The government is encouraging Canadians to switch to EVs and heat pumps to fight climate change. But many CBC News readers have asked: won’t electrifying everything break the grid and drive up energy costs? Here’s what electricity operators and those researching the transition say.
I always wonder what the point of these articles are. If we’re going through the effort of electrifying hundreds of thousands of homes we’re obviously going to upgrade our power grids as well. A switch to renewable energy is going to require almost all of our infrastructure to be replaced.
That comes at a huge cost but the alternative is societal collapse once non-renewable energy runs out. Everyone agrees the switch will need to happen eventually, but lots of people seem to want to pass that responsibility on to the next generation. How long can we do that for?
The title is definitely clickbait, but I found the article itself a bit more interesting. i.e., what sorts of upgrades/capacity do we need.
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On the home heating aspect, our building standards have been wholly inadequate for the climate we live in (coming from SK). Minimal insulation, inefficient layouts, no consideration for passive solar heating obviously leads to more heating demand and the solution historically has been just a bigger furnace.
The typical assumption is a 10-15% increase in build cost can get a new house to net-zero ready, or about 50% better than code. An R32 wall is just as easy to build as an R16 wall, its just more material. For existing homes, yes, heat pumps can be much more efficient than other existing heating methods, but the focus should instead be on reducing heating demand in the first place.
I’m currently working with some indigenous communities on minor energy retrofits while also providing energy efficient new homes. The total retrofit cost is similar to the increase in cost for the energy efficient home versus one to base code, yet they only get 30-50% of the energy savings. It’s obvious we need to build it right the first time.
Of course, this doesn’t mix well with a housing supply crisis, but what is it going to look like when natural gas is no longer an option?
What I find frustrating is that Saskatchewan funded the development of some world class energy efficient housing back in, I think, the 1980s, and then did nothing about making it standard.
The Saskatchewan Conservation House, yes. It was a great early example of building science concepts that contributed to PassiveHaus becoming a thing.
I think a significant issue is that the biggest (richest) voices in home construction are developers, who are trying to cut costs at any opportunity. If policy makers say we need houses with maximum heating demand of x kWh/m2, developers see the increased cost and time of doing so, and put their efforts into stifling or reducing that target so they can maintain the status quo and keep assuming that homeowners will neglect to consider the long-term costs of inefficiency.
It also doesn’t help that our current government would rather waste taxpayer money challenging a carbon tax in court (which other provinces already failed to do), than actually coming up with solutions to better the province.
Damn right. Houses are always built as cheaply as possible and they need to really increase the standards we build our houses to. If there’s ever a push to make those changes you’ll probably hear push back from developers and others about how it’s going to further make houses unaffordable. Thats the smallest contribution to housing prices so too bad I say.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reports from the International Energy Agency and the Canadian Climate Institute in 2022 found Canada would need to double or triple its electrical grid capacity by 2050 to reach its net-zero goal.
For example, Mario Chiarelli, a Toronto-based energy efficiency consultant, estimated that converting Toronto’s 650,000 natural gas-heated homes to best-in-class heat pumps would double the city’s electricity demand, an increase of about 5,000 megawatts.
“If you’re getting paid a fee or feeding some of your electrical energy that you’re storing in your battery back into the grid at those high peak times, [that] could actually result in a net customer savings.”
However, its newer report notes that costs may be unevenly distributed across the country, and may be higher for Canadians who live in regions that currently rely heavily on fossil fuel generation.
DeMarco said planning in Canada’s electricity system generally only looks a few years into the future, without considering the long-term impact of growing extreme weather and the global energy transition.
They’re backed by a commitment of more than $40 billion over the next decade, outlined in the 2023 federal budget, to support Canada’s clean electricity sector through tax measures, public financing and grant contributions.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
All the other commenters seem quite optimistic, although I still have reservations
in my province (PEI) our government is doing a great job handing out heat pumps to pretty much anyone who asks. However I don’t see a sufficient investment in the supply side of this equation. Pretty much everyone I know who got a free heat pump is switching over from oil, meaning that the energy we were importing as oil is now being demanded from New Brunswick’s electrical grid. We do have solar incentives, (I think there’s a rebate + an interest free loan for sure), but maybe 1 in 8 of the people I know who installed heat pumps also installed solar.
I know it can be done, but I’m concerned that PEI doesn’t have a cohesive plan to address the demand we’re inducing.
Yes, the plan now sucks. But, two things:
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moving to even oil-generated power to feed electric heat pumps keeps the oil in one place and not befouling residential land further with spills and normal mess with delivery and transport, and enables the second phase where we can switch to non-oil power by making it a single head-end swap.
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nothing’s gonna drive the adoption of alternate power generation like a demand for power that doesn’t need to be oil specifically. Options allow for competing methods, which avoids monopolies, which gives better pricing, which allows upgrades.
Canada should add a tiny tiny tax onto fuel and use the proceeds to push for cleaner power generation and subsides for the heat pump adoption. … which I think we are, right? Genius.
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The good news is that many people, including the authors of the report, think it’s achievable.
“Making electricity systems bigger, cleaner and smarter is technically and economically feasible,” the report said.
CBC readers are probably less qualified than the International Energy Agency to answer that question.
Edit: got the NGO name wrong.
The car charging argument is so stupid… Cars typically charge at night, when demand is usually lowest. If you need to charge when demand is high, you’ll simply pay a higher price for power – which will still be a fraction of what gas costs.
When car-to-home smart grid solutions roll out, there will be even less of an issue – the grid will feed into your car overnight to charge it up to 80-90%, then ‘borrow’ back 10-15% when it’s most needed (5am-6am in the winters when it’s coldest, 5pm-6pm in the summer when it’s warmest). Add in solar roofs and in-home battery storage, and it smooths out the demand.
Yes, Most if not all power grids in Canada cannot handle adding mass adoption of EV charging on top of the grid.
The only solution to this is nuclear power plants, more coal power plants or more natural gas power plants.
And EVs are not the answer. Manufacturing a EV is worse for the planet then manufacturing a regular car and driving it for years. If you wish to be green, just buy any used gas car and you will be making a difference or get a bike.
Yes, Most if not all power grids in Canada cannot handle adding mass adoption of EV charging on top of the grid.
If only they could be upgraded. Oh, wait! Easier than a leaky pipeline, you say? Cables don’t leak into ecosystems and kill entire species?
Until then, will have to consider encouraging charging during off-peak with lower rates. But, then again, that’s already being done.
The only solution to this is nuclear power plants, more coal power plants or more natural gas power plants.
And only the first one isn’t horrible. I wish we could get energy from the wind or the sun or wave action to bolster nuke power but … not invented yet I guess.
And EVs are not the answer. Manufacturing [an] EV is worse for the planet [than] manufacturing a regular car and driving it for years.
False, old info, false dilemma to boot. The ‘rotten EV’ Facebook meme was so soundly debunked by 2019 that it was even debunked by Forbes.
Producing an EV does create higher CO2 emissions though. Not even Tesla argues against that one. It’s estimated to be ~20,000 km, but can be more or less depending on your source of electricity. So between a year and two years depending on how much you drive, but could be less if you drive a lot.
Edit: Also, we have so much excess energy at night. We just need to set up and incentivize charging at night and the grid can take on a ton more.
