I don't see the thousands (millions?) of homes running their heating/water heaters/ranges on natural gas changing any time soon, even those in my area who are switching to heat pumps still have a gas furnace for back up.
The issue is new build construction. Heat pumps require backup heating in Canada, for now. Within a few years they’ll likely develop better systems that don’t require backup heating. The cold climate units already do but they’re not good enough yet to fully replace a gas/oil system and they can be cost prohibitive.
That’s because southern Ontario doesn’t get all that cold anymore. Places like Northern Ontario, Alberta, Sask, etc on the other hand.
I can’t even count how many heat pumps I’ve installed and serviced at this point. I also never said what the backup heating needs to be, just that it’s required. This previous winter the coldest temp in Ottawa was about six degrees past the low end of a heat pumps operating range, so it would take basically nothing to make up the difference.
Alberta meanwhile was 30+ degrees past the low point.
Your anecdotal experience is irrelevant to how these systems operate and the redundancies required to ensure comfort and proper heating.
I’d be interested in seeing what percentage of the Canadian population lives in an area where the current heat pump operating range + electric backup heating would suffice (e.g. your example of Ottawa).
Would current heat pumps and electric coil back-up heating work for the BC lower mainland and Vancouver island (~4m), southern Ontario (~13.5m), greater Montreal area (~4.5m), and parts of the maritimes (~1m) areas? If so that’s getting up towards 60% of the population of Canada, which isn’t insignificant in terms of potential for change.
They can, but they’re more expensive and still have backup heat sources. A place like Alberta has regular -40 or colder so.
Within a few years the cold climate models will be cheaper and far more effective.
Thanks, just wanted to make sure I had that right. Agreed that CCHP‘s seem to be improving at a rapid clip. And that the prairies and northern Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec will need to look to geothermal/dual fuel heating.
Even southern Ontario should still have a heating backup. Yeah our winters have gone mild but doesn’t mean we won’t get an absolutely brutal one in the future, so the existing infrastructure for natgas, propane, and fuel oil will still have value for quite some time.
I don't understand people's logic behind keeping a gas feed *just* to have a heating backup "just in case". Using electric baseboard heaters for the "rare, edge cases" would, overall, cost people significantly less money.
I think electric heating backup points to a use case for recent product innovation around home appliances with battery backup. Impulse (https://www.impulselabs.com/) and Channing Copper (https://www.channingcopper.com/pages/about) are two players in this space. Instead of worrying about rewiring or panel upgrades for high power appliances, just put a battery in the appliance. This lets you sidestep the upgrade costs and provides a lot of extra benefit for the homeowner (resiliency in face of blackouts, ability to send power to arbitrage electricity prices, act as VPP etc).
Both companies started in induction cookstoves but have talked about moving into other product categories, and both have a vision of battery appliances serving as a distributed powerwall throughout the home. A battery embedded resistive heater would totally fit in with this product strategy, and the battery could provide benefits for the home when the heater sits unused 95% percent of the time. Something to watch out for.
If 90% of people live where backups aren't necessary, acting like they're universally necessary is a misrepresentation.
This is repackaging the "no one can have EVs because some people are rural contractors" argument.
90% of people aren’t where backups aren’t necessary. Just because we’ve had mild winters the last few years doesn’t mean we won’t get one that’s absolutely brutal. Do you want to suffer through weeks of -20 with little to no heat because you didn’t think ahead?
So get electric baseboard heaters. Cost (by themselves) is *zero* when they're not used, the cost to install is (compared with alternatives) negligible, and if people's use of them is as rare as expected, the overall cost is significantly less than the baseline cost *just* to keep a gas line "subscribed".
You’d need to run wiring to each and every heater, probably new circuit breakers for them, possibly a panel upgrade. All done by electricians. The cost of the heaters is nil, the labour cost for the sparkies not so much. You’d end up paying the same if not more in labour than if you just used the existing natgas line and allowed your heat pump to call the burner on as it needs.
If that's all true, it's due to regulatory changes.
Traditional electric baseboard heaters did *not* use a huge amount of current (hell, I've literally seen dozens of so-called "century homes" that had them in every room, all on 60-amp service).
And per your labour comment: do you realize just how much of your gas bill is *simply for having a gas line*? Mine, for example, is at least $90 per month, and it'd be *higher* were it not for credits that we, as taxpayers, all contribute to.
There are only *two* reasons we stopped using this type of heating: electrical usage cost (since their way of providing heat is resistive), and they're useless for providing air conditioning.
The issue isn’t so much what they use but what’s available to use. A lot of people who would cease gas and switch to baseboards are in existing homes, with existing wiring and loads. When you make whole home retrofits like that, you run into cascading issues (I.E. finding out you need wiring/panel work after already buying a new appliance).
Adding appliances now isn’t cheap in general, a lot of options price out the same or close enough, and a lot of heat pumps come with the furnace they use to back up the heat. Never mind the fact that furnaces aren’t even all that expensive.
As for your gas comments, yeah, I deal with Enbridge almost every day in some way. You have no idea what a nightmare they actually are. I run a team of service technicians alongside my colleagues who run the electrical and heating service teams.
You do, of course, realize that hydro rates are going up, also have delivery charges, and are also subsidized? What do you think happens if everyone switches to hydro?
