The Globe and Mail claims to have seen a leaked confidential seven billion dollar Ontario master plan, for all new homes to use geothermal or electric heating by 2030, and to provide grants to retrofit older buildings.
Ontario to spend $7-billion on sweeping climate change plan
The Ontario government will spend more than $7-billion over four years on a sweeping climate change plan that will affect every aspect of life – from what people drive to how they heat their homes and workplaces – in a bid to slash the province’s carbon footprint.
Ontario will begin phasing out natural gas for heating, provide incentives to retrofit buildings and give rebates to drivers who buy electric vehicles. It will also require that gasoline sold in the province contain less carbon, bring in building code rules requiring all new homes by 2030 to be heated with electricity or geothermal systems, and set a target for 12 per cent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2025.
…
- $3.8-billion for new grants, rebates and other subsidies to retrofit buildings, and move them off natural gas and onto geothermal, solar power or other forms of electric heat. Many of these programs will be administered by a new Green Bank, modelled on a similar agency in New York State, to provide financing for solar and geothermal projects.
- New building code rules that will require all homes and small buildings built in 2030 or later to be heated without using fossil fuels, such as natural gas. This will be expanded to all buildings before 2050. Other building code changes will require major renovations to include energy-efficiency measures. All homes will also have to undergo an energy-efficiency audit before they are sold.
- $285-million for electric vehicle incentives. These include a rebate of up to $14,000 for every electric vehicle purchased; up to $1,000 to install home charging; taking the provincial portion of the HST off electric vehicle sales; an extra subsidy program for low– and moderate-income households to get older cars off the road and replace them with electric; and free overnight electricity for charging electric vehicles.
If I lived in Ontario, I would be deeply concerned about this plan.
Electric home heating is fine, until the electricity fails. When my family lived in Britain, our 6Kw coal burner was indispensable, especially when power lines were damaged by blizzards.
Geothermal systems, heat pumps which take advantage of the relatively constant ground temperature, are expensive, and require electric power to operate.
As for electric cars, a petroleum or diesel car can keep the occupants warm and safe for many hours, if the car is trapped in heavy snow. An electric car, with its much lower energy density, and the susceptibility of batteries to cold, not so much.
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If these goofballs were really rational folks, they would realize that electric cars are the future, just as son as the batteries get perhaps 33 to 50% cheaper. They are gaining virtually nothing by huge subsidies for a vehicle which is not going to help any carbon anything unless the grid reduces its carbon. And from all this the grid looks to be needing a big upgrade. How? How are they going to cost out this grid upgrade? These people are just plain studpid, aside from being idealogues of the first magnitude.
If you said hybrids are the future, like the Prius, I would agree with you. That way the battery cost/performance issue is less. The current sales of Toyota’s cars tells the tale.
ECB Hybrids and battery powered cars are a total waste of time and energy to produce. If they were not a waste the government wouldn’t have to subsidize them. Batteries are very dangerous even with their low energy density. If the energy density were to become closer to fossil fuel levels their danger would increase almost exponentially. Check out some YouTube videos and see what happens when LiPo’s are exposed to improper charging or an impact and decide if you want to be sitting on a bomb while driving your car. The people buying these hybrids have been drinking the “Kool Aid”. If they actually ran the numbers they would realize that they never make back the extra $20,000 or $30,000 it costs to buy the hybrid over the internal combustion powered model even if the hybrid survives 300,000 miles because the batteries will need to be changed several times to make that milage.
….and 100% more energy dense, and we have a totally nuclear hydro generating profile.
Don’t hold your breath, even if it does reduce your personal missions….
Only a doubling? That’s very generous – I’d say 100 x more energy dense
Ontario was well on the way to this before it was greenjacked and windfarms popped up everywhere
“They are gaining virtually nothing by huge subsidies for a vehicle which is not going to help any carbon anything unless the grid reduces its carbon.”
Whenever the government has to pay you to buy something, you know its going to suck.
You can build a house that doesn’t need a heater. It loses so little energy that the energy used in the appliances and the energy given off by the occupants is sufficient. It will cost more but, given the stupid house prices in Toronto, that won’t actually be much of a factor. What’s an extra 50k when your house costs a million bucks!
Just try it. If its hermetically sealed the occupants will suffocate. The requirement for ventilation becomes the dominant heat loss of nearly all housing to (eg UK) insulation standards.
