Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although natural gas is "clean" compared to, say, coal, the advantage of a heat pump is that it uses less total energy than natural gas. That means it would be more efficient to run a heat pump off a natural gas power plant than to burn natural gas to heat your home directly.
People's AC summertime electric bills regularly get into triple-digits - it's not uncommon to hear someone with a moderately sized home having a $200-400 electric bill in the summertime. However, even in the midst of winter, gas heating bills rarely climb above $100 monthly. What am I missing here? It seems a heatpump, while more efficient, will cost significantly more to operate. Natural Gas is cheap ... and clean e…
It's actually difficult to say what the cost would be if everyone switched over. The reason is that natural gas is subsidized, both on the production side (at least in the US, which wants energy security) and on the consumption side (because it's politically unpopular to let people freeze to death). Of course, electricity prices are also affected by subsidies. Figuring out the true operating prices would require some research. However, it remains true that, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it is usually preferable to heat a home with a heat pump than by burning gas directly (there exists a temperature below which any given unit will become less efficient than burning gas, but unless you live in a place where this temperature is common then heat pumps will still come out on top (and the fact that residential gas lines are notoriously leaky and basically just venting nonstop into the atmosphere makes the calculation even more favorable)).