03/06/2023

America’s Great Home Heating Divide, Visualized

The split shows the realities that lie ahead

Until recently, you might not have focused much on whether you needed gas, oil or electricity to warm your house. But in America’s highly fractured energy landscape, the surprising ways our home heating is split could speed — or slow — our shift away from fossil fuels.

There are four main ways that Americans heat their homes: electricity, natural gas, propane or fuel oil. The vast majority of U.S. homes, nearly 90 percent, get their warmth from either electricity — in the form of old, inefficient electric resistance heaters or new, more efficient heat pumps— or from natural gas that is piped into homes and burned in a natural gas furnace. The remaining homes use propane — a fossil fuel created by natural gas processing or oil refining — or fuel oil, both of which need to be delivered to homes by truck.

But these fuels are not evenly distributed across the entire country.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.