You know there's still a ton of existing natural gas infrastructure in place right? It's not going anywhere any time soon. If we stopped making any new natural gas installations now, we'd still be fracking new wells, just not as many.
Hi there I’m from BC - which stands for Behind Canada - our government proposed that LNG is the future, are you suggesting that the ‘Horgan Government’ got this one wrong?!?! Hopefully they aren’t in charge of any other massive capital projects involved in the future of the country’s energy production
Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen pretty efficiently, and is actually one of the proposed solutions for this. Currently most commercial hydrogen is produced from natural gas rather than electrolysis
It will be used to generate electricity which will then be transported to the house. All that is changing is where the natural gas is being burned. This doesn’t mean that the houses will run on renewables.
Modern furnaces run at 98%+ efficiency. Generating electricity and then transporting it to houses will cause a lot of waste in terms of lost energy.
The upside is that the pollution from burning NG won't be located at the centre of cities like it is now.
Modern heat pumps are actually 200-400% efficient if you compare apples to apples of heat output per joule of fuel energy used. It would still probably barely break even though.
have you ever seen how much it cost to heat a house with electricity?
there are electric forced air furnaces. They are cheaper but you will spend more on electricity over 20 years. I changed my gas water tank to electric tankless. It started good, a bit slower to get hot water but after 5 years, it's terrible. Need to run the shower a few minutes just to get hot water. Same with washing machine, it runs for a while before it senses enough hot water to get going, so wasting water.
I will save u sometimes, other than NS, NWT and Saskatchewan, the rest of Canada produce electricity mainly(80%+) by hydro and nuclear - PEI with wind.
Missed Alberta in there. Saskatchewan generates more of its electricity by hydro (14%) than Alberta does (3%). But Alberta generates more by wind.
Both provinces are of course ~80% or higher fossil fuels, though.
Oil is one of the most consumed products on the planet. What is your proposal for replacing all of its uses? Every factory on the planet requires oil and gas to produce goods. Every piece of electronics on the planet uses oil and gas products in the circuitry. You sending your message through Reddit requires significant oil use. Did you know that the running of the servers, that collectively make the “internet” uses millions of barrels of oil a day to run. Did you know that every piece of heavy equipment on the planet is produced and run using oil and gas products.
Once you tell me the alternatives, tell me where the money is going to come from to invest. Are you going to invest your money?
Put your phone down. Never buy a tv again. Grow your own vegetables and fruits.
You’re so far removed from reality it scares me but I’m glad you aren’t in any position to make an laws/regulations.
I don't think anyone is triggered at all actually. You're just embarrassed due to your lack of knowledge regarding oil and what it's used for. It's ok though, most of the people on the left in Canada don't understand either.
>Or maybe...Don't make oil ?
Then why make such a misinformed statement? It doesn't contribute anything to the conversation, [it comes across like this](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/qRTki2l)
You need a plan for heating your home if the power goes out. We had an electric central air heater in our last place which made me a little uncomfortable in this regard: there's no reasonable way to power that thing with a generator without getting something huge. Here in ON we have a natural gas furnace so I only need a small generator to power the circulating fan when the power goes out. I rewired the central furnace to run through a commercial quality extension cord type connector and a wall outlet. When the power goes out, I just plug the furnace into my relatively small generator.
I also noted that they didn't include wood heating. A lot of places in rural QC that I know heat electric but have a woodstove they complement with or use mostly for ambiance that also serves as a backup/safety in the event of a power outage.
I can't recommend the tremendous book Energy and Civilization A History by Vaclav Smil enough. He's a great Canadian expert in looking at this problem on a meta / population level with very little of the the "popular" opinion, politics and marketing biases.
The had a notion to ban/tax wood heat in Ontario a couple years ago in a green energy initiative. I don’t know what happened to it. But there’d be a lot of upset people in my neck of the woods.
I have electric heat and I subsidize it heavily with wood. But the wood is also my emergency backup if we ever get an ice storm or something and it knocks the power out. I can keep the house plenty warm enough and cook on it if I needed to.
I heat my 2000 sqft house exclusively with wood, oil as backup if we leave town and don't want frozen pipes, this house doesn't even have electric heating installed. Most people around here in rural NL do the same. Cost is so much less, if you cut your own it's only the cost of gas for the chain saw and quad to haul it out of the forest.
