Planned Obsolescence is your fault

[burkhard]

Having an argument about waste heat from electricity is a little silly. For some of us, heating with electricity would be extraordinarily expensive. For others, it's actually pretty darned cheap. We've got people on this forum all over the world—sources and rates vary wildly. At least as important are the costs of alternatives. A place with cheap electricity might have still cheaper natural gas making electricity a poor option for heating energy. Likewise a place with expensive electricity might have even more expensive everything else, making electric heat the best option of a bunch of bad ones.

It's further complicated that power sources are one of those things things that governments can't resist tinkering with via public policy, taxation, and subsidies.

In the end, there is no "universal" answer, world or even region-wide because situations vary tremendously. Where I live in the USA, I pay about US$ 0.12 per kW×hr of electricity. People in a town nearby (15 minutes away) have it much cheaper (paying only about half of what I pay!). While I wouldn't think of heating with electricity, folks in that town tend to have more electric heat (both resistive and heat pumps) as well as electric cars. They might even switch all their light bulbs back to old incandescent ones in the wintertime as well, but I'm not sure of that :-)