Colony? We’ve taken back control!
I'm glad you put the smiley on there...
As for electric storage heaters for house heating, we had that in the first house we bought. It was expensive enough to make converting back worthwhile. Despite the idiot previous owners squashing all the radiator pipes as they cut them out.
Electric storage heaters are a bloody stupid idea. There is a reason they are banned in some countries.
I hope that in the event of any boiler scrappage scheme, they include getting rid of storage heaters too...
Have the economics of running the thing shifted? Because if not no amount of demand shifting is going to make the low emissions a widespread winner.
What thing?
We can replace gas fired boilers for hot water with an electric heated water tank. These are very efficient, and also coming down in price quite nicely.
For space heating, the answer is heat pumps. Ground source would be preferred, but air source is still good too. The big problem with heat pumps is they are seriously fscking expensive. Considerably more so than a gas boiler. But that is largely due to economies of scale. When the demand goes up, the production costs should come down a bit. They also have the issue that they produce a low grade heat, which can be an issue with radiators that were designed for gas boiler supplied hot water. There are ways round this, in a new build, underfloor heating is the way forward, but there are modern heat pumps coming onto the market that sacrifice a little in efficiency, for being able to feed into traditional radiators, making for a reasonably effective plug and pray system.
In cities tho, the thing to also consider is district heating. Where I live we joke about having heated cycle lanes. The reason for this is the waste heat from the nearby MSW fired power station is used to heat the homes in this area. Cycle paths are cheaper to dig up, so when they ran the pipes, they did so under the cycle lanes. Result, they cycle lanes freeze slower. In the basement of this building we have a huge heat exchanger that takes the hot water from the MSW plant, and uses it to heat the water in the circuit that supplies the building. The result is that all 7 units on my stair are connected together, and when one of them fucks up and gets air in the system, it all collects in my living room radiator... not bitter and annoyed about this... honest... There are plans to get rid of the MSW fired power plant, not least because it was originally a coal plant, and the whole air quality thing. But when they do so, I'm not sure what they will do about the district heat. I wonder if we'll see neighbourhood scale heat pumps...
NL has already banned gas boilers for new builds I believe, and the UK has a ban coming in, tho I am not sure when it will come into effect. 2024 rings a bell, but it could be something pointless like 2030.
J