It depends... hydrogen is a lot more valuable than heat for starters. Although of course heat storage is a lot cheaper. This meant one upshot of renewables in the EU was a burst of investment in very large heat stores that allowed large CHP units to store heat so they didn't have to run when the power prices was low or negative.
Yes, but the vast majority of use of natural gas in the UK is for heat of various types (including heat used for electricity production).
One reason why some are very excited by hydrogen grids is that gas networks give a lot of inertia/short-term storage to energy systems to cope with spikes in demand (e.g. the pickup in heat demand at 6am on a winter's morning). Secondly it means heating systems might be decarbonised with minimal fuss.
Going electric is not particularily troublesome compared to many other options for decarbonisation, and it has the advantage that you would no longer have to maintain two seperate energy distribution infrastructures that supply a large fraction of teh total number of dwellings in the country.
Finally, if heat goes electric then gas companies like Cadent are sitting on a colossal stranded asset.
Well if electric heat is cheaper then we would expect this to happen. And if hydrogen is being used as the heating medium, electric heat
will be cheaper.
You can't decarbonise domestic heat with storage heaters. Firstly you'd need to probably quadruple the size of the electricity system to delivery 400 GW of electricity, and secondly replace gas central heating with storage heaters, which consumers won't do.
Electricity distribution costs are primarily a function of the number of subscribers and their geographic distribution. Costs are extremely non-linear in relation to the amount of electricity actually distributed as many studies have concluded in the past.
A 2MW substation does not cost twice as much in life-cycle terms as a 1MW substation.
In fact the easiest way to reduce the cost of electricity per unit is to double the amount of electricity being consumed.
In addition, the use of modern electronically controlled storage heaters would allow them to soak up off-peak electricity, whenever those peaks occur in real time, essentially converting all electricity demand into baseload demand.
At that point, even replacing all gas boilers with CCGTs and resistive heaters would only be 25% or so more carbon emitting than the current system, add in some use of heat pumps and non-carbon intensive energy generating sources and that figure falls precipitously. And we all know of a power generation tech that doesnt produce carbon dioxide and is very very very good at baseload generation.
ANd consumers will do many things when they realise they can save substantial amounts of money by going electric, and new construction would certainly go entirely electric. Likewise with phase change heat stores built into the walls and floor and simple underfloor heating, or by adopting heat pumps with heat stores.