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.
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.