8mo ago

Councillors in Canada’s coldest city are split on whether to phase out fossil fuels to heat buildings

thenarwhal.ca

Winnipeg eyes phasing out natural gas for heat | The Narwhal

7 comments

Well the good news is that if they wait long enough they won't need to phase it out, they simply won't have a need for it.
- Also building differently. Mixed use buildings and wall to wall buildings are more effecient to heat because they have less surface area exposed to the outdoors and often house multiple families per building. This type of building can be very difficult to build now but was the norm 100 years ago.
- In rebuttal, gas heating is still releasing carbon into the atmosphere, and we really can't afford to do much more of that. Also, Manitoba's electricity is 98% or higher renewable, so even electric resistive assisting heat pumps for the month or so a year you'd need it wouldn't mean more carbon is being released into the atmosphere. So the big problems are, people already have natural gas heating (like me) and can't afford to put in heat pumps to solve that problem. And it will cost more, but only because we externalize the cost of the climate damage.
- First is that gas heating can actually be more efficient than resistive electric heating depending on the power source.
  Manitoba's electricity is almost exclusively Hydro.
  So of your using gas to generate electricity to heat homes your actually better off just burning the gas for heat.
  If you don't account for the environmental impact of the roughly 2% which is lost in transit.
  Heat pumps can adjust this equation during moderate temps, being more than 100% efficient at moving heat, but during cold snaps we will still ned auxiliary heat.
  That only applies to air-source heat pumps, and even then, they're constantly improving.
  We would need to roughly triple the electric grid capacity to be able to take up the current winter heating demand.
  Source? Also, as the population and the economy grows, energy sources are going to need to grow either way, so it might as well be electricity.
  
  The expense for ground source heat pumps, especially in the city, would be ridiculous.
  Heat pumps are great, but under -15C, they're really, really inefficient. And Winnipeg is very often much colder than that.

7 comments