I mean a town in Massachusetts pretty much blew up because of natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...

Our neighbor once had a LNG powered trash truck explode in front of their drive way. It burned the entire front of the house off. Now he's got a major remodel and an antique Porsche!

Unfortunately I can't find any links on local news now. It is available here with some photos of my neighborhood.

https://statter2017.wpengine.com/2015/07/03/take-a-look-at-h...

That's one very lucky driver.

You probably couldn't though.

Gas is fairly clean energy, and many of the inefficiencies of electricity distribution don't apply.

It will be quite a long while before people in cold climates who need to heat their homes would switch to all electric or have anything close to local generation capable of heating their homes.

> You probably couldn't though.

Well, you clearly can. Norway hasn't used gas. At home people have used mostly electric heaters and wood. They're now switching out oil burning furnaces and wood burning furnaces in many areas with heat pumps.

Sweden is burning trash for electricity and piping heat from those powerplants to nearby areas.

In most areas you'd need cheaper electricity, and heat pumps should be cheaper as well. But it's definitely possible.

Norway is 99% hydroelectric because of geography and low population. Sweden is 40% hydro, 40% nuclear.

In neither are renewables used in significantly large ways (maybe excepting the few percent of Swedish trash burning) that are applicable to the rest of the world.

I think this calculation is better than you'd expect using air to air heat pumps. Their coefficient of performance can be between 2-5, meaning for each 1W of electricity, 2-5W heating is produced.

??? Any northern countries like Scandinavia for example? Gas isn't a thing here.

Norway is 99% hydroelectric. They have all the power they need from their geography, that is not a thing which occurs very many places in the world.

Washington state USA and Qinghai China are in similar positions (getting mot of their power from hydro), with similar populations to Norway.