Thematic Map: Most Common Heating Fuel

 

As New Yorkers, we might think it's odd that electric heating is the most popular way to heat houses in great parts of country, and it's not just in warm climate south -- electricity is popular where electricity is cheap, like in the Northwest and much of Appalachia.

 

Oil is odd fuel, not widely used outside of the rural areas in the Northeast and Alaska. Propane dominates the rural Midwest, where it is cheap due to farms using to dry corn.

Heating with fuel oil, which is essentially dyed diesel, seems like an odd choice. Oil is expensive, but also is electricity in the Northeast.

In the 1940s through the 1970s, there was a big push to retire both coal power plants and coal heating for reasons of pollution and convenience, and oil seemed like a good drop in replacement, when oil was cheap. But the northeast relying on oil so heavily for power generation, caused electricity to spike in 1970s, which ironically caused some people to swap out electricity for fuel oil. Natural gas supply has traditionally been constrained in New England, which is another reason why the Northeast likes oil so much.