[tonyarkles]

That's one of the neat things about heat pumps. In my province in Canada about 25% of our energy is used as electricity and 75% is used as heat. This is ignoring cars, looking at residential, commercial, and industrial. The majority of our electricity generation comes from coal and natural gas, with some hydro and some wind/solar. People are very keen to close down the polluting power plants but are generally quite quiet on the topic of converting our residential and commercial heating to electric even though that covers 75% of our energy use.

But with heat pumps (backed up by resistive heating since we get cold enough to need it), we can still get a win there. Natural gas and coal generation can be ~30% efficient, but heat pumps can readily have a 4:1 COP or better. Even factoring in the inefficient generation of electricity we can still heat our homes with net less energy and then focus on replacing our electricity generation with less polluting sources (eg a mix of nuclear baseload, wind+solar+battery, and natural gas as a fallback)