France has 80% zero carbon all the time. Why not resistive heating?

pfdietz 10 months ago | parent | next [-]

It's expensive compared to heat pumps, especially if you also want air conditioning.

fsh 10 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

According to the IEA [1], 43% of the energy consumption is oil (transportation, heating), 18% is natural gas (mostly heating), and 25% is electricity. Switching to resistive heating would require doubling the electricity production. Using heat pumps is much more efficient.

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix

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mschuster91 10 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why not resistive heating?

Because France has a massive dependency on nuclear power... of course resistive heaters are cheaper than anything else when you got a ton of NPPs around. But their plants are all aging and are a nightmare to keep operational, so if they'd switch over to heat pumps their total energy demand would go down drastically.

	▲	pfdietz 10 months ago \| parent [-]
		> of course resistive heaters are cheaper than anything else when you got a ton of NPPs around. No "of course" about that, especially with current heat pump technology and the fully loaded cost of power from new nuclear power plants.

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UltraSane 10 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Heat pumps reduce electricity usage by at least 3x and also provide cooling.

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Scoundreller 10 months ago | parent | prev [-]

They lose out on export revenue