I have just had installed a new extremely high efficiency gas furnace. It will reduce my greenhouse gas emissions. I teased the installers telling them that in their working careers they will be replacing that furnace with an electrical unit to fully eliminate the natural gas emissions from my household. It may be a heat pump. It may be a new roof made up of solar panels that are used to heat elements in my furnace. I can only imagine.
It may happen earlier than I suspect. But for Fort Frances, Ontario, and Canada to reach their carbon zero goals by 2050, we will as a nation, province and the community be called upon to make many changes. The first major change will be that homeowners will be upgrading their electrical systems in their homes to both heat their homes and charge their vehicles. To do that the electrical distribution companies will be called upon to increase the power to all the streets in the community. Lines will carry far more electricity than currently because the household demand will be greater.
The population will grow across Canada. The number of households will increase and the number of new electrical appliance and gadgets in homes will also increase.
Households now consume 40 per cent of the energy produced in the United States. In Canada it may be as high as 70 per cent. From time to time, both the provincial and federal governments have offered incentives to homeowners to replace windows, upgrade furnaces, increase insulation in attics and make homes more airtight all in the name of reducing energy demands. Those incentives have reduced energy demands.
With changing weather patterns, demand for electrical power peaks in the summer months across much of North America for air conditioning. Moving from natural gas to electrical heat will create new peak demands during the coldest months of December, January, and February. They are also the months with the shortest periods of daylight and solar electrical energy is least.
To replace natural gas electrical power, thousands of square miles of solar panels would have to be erected and connected to the grid. A solution being assessed in Massachusetts is connecting whole neighborhoods to ground source heat pumps to heat homes in winter and cool homes in the summer. That is reducing electrical demand in both peak energy consumption periods. Other smart technologies can also be created to reduce electrical energy consumption.
The Royal Bank of Canada predicted that energy demand would increase in Ontario by 50 per cent in the next decade and by 2026 Ontario residents might experience brown outs. Local energy companies will have to create electrical storage facilities and look at generating more of their own power through solar means for their customers. We can’t move fast enough.
Former Publisher
Fort Frances Times