You can fit ‘heat recovery’ ventilation, at considerable expense, but then you find that your triple glazed argin filled windows are dominating the heat loss. So eliminate the windows and illuminate with LEDS..oh dear, that’s even more energy..
May I suggest that you abstain from reading green EcoBollox and take a course in basic engineering?
My regular computer is down for a while and I’m using a crap Chromebook so I’m not going to bother digging up any links.
IIRC, it was done by the Canadian NRC back in the 1970s. I did not say you would enjoy living in such a house. The other example I would cite is the typical (60 years ago) ice house. It was usually built with hay bales. It would keep ice frozen all summer with no refrigeration. As for basic engineering courses; I’ve taught a few. 🙂
CommieBob, I can’t wait to live in a windowless house that is insulated with hay bales and heated by appliance heat, occupant warmth, and light bulbs. Oh wait. It will have LED bulbs,… and I won’t be there during working hours. Maybe if I burn the hay in the fireplace….
Commiebob – Sure, we had an ice house on the farm, buried in a bank and covered with sawdust from our one lung diesel powered saw mill. And yes, it kept things frozen all summer but would I want to go back to cutting ice every winter and hauling fresh sawdust to cover the roof and the ice inside? Not a chance. Your comment about low energy housing is also something I would not choose to live in. Leave it for the Morlocks. There is a happy median though and indeed, I do have argon filled windows and one foot thick walls on my house.
Hay bale construction is becoming more common but has its own issues. One of my nieces just finished building one in the mountains south of Tuscon, Arizona.
No offense Leo, but UK building standards are laughable compared to Canadian building codes for energy efficiency. With slightly more advanced features we have passive solar homes in the West where temps hit -40 that need no heat beyond that provided by the sun (8 hrs./day in Dec.) and lighting. R-60 insulation, high-e air to air heat exchangers, etc. It’s a style not everyone wants to live in and it’s expensive but it can be done. There isn’t much we don’t know about building warm, efficient houses. Ontario’s b.s. proposals are just piling on from a political position.
You would be insane to build a house without a heating system in Ontario and would be unable to sell it!
In Ontario, let’s see what would one need, maybe 24″ walls, R150 ceiling, no windows and air intrusion sealing so tight that an air exchange unit (not that uncommon anymore) would be needed.
That would just about do it.
24″ walls would be R-120 for styrofoam. For ease of arithmetic, let’s take a structure 30’x30’x10′ insulated on all sides with R-100. The surface area is 3000 sq. ft. Outside temperature is -30 deg. F. Inside temperature is 70 deg. F. The difference is 100 deg. F.
Heat flow per hour is:
That translates to about a kW. An adult seated human puts out about a hundred watts. So a couple of people and a reasonable appliance and lighting load would nearly do it. ie. extra heat would be required for only a couple of days per year. (Ignoring windows, doors and air change.)
You’re getting carried away. Some passive solar and thermal mass with R60 or so, air tight with air to air h/e and CO staging and you’re most of the way there. Problem is you kinda need some technical knowledge to manage it. The average homeowner is at the righty-tighty, lefty-loosey level.
24″ walls and double windows, double doors.
Double windows and doors are very effective, when I open my front door there is a weak vacuum I have to pull against to open it, if not for the vents around the apartment, the vacuum would be much stronger when opening the outer door.
I am from Ireland but moved to Finland. The way homes are built in Ireland, a downturn in temperatures would kill 10s of thousands every winter, they are a joke, they are freezing in Ireland’s weak winters of +degrees let alone -30.
What is ‘CO staging’?
I lived in an apartment with electric heat. Trust me, it’s cheap … for the contractor to install: all baseboard wired in heaters; nothing cheaper for the developer. Needless to say (but, I guess I’m saying it anyway), the intention was for the renters to pay the bill; each apartment unit was metered. My single bedroom apartment; insulated below and to either side by similar apartments; with an electric stove (of course) which I never used; and no dish washer, clothes washer or dryer; with myself alone living there worked out to about $125.00 a month in electric bills. That was in the 1980s and 90s. In my current 2 bedroom duplex I pay about $65.00 a month for electric during winter. Home heat, hot water, and the stove is natural gas and for the whole year I pay about $450.00 total.
Never again will I submit myself to an all electric home. You will pry that gas line out of my cold dead hands.
I just moved from a two bed apt. cond at the beach with electric powered in floor h/w heat. Bills ran about $2500 year. Now in an older two bed house with a 40 year old gas beast. Combined power/ gas bills ran under $200 month in a very mild winter. One big difference- I use night setback on gas as recovery is excellent with gas/forced air. Doing that with electric means shivering for half a day as it tries to catch at -30 outside. Politicians don’t understand things like that. The rest of us understand this as a thing called “reality”.