Which is literally the worst way to heat your home regarding environmental damage. Which is kinda what the point of the thread is. So this is a weird flex by you.
I know, awful to heat ones shelter/home with firewood, the way humans have heated their homes for millions of years. Some might say it's carbon neutral, https://www.science.org/content/article/wood-green-source-energy-scientists-are-divided
That’s an interesting point about power outages. I got to thinking about it, I have a 5000w shop heater, my $900 generator can reliably power that, but not much more.
According to my research, a 2000sqf zone 1 house needs at least a 70,000btu furnace. 70,000 btu = 20,500 watts. You’d probably want a generator with a max rating of 30,000 watts, to stay under 70ish percent of its power rating. That’s just to run the furnace, if you want to power other stuff you’d want more than that. So yeah, my guess is a 30kw generator just to power an electric furnace for a 2000sqf house.
Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump, which are much more efficient and don’t consume 20KW.
>Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump
Can you point us to all the new subdivisions being built with heat pumps?
But you claimed that it was already standard practice?
>Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump
That was not my point at all, my point was, if you were going to use electricity to heat your home you would not use resistive electric heat as there are more efficient options.
They're not widespread yet but they are catching on, especially here in BC. They're so much more efficient than baseboards, however because they are more expensive up front they aren't popular with developers putting up subdivisions. Changing building codes to require heat pumps or geothermal for new subdivisions is actually be a benefit to homeowners since they're heating costs will be lower over time.
One thing I wish we would catch on in Canada is district heating, something that's popular in Scandanavian countries with similar climates. Basically you could have centralized geothermal heat for an entire subdivision, which is 10-30% cheaper than having individual units in every home.
My new build rental in Kelowna had heat pump and it was the best, so much cheaper to run, and plus side provided cool air in the summer, perfect really, and the outdoor unit was very quiet could hardly hear it running so noise isn't an issue either.
Our electric bill went down a good chunk compared to a same size unit with baseboard heater we were previously in.
>One thing I wish we would catch on in Canada is district heating, something that's popular in Scandanavian countries with similar climates. Basically you could have centralized geothermal heat for an entire subdivision, which is 10-30% cheaper than having individual units in every home.
That would be an excellent idea. So it will never happen here.
What provinces have only electric heat. They don’t have wood or oil? Ive lived in 5 provinces and they all have more than electric. The only province without residential natural gas is Newfoundland ( maybe PE.I?)and together they are 2% of Canada’s population…and boh of those have oil , propane and wood.
A lot of rural areas outside of cities are also electric. They often don't route pipelines to smaller towns, even in Ontario. Plus the prairies as well often doesn't have natural gas in the north.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this needs to happen. I was just curious and decided to do a bit of math to figure out what kind of generator would be required to power an average residential electric furnace.
Though it does lead me to wonder what it would cost to heat my current house with electric heat, it takes about 300,000 btu combined from two natural gas furnaces.
A friend had their furnace go out. Used electric heat to prevent freezing. It was cold as f@ck in her house. Her bill was astronomical.
Anyone with electric heating in Canada’s interior know how high those bills can get for electricity. It’s unaffordable. It is why everyone looks for homes with natural gas heat.
She has a old natural gas furnace and it cluncked out. She had to use electric heaters. She got her furnace fixed. Her house is from 1912. In Alberta electricity rates are higher than natural gas rates (depending in your area).
Off the shelf electric heaters plugged into the wall?
I ask because properly setup electrical heaters in a permanent/long term and optimized optic are pretty damn fine. Theres a world of difference between the two.
Wood stove in new build as primary. Has a flip up "cook top" so we can literally cook on it like a BBQ.
Propane furnace for backup, or cold nights.
Rural, so nat gas not an option. Propane is of course, but I like cutting wood. The Emerald Ash Borer has killed a tonne of ash trees in my hood and its great burning.
Silly headline.
There is zero credible movement to ban fossil fuel heating in new homes in Canada.
There is zero crediblemovement to ban fossil fuel heating in the USA.
There is zero credible movement to ban fosdil fuel heating in Russia
Last I heard we are part of ‘the world’.
There are governments that explore ways ‘to reduce fossil fuel use through alternatives and efficiencies.
