Wood heat is very common in this area, and many people go through 10-15 tonnes of wood in a heating season - firewood is about 250 euros/tonne if purchased but all but free if you cut your own, so homes tend to have much less insulation than they should. The only reason this works at all is because the population density here is low and the supply of wood locally is high. Historically, junipers were held in check by fire. After more than 100 years of fire suppression they are taking over, so wood from thinning operations is readily available. The value of the wood stays low because juniper makes for poor lumber and shipping it as firewood to other markets is impractical for lots of reasons (including possible spread of forest pests). Electricity is about 0.10 euro/kwhr here, which is also not a large incentive for people to use it wisely
The thread caught my attention because we have for nearly ten years, since the installation of a pellet stove concurrent with a new addition, had exactly that arrangement - wood, pellets and heat pump. Our home is about 250sqm on one floor with a central heat pump/electric furnace (in the U.S., nearly all heat pumps have condensing coils installed in what is in effect a electric forced air furnace to provide heat when temps drop below the capability of the pump - which historically has not been very good at much below 0C). There are five doorways between the two wood burning appliances - so it takes both to heat the home. This is a high desert region, we see anything from 40C to -30C and routinely have daily temperature swings of 25C. Our house has double glazed windows and a moderate amount of insulation (high, by local standards). Generally, we need to heat only when average temperatures go below 13C. From that base point (lower than typically used for climate statistics, but supported by analysis of our particular house), we see about 1,700C degree days in a season.
Up to this winter the 'wood' portion was a fireplace insert woodstove with no forced convection and no particular claims to efficiency. Over the course of a winter, we'd use about a tonne of pellets, two of firewood, and 3,200kwh of electric heat. To plan a system, it is worth it to do some calculations with the actual fuel costs and nameplate efficiencies of the equipment you'll use. In our case, by cost per kcal the cheapest heat was the heat pump when the outdoor temp was above 7C - unfortunately in our climate, this usually means no heating is needed until the heat pump efficiency is no longer attractive. The pellet stove was next, followed by the heat pump (and auxiliary resistance heat) in more typical temperatures. The older stove insert was only economical if 'free' cut firewood was burned - with purchased fuel (and a efficiency that may have been less than 50%) it could not compete with the heat pump. Using the fireplace insert intensively cut the electric load to 2,500kwhr, not using it would bump power use to 5,000.
This year we replaced the 35 year old insert with a modern insert woodstove with a catalyst element, rated at 80% efficiency (even at very low heat outputs) and particulate emissions of 2.5gm/hour. Local law now prohibits transferring property with a wood heating appliance that is not certified to meet efficiency and emission standards, so the old insert had to go eventually. The heat pump is now idled entirely, the pellet stove is going through about 5kg per day, and I am filling the woodstove once a day with about 20kg of juniper firewood. The low last night was -25C and the high yesterday -10C and I have both stoves turned up to about 50% of their capacity. Sounds good, but I am saving money at the cost of having to cut the wood myself (juniper has excellent heat value for a softwood, but grows like a twisted weed and is notoriously painful to cut and split). It also brings significant debris (and, potentially, wood eating insects) into the house. Efficiency is a huge plus - if I had to (like many of my neighbors) cut 6-8 cords of wood each year rather than one or two, and had to deal with an equivalent increase in ashes, bark bits everywhere, and stove tending, I probably would not do it. Insulating and sealing the house and using an efficient appliance makes it work for me.
On a wider scale and outside our little niche, wood as a fuel becomes a harder problem. The supply is nothing like the potential demand. Pelletizing it (which eliminates the pest problem) comes at a cost and growing wood as a crop (as opposed to using tops/limbs/scraps) becomes a rather grim business - I've walked nowhere as eerily dead as a monoculture pine plantation - trees in starkly precise ranks, and not a bird or mammal to be seen (as there is very little growing there to support them). It is more like a cornfield than what anyone would recognize as a forest. If wood fuel has to be transported in and purchased and is not burned in a proper appliance, it quickly becomes more expensive than all but the priciest electricity.
Lots of people claim or think they have sustainability well in hand, but there is quite a challenge to making what sounds good for one home or a few people in a favorable niche to work when applied to enough people to matter globally. It is, for example, simply not possible for an increasingly urbanized world to eat off the garden patch, no matter how well it may work for the very few privileged enough to own enough arable land to manage it. Kudos to them for not wasting fertilizer and pesticides on a non-productive (but attractive) lawn and they are headed in the right direction, but gardens will never feed Mexico City. The thing that will always, always make home heating solutions work better is to start by reducing the heat load of your home - by insulation, control of airflow and moisture in and out, and management of solar gain (and, in the society I grew up in, accept having to wear a sweater or two). This alone lets us get through 0C nights in the spring and autumn without any artificial heat, coasting on the thermal mass of the house and the solar gain during the 20-25C day (again, something much easier to do in a desert climate than in a place that is largely overcast - but these steps also allows us to avoid using the heat pump at all for cooling in the summer). Although the payback will be longer than one or two seasons, if you can afford to eat beef, you can probably afford to insulate.
A historical tidbit - before urbanization and widespread use of (petrochemically derived) manufactured fertilizers, firewood supply was a key leading indicator of the health of what we now refer to as developing populations (usually poor and, back then, agrarian). A significant tipping point was when firewood (which had to be gathered by hand, within walking distance) for cooking was no longer available and people began burning dried manure as fuel. Since the manure was no longer going back into soil, crops declined and the bottom dropped out of quality of life. Metaphorically, one wonders what a post fossil fuel global firewood economy will start to burn when the wood runs short.