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My understanding based largely on this video is that state of the art heat pumps manage to perform such that even in places like Chicago using them to heat with energy from a natural gas power plant uses less fuel even including transmission and generation losses than a domestic furnace when the temperature is above -15C (5F). I'm not quite sure how cold any given place in Northern Europe gets, but Chicago isn't exactly known for being warm in the winter.
I'd like to see what the cost premium for "state of the art". Skimming the web I see that there are heat pumps that start to struggle below 40F, some 25, some 15, and I'm sure nobody's deliberately buying the crummy models to spite their electric bill, so there must be some kind of tradeoffs.
I had a house with a heat pump, and it worked fabulously through 95% of each of our mild winters ... right up until the temperature was freezing enough, at which point our options were "turn off the heat" or "auxilliary heat" ... which the manual said works via resistance heating, but my bills suggested that Aux Heat simply sets dollar bills on fire until the house is warm. More seriously, it looks like you can get around the problem with a lower-temperature refrigerant and a freeze-proofed outdoor unit, but is that a few hundred extra dollars per house or a few thousand or what?
It's one of those things where there are both generations and quality tiers. A Mitsubishi hyperheat that supposedly works down to -17F will cost 5x as much as a Midea which performs as well as the last (-5F) gen of Mitsubishis.
I'm keeping my wood stove for when it gets down to the teens, but I'm lucky to live in a mild climate where that's as low as it gets.
Don't know why anyone who has gas as an option in places that get below 0F would want one, unless it's mostly for summer AC and they have a long shoulder season.
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Is there any kind of portable fossil-fuel heater you roll out for emergencies?
Massachusetts is giving incentives to install heat pumps as part of the HVAC unit when it is time for replacement. It has been going on for a few years so there has to be some data on how it works.
Portable indoor combustion is surprisingly dangerous for emergencies; IIRC when I've looked into cold-wave death totals it's turned out that maybe 1 person froze to death and 100 people asphyxiated themselves from inadequately ventilated CO while keeping warm. Plus, although 95% sounded like hyperbole it was if anything an underestimate; burning dollars one or maybe two days every year or two was cheaper than buying a backup system would have been.
Not my problem any more; I'm now living with gas for heat (which is fine) as a marginal decision on top of getting a house with gas for cooking (which is fantastic).
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If you believe that you've never been in a cold place "heated" by an air source heat pump. The problem isn't just efficiency, it's efficacy. Burning stuff provides just as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm. A heat pump can't move nearly as much heat when it's cold out as when it's warm.
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