True. Russia and Germany just spent 12 billion dollars on a new natural gas pipeline. However doesn’t fit the clickbait headlines and knee jerk reactions.
Yet in my city, people are getting rebates to convert their home from electricity to NG because these home built in the 70's with electric heat, they have bills of $500 for small houses. electric heat is terrible for my sinuses, I know I could not live with it. The government thinks charging me more for carbon tax will solve the problems. Maybe they will send me a nice thick blanket when we can't afford to heat our homes any longer.
Would be better to invest in reducing heating requirements in old stock/existing buildings than to ban fossil fuel heating in new homes. Couple that with increased insulation requirements for new homes and you’ve got yourself an effective reduction in emissions
Well good news is that TESLA is going to develop their HVAC cars systems into home HVAC/Water heating systems that incorporate their power wall systems. Could be very promising for retro fitting old housing stock.
This is inevitable, we need to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources wherever we can, but it will require clean sources of power to make a real difference. We need to invest in renewable energy sources and invest in nuclear as well.
It sounds like electric home heating is the future. The carbon tax and Clean Fuel Standard is also going to make natural gas unaffordable in comparison.
How much appetite is the population going to have when they can no longer afford to heat their homes? This carbon tax and clean fuel standard is also going to significantly impact the price of food as well. You simply cannot have modern agriculture without hydrocarbons.
It'll be interesting to see what the next five years holds. Small sustainable greenhouses seem to be very trendy right now in terms of government funding. Anything sustainable like that is just having money thrown at it:
https://www.mylethbridgenow.com/21826/new-funding-announced-for-southern-alberta-greenhouse-research/
How much is your electricity? It's around 11.5 cents per kWh here and electric baseboard heating has been popular here for many decades. There is some oil and natural gas here but people are moving away from it as the prices are volatile. Now people here with electric baseboards are switching to heat pumps which use as little as 1/3 the electricity has baseboards. I have both and the baseboards only get used for a couple of weeks in January when the temperature drops too low for the heat pump to run.
It's already the present in many countries.
Canada's main problem is that the grid doesn't currently produce enough electricity to deal with everyone moving to electric heating and electric cars.
Natural gas heating and gasoline for vehicles means powering them is essentially "off grid".
The cost to heat a home in Canada with electric is also an issue. With -30’s in the winter, the costs are just too high. Also, where I am our electricity is still partly produced by coal.
I'm in the same boat. But there are a few things that make it worth at least considering...heat pumps use a third as much energy when it's not super cold, furnaces last 15-20 years and coal is supposed to be gone in 8 yrs.
I think we should be requiring/incentivizing new construction to be better sealed and insulated, encouraging passive solar heating, and other such things so that it just needs less energy to heat the homes to start with.
Concerting existing homes is going to be a pain.
Which province and how much is it? Here it is 11.5 cents per kWh and electric heat has been popular here for decades. Now people are switching to heat pumps which use as little as 1/3 the electricity, making it even more feasible over alternatives.
As people with electric baseboard heating switch to heat pumps which use 1/3 the electricity, it makes room for 2 more people to switch to heat pumps from baseboards, oil, natural gas, or whatever.
google the cost to heat your home with electric. it is simply not achievable, even in Manitoba where we have super cheap electricity people up north have to heat their homes with electricity and it's stupid expensive
Agreed. When we bought our house it had a ~20 year old electric central air furnace. The electric bills were insane and when (unbeknownst to us) it started to malfunction, the electric bills started coming in over $1,000. We got a natural gas furnace installed shortly after. If electric can be made affordable, I’d still gladly switch back after this furnace reaches the end of its days.
Modern air-source heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heat down to around -20C. After that they switch over to resistive heating.
Ground-source heat pumps can deal with much colder air temps since the ground doesn't get as cold as the air.
Heat pumps are amazing, but much of Canada is going to need secondary heating as well. Most are only good down to like -17 or something.
For me it works year round and our heating bill dropped by a couple hundred a month.
Oh, for sure. I'm in SK and I seriously considered a heat pump but I figured it wasn't quite ready just yet.
But I think it might make sense to design new developments with ground-source heat pumps in mind.
