Either way you should take into account you lose about 40% of that by simply converting the fuel to electricity, which is kind of the opposite of what happens when moving from combustion engines to electromechanical engines.
You can generate electricity with a gas power plant at 50%, use that to operate heat pumps, and you will warm your house more than directly burning the gas.
Or put another way, in a gas dominated grid, switching from gas heating to heat pumps saves carbon gas emissions.
while that is true, it is only a stepping stone towards generating electricity renewably (let's say wind or solar).
The consumer ultimately decides the method (via market forces), and they are the easiest to convert first. If the demand for gas heating drops because of electrification, gas demand would fall (but the cost of extraction remains the same/similar), and therefore, makes electricity cheaper and cheaper.
The losses from current electricity conversion from gas at the plant is merely a short term loss for a better long term 'future', and i would consider it a cost of electrification.
> Similarly, in Finland, tests of air-to-air heat pump systems from various manufacturers resulted in COPs of 3 at -10C and 2 at -20C.
Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-the-energy-crisis...
The main issue is that homes were designed to trap and keep heat in, rather than true insulation, which means that as summers get warmer, our homes turn into ovens, with no way to cool them down properly. Case in point last summer with UK temps hitting 40C and above for a few weeks.
Government are trying to kill off the old gas boilers though, with heat pumps being pushed very heavily, not sure if they're enforcing it yet or not though. Apparently they're also looking at switching out natural gas for a hydrogen mix, but that means having to rework a lot of the piping/valves as hydrogen needs much higher standards than currently applied.
1. It is unlikely that hydrogen will be pushed heavily by the UK gov because of the expensive pipe rework. The reason they're pushing hard for heat pumps is because of the Glasgow Climate Pact; they're on the hook to reduce carbon emissions or pay heavy fines. To that extent, subsidising heat pumps becomes financially less unviable for them than doing nothing.
2. Regarding the heat in summer; the houses insulate well but don't do much to prevent heat coming in from the windows during summer. There are some pretty useful half-fixes; mvhrs+insulation, or recessed windows/overhangs/sunshades massively aid this. For those who rent that's not much help though :(
The average minimum temperature in the winter months in London is 3c above freezing.
https://www.mylondon.news/weather/london-weather-coldest-nig...
But - other comments have noted, some backup generation capability that use less green resources should be acceptable for such rare contingencies.
Probably a good half of our homes have fireplaces and chimneys.
It's not cost effective for everyone to have a wood burner but if only a small percentage used them on the cold days we'd be fine.
People obsess a bit about pollution, as a response to rare events it's fine.
Simply burning gas to generate heat is basically 100% efficient, if you convert it to electricity first you'd need a COP of at least 1.7 to recover the energy lost while generating the electricity.