Effect of heat pump and electric water heating on our electricity bill in December 2023

Since we had our gas supply removed last year we've used electricity for both our water heating and our home heating. Unsurprisingly, this means we're using more electricity, especially in winter months as we no longer burn gas for heating.

We consumed 222 kWh more electricity from the grid in December 2023 than we did in December 2022.

Our heat pump consumed 168 kWh of electricity in December and the water heater used about 70 kWh. It's been a bit chilly upstairs sometimes so we've also used some small electric heaters occasionally, but clearly we also managed to reduce our consumption of electricity elsewhere as otherwise the numbers don't quite add up.

We had hoped to compensate at least some of the increased electrical consumption by expanding our solar power system. Unfortunately, due to the last quarter of 2023 being incredibly grey and rainy (a new record for rainfall was set, largely due to rainfall in the last three months of the year), the expanded system produced just 42 kWh in December, vs 60 kWh from the smaller system a year before.

Part way into January, waiting for ice to melt off the extra panels so that they could have full performance, if only the sun came out properly...

The gas we didn't burn, and the resulting CO2 emissions
In December 2022 we burnt 125 m3 of gas. That's less than an average apartment and well under half the average for a house like ours. This year we of course burnt no gas at all. 125 m3 of gas contains the equivalent of about 1250 kWh of energy, so the 222 kWh extra electrical energy that we drew from the grid was considerably less than that contained in the gas that we used to burn.

The 125 m3 of gas which we burnt in December 2022 produced 223 kg of CO2 (factor of 1.78). The average CO2 intensity of Dutch electricity for 2022 was 321 g / kWh meaning that our extra 222 kWh of electricity consumption in December 2023 will have led to 71 kg of CO2 emissions if our electricity was of average CO2 intensity for the Netherlands. That's a worst case scenario as even in the exceptionally grey month which just passed, 8% of our electricity still came from our solar panels. We are of course also signed up to a tariff which claims to supply us with zero CO2 green electricity (despite this not always being possible to do).

Therefore in the worst case our emissions in December as a result of replacing the gas supply with electricity were less than a third of what they would have been if we'd continued to burn gas. In the best case we did a lot better than that, but we're then in the realm of guesswork based on where our electricity might really have come from. When a large proportion of Dutch electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels it's nonsense to ever claim that electricity has zero emissions.

An average Dutch household in a home like ours will have consumed around 300 m3 of gas in December, resulting in around 530 kg of CO2 being emitted so in the worst case we had around 1/7th of the emissions of an average household.

Update: Dutch emissions per kWh electricity may actually be much lower.
It's possible that emissions in 2023 per kWh were actually much lower than 321 g. A smart guy on Mastodon calculated that the true figure was actually around 223 g / kWh for the Netherlands in 2023. This would have the effect of reducing our worst case emissions for heating in December to just 50 kg, meaning that we emitted about a fifth so much CO2 this year compared to last, or around a tenth of the amount emitted by an average similar size household using gas for heating.

Costs
It's difficult to work out exactly what the cost of gas would have been, but based on pretending to take a new contract out with our electricity supplier it appears that they would have charged us about €200 for the 125 m3 of gas had we used it in December. The cost of the extra electricity that we used is about €100.

But actually we deliver more electricity to the grid each year than we consume, so we only pay €5 a month for energy. At the moment our supplier says they still owe us about €260. This amount becomes due in mid February so we won't get quite that much returned to us because we expect to use more electricity than we produce for heating in January and February as well.

How well did the heat pump work in the cold ?
The lowest temperature in the morning that we've seen so far was about -7 C. There was plenty of heat from the heat pump. It does need to pause and defrost itself occasionally when it's cold outside.

Onward and hopefully downward
December is the worst month of the year due to the short daylight hours. Let's hope we can take proper advantage of the sun in January, February and March as more sun means lower emissions.

This may look like a grey rectangle but it's an actual photo of the sky today. The sun is roughly in the centre (that's a guess as I couldn't see it). Not exactly ideal weather for solar power.