the future the gas grids will be coverted to hydrogen. Most experts in the space don't think this is very plausible, because it's unlikely that such a huge amount of green hydrogen will be produced and using fossil gas based hydrogen doesn't really make much sense. Also converting a grid from methane to hydrogen isn't trivial, there are safety concerns and compared to a heat pump this is excessively inefficient. But if you own a gas grid you may see things differently.
I'm in Australia, and we export most of the gas we produce - mostly for power stations in Japan and other places in the region I believe. We actually burn more gas to compress (liquefy) other gas for export than we use for electricity generation or in homes locally.
But yeah, it's really good to replace gas hot water, heating and cooking with heat pumps and induction stoves. Way more efficient and a good induction stove is just as good or better than gas (even though people who haven't used them will swear it can't be true). Heat pumps tend not to be able to fill your house with poisonous carbon monoxide (as can happen with gas heaters) or leak methane into your living space (which can be bad for a lot of reasons).
I read a report that claimed that properly accounting for fugitive methane emissions (which have tended to be massively underestimated) actually brings gas back to being just as bad as coal in terms of global warming cost. But coal plants do emit huge quantities of other nasty pollutants apart from CO2, so gas is still slightly better in that way.
I get that there is no way Central Europe will switch to ground source, but regular heat pumps should be cheap enough to subsidize.
Our family bought a house in the immediate periphery of a smaller city. Since most city housing here is old, the consequence of that decision is that our modest city home has abysmal energy efficiency.
I have wanted to renovate ever since we bought it, in order to cut down on our carbon footprint before 2030, but I have given up on the idea that we'll be able to afford a heat pump before then.
After having spoken with several architects, the building cost alone will eat up €200K without any frills. This will make our house smaller, by replacing poorly built annexes with a more compact and thus thermally efficient cube shaped annex. This comes on top of the mortgage that we took out.
So ironically, in making our home more energy efficient, we would also be making it smaller and less desirable in this regard, at a great expense. Tacking on a heat pump and PV panels would inflate the cost by another 10%.
That is the very real cost of making a home suitable for low energy heating systems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm able to consider such an undertaking, but going through this exercise myself is just a reality check of how dire the situation really is.
If we want to achieve net zero in housing, can we really do so at the cost of conventional building practices?
Talking about the local situation, less than a third of homes are from after 1981 [1]. That's millions of homes slated for a similarly-priced revamp. Who is going to foot the bill? Even with government incentives, some owners don't want to spend all that money on something as intangible as low energy housing, and others simply can't afford to.
[1] https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock
I’m replacing my 20 year old heat pump now with a new one and it’s around €8k installed. At the same time I’ll tear out the floors and radiators (replacing the floor anyway) and replace with heated floors. This costs at least another €20k but isn’t really necessary - that’s just a luxury when changing the floors anyway.
Good thing around here really old houses have 200mm insulation and newer ones have 300+ required by the code. Regulation also bans fossil heating or direct electric for any new construction or major rebuild.
I know €200K sounds like a lot, but if you strip out unavoidable costs such as VAT, architect's fees, misc hidden fees, what you are left with is a whole lot less.
Let's say they account for 20% of your project cost, that leaves you with 160.000 EUR to buy materials and pay craftsmen.
> Good thing around here really old houses have 200mm insulation and newer ones have 300+ required by the code. Regulation also bans fossil heating or direct electric for any new construction or major rebuild.
Where is that?
Laissez faire was the norm until the 90s here. Urban planning, zoning, and building codes might have theoretically existed before, but enforcement was nonexistent. Energy efficiency regulations are newer still.
As a result, insulation in most homes from before 1990 is severely lacking (if not entirely absent).
> At the same time I’ll tear out the floors and radiators (replacing the floor anyway) and replace with heated floors. This costs at least another €20k but isn’t really necessary - that’s just a luxury when changing the floors anyway.