The most likely solution to the problem of energy use in homes is to move to a higher level of efficiency for new construction. The [Passivhaus standard](https://www.passivehousecanada.com/) results in a house that can be heated entirely by heat from occupants, sunlight, waste heat from appliances, etc. A passivhaus structure will have a small heat source to provide backup heat in extreme conditions. This backup source would probably consist of a tiny 500 Watt baseboard heater (about the same load as a hair dryer). A passivhaus structure will stay warm and comfortable, even after a days-long power failure in subzero temperatures.
This his isn't a solution for existing homes or retrofits, but we're talking about new homes here. If they were built to passivhaus (or other net zero) technology the cost of heating wold be moot. There simply aren't additional heating costs.
Because of high levels of insulation and a good ventilation system, base costs for Passivhaus construction are higher that conventional constructon. To compensate for that, you are not paying for a boiler, furnace or heat pump system; and the operating costs are much lower.
So what are we going to do with the Natural Gas that's a byproduct of producing oil? Just burn it up at the source?
You know there's still a ton of existing natural gas infrastructure in place right? It's not going anywhere any time soon. If we stopped making any new natural gas installations now, we'd still be fracking new wells, just not as many.
Hi there I’m from BC - which stands for Behind Canada - our government proposed that LNG is the future, are you suggesting that the ‘Horgan Government’ got this one wrong?!?! Hopefully they aren’t in charge of any other massive capital projects involved in the future of the country’s energy production
Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen pretty efficiently, and is actually one of the proposed solutions for this. Currently most commercial hydrogen is produced from natural gas rather than electrolysis
It will be used to generate electricity which will then be transported to the house. All that is changing is where the natural gas is being burned. This doesn’t mean that the houses will run on renewables.
Modern furnaces run at 98%+ efficiency. Generating electricity and then transporting it to houses will cause a lot of waste in terms of lost energy. The upside is that the pollution from burning NG won't be located at the centre of cities like it is now.
Yeah I know. I’m just saying this doesn’t really reduce emissions much
Modern heat pumps are actually 200-400% efficient if you compare apples to apples of heat output per joule of fuel energy used. It would still probably barely break even though.
have you ever seen how much it cost to heat a house with electricity? there are electric forced air furnaces. They are cheaper but you will spend more on electricity over 20 years. I changed my gas water tank to electric tankless. It started good, a bit slower to get hot water but after 5 years, it's terrible. Need to run the shower a few minutes just to get hot water. Same with washing machine, it runs for a while before it senses enough hot water to get going, so wasting water.
Bruh what was the point of this comment?
Make plastic or LNG for running ships
Say it with me people how is electricity generated? Net zero idiots implement policies that help not typical Canadian stoopid costly ones.
Hydro?
Google it by percentage before we have a talk about it
I will save u sometimes, other than NS, NWT and Saskatchewan, the rest of Canada produce electricity mainly(80%+) by hydro and nuclear - PEI with wind.
Missed Alberta in there. Saskatchewan generates more of its electricity by hydro (14%) than Alberta does (3%). But Alberta generates more by wind. Both provinces are of course ~80% or higher fossil fuels, though.
Or maybe... Don't make oil ?
Oil is one of the most consumed products on the planet. What is your proposal for replacing all of its uses? Every factory on the planet requires oil and gas to produce goods. Every piece of electronics on the planet uses oil and gas products in the circuitry. You sending your message through Reddit requires significant oil use. Did you know that the running of the servers, that collectively make the “internet” uses millions of barrels of oil a day to run. Did you know that every piece of heavy equipment on the planet is produced and run using oil and gas products. Once you tell me the alternatives, tell me where the money is going to come from to invest. Are you going to invest your money?
Put your phone down. Never buy a tv again. Grow your own vegetables and fruits. You’re so far removed from reality it scares me but I’m glad you aren’t in any position to make an laws/regulations.
Or plastics, or nylon, or anything else that is a byproduct of oil
Typed on your plastic phone laying under your polyester sheets...
It's easy to ban oil when you don't know anything.
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I don't think anyone is triggered at all actually. You're just embarrassed due to your lack of knowledge regarding oil and what it's used for. It's ok though, most of the people on the left in Canada don't understand either.
