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.
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.