> Reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time
Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.
Yes, most households don't have the 25-30k available to switch to heat pumps. If we dig deep I think we partially solved why people don't have kids anymore in Europe: for that you need optimism, and to be told every few years even something basic as your heating system is due to be illegal (!) doesn't really fill people with optimism. Same thing with banning internal combustion engined-cars, which was reversed too... Europe as a whole needs to manage these tech transitions very differently in my opinion.
Yes that is a split A/C, which is also a form of heat pump, that's not really what people refer to as heat pumps by default in Europe. A heat pump is normally an air-to-water system here, which drives either radiators or heated floors. Heating with an A/C is practically unknown in most of Europe and definitely not the desired choice for most people here (even though it would make sense).
And you’d still need five or six split systems to properly heat a home.
Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.
I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.
Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.
Ortogonal to the discussion, but I think in an odd way, Australia is one of the most similar countries to Spain in this aspect. Very limited to no natural gas proliferation, electric heating, if any, but houses made rather cheaply but somehow still ending very expensive. I've seen houses near Melbourne resembling a tin hut costing AU1.5M. According to weatherspark, some Spanish locations have their climate counterparts in Australia, e.g. Perth is most similar to Malaga.
True true. The old housing stock is poorly insulated. I mean: not at all insulated, and retro fitting insulation is painfully expensive.
Sure, insulation in ceilings is relatively easy to do, but swapping windows out for double glazed windows with solar thermal reflective film, very expensive.
New homes are much better designed, requiring wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed windows or better.
And yeah, the state of Victoria is still prompting banning new homes even connect to gas. Seems strange when we export around the same volume of LNG as Qatar.
The people who need heat pumps the most don’t have $6000+ to blow on heat pumps.
So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.
And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.
> London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
This seems unrelated. It's not an energy problem: it's a problem with lack of space in the tunnels and lack of places to build ventilation shafts due to the issue not being considered 100 years ago when the tunnels were built.
> Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
I think this has very little to do with renewables. In particular, solar is perfect for reducing "melt in summer" cases (it's almost always sunny when it's hot) (and I'm not sure where has freeze in winter problems).
The issue seems to be more that weather has gotten hotter, and infrastructure needs to change in response to that (inevitably slow and expensive).
London’s tube system had an eminent domain, technology, political will problem. It’s entirely fixable.
Cold weather kills more people than hot weather. By a huge margin.
People frequently move from cooler areas to areas that have comparatively hotter climates than even the worst (completely fabricated) global warming predictions.
Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.