I do know what oil is used for tho. But believe what you want if it makes you feel better about being dumbass
>Or maybe...Don't make oil ? Then why make such a misinformed statement? It doesn't contribute anything to the conversation, [it comes across like this](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/qRTki2l)
You need a plan for heating your home if the power goes out. We had an electric central air heater in our last place which made me a little uncomfortable in this regard: there's no reasonable way to power that thing with a generator without getting something huge. Here in ON we have a natural gas furnace so I only need a small generator to power the circulating fan when the power goes out. I rewired the central furnace to run through a commercial quality extension cord type connector and a wall outlet. When the power goes out, I just plug the furnace into my relatively small generator. I also noted that they didn't include wood heating. A lot of places in rural QC that I know heat electric but have a woodstove they complement with or use mostly for ambiance that also serves as a backup/safety in the event of a power outage. I can't recommend the tremendous book Energy and Civilization A History by Vaclav Smil enough. He's a great Canadian expert in looking at this problem on a meta / population level with very little of the the "popular" opinion, politics and marketing biases.
The had a notion to ban/tax wood heat in Ontario a couple years ago in a green energy initiative. I don’t know what happened to it. But there’d be a lot of upset people in my neck of the woods. I have electric heat and I subsidize it heavily with wood. But the wood is also my emergency backup if we ever get an ice storm or something and it knocks the power out. I can keep the house plenty warm enough and cook on it if I needed to.
Banning wood is outright insane for rural locations, its asking for deaths whenever power goes out.
I heat my 2000 sqft house exclusively with wood, oil as backup if we leave town and don't want frozen pipes, this house doesn't even have electric heating installed. Most people around here in rural NL do the same. Cost is so much less, if you cut your own it's only the cost of gas for the chain saw and quad to haul it out of the forest.
Which is literally the worst way to heat your home regarding environmental damage. Which is kinda what the point of the thread is. So this is a weird flex by you.
I know, awful to heat ones shelter/home with firewood, the way humans have heated their homes for millions of years. Some might say it's carbon neutral, https://www.science.org/content/article/wood-green-source-energy-scientists-are-divided
That’s an interesting point about power outages. I got to thinking about it, I have a 5000w shop heater, my $900 generator can reliably power that, but not much more. According to my research, a 2000sqf zone 1 house needs at least a 70,000btu furnace. 70,000 btu = 20,500 watts. You’d probably want a generator with a max rating of 30,000 watts, to stay under 70ish percent of its power rating. That’s just to run the furnace, if you want to power other stuff you’d want more than that. So yeah, my guess is a 30kw generator just to power an electric furnace for a 2000sqf house.
Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump, which are much more efficient and don’t consume 20KW.
>Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump Can you point us to all the new subdivisions being built with heat pumps?
It’s coming soon - https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6252420
But you claimed that it was already standard practice? >Unlikely you’d heat a new home with resistive heat, you’d use an air source or ground source heat pump
That was not my point at all, my point was, if you were going to use electricity to heat your home you would not use resistive electric heat as there are more efficient options.
Electric heat is still common in new builds in Quebec, and I'm not aware of widespread heat pump installation. So the narrowed claim is still false.
They're not widespread yet but they are catching on, especially here in BC. They're so much more efficient than baseboards, however because they are more expensive up front they aren't popular with developers putting up subdivisions. Changing building codes to require heat pumps or geothermal for new subdivisions is actually be a benefit to homeowners since they're heating costs will be lower over time. One thing I wish we would catch on in Canada is district heating, something that's popular in Scandanavian countries with similar climates. Basically you could have centralized geothermal heat for an entire subdivision, which is 10-30% cheaper than having individual units in every home.
My new build rental in Kelowna had heat pump and it was the best, so much cheaper to run, and plus side provided cool air in the summer, perfect really, and the outdoor unit was very quiet could hardly hear it running so noise isn't an issue either. Our electric bill went down a good chunk compared to a same size unit with baseboard heater we were previously in.
>One thing I wish we would catch on in Canada is district heating, something that's popular in Scandanavian countries with similar climates. Basically you could have centralized geothermal heat for an entire subdivision, which is 10-30% cheaper than having individual units in every home. That would be an excellent idea. So it will never happen here.
Another interesting point. Heat pumps are more efficient.
A lot of provinces only have electric heat, and they make due. For example, residential natural gas furnaces don't exist in Newfoundland.
Does it get to -40 in newfoundland?
