Heat Pumps vs Gas Heating

The most efficient way to heat would still be generating electricity from gas. You lose 50% of the energy (well, you can still use part of the residual heat for heating, too), but with the electricity, you can run a heat pump that heats with about 400% efficiency. 50% × 400% is still 200%, so twice as good as burning gas for heat.

Even without a system that has >100% efficiency (i.e. a heat pump), home heating systems often use a source of heat that is significantly less expensive per watt than electricity. (For example, natural gas.)

An alternative to using heat pumps is to use gas heating. Gas heating lets you achieve >100% "efficiency" relative to electric heating because you don't have to pay the price of converting the gas into electricity.

Resistive heating is more efficient than burning gas for heat. Gas has been historically cheap, so burning it has made economic sense over using electricity.Heat pumps are kinda what the sound like. Pumping 30 degrees of heat inside to keep warm takes more energy than pumping 20 degrees of heat outside to stay cool. Heating costs will come to dominate residential energy usage as people electrify their homes. A/C will be number two or possibly number 3 behind water heating.

Amazingly a modern heat pump running on electricity generated by 100% gas is more efficient at heating than burning the gas for heat directly. Modern heat pumps are 5x efficient so you break even at even just 20% thermal efficiency of the power plant and gas plants are much more efficient than that. If you use the waste heat of the power plant for something else useful it's even better. Switching everyone to heat pumps would help even if 100% of your grid electricity was obtained by burning

It's not so much a worry as an efficiency thing. If your in a cold climate that needs resistive heat its a lot less efficient to burn natural gas at power plant at 50-60% then turn to heat with a resistor in your house, than to burn it in your house at 80-90% efficiency.Thing about a heat pump is it basically turns into a resistive heater once it can't capture any outside heat, then you just have heat of compression.This changes with a lot of renewable and nuclear power, but also

That's not true, even if you produce electricity from gas, using a heat pump to heat your home rather than a gas-powered central heating is more efficient.

Gas is only efficient for heating when compared to resistive electric heating. Modern heat pump systems are capable of producing 2.5x the thermal energy as they consume electrical energy even when it's below freezing. The hotter it gets from there, the more efficient they get.The main issue about doing electric heating in a very cold zone is what the reliability of the electrical system is. New York has a pretty good record with their hydroelectric generation though.

How is it "so efficient for heating"? It's much more efficient to burn the gas for electricity then use the electricity to run a heat pump.

This is a really bad take.Heat pumps can have coefficients of performance (joules of cooling provided over joules of energy consumed) between 2.5-5 (going down as outside temperatures drop).In most situations, it’s more efficient to burn the gas for electricity and then put it into a heat pump than to burn it directly for heating.In the very coldest situations, where the heat pump less effective, then you may use the resistive heating to augment it.And “green” tech is about ch