Certainly not Germany and Poland. Gas cucks. I just want affordable heat. Renewables are cheaper, why are policymakers resisting cheap energy, during an energy price crisis?

Perhaps it surprises you but a lot of people are such oil brained corpo shills they cannot fathom not burning the planet down to the ground. They call free energy ideologically driven in an obvious attempt at projection.

Which is to say that sadly a lot of people would never guess importing fossil fuels just to burn them might be a terrible idea actually.

Won‘t stop the tidal wave of heat pump installations though because most people actually like saving money.

There is a bit of a difference there, though.

If European-Russian relations sour, the fossil fuel supply can be cut off and you're just fucked by that.

If European-Chinese relations sour, the Chinese can cut off supply of new heat pumps, but all your existing heat pumps will still be there and will still work.

Losing fossil fuel supply is an immediate and urgent problem; losing heat pump supply is a much less pressing issue and leaves you much more time to spin up alternate supply lines.

You don't burn a heat pump every time you use it. Not the same thing

important imo that Europe produces heat pumps and components itself rather than importing it from countries like China

Don't worry. We only sell our heat pump producers to the US.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/carrier-buy-german-firm-viessmanns-unit-1317-bln-deal-2023-04-25/

For a flat I once had, to have 24 degrees I paid 2000 € in just gas for one year. It may seem high, but it gets profitable pretty quickly.

Where would that be? My sister in Germany just got an offer for a heat pump+installation for 42k Euros in Germany.

Mini-splits are really not that hard. Run an electricity supply and punch two holes through the wall. Mount the units.

As someone who recently moved to the UK, how at they so expensive? The price for the unit isn't that bad, but I assume duct works to all rooms would be? Maybe I'm just not understanding apples to apples coming from the US.

Out of interest, just how expensive are they? I can get a minisplit heat pump installed on our house for about a 1000€ (higher end models are obviously more expensive) here in Finland. It requires a small-ish hole trough the wall for pipes/wires, but otherwise the installation is pretty easy.

We have one in the house and another in garage and both have already paid for themselves since I don't need to run electric radiators anymore. Newer models would be even more efficient, but as the current ones still work they're not the first thing on the long list of house maintenance.

I feel this is an almost dilberate choice by the government at this point. The credit you get for them is a really poor scheme and every government seems determined to avoid doing anything to assist retrofitting existing homes. Probably because trying to improve things sounds too much like communism to them.

We have just converted from a gas furnace to a heat pump. It took a day. Connected to the existing heating system (water radiators and under floor) and hot water pipes. I know you wanted an ethanol solution, however, the electricity route combined with solar cells (like we have) makes it cheap to run.

I'm back from the Internet with knowledge to share!

https://www.northeastbiodiesel.com/heating-with-biodiesel

So it does exist, requires no retrofit up to 20% biodiesel, and with minor retrofit can go to pure BD, but it congeals around 45°f so some amount of petroleum as a stabilizer is required for winter heating. Apparently ethanol from corn does not produce more energy than is required to create it, but biodiesel already being partly made for another purpose and otherwise wasted brings its creation energy down a lot.

If I remember correctly, the issue with corn ethanol is the scale. It requires a lot of space and a lot of water.

Solar panels are energy wise a much more efficient use of the same area. They also don't require water or any kind of labour to harvest. Finally the consumption of electricity in heaters or cars is more efficient than burning ethanol.

I like your idea of using existing burners instead of replacing entire heat systems. Perhaps biogas produced by household and agricultural waste is a better option than growing corn for this purpose.