So, to give you an example: I'll also install heated floors since they are the most suitable heat delivery system for heat pumps and so the most future proof, but first I'll have to excavate 55 cm so I can fill it back up with insulation mostly so as not to lose all of the heat to the bare soil.
We stopped mandating new connections. Great. Insidiously, though, Big Gas successfully lobbied for a price cap of 250 EUR for new connections to the gas grid.
So not only are we still allowing new housing to be heated with gas, we're saying that that's a-ok you can do it on the cheap.
It's almost as if politicians actively want their voters to feel disenfranchised. Who's going to tell those households in a few years that, "Whoops we made a mistake--so maybe this natural gas thing for heating wasn't such a good idea after all"?
At the same time, households who are leading the charge in the energy transition with heat pumps pay full cost, get no rebates, and, cherry on top, pay through the nose for per kWh surcharges on electricity that don't exist for natural gas.
Very often, green energy discussions forget that doing everything (heating, traffic, industrial processes) electrically needs an increase in electric capacity by a factor of 2 or 3 at least.
And the situation seems that it's going to increase even more.
It started harmless enough, but it has spiraled out of control. Of course distribution and transmission need to factor into the energy price somehow, but unfortunately for our friend, the electricity bill, stuff got out of hand.
Government after government tasked transmission and distribution network companies with ever more duties.
In addition to the core business of running their networks, their obligations include, but aren't limited to: acting as the social energy provider of last resort, running the street lights, building and maintaining EV charging infrastructure, buying green energy certificates at predetermined prices, financing offshore wind interconnection, etc.
In light of these extended duties, the DSOs and TSOs then went to the energy market regulators and asked if they could raise prices. Of course, the regulators decided in their favor, or they'd be guilty of systematically underfunding the companies they're supposed to regulate.
The situation now is that 35-44% of the electricity bill is directly earmarked for these so called Public Service Obligations. Add some excise taxes, miscellaneous fees, sum them all up, add VAT to the subtotal, and you end up with a grand total of ⅔ of your electricity bill being spent... not on electricity.
Don't get me wrong: We should be subsidizing most of these things, but in light of the energy transition, the electricity bill is just about the worst place to hide the cost.
Meanwhile, the gas bill has only a fraction of these Public Service Obligations factored into them. How on earth is that right?
No wonder people are reluctant to install heat pumps. It makes no financial sense!
It's true that the spanish grid very very rarely has problems, but still seems a lot compared to other countries.
Norging stands out in the stats.
Is this because people who use electric heating have old direct electric radiators? Don’t most homes in Spain or Italy these days have AC? Those are heat pumps so should be able to provide (some) heat in winter with reasonable efficiency.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
The rationale, they say, is that the spanish grid is "solid" and we rarely have problems, which is true but I don't know to what extent this explains the prices, or if cheaper countries do really have much more problems than us, which I highly doubt.
Electricity price (A)
+ Distribution network fees (B1)
+ Transmission network fees (B2)
+ Excise taxes on electricity (C)
────────────────────────────────
Subtotal
+ 21% VAT (D)
────────────────────────────────
Electricity price on bill
It sums up to somewhere between €0.23 and €0.28 per kWh for a cheap energy provider.
Electricity: 0.053 €/kWh Transfer fee: 0.043 €/kWh Electricity tax: 0.028 €/kWh VAT: 0.023 €/kWh
So, about 0.146€ per kWh. The transfer fee is to the local utility company, and we can't avoid that, nor the taxes.
We're paying extra for having power generated by solar/wind only, but the cost of the electricity is only about 1/3 of the actual price.
Is electricity so expensive in some countries that burning fossil fuel for heat is cheaper than using an electrical heat pump? If that’s the case - wouldn’t a solution be to switch that around by taxes and subsidies so burning fossil fuels for heat is more expensive? (This of course assumes such countries can quickly switch electricity production if it’s using fossil to supply the electricity from renewable or nuclear).