01The six things that actually differ
Installed cost
Electric: a cable, a panel and a bank in the airstream. Gas: burner, refractory, flue, gas train, combustion-air louvres, and a gas connection that may need a utility upgrade and a design review.
Permits and inspection
Combustion equipment brings permits, annual inspection and CO monitoring in occupied buildings. Electric brings an electrical inspection and a demand calculation instead. Which is heavier depends entirely on your jurisdiction.
Turndown
A modulating gas burner turndowns to roughly 20-25% with care; an SCR-controlled electric bank goes smoothly to 5% and below. Drying lines that idle at night and ramp in the morning live in that turndown range.
Response and control
Electric changes output in one cycle of the mains. A gas burner has a firing-rate ramp for safety, which costs minutes during a product changeover.
Moisture and exhaust
Burning gas produces water vapour — roughly 1.6 kg of water per kg of natural gas. In a drying application that water goes into the airstream you are trying to dry with.
Residual heat
Gas systems carry stack losses; electric banks can be ducted to recover almost everything downstream. Where the exhaust is hot and wet, the electric option keeps more of the energy inside the process.
None of these is a winner by itself. The reason to compare them side by side is that most of the six are fixed costs, and only the first one is the number people usually argue about.
02Running cost, done properly
Same duty, two fuels
A dryer needing 300 kW of heat: electric draws 300 kWh per hour at the meter (bank efficiency near 100%). Gas at 85% net efficiency needs about 353 kWh of fuel per hour, roughly 35.6 m³ of natural gas.
Compare your own prices
The break-even is simply kWh_price × 300 versus gas_price × 35.6 m³. If electricity costs 0.12 and gas 0.045 per kWh-equivalent, gas wins on fuel. At 0.08 per kWh-equivalent for electricity the two are level, before the other five rows.
Demand charges
Electric plants pay a capacity charge on peak kW. A 300 kW dryer that ramps at 08:00 with everything else can move the whole site into a higher demand band. Staggering the ramp or holding a small buffer temperature is often worth more than the fuel choice.
Standby
A gas dryer that keeps a burner lit and a flue warm at idle is paying during idle. An electric bank consumes nothing when it is off, which is the most underrated line in the comparison.
Put your own tariff into the two numbers above before believing anyone else's chart, including ours. The fuel comparison is genuinely close in many markets and the deciding factor is usually standby behaviour and turndown, not the unit price.
03Where electric wins outright
No gas connection within a practical distance, or a utility upgrade that costs more than the dryer.
A dryer inside an occupied or temperature-controlled building, where combustion air and flue routing dominate the layout.
Processes that must not see combustion products — food, pharma, optics, some coatings.
Hazardous areas where a naked flame or a hot combustion surface is a classification problem of its own.
Lines that idle for long stretches and need to be at temperature in minutes rather than in half an hour.
Sites with on-site generation or storage, where the marginal cost of electricity is not the retail price.
04Where gas still wins
Very large continuous duties — above roughly a megawatt of heat — in a market where gas is cheap and the site already has the infrastructure.
Plants with waste heat or low-pressure steam available for free, where a steam coil does the job and neither fuel is really being spent.
Retrofit into an existing oven whose burner openings, refractory and flue are already there, where the electric alternative means rebuilding the plenum.
Sites with weak electrical supply where a 300 kW load would trigger a substation upgrade — a supply cost that dwarfs a decade of fuel difference.
The honest summary: electric heating is usually the better answer for control, footprint, standby and cleanliness; gas remains the better answer for very large continuous heat on a site that already has gas. Price the supply, the permits and the standby hours, and the decision gets easier.