Air Sourced Heat Pump.

That may be true Andy, but I bet that he said nothing about the thermal mass of the building, or calculate heat-up times, or the other things I mentioned above. Most people do not know or understand that the COP (you called it efficiency above, but your term is seriously inaccurate) varies with the input and output temperatures very widely, or that wet heating with cooler water basically doesn't work, or that the radiator mainly transfers heat by convection or a myriad of other things. It would be nice to have wet heating with a small rad and a 25C water temperature, do you know why this will need rads the size of all the walls? Why does a house with 10kW of heat loss when outside is at zero, need more heat when it is -10C but not in proportion to the difference as the heat loss increases more than expected? Why is air to air transfer best? How much insulation do you really need to get heat loss in the low kW range, and how much energy do you need to make this compared with the heat loss it stops? Do you really want small portholes in place of windows? You know how much power in electrical form we have for each property and it is not a lot for space heating. Electrical energy transfer from fuels is about 30% efficient, but your gas boiler is 95% efficient (if modernish), so why change? Only if the electricity is essentially cheaper or free, but it is not! Even a combined cycle turbine is about 45% and then there are transmission losses, why go there? These are the really hard questions that politicians cannot answer because the answers are not sensible, particularly if every country changes to all electricity.


As a direct answer to your point, good electrical designers do understand the supply fully too, because they have many supply constraints to deal with. Domestics are usually fine, but bigger things get much more complex in concept, supply, and potential problems. You cannot design a hospital, school, or factory with the OSG or even just BS7671. You are just beginning to see supply constraints with car chargers and similar. It can only get more complex. Imagine a 500-bed hospital with 500 on-suite showers that are electric. What is the diversity to be applied?

That may be true Andy, but I bet that he said nothing about the thermal mass of the building, or calculate heat-up times, or the other things I mentioned above. Most people do not know or understand that the COP (you called it efficiency above, but your term is seriously inaccurate) varies with the input and output temperatures very widely, or that wet heating with cooler water basically doesn't work, or that the radiator mainly transfers heat by convection or a myriad of other things. It would be nice to have wet heating with a small rad and a 25C water temperature, do you know why this will need rads the size of all the walls? Why does a house with 10kW of heat loss when outside is at zero, need more heat when it is -10C but not in proportion to the difference as the heat loss increases more than expected? Why is air to air transfer best? How much insulation do you really need to get heat loss in the low kW range, and how much energy do you need to make this compared with the heat loss it stops? Do you really want small portholes in place of windows? You know how much power in electrical form we have for each property and it is not a lot for space heating. Electrical energy transfer from fuels is about 30% efficient, but your gas boiler is 95% efficient (if modernish), so why change? Only if the electricity is essentially cheaper or free, but it is not! Even a combined cycle turbine is about 45% and then there are transmission losses, why go there? These are the really hard questions that politicians cannot answer because the answers are not sensible, particularly if every country changes to all electricity.


As a direct answer to your point, good electrical designers do understand the supply fully too, because they have many supply constraints to deal with. Domestics are usually fine, but bigger things get much more complex in concept, supply, and potential problems. You cannot design a hospital, school, or factory with the OSG or even just BS7671. You are just beginning to see supply constraints with car chargers and similar. It can only get more complex. Imagine a 500-bed hospital with 500 on-suite showers that are electric. What is the diversity to be applied?