system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is electric heating inefficient?

I've always been told that electric heating with a personal heater is very inefficient compared to central gas heating. Are they talking cost wise, or energy wise? Or am I just completely mistaken?
gpt
The answer to the question depends on how you define efficiency here. In general heating can be an extremely efficient process, close to 100% in fact. The reason is that virtually all energy you use will eventually be converted to heat. This is equally true for passing electricity through a resistor as in a space heater, burning gas directly for heating, or even running a computer. All of these devices are essentially 100% efficient in taking their energy source (electricity/gas/whatever) and in the end producing heat. 

The biggest difference between using natural gas or electricity for heating lies in the overall efficiency of acquiring the fuel, generating and transporting the electricity, and finally heating your home. Consider two possibilities 1) using natural gas to create electricity to power a space heater or 2) using natural gas directly in a gas heater. In the first case, you first need to burn the gas to create electrical energy (which even for the most efficient power plants will only have an efficiency of around 50%), and then you will need to transport this electricity from the power plant to your house (which again will eat up roughly 50% of the energy). So in this scheme you are only left with 25% of the initial energy stored in the gas before you can turn on your space heater. In contrast, in the second case you take the gas tank directly into your house, where virtually all of its stored energy will result in local heating. It is in this more general sense that we can say that gas heating is more efficient than electrical heating.