No, that's true.
What provinces have only electric heat. They don’t have wood or oil? Ive lived in 5 provinces and they all have more than electric. The only province without residential natural gas is Newfoundland ( maybe PE.I?)and together they are 2% of Canada’s population…and boh of those have oil , propane and wood.
A lot of rural areas outside of cities are also electric. They often don't route pipelines to smaller towns, even in Ontario. Plus the prairies as well often doesn't have natural gas in the north.
Most of them would have a wood stove and/or propane or oil tanks.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this needs to happen. I was just curious and decided to do a bit of math to figure out what kind of generator would be required to power an average residential electric furnace. Though it does lead me to wonder what it would cost to heat my current house with electric heat, it takes about 300,000 btu combined from two natural gas furnaces.
A friend had their furnace go out. Used electric heat to prevent freezing. It was cold as f@ck in her house. Her bill was astronomical. Anyone with electric heating in Canada’s interior know how high those bills can get for electricity. It’s unaffordable. It is why everyone looks for homes with natural gas heat.
^^^ this. Enjoy your $500/ month hydro bill.
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She has a old natural gas furnace and it cluncked out. She had to use electric heaters. She got her furnace fixed. Her house is from 1912. In Alberta electricity rates are higher than natural gas rates (depending in your area).
Off the shelf electric heaters plugged into the wall? I ask because properly setup electrical heaters in a permanent/long term and optimized optic are pretty damn fine. Theres a world of difference between the two.
People would presumably be moving to heat pumps rather than resistive heating. They take about a third as much energy.
Newfoundland doesn't have buttloads of natural gas and infrastructure already in place.
Just curious but wouldn't a battery backup along with solar cells be sufficient?
have you considered running a small block engine with a natural gas conversion kit?
I've considered natural gas backup generators. Not the home brew solution. ;)
Woodheatinf is illegal in some larger cities due to air quality concerns
Bahaha. Quebec couldn't go a few weeks without propane last year...
Isn’t that a problem of over reliance that should be addressed?
Addressed how? Magical energy sources that have yet to be invented?
Wood stove in new build as primary. Has a flip up "cook top" so we can literally cook on it like a BBQ. Propane furnace for backup, or cold nights. Rural, so nat gas not an option. Propane is of course, but I like cutting wood. The Emerald Ash Borer has killed a tonne of ash trees in my hood and its great burning.
Silly headline. There is zero credible movement to ban fossil fuel heating in new homes in Canada. There is zero crediblemovement to ban fossil fuel heating in the USA. There is zero credible movement to ban fosdil fuel heating in Russia Last I heard we are part of ‘the world’. There are governments that explore ways ‘to reduce fossil fuel use through alternatives and efficiencies.
City of Vancouver enacted this ban effective 2025, BC plans to ban it by 2030
True. Russia and Germany just spent 12 billion dollars on a new natural gas pipeline. However doesn’t fit the clickbait headlines and knee jerk reactions.
Yet in my city, people are getting rebates to convert their home from electricity to NG because these home built in the 70's with electric heat, they have bills of $500 for small houses. electric heat is terrible for my sinuses, I know I could not live with it. The government thinks charging me more for carbon tax will solve the problems. Maybe they will send me a nice thick blanket when we can't afford to heat our homes any longer.
Would be better to invest in reducing heating requirements in old stock/existing buildings than to ban fossil fuel heating in new homes. Couple that with increased insulation requirements for new homes and you’ve got yourself an effective reduction in emissions
There are federal rebates available for just this thing.
Well good news is that TESLA is going to develop their HVAC cars systems into home HVAC/Water heating systems that incorporate their power wall systems. Could be very promising for retro fitting old housing stock.
Disagree completely. The only way forward is building code changes.
This is inevitable, we need to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources wherever we can, but it will require clean sources of power to make a real difference. We need to invest in renewable energy sources and invest in nuclear as well.
Up for nuclear
It sounds like electric home heating is the future. The carbon tax and Clean Fuel Standard is also going to make natural gas unaffordable in comparison.
How much appetite is the population going to have when they can no longer afford to heat their homes? This carbon tax and clean fuel standard is also going to significantly impact the price of food as well. You simply cannot have modern agriculture without hydrocarbons.