The moral bankruptcy of Greenies is plain as day. Their plans cause, and will cause nothing but misery. Bernie Sanders is probably looking at these plans and licking his chops. Hillary too, only perhaps in a more watered-down version.
When will the “carbon” idiocy end?
That’s the point for the true believers. For the likes of politicos, it’s an opportunity to grab more power and preen before each other at the champagne socialist dinner parties
Not pointed out is that electric heating costs 2 – 3x as much as natural gas. Folks in Canada will have to either stay warm and starve, or freeze and eat.
..If anyone dies during an Ontario winter storm because of lack of heat ( energy poverty) , then the entire Ontario liberal government should be charged with accessory to murder ! They cannot claim that they did not see it coming, it is just too obvious!
They cut back on snow removal… people died. They cut back heath care… people are dying and suffering needlessly every day. They throw the money saved down the drain… every day. Why would they care if we freeze? Do people remember at election time… no! Many are greedy to take the handouts and THINK they are doing better… they are just doing less worse than the rest of us.
Like so many other locations around the world Ontario needs to fight and destroy the left.
It’s War. You’re under attack. Not with troops, tanks, bombs, killing and invasion.
But with equally maniacal, activist bureaucrats, politicians, assaulting policies and costly upheaval.
You have to fight, ferociously, or suffer.
That’s the cold hard fact.
Take your pick.
Talking about an assaulting force’s atrocious behavior and objecting never stopped any war-like attack in history.
People have to move their arms, legs, pens, lips and resources in any way they are capable. An ignite others at the same time.
It’s very inconvenient and disturbing to have to fight an enemy whose very purpose for existing is to serve you.
But you better fight or see your livability served up to be sacrificed by your attackers. .
That isn’t radical rhetoric. It’s recognizing war by radicals.
..That is why Trump is so popular…the silent majority in America has had enough of this liberal p.c. BS !
Canadian Liberal government orders residents to get rid of their old wood-burning stoves or pay thousands of dollars in fines
http://www.naturalnews.com/052752_wood-burning_stoves_Agenda_21_Canadian_government.html
Actually, it looks like it is the City of Montreal rather than the federal government. In any event, Uncle Sam beat them to it.
Ontario sells power to Quebec and New York at a subsidised price, at the same time as charging a “clean power” premium to Ontario residents. The Auditor General calculated Ontario residents paid C$37 billion over the market price:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontarians-paid-37-billion-above-market-price-for-electricity-over-eight-years-ag/article27560753/
Sadly, most of this was already known before the last (two) provincial elections and the Liberal government was re-elected. The litany of dodgy deals and cover-ups is stunning – matched only by the way the press (and apparently the electorate) have ignored the issue. A C$1 billion charge for cancelling two gas-fired power stations (and win a crucial seat for re-election) was reported as costing less than C$100 million and when the (then) Premier left office, he brought in an outside contractor who wiped computer records to remove evidence of the mis-reporting:
https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2015/12/17/two-mcguinty-aides-charged-in-gas-plants-computer-probe.html
In a nice twist, the tax-payers covered the C$10,000 cost of the outside contractor!
The current Premier was Energy Minister at the time of the original gas-plant fiasco and yet was re-elected after the investigation was well under-way.
Quite what you have to do to be voted out in Ontario I really don’t know.
..Promise unaffordable freebies to the 48% of the population that doesn’t work and that’s how you get elected in Ontario !
live in Maine, we needed 440v in (basically 2 sep 100A 220v services) for electric heat with (for all intents and purposes) 1 220v 100A leg just for heat.
want to watch a meter spin?
look at it when -15F outside
IMHO it’s obvious the enhanced greenhouse effect (AGW) has been oversold.
Here in Ontario too many influential people have committed to a position they can’t back out of without admitting being wrong. Our elites are convinced we are doing what’s right in demonstrating a commitment to fight climate change. And so it continues.
There has been significant financial damage. They have wasted double digit $billions on a very questionable concept. Shutting down coal, refurbishing old nukes, building new nukes, subsidizing and building huge wind and solar parks and “giving” away excess wind generated power…for what? Do they actually think we have changed the clouds and we’ve got to change them back?…madness.
It’s very weird, even though the evidence supporting man-made climate theory is entirely questionable nobody of influence is saying anything to counter the alarmist narrative. I guess it’s no surprise, in Canada, if you are not on board the “climate of doom” ship of fools you are politically irrelevant.
>>IMHO it’s obvious the enhanced greenhouse effect.
Indeed. A UK Low-Standards airline was so right-on-green, they believed the hype about no more snow (in 2010). So they only bought 3-days worth of ground deicing fluid. There result was the entire airline was grounded for three days, when everyone else was flying.
There is no accounting for stupid. And I think we see more of that in this Ontario proposal.
R
Ontario Liberals are dumb like foxes. They have the NDP on their left and the Green Party sucking up all the oxygen in the environmentalist end of the spectrum. They know they’re toast in the next election except for one possible, very cynical ploy. They abandon all pretext of good governance and go hard rudder to the loopy, environmentalist left. They calculate they have a chance to scoop up votes out in whoo-hoo land. If it’s not enough to win it may be enough to secure second place and a base to fight future elections from. It is the way politicians think strategically. Entirely calculated. No integrity whatsoever. Servants of the people my *as!
I’m in Ontario. The Environment Minister here is a guy originally from Manitoba and along with the Minister of Energy seems to be doing everything he can to destroy Ontario’s economy. Both are crazy. Here our hydroelectricity generation from Niagara Falls is often turned off in favour of wind and solar generation. There’s an excess of electricity that is often dumped into neighbouring Provinces and US States at considerable cost to Ontario.
If the Ontario Conservative party leader eventually sees the light of day and adopts a sensible “climate change” policy, I’d guess the Liberal government will be thrown out in the next election in 2018 and this plan will die.
$35 billion loss and counting.
It gets worse. Ceres Organization says they need $1 trillion per year to save the two-degree world:
http://www.eenews.net/tv/videos/2129/transcript
Clean Energy:
Ceres’ Lubber discusses challenges to exponentially scaling investments to meet Paris goals
OnPoint
Aired: Thursday, May 12, 2016
Video_asset_5581_medium
As businesses of all sizes become more focused on clean energy investments, what challenges exist to scaling these investments to meet the goals established in the Paris Agreement? During today’s OnPoint, Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, discusses the public- and private-sector efforts needed to achieve international targets on emissions reduction.
[. . .]
Mindy Lubber: So it is a hard task but it is feasible. We need to get to about a trillion dollars a year. Now, that’s a big number, and a lot of zeroes, but a trillion dollars a year by 2030, to be meeting our clean energy goals and to get to where we need to be. Now, one way to think about it is today $350 billion is going into clean energy around the world, not just the United States. So we need to triple that. That’s not impossible. Over the last five years we’ve tripled it, we’ve grown. We have $350 billion going into renewables, $350 billion — I think we could get to $500 billion by 2020, and that we could get to a trillion by 2030.
It will never be enough. They will always need more as none of their schemes to save the world from man-made global warming will actually have an effect.
The UK currently has the most aggressive carbon cutting plan in the world. The main result is 25,000 extra deaths per year from the cold due to fuel poverty. In the UK, fuel poverty is defined by the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act as: “a person is to be regarded as living “in fuel poverty” if he is a member of a household living on a lower income in a home which cannot be kept warm at reasonable cost”. As many as 40,000 can die during a brutal cold snap.
Canada seeks to top this record.
Same old song.
Fearful tiny people, they foster so much fear and self loathing in their hearts that they must control everyone else.
Their cheerleaders project their illness upon all who question their madness..
There is mental illness rampant in these climate wars.
Amongst the fearful these psychosis run wild.
Ordinary citizens are under attack, all over.
The frightened ones see you as they see themselves, they hate and fear you.
Belief in CAGW is a blessing, the afflicted self identify and project their madness everywhere.
The blessing is,they leave you with no doubt as to their unfitness for positions of authority.
Yet madness,in the form of hysteria, is contagious.
Look no further than the urban voters of Canada.
This line (from the G&M’s article) is very interesting …
“All homes will also have to undergo an energy-efficiency audit before they are sold. …”
Please note that it isn’t just new homes that will have to undergo this madness, but ALL homes! There you go, existing homeowners will have to retrofit their homes to the liking of eco-nutters, before they are placed on the market.
Yeah but no! Just means that the potential buyer can ask to see the energy audit. It might even be on the disclosure. Like a used car report. Not the worst idea in all this by a long shot.
That’s odd. When I purchased three used cars in