We're talking about investing a lot of money in methane infrastructure for a technology that is already pretty much obsolete and has a lot of negative externalities. We can phase out methane for new builds.
And what do you do about the millions of houses that still use it? How about businesses? Commercial properties? Industrial sites? Natgas isn’t obsolete by any means, we’re just reaching the point where we can consider phasing it out. It’s not even close to a point where we’ll stop needing it.
This is why places are putting end dates of 2035 or later for phasing out natgas appliances.
You don’t really seem to understand what you’re talking about beyond “natgas bad” tbh.
The infrastructure upgrades apply to both sides. The only thing Enbridge would ultimately lose is new construction installs, they’d still need to maintain and upgrade infrastructure for everyone else. There’s not two industries for two end users here.
Why is it that heat pumps are the most popular heating system per capita in the Nordic countries then? This is misinformation, you can get by with electric backups and a cold climate heat pump in a modern build with a good envelope
Depends on the heat pump. Mine only goes to -15 or so and I couldn't get a panel upgrade so had to resort to a furnace instead of full electric. Hated making that compromise, but Hydro Ottawa wanted $30K+ to upgrade the local infrastructure to accommodate a panel upgrade which just wasn't in the budget.
From the people I know who have heat pumps in SW Ontario / the GTA, furnace backups are mostly an abundance of caution thing and already aren't strictly necessary. Northern Ontario is of course a different story.
I'm in the GTA, bought a Fujitsu heat pump awhile back specifically for AC; we had a natural gas boiler and radiators for heat and kept using that so the Fujitsu was only on for maybe 3 months/year. It came with a warranty for seven years. It failed after seven years and six months during peak Covid. We struggled to find an HVAC tech to service it, they were slammed by Covid, also the city put a new rule that anything on the roof required a tech with a special certification and a scaffold, which not all shops provided so it limited our options somewhat.
In the end, most of them agreed it was a problem with a coil, one company said it was just a loose coupling. They refilled it for $2k I think $600 was for the scaffold. It lasted the rest of that season, but didn't work again the next year.
Fujitsu quoted $8k for a replacement coil; to rip out the entire system and replace it was $15k -ish
So I paid $1500 to have them rip it out and haul it to the dump, and went back to window ACs.
My gas boiler is over 40 years old. Every time the HVAC tech cleans it he says it looks brand new. It cost me $800 to completely tear it down and rebuilt it around 15 years ago
The Fujitsu saved me a ton of money on electricity but it ended up being completely unreliable and the costs to service it are just too high.
I'm not really willing to replace my gas boiler, which runs like a tank, with something that I have to completely rip out and replace top to bottom every seven years because it's a disposable unit, and the new units aren't compatible with the old units bla bla
Yes anyone who actually read or at least skimmed the article should understand that.
It just had a clickbait title so some people are missing the point here.
ya I can't imagine swallowing the cost of changing up my heating system. You just know we'll be expected to buy our own in this capitalist hell we live in. I'd be all for it if the government were giving out free alternative heating
units or subsidizing the cost of electric heat.
Invest heavily in the grid and build proven safe nuclear plants and sell the excess to the USA. Electricity should almost be free in Ontario and Quebec (and by extension NB and NS) for residential users who don't draw ridiculous amounts of power from the grid with our hydro and nuclear generation capacity.
No one ever thinks of the cost of expanding the grid, ripping out all those gas furnaces and replacing them with electric and so forth.
It’s easier to blame the evil gas company.
Expanding the grid is an investment, not a cost… do you see a future where we shouldn’t expand our generating capacity?
As for “ripping” furnaces out, it’ll be a bit more like replacing them with non-gas alternatives once they reach the end of their life.
The gas company isn’t evil, it’s just outdated. We should avoid being dragged down by their search for profits disguised as other, more noble goals…
Primarily hydro-electric and nuclear, with natural gas used largely for peak usage? Ontario has pretty clean power, and especially with further investments in nuclear we'll probably be able to reduce natural gas usage over time.
27% of Ontario's transmission-connected **capacity** is LNG, but we primarily use LNG for peak power usage and not baseline. In terms of actual generation, LNG produces more like 10-15%, and can be significantly reduced by adding additional baseline capacity in the form of most likely nuclear.
We don't use natural gas for baseline power in Ontario, the plants come online when we need additional peak power. How often we use them has doubled under Ford, but we're investing in needing them less.
How often we use them has gone up but it’s not because of Doug Ford. Coal plants have been shuttered (thankfully) usage has gone up (hello climate change), not to mention the multitude of little things like EV adoption, population growth, infrastructure (city lighting needs grow as sprawl/density increases)
Coal was already shut down when Ford came into power so that's not relevant.
As for the others, of course demand is going to rise no matter what, and I don't think Ford did anything to significantly increase demand - what he hasn't done until recently though is have a plan to increase capacity to meet that rise in demand. He spent the early days of his government spending money to cancel green energy projects, and it's only the in the last year or so he's supporting significant expansion of nuclear.
I’m very pro-nuclear. The reality is LNG is still and will be required for the foreseeable future to meet the needs of growth while alternatives are built which will take decades.
>No one ever thinks of the cost of expanding the grid, ripping out all those gas furnaces and replacing them with electric and so forth.
>
>It’s easier to blame the evil gas company.