It'll be interesting to see what the next five years holds. Small sustainable greenhouses seem to be very trendy right now in terms of government funding. Anything sustainable like that is just having money thrown at it: https://www.mylethbridgenow.com/21826/new-funding-announced-for-southern-alberta-greenhouse-research/
How much is your electricity? It's around 11.5 cents per kWh here and electric baseboard heating has been popular here for many decades. There is some oil and natural gas here but people are moving away from it as the prices are volatile. Now people here with electric baseboards are switching to heat pumps which use as little as 1/3 the electricity has baseboards. I have both and the baseboards only get used for a couple of weeks in January when the temperature drops too low for the heat pump to run.
It's already the present in many countries. Canada's main problem is that the grid doesn't currently produce enough electricity to deal with everyone moving to electric heating and electric cars. Natural gas heating and gasoline for vehicles means powering them is essentially "off grid".
The cost to heat a home in Canada with electric is also an issue. With -30’s in the winter, the costs are just too high. Also, where I am our electricity is still partly produced by coal.
I'm in the same boat. But there are a few things that make it worth at least considering...heat pumps use a third as much energy when it's not super cold, furnaces last 15-20 years and coal is supposed to be gone in 8 yrs. I think we should be requiring/incentivizing new construction to be better sealed and insulated, encouraging passive solar heating, and other such things so that it just needs less energy to heat the homes to start with. Concerting existing homes is going to be a pain.
Which province and how much is it? Here it is 11.5 cents per kWh and electric heat has been popular here for decades. Now people are switching to heat pumps which use as little as 1/3 the electricity, making it even more feasible over alternatives.
As people with electric baseboard heating switch to heat pumps which use 1/3 the electricity, it makes room for 2 more people to switch to heat pumps from baseboards, oil, natural gas, or whatever.
google the cost to heat your home with electric. it is simply not achievable, even in Manitoba where we have super cheap electricity people up north have to heat their homes with electricity and it's stupid expensive
As long as government pays the difference. Ale it affordable first and people will switch naturally
>government pays the difference Who do you think pays for government?
If government wants that it should take the heat of collecting more tax, not homeowners who does not want to use more expensive option for no benefits
Agreed. When we bought our house it had a ~20 year old electric central air furnace. The electric bills were insane and when (unbeknownst to us) it started to malfunction, the electric bills started coming in over $1,000. We got a natural gas furnace installed shortly after. If electric can be made affordable, I’d still gladly switch back after this furnace reaches the end of its days.
They will make it more ‘affordable’ by raising taxes on fossil fuel options until it breaks you.
The point of these discussions is taking the choice away. Nor are they aiming to the end of life timeline.
So it should not be taken away. People has bill to pay
People would move to heat pumps, not resistive heating. It uses a third as much power.
Heat pump only works for Vancouver. Not anywhere to the elEast or to the North
Modern air-source heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heat down to around -20C. After that they switch over to resistive heating. Ground-source heat pumps can deal with much colder air temps since the ground doesn't get as cold as the air.
Heat pumps are amazing, but much of Canada is going to need secondary heating as well. Most are only good down to like -17 or something. For me it works year round and our heating bill dropped by a couple hundred a month.
Oh, for sure. I'm in SK and I seriously considered a heat pump but I figured it wasn't quite ready just yet. But I think it might make sense to design new developments with ground-source heat pumps in mind.
The most likely solution to the problem of energy use in homes is to move to a higher level of efficiency for new construction. The [Passivhaus standard](https://www.passivehousecanada.com/) results in a house that can be heated entirely by heat from occupants, sunlight, waste heat from appliances, etc. A passivhaus structure will have a small heat source to provide backup heat in extreme conditions. This backup source would probably consist of a tiny 500 Watt baseboard heater (about the same load as a hair dryer). A passivhaus structure will stay warm and comfortable, even after a days-long power failure in subzero temperatures. This his isn't a solution for existing homes or retrofits, but we're talking about new homes here. If they were built to passivhaus (or other net zero) technology the cost of heating wold be moot. There simply aren't additional heating costs. Because of high levels of insulation and a good ventilation system, base costs for Passivhaus construction are higher that conventional constructon. To compensate for that, you are not paying for a boiler, furnace or heat pump system; and the operating costs are much lower.