When will it be cheaper to heat with Electricity

mcmalins

With Gas prices raising this year possibly by 25% (ignore fixing)

And I expect will rise in future years

At what price will gas need to be - relative to Electric to make it cheaper to turn the gas off ?

Cardew

That depends to a large extent on the efficiency of your gas CH boiler.

Electricity costs approx three times as much as gas.

The efficiency of a gas boiler ranges from approx 60% to 90%.

Then you have to factor in the servicing/repair costs of gas and the finite life of modern gas boilers.

I would think that if gas rose in price to be, say, half the price of electricity, then electrical heating would be worth considering for smaller properties.

macman

Never, since the majority of electricity in the UK is produced in gas-fired power stations. It will be decades before that balance changes.
When wholesale gas prices rise, you can expect electricity to go up as well.

grahamc2003

It certainly will be cheaper at somestage in the future, but quite a few years away yet. Athough w are still building gas turbines stations as temporary measure to ameliorate the effects of the upcoming energy shortages, eventually, our electricity production will be a high proportion Nuclear, as in France at the moment.

Of course, more gas burning stations generating lectricity puts the price of gas higher than it would otherwise be, so gas turbines are pretty poor for gas as well as electricity prices (gts are the most expensive fossil generation, but they have the advantage of short start-up and shut-down times), Using gts for bulk production as looks likely to happen for a few years simply makes them expensive without using their advantages.

Hard to estimate the answer to your question, but I'd certanly expect electricity to be cheaper than gas-(kwh for kwh) before 40 years is up, when I expect price pressures to have ensured we are at least 80% nuclear.

smogit2

Bear in mind that you could use (as I do) an economy 7 tariff and storage heaters. This is more comparable to gas prices, but you can only run the heating at night, so if there is a suddenly cold day (for example in the summer) it does mean you need to run a fan heater in the day.

Its not for everyone, and the day time electricity prices are a little higher, but otherwise its not too bad.