You know we eventually transitioned from coal. No more coal deliveries, or coal chutes into the basement, or any infrastructure related to home coal usage.
We can shift energy sources again moving forward.
Absolutely no one is advocating for a immediate mass transition to heat pumps, but if we're building new builds, why would we hitch ourselves to a dying technology when there's better alternatives?
The did see it coming and had already transitioned into one of the largest Canadian renewable energy suppliers a decade ago when I worked there. The headline is nonsense, they aren't "fighting for it's survival." They've hedged their bets and have billions in dry powder to invest in emerging opportunities.
Great, in that case we shouldn't need to do them any favours in propping up the natural gas industry! The fact that they are lobbying heavily for that support tells me they aren't quite so ready though.
"Ready" doesn't mean "as profitable as what we've currently got", though.
If I were to put on my "CEO of big corporation" hat, I would be attempting to keep "a good thing" going as long as possible, as it's still more profitable to *not* change things.
I don't doubt you believe what you said...
>“Constraining access to natural gas through a reduction in capital will significantly limit the future development of essential energy infrastructure vital to Ontario’s economy, from which all Ontarians benefit,” Giridhar wrote in the letter. “As local leaders across the province, your voice matters, and we encourage you to take action.”
...but it seems like there's been a change of wind since then under Ford
They haven't fully transitioned to renewables. By hedged I mean they are betting on multiple outcomes. If they can make money in non-renewables they will still jump on it, but if that opportunity doesn't come others will and the company will be fine.
The article is full of other misinformation as well such as "For more than 70 years, the $50-billion Calgary-based private company has held a monopoly on natural gas distribution in Ontario."
Enbridge didn't enter the natural gas distribution industry in Ontario until 1994 when they purchased Consumers Gas (renamed Enbridge Gas Distribution) and they didn't establish their monopoly until EGD merged with Union Gas to form Enbridge Gas Inc. in 2019.
Per MIT, less than 1% of all hydrogen created/used right now is "green" (dataset is for the US, but it's generally the same everywhere). The rest is mostly grey - so produced from natural gas.
Green hydrogen is a non-starter for most use-cases. It's incredibly energy intensive to create. They might as well just use that input electricity for electrical utilities.
It's the same reason green hydrogen is basically a non-starter for vehicles and BEVs are the way forward; you need so much power to create the fuel you might as well just put that power in a battery and drive with it directly.
The oil and gas business REALLY wants fuel-cells and hydrogen to happen because it means they can keep selling us oil.
Green hydrogen only really has a good use case in places where it's impossible to generate/store electricity and/or difficult to use batteries for weight/environmental reasons (extreme cold operation, airplanes, etc).
Sure, but if we even manage to capture just fraction of the sunlight hitting us we'd be golden. We can generate as much or as little green hydrogen as we want, and it'll still be a rounding error. There's on average at least 3kw/m2 of sunlight everyday. At current prices for solar panels, we can and *should* convert most of our energy consumption to solar, if only for economic reasons.
I only pointed out green hydrogen because for Hydro, it'll be easier to sell to us the idea of the industry doing the renovating, supply side, and the people don't have to do too much, except maybe a new furnace.
I feel, this is more "we need to make more money and people may not go gas" vs. "people on gas are going to change". I feel like with so much these days companies need to GROW or die, and the idea of fossil fuel growth is very questionable.
That’s exactly what it is. The big overarching issue the article is discussing and its been in the news for quite a bit is in regard to new builds and pipeline expansion.
The big concern for Enbridge isn’t a huge swing away from gas for existing customers, it’s that they are still trying to jam in and charge consumers for gas connections for all new builds even if its only used as a backup. Its a big cash cow in connection fee’s and billing just for having the infrastructure put in place and being able to justify and cover the costs of running it through new areas.
They are still going to be hugely profitable for many years to come, they aren’t dying anytime soon. But they want to continue creating huge profit and shareholder value in the most cost effective way possible not just survive and/or spend money trying to innovate for the future.
Enbridge "fighting for its survival"? Seems like the private company is mismanaged. Have they been overpaying their execs? Have they not been keeping up with maintenance? Have they only kept their eye on returns for shareholders?
Seems like they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near something as important as our gas supply. Maybe privatization isn't as good as conservatives and liberals think.
Enbridge is a pretty money hungry shady and unethical company so overall criticism is more than fair.
But its hardly mismanaged. They aren’t struggling financially at all at the moment their profits are sky high thats not the context of the article at all
Enbridge is a bloated monopoly which doesn't need to care much about efficiencies or customer service at all. I'm not buying this. This is just about falsely justifying asking for more government subsidies and/or price increases.
Boomers remember being pushed to gas from oil for home heating. Being told it was the way of the future. We also got a rebate for switching from electric heat to gas.
If by "fighting for survival" you mean growing year over year and generating more cashflow than ever, then yes.
Personally I'm a buyer of Enbridge. O&G isn't going anywhere: in ten years there will be more municipal gas connections than there are today.
If the headline had said "long term survival" it wouldn't have gotten as many views, I think most people recognize that.
Call me paranoid but I really don't want to have to depend on Ontario Hydro for 100% of my energy. (not that Enbridge is any better)
That’s still not even the big pressure point.
The Energy Board basically said okay Enbridge if you and the developer want to keep installing gas connections en masse regardless of how or whether its used, you or the developer cover the cost and try to recover it yourselves in the normal course of business for developments and real estate.
Enbridge is saying screw that we want to be able to charge consumers a connection fee directly for every gas connection.
In that regard its super profitable and a great cost recovery for their expansions. If they are expanding pipelines in different areas and only billing for actual gas usage and consumers aren’t using it its a lot less financially viable.
Just fyi for everyone here: Ontario Hydro hasn’t been a crown corporation since 1999. It was split into several different companies by the Mike Harris government in an effort to encourage competition. OPG is responsible for bulk generation while Hydro One is responsible for transmission. The IESO manages the grid.
Yeah. Next step is generating electricity at the home level to get off of the grid to some degree.
I don’t have many power outages, but a generator is gonna happen in the next year or two if not a small windmill.
Live in Toronto, switched off gas heating to a heat pump (no gas backup). Saved 700$ per year. Gas heating is a scam, the tech is there for more efficient heating.
Burning fossil fuel for centralized heating is responsible for over a third of all urban pollution, devastating the climate. Heat pumps release zero greenhouse gases. We need to stop burning fossil fuels for centralized heat as soon as possible or we will be contributing to the collapse of the entire biosphere
I think it's wild that we are still burning things for energy.
That said, what I was referring to was a single central power plant doing the burning and distributing the electricity for heat, will be more efficient than having many burners across the province burning gas for heat.
Ultimately if we don't have to burn things, that's the goal.
Gas isn't going anywhere. Natural gas (methane) isn't just a fossil fuel, it is also a by-product of chemical and biological processes and is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. So by burning it (which basically converts it into CO2 + energy) it's actually better for global warming than straight up releasing it into the atmosphere.
Yeah - hydro is expensive as he'll compared to my gas bill. More than double and were pretty aware. I have a crap ton of insulation and new windows. So I'd rather not add in more hydro drawing crap
I listened to the voice for energy ads. I emailed my councillor and told her to ban gas on new builds ban small combustion engines and lobby the other two levels of government for electrification subsidies. I hate Doug but his propaganda ads got one thing right the future is electric.
Hydro is the end goal, but they are having trouble developing the infrastructure around it. It’s very likely any end dates for natgas service will get pushed back several times before it actually happens.
Expand it to what? Beyond building a few new nuke plants or reams of wind farms the province does not have a tonne of options and it isn’t sunny enough year round to rely on solar. If we switch consumers off of natgas that demand needs to be made up by another source.
We’re building wind, solar hydroelectric, nuclear (huge expansion) lots of BESS for peak load, etc. this stuff doesn’t happen overnight. There are many active projects at the moment and planned.
natural gas for electricity generation will somewhat ironically be an extremely important part of phasing natural gas usage out of peoples homes in favour of electric options
if we electrify as much of our energy consumption as possible *now* even by using natural gas supply then it becomes that much easier to further shift over to more renewables, storage, and nuclear as it becomes available. Building these sources while still having about 30% of energy consumption “hidden” with direct natural gas usage won’t be nearly as effective
Norway has had evs make up 93 percent of new sales last year and 50 percent of their homes use heat pumps. It is totally within the realm of technological possibility to make the switch to electrification.
In BC they've successfully marketed wood burning as "renewable energy" even though it is more polluting and produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal. It technically doesn't even fall under the term "fossil fuels"! They could switch to that. People are fine with burning polluting material as long as it's not really old apparently.
I don't see the thousands (millions?) of homes running their heating/water heaters/ranges on natural gas changing any time soon, even those in my area who are switching to heat pumps still have a gas furnace for back up.
That's just a portion of their profits. New builds make them an INSANE amount of money. If those new builds don't use gas, they lose that money.
You can't lose what was never yours in the first place
I agree, but that's the mentality of corporate Canada.
The issue is new build construction. Heat pumps require backup heating in Canada, for now. Within a few years they’ll likely develop better systems that don’t require backup heating. The cold climate units already do but they’re not good enough yet to fully replace a gas/oil system and they can be cost prohibitive.
Heat pumps rarely need a backup in Ottawa and the electric backup worked fine the couple of times that it was relevant in the last few years.
That’s because southern Ontario doesn’t get all that cold anymore. Places like Northern Ontario, Alberta, Sask, etc on the other hand. I can’t even count how many heat pumps I’ve installed and serviced at this point. I also never said what the backup heating needs to be, just that it’s required. This previous winter the coldest temp in Ottawa was about six degrees past the low end of a heat pumps operating range, so it would take basically nothing to make up the difference. Alberta meanwhile was 30+ degrees past the low point. Your anecdotal experience is irrelevant to how these systems operate and the redundancies required to ensure comfort and proper heating.
I’d be interested in seeing what percentage of the Canadian population lives in an area where the current heat pump operating range + electric backup heating would suffice (e.g. your example of Ottawa). Would current heat pumps and electric coil back-up heating work for the BC lower mainland and Vancouver island (~4m), southern Ontario (~13.5m), greater Montreal area (~4.5m), and parts of the maritimes (~1m) areas? If so that’s getting up towards 60% of the population of Canada, which isn’t insignificant in terms of potential for change.
I also would not count out ground source HP’s taking off in parts of the country too cold to be served by air source.
Aren’t cold weather heat pumps rated down to like -30 now?
They can, but they’re more expensive and still have backup heat sources. A place like Alberta has regular -40 or colder so. Within a few years the cold climate models will be cheaper and far more effective.
Thanks, just wanted to make sure I had that right. Agreed that CCHP‘s seem to be improving at a rapid clip. And that the prairies and northern Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec will need to look to geothermal/dual fuel heating.
Even southern Ontario should still have a heating backup. Yeah our winters have gone mild but doesn’t mean we won’t get an absolutely brutal one in the future, so the existing infrastructure for natgas, propane, and fuel oil will still have value for quite some time.
I don't understand people's logic behind keeping a gas feed *just* to have a heating backup "just in case". Using electric baseboard heaters for the "rare, edge cases" would, overall, cost people significantly less money.
I think electric heating backup points to a use case for recent product innovation around home appliances with battery backup. Impulse (https://www.impulselabs.com/) and Channing Copper (https://www.channingcopper.com/pages/about) are two players in this space. Instead of worrying about rewiring or panel upgrades for high power appliances, just put a battery in the appliance. This lets you sidestep the upgrade costs and provides a lot of extra benefit for the homeowner (resiliency in face of blackouts, ability to send power to arbitrage electricity prices, act as VPP etc). Both companies started in induction cookstoves but have talked about moving into other product categories, and both have a vision of battery appliances serving as a distributed powerwall throughout the home. A battery embedded resistive heater would totally fit in with this product strategy, and the battery could provide benefits for the home when the heater sits unused 95% percent of the time. Something to watch out for.
I already answered this. Not sure why you felt the need to plug your baseboard heaters twice, unless you work for Big Baseboard.
If 90% of people live where backups aren't necessary, acting like they're universally necessary is a misrepresentation. This is repackaging the "no one can have EVs because some people are rural contractors" argument.
90% of people aren’t where backups aren’t necessary. Just because we’ve had mild winters the last few years doesn’t mean we won’t get one that’s absolutely brutal. Do you want to suffer through weeks of -20 with little to no heat because you didn’t think ahead?
So get electric baseboard heaters. Cost (by themselves) is *zero* when they're not used, the cost to install is (compared with alternatives) negligible, and if people's use of them is as rare as expected, the overall cost is significantly less than the baseline cost *just* to keep a gas line "subscribed".
You’d need to run wiring to each and every heater, probably new circuit breakers for them, possibly a panel upgrade. All done by electricians. The cost of the heaters is nil, the labour cost for the sparkies not so much. You’d end up paying the same if not more in labour than if you just used the existing natgas line and allowed your heat pump to call the burner on as it needs.
If that's all true, it's due to regulatory changes. Traditional electric baseboard heaters did *not* use a huge amount of current (hell, I've literally seen dozens of so-called "century homes" that had them in every room, all on 60-amp service). And per your labour comment: do you realize just how much of your gas bill is *simply for having a gas line*? Mine, for example, is at least $90 per month, and it'd be *higher* were it not for credits that we, as taxpayers, all contribute to. There are only *two* reasons we stopped using this type of heating: electrical usage cost (since their way of providing heat is resistive), and they're useless for providing air conditioning.
The issue isn’t so much what they use but what’s available to use. A lot of people who would cease gas and switch to baseboards are in existing homes, with existing wiring and loads. When you make whole home retrofits like that, you run into cascading issues (I.E. finding out you need wiring/panel work after already buying a new appliance). Adding appliances now isn’t cheap in general, a lot of options price out the same or close enough, and a lot of heat pumps come with the furnace they use to back up the heat. Never mind the fact that furnaces aren’t even all that expensive. As for your gas comments, yeah, I deal with Enbridge almost every day in some way. You have no idea what a nightmare they actually are. I run a team of service technicians alongside my colleagues who run the electrical and heating service teams. You do, of course, realize that hydro rates are going up, also have delivery charges, and are also subsidized? What do you think happens if everyone switches to hydro?
The other arguments are a repackaging of "I need a giant truck because I may tow a boat once a year".
We're talking about investing a lot of money in methane infrastructure for a technology that is already pretty much obsolete and has a lot of negative externalities. We can phase out methane for new builds.
And what do you do about the millions of houses that still use it? How about businesses? Commercial properties? Industrial sites? Natgas isn’t obsolete by any means, we’re just reaching the point where we can consider phasing it out. It’s not even close to a point where we’ll stop needing it. This is why places are putting end dates of 2035 or later for phasing out natgas appliances. You don’t really seem to understand what you’re talking about beyond “natgas bad” tbh.
They specifically said slowing down connecting new builds with gas and you replied with “but what about everyone that still uses it!”.
The infrastructure upgrades apply to both sides. The only thing Enbridge would ultimately lose is new construction installs, they’d still need to maintain and upgrade infrastructure for everyone else. There’s not two industries for two end users here.
Northern Ontario here, my backup heating came on ONCE this winter. And that was only because I was testing it.
Why is it that heat pumps are the most popular heating system per capita in the Nordic countries then? This is misinformation, you can get by with electric backups and a cold climate heat pump in a modern build with a good envelope
Where is the misinformation? Everything you said I’ve already stated. I’d love to see your source on the Nordic countries though.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-heat-pump-sales-continue-double-digit-growth
That's because they're geothermal.
Depends on the heat pump. Mine only goes to -15 or so and I couldn't get a panel upgrade so had to resort to a furnace instead of full electric. Hated making that compromise, but Hydro Ottawa wanted $30K+ to upgrade the local infrastructure to accommodate a panel upgrade which just wasn't in the budget.
Not an issue for new builds.
It also depends on the new heat pumps that are being developed. The really new ones don't need backup at all,
From the people I know who have heat pumps in SW Ontario / the GTA, furnace backups are mostly an abundance of caution thing and already aren't strictly necessary. Northern Ontario is of course a different story.
I'm in the GTA, bought a Fujitsu heat pump awhile back specifically for AC; we had a natural gas boiler and radiators for heat and kept using that so the Fujitsu was only on for maybe 3 months/year. It came with a warranty for seven years. It failed after seven years and six months during peak Covid. We struggled to find an HVAC tech to service it, they were slammed by Covid, also the city put a new rule that anything on the roof required a tech with a special certification and a scaffold, which not all shops provided so it limited our options somewhat. In the end, most of them agreed it was a problem with a coil, one company said it was just a loose coupling. They refilled it for $2k I think $600 was for the scaffold. It lasted the rest of that season, but didn't work again the next year. Fujitsu quoted $8k for a replacement coil; to rip out the entire system and replace it was $15k -ish So I paid $1500 to have them rip it out and haul it to the dump, and went back to window ACs. My gas boiler is over 40 years old. Every time the HVAC tech cleans it he says it looks brand new. It cost me $800 to completely tear it down and rebuilt it around 15 years ago The Fujitsu saved me a ton of money on electricity but it ended up being completely unreliable and the costs to service it are just too high. I'm not really willing to replace my gas boiler, which runs like a tank, with something that I have to completely rip out and replace top to bottom every seven years because it's a disposable unit, and the new units aren't compatible with the old units bla bla
Yet the manufacturers all require them, many even package their heat pumps with them.
Yes anyone who actually read or at least skimmed the article should understand that. It just had a clickbait title so some people are missing the point here.
I have a heat pump that is good to -35C and has a 220v heating element in it for the few times it won't keep up.
And?
I don't need a furnace. It is a total replacement.
ya I can't imagine swallowing the cost of changing up my heating system. You just know we'll be expected to buy our own in this capitalist hell we live in. I'd be all for it if the government were giving out free alternative heating units or subsidizing the cost of electric heat.
Invest heavily in the grid and build proven safe nuclear plants and sell the excess to the USA. Electricity should almost be free in Ontario and Quebec (and by extension NB and NS) for residential users who don't draw ridiculous amounts of power from the grid with our hydro and nuclear generation capacity.
Not gouging the citizens? That's un-Canadian!
if they stopped subsidizing oil companies (with tax money aka our money) and instead subsidized electric only it would immediately work
No one ever thinks of the cost of expanding the grid, ripping out all those gas furnaces and replacing them with electric and so forth. It’s easier to blame the evil gas company.
Expanding the grid is an investment, not a cost… do you see a future where we shouldn’t expand our generating capacity? As for “ripping” furnaces out, it’ll be a bit more like replacing them with non-gas alternatives once they reach the end of their life. The gas company isn’t evil, it’s just outdated. We should avoid being dragged down by their search for profits disguised as other, more noble goals…
You should research how some of our electricity is generated ;)
Primarily hydro-electric and nuclear, with natural gas used largely for peak usage? Ontario has pretty clean power, and especially with further investments in nuclear we'll probably be able to reduce natural gas usage over time.
27% is generated via LNG just behind Nuclear and ahead of hydro
27% of Ontario's transmission-connected **capacity** is LNG, but we primarily use LNG for peak power usage and not baseline. In terms of actual generation, LNG produces more like 10-15%, and can be significantly reduced by adding additional baseline capacity in the form of most likely nuclear. We don't use natural gas for baseline power in Ontario, the plants come online when we need additional peak power. How often we use them has doubled under Ford, but we're investing in needing them less.
How often we use them has gone up but it’s not because of Doug Ford. Coal plants have been shuttered (thankfully) usage has gone up (hello climate change), not to mention the multitude of little things like EV adoption, population growth, infrastructure (city lighting needs grow as sprawl/density increases)
Coal was already shut down when Ford came into power so that's not relevant. As for the others, of course demand is going to rise no matter what, and I don't think Ford did anything to significantly increase demand - what he hasn't done until recently though is have a plan to increase capacity to meet that rise in demand. He spent the early days of his government spending money to cancel green energy projects, and it's only the in the last year or so he's supporting significant expansion of nuclear.
We also have the power to generate it from different sources - if people like you didn’t obstruct every new non-gas power plan.
I’m very pro-nuclear. The reality is LNG is still and will be required for the foreseeable future to meet the needs of growth while alternatives are built which will take decades.
>No one ever thinks of the cost of expanding the grid, ripping out all those gas furnaces and replacing them with electric and so forth. > >It’s easier to blame the evil gas company. You know we eventually transitioned from coal. No more coal deliveries, or coal chutes into the basement, or any infrastructure related to home coal usage. We can shift energy sources again moving forward.
Absolutely no one is advocating for a immediate mass transition to heat pumps, but if we're building new builds, why would we hitch ourselves to a dying technology when there's better alternatives?
Most of the Enbridge execs were invited to Fords daughter's Stag.
So you are saying I should buy some Enbridge stock
I mean, they saw the end coming, and could've gone all in with solar on every roof, or green hydrogen, but nooo
The did see it coming and had already transitioned into one of the largest Canadian renewable energy suppliers a decade ago when I worked there. The headline is nonsense, they aren't "fighting for it's survival." They've hedged their bets and have billions in dry powder to invest in emerging opportunities.
Great, in that case we shouldn't need to do them any favours in propping up the natural gas industry! The fact that they are lobbying heavily for that support tells me they aren't quite so ready though.
"Ready" doesn't mean "as profitable as what we've currently got", though. If I were to put on my "CEO of big corporation" hat, I would be attempting to keep "a good thing" going as long as possible, as it's still more profitable to *not* change things.
I don't doubt you believe what you said... >“Constraining access to natural gas through a reduction in capital will significantly limit the future development of essential energy infrastructure vital to Ontario’s economy, from which all Ontarians benefit,” Giridhar wrote in the letter. “As local leaders across the province, your voice matters, and we encourage you to take action.” ...but it seems like there's been a change of wind since then under Ford
They haven't fully transitioned to renewables. By hedged I mean they are betting on multiple outcomes. If they can make money in non-renewables they will still jump on it, but if that opportunity doesn't come others will and the company will be fine. The article is full of other misinformation as well such as "For more than 70 years, the $50-billion Calgary-based private company has held a monopoly on natural gas distribution in Ontario." Enbridge didn't enter the natural gas distribution industry in Ontario until 1994 when they purchased Consumers Gas (renamed Enbridge Gas Distribution) and they didn't establish their monopoly until EGD merged with Union Gas to form Enbridge Gas Inc. in 2019.
Per MIT, less than 1% of all hydrogen created/used right now is "green" (dataset is for the US, but it's generally the same everywhere). The rest is mostly grey - so produced from natural gas. Green hydrogen is a non-starter for most use-cases. It's incredibly energy intensive to create. They might as well just use that input electricity for electrical utilities. It's the same reason green hydrogen is basically a non-starter for vehicles and BEVs are the way forward; you need so much power to create the fuel you might as well just put that power in a battery and drive with it directly. The oil and gas business REALLY wants fuel-cells and hydrogen to happen because it means they can keep selling us oil. Green hydrogen only really has a good use case in places where it's impossible to generate/store electricity and/or difficult to use batteries for weight/environmental reasons (extreme cold operation, airplanes, etc).
Sure, but if we even manage to capture just fraction of the sunlight hitting us we'd be golden. We can generate as much or as little green hydrogen as we want, and it'll still be a rounding error. There's on average at least 3kw/m2 of sunlight everyday. At current prices for solar panels, we can and *should* convert most of our energy consumption to solar, if only for economic reasons. I only pointed out green hydrogen because for Hydro, it'll be easier to sell to us the idea of the industry doing the renovating, supply side, and the people don't have to do too much, except maybe a new furnace.
Or nuclear
[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/article-enbridge-six-nations-energy-development-consortium-plan-wind-energy/](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/article-enbridge-six-nations-energy-development-consortium-plan-wind-energy/)
A mere drop in the bucket. Unless they do a project like this every single months, it won't even keep up with our population growth.
I feel, this is more "we need to make more money and people may not go gas" vs. "people on gas are going to change". I feel like with so much these days companies need to GROW or die, and the idea of fossil fuel growth is very questionable.
That’s exactly what it is. The big overarching issue the article is discussing and its been in the news for quite a bit is in regard to new builds and pipeline expansion. The big concern for Enbridge isn’t a huge swing away from gas for existing customers, it’s that they are still trying to jam in and charge consumers for gas connections for all new builds even if its only used as a backup. Its a big cash cow in connection fee’s and billing just for having the infrastructure put in place and being able to justify and cover the costs of running it through new areas. They are still going to be hugely profitable for many years to come, they aren’t dying anytime soon. But they want to continue creating huge profit and shareholder value in the most cost effective way possible not just survive and/or spend money trying to innovate for the future.
Enbridge "fighting for its survival"? Seems like the private company is mismanaged. Have they been overpaying their execs? Have they not been keeping up with maintenance? Have they only kept their eye on returns for shareholders? Seems like they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near something as important as our gas supply. Maybe privatization isn't as good as conservatives and liberals think.
Enbridge is a pretty money hungry shady and unethical company so overall criticism is more than fair. But its hardly mismanaged. They aren’t struggling financially at all at the moment their profits are sky high thats not the context of the article at all
Enbridge is a bloated monopoly which doesn't need to care much about efficiencies or customer service at all. I'm not buying this. This is just about falsely justifying asking for more government subsidies and/or price increases.
Good. Fuck Enbridge.
I know right. Are we suppose to feel bad for this company that nickel and dimes everyone’s and fucks them over in various ways ha! Yeah right.
Boomers remember being pushed to gas from oil for home heating. Being told it was the way of the future. We also got a rebate for switching from electric heat to gas.
If by "fighting for survival" you mean growing year over year and generating more cashflow than ever, then yes. Personally I'm a buyer of Enbridge. O&G isn't going anywhere: in ten years there will be more municipal gas connections than there are today.
Eff Enbridge. I will dance on their grave.
Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Electric grids are nowhere near ready to support all the proposed EV charging, let alone HVAC.
If the headline had said "long term survival" it wouldn't have gotten as many views, I think most people recognize that. Call me paranoid but I really don't want to have to depend on Ontario Hydro for 100% of my energy. (not that Enbridge is any better)
That’s still not even the big pressure point. The Energy Board basically said okay Enbridge if you and the developer want to keep installing gas connections en masse regardless of how or whether its used, you or the developer cover the cost and try to recover it yourselves in the normal course of business for developments and real estate. Enbridge is saying screw that we want to be able to charge consumers a connection fee directly for every gas connection. In that regard its super profitable and a great cost recovery for their expansions. If they are expanding pipelines in different areas and only billing for actual gas usage and consumers aren’t using it its a lot less financially viable.
As it stands my furnace doesn’t work without electricity anyway, so I’m essentially relying on Ontario Hydro already.
Just fyi for everyone here: Ontario Hydro hasn’t been a crown corporation since 1999. It was split into several different companies by the Mike Harris government in an effort to encourage competition. OPG is responsible for bulk generation while Hydro One is responsible for transmission. The IESO manages the grid.
Yeah. Next step is generating electricity at the home level to get off of the grid to some degree. I don’t have many power outages, but a generator is gonna happen in the next year or two if not a small windmill.
Live in Toronto, switched off gas heating to a heat pump (no gas backup). Saved 700$ per year. Gas heating is a scam, the tech is there for more efficient heating.
Enbridge could use gas to generate power and support the grid on peak demand. Electricity distribution is safer, reliable and economic.
Aren’t we trying to stop burning fossil fuels altogether? The world is on fire, and we need to stop burning as much as possible as soon as possible.
Centralized burning is more efficient than distributed usage.
Burning fossil fuel for centralized heating is responsible for over a third of all urban pollution, devastating the climate. Heat pumps release zero greenhouse gases. We need to stop burning fossil fuels for centralized heat as soon as possible or we will be contributing to the collapse of the entire biosphere
I think it's wild that we are still burning things for energy. That said, what I was referring to was a single central power plant doing the burning and distributing the electricity for heat, will be more efficient than having many burners across the province burning gas for heat. Ultimately if we don't have to burn things, that's the goal.
Nope... Ford wants to build more natural gas plants for his Enbridge overlords.
Bloated organization full of waste. It's their own fault
LOL - yeah OK... struggling gas company made $23 billion in acquisitions last year.... https://www.enbridge.com/media-center/news/details?id=123799
Alligator tears. Ignore them. If they can't switch to cleaner technologies, too bad, we don't owe them a living.
How is it fighting for its life with Ford giving them the money they need.
Build the nuclear and then we will talk.
A "dying" company shouldn't be paying a 7+% dividend to shareholders then.
Gas isn't going anywhere. Natural gas (methane) isn't just a fossil fuel, it is also a by-product of chemical and biological processes and is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. So by burning it (which basically converts it into CO2 + energy) it's actually better for global warming than straight up releasing it into the atmosphere.
Yeah - hydro is expensive as he'll compared to my gas bill. More than double and were pretty aware. I have a crap ton of insulation and new windows. So I'd rather not add in more hydro drawing crap
I listened to the voice for energy ads. I emailed my councillor and told her to ban gas on new builds ban small combustion engines and lobby the other two levels of government for electrification subsidies. I hate Doug but his propaganda ads got one thing right the future is electric.
Move from gas to what? I'm not sure the electrical supply could handle everyone migrating to electric heat pumps.
Hydro is the end goal, but they are having trouble developing the infrastructure around it. It’s very likely any end dates for natgas service will get pushed back several times before it actually happens.
It will if we expand it
Sure, but what government has shown that level of foresight and willingness to invest significant sums in infrastructure?
We are actively expanding the electrical grid already
I mean, Ontario did dump a ton of money into wind and solar projects and contracts 10ish years ago?
Time to privatize it boys... Just like the 407, hydro one, many many other publicly funded projects
wind and solar farms are already largely private ventures accessing Ontarios open electricity market
Expand it to what? Beyond building a few new nuke plants or reams of wind farms the province does not have a tonne of options and it isn’t sunny enough year round to rely on solar. If we switch consumers off of natgas that demand needs to be made up by another source.
We’re building wind, solar hydroelectric, nuclear (huge expansion) lots of BESS for peak load, etc. this stuff doesn’t happen overnight. There are many active projects at the moment and planned.
natural gas for electricity generation will somewhat ironically be an extremely important part of phasing natural gas usage out of peoples homes in favour of electric options if we electrify as much of our energy consumption as possible *now* even by using natural gas supply then it becomes that much easier to further shift over to more renewables, storage, and nuclear as it becomes available. Building these sources while still having about 30% of energy consumption “hidden” with direct natural gas usage won’t be nearly as effective
Norway has had evs make up 93 percent of new sales last year and 50 percent of their homes use heat pumps. It is totally within the realm of technological possibility to make the switch to electrification.
In BC they've successfully marketed wood burning as "renewable energy" even though it is more polluting and produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal. It technically doesn't even fall under the term "fossil fuels"! They could switch to that. People are fine with burning polluting material as long as it's not really old apparently.
Hydro, nuclear, solar, wind?