| Comment | Are you sure you're not reading about heat pumps rather than electric boilers? Electric heating *can* be lower carbon if using heat pumps appropriately paired with renewable supply, and will be more so in the future when there is more renewable energy on the grid, but it isn't *inherently* more environmentally friendly just by being electric
The biggest source of electricity in the UK is still gas, so at the moment a resistive electric boiler is less environmentally friendly than a gas one, because you're still burning gas to get the same energy, but if you convert it to electricity first then you also have conversion losses and the heat loss through transporting it through the grid
Heat pumps = low-carbon, the future
Electric boilers = no better than gas, but a lot more expensive to run
Storage heaters = somewhere in the middle |
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