Electric heating is a little silly. Most electricity comes from burning fuel. Due to inevitable thermodynamic losses, less than half of the heat energy gets converted to electricity. Then we send it to homes to... convert it back to heat.

1) We could skip the electricity step: bring the fuel to the house and burn it there.

2) Or we could use electricity to run a heat pump, moving heat from the outdoors in. This has over 100% efficiency, because all the electricity's energy will end up heating the home too - after it's done its work, there's nowhere else for it to go.

3) Or we could combine 1 and 2 and make a heat-driven heat pump, getting 100% of the fuel's heat plus some heat from the outside.

4) More generally, a heat-driven heat pump works because fuel burns at higher temperature than you want in your house, creating a temperature differential that can be used for work. You could use it for other kids of work too: running domestic appliances, mining crypto, charging batteries, or even selling power back to the grid! That's less absurd than it sounds, because using the temperature differential for work somewhere else is better than just letting it decay into heat.

5) But that's still wasteful. The weather is sometimes hot and sometimes cold. If we had a heat reservoir, like thick walls, we could smooth out this variation and have always nice temperature in the house while spending much less energy.

6) And even that is still wasteful! Many of our possessions can deal with temperature changes just fine. Just the human body is fussy. So we go from needing thick walls to needing thick clothes, maybe with built-in warmers.

7) And believe it or not, even that is still wasteful. Cold is unpleasant because our bodies are frugal about energy. It made sense in the savanna when food was scarce, but today we have lots of food. So we arrive at the perfect heating solution: a pill that would make us self-heat more easily when cold, losing weight along the way. Combine with clothes to taste.

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