[hexbin010]

From the PDF at your link:

"Heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers and become competitive when the electricity price is lower than around three times the gas or oil price"

Sweden seems to have quite high domestic gas rates (highest in EU I think?), around £0.18/kWh, with electricity at £0.23/kWh so I can definitely understand the adoption of heat pumps with gas being so high.

In the UK we have lower heat pump adoption, which could largely be explained by gas being ~£0.06/kWh (and electricity is ~£0.27/kWh). There is also the barrier that many houses are draughty and would require significant expensive upgrades

[renhanxue]

Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.

[DrScientist]

Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible.

The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders.

Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.

[jcsager]

Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.

[pjc50]

Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.

[zzbn00]

This is exactly the thing. In UK electricity price is set by the cost of generating it from natural gas. After losses, etc, you get about 1/3 of power in electricity compared to heat in the gas. And the heat pump has an efficiency factor of about 3. So you get back to unity.

While electricity is priced off gas, current heat pumps do not have a strong economic case.

[zeristor]

That is as long as gas forms the final price at the determination of each 30 min electricity price setting around.

The prices plummet from time to time, even going negative, but not enough for the prices to be lowered.

Seemingly it’ll take a few more years for more energy to reach the south, but by then data centres may be using more.