| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Natural Gas Heat

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 9 months ago

How much more efficient is Natural Gas Heat?

 

Well from a world view level, probably a lot. The energy loss from burning something (which is still the major source of electricity for most) to produce heat, and then converting that heat via heat engine (often a steam / turbine based process) into electricity is huge. You get something like high 30% thermodynamic energy transfer efficiency at power plants. Then you've got line losses from transporting the electricity over power lines, and finally you get inefficiencies in converting that energy in the general sense into something else, in this particular case though, as you're converting to heat and heat is usually where that energy lost to inefficiency is lost it is sort of moot.

Now for Methane (propane?) it's a little different. The hard part is in the "manufacture", I don't know precisely how much less / more efficient it is to make / store / process methane vs other common fuels. So from me that's up in the air. Transport is going to be expensive because you are using a fuel, at low 30% efficiency to move a huge multi ton truck around carrying said gas, which will dwarf energy losses due to transport of electricity.

So basically the question boils down to, what are the inherent transportation costs(in energy) for the gas you are buying, and do those prices per unit of heat produced outweigh the loss of energy due to producing electricity remotely? Obviously there are other infrastructure questions from the societal level of requisite civil projects that are required to allow each of these systems to function (roads and power lines) but I think from our perspective it is a very marginal utility sort of question as we don't exactly have the power to legislate a new system from scratch.

-M

 

Consumers have the opportunity to choose natural gas appliances over electric ones. Hopefully we'll be able to quantify that cost. The Home Energy Diet suggests that gas appliances themselves aren't super-efficient (e.g. amount of energy that makes it into the water you are heating), but that for heating, at least, they are much more cost-effective and overall efficient than electric (which is highly efficient once you have the electricity).

-S

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.