Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?

Tradition! Tradition!

Here in a central european country, end-user price for Russian natural gas is about 4 eurocents/kWh. Electricity is 12 cents/kWh, in Germany even more iirc.

I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.

Using electricity to heat buildings should be one of the last steps to take, after almost everything else using energy is renewable. Electricity is a precious form of energy, while heat is primitive. Converting in both directions is not lossless, so you want to keep the precious form.

The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable energy. Once you have an electric heater at your home, you will be using electric energy generated by burning coal to heat your home.

It also does not solve the problem of the German electricity market, which is mostly that renewable energy is not steady. Power is not distributed evenly across space and time. So you need to store the energy and move it from North to South. But storage and transmission lines are lacking to say the least.

One intermediate strategy you could take, would be to convert abundant electric energy to hydrogen, which you can feed into the already existing natural gas pipes and burn inside the already existing gas heaters, the author is criticizing. This way you would solve both problems (missing network and missing storage) at the same time.

This is why identifying unintended consequences beforehand is so important.

"We want green energy -- let's subsidize green energy by taxing electricity."

Seems fair enough... fast forward several years and:

1. People burn fossil fuels for heating because electricity is too expensive, increasing their carbon footprint.

2. Poorer people in apartments and cities pay out the nose to fund rebates to wealthier suburban homeowners with solar roofs.

I couldn't disagree more.

Electric heating via heat pump is ridiculously efficient and has a much bigger bang for your carbon-reducing buck than anything else a homeowner can do.