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Comment by kuon | Hacker News Reader

I am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for heating.

Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole city while burning the garbages.

But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess, even if there might be better ways to use compute power.

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Using an electric heat pump is very efficient, usually better than heating directly by burning gas. In many high efficiency houses, the leftover demand not satisfied by the heat pump is more easily satisfied by a small amount of electric resistance heating - and you get a double win if you don't have to run gas to your house at all, saving both the monthly gas connection fee, simplifying internal plumbing, and improving safety.)

Using electric resistance heating alone is usually bad, as you say.

In my old house we didn't have natural gas, options were: get a truck to refill a propane tank (we didn't have a tank), burn wood (we lived in the desert of eastern WA, not many trees) or use an electric heat pump (we had abundant cheap hydropower from the Columbia river basin). Was an easy choice. Supplemented with an electric resistance heater for the coldest days in the winter.

In France, the electricity is mostly nuclear. Heating with electricity is not a problem.

The future will be electric heating for everyone, once we have enough renewable and storage sources.

Electricity doesn't have to be a bad option for heating. Norway gets 88% of it's electricity through hydropower, another 10% through wind, and the rest of it is geothermal, as an example. That doesn't mean that electricity is necessarily the most efficient option, or the cheapest, but it is clean.

I am not saying electricity is bad for heating. But it is surprising to me. It is "illegal" here, but honnestly I don't have an opinion or an objective view on it.

That's awesome, but it's too bad they financed the construction of all that green energy through the sale of oil, which is obviously being burned.

I don't think this is entirely true. A lot of the modern "green industry" stuff in Norway is funded by the oil industry. However, the hydropower industry in Norway is way older than the oil industry and is quite economical on its own.

If you prefer gas, you could use it to power a gas generator and use that electricity to mine bitcoins. All the waste heat from both the mining and the generator could be used to heat your house

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