Almost half of all Romanians (49%) believe it would be desirable to use environmentally friendly solar energy for space heating, considering that this would help protect the environment, according to the findings of a study on living in Europe conducted in eight European countries, commissioned by E.ON.

However, this would require a radical change because the representative survey by Kantar Emnid also revealed that most houses and apartments in Romania are still heated with natural gas or oil. Only 1% of respondents indicated they currently use solar energy to heat the home and 1% said they had developed geothermal energy based systems.

Elsewhere in Europe, too, people prefer solar for home heating. 61 percent of all Hungarians and 60 percent of Italians would opt for a solar-heated home. The people least interested in heat from the sun are the British. While 38 percent would prefer to heat their homes with solar energy, 36 per cent would like to live in a gas-heated home.

In many central European countries, wood is a much used fuel. Almost a third (31 percent) of Hungarians use this source of energy for heating, followed by the Czechs (20 percent) and Romanians (19 percent).

10% of Romanians surveyed said they use electrical devices such as electric radiators / heaters for heating, and the share of users in Romania who use this type of is smaller than in the UK (18%), but much bigger than in Italy, where only 1% said they use electrical heating sources.

These results are part of the ‘Living in Europe’ study, for which E.ON and Kantar EMNID questioned around 8,000 people in Germany, the UK, Italy, the Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Turkey and Hungary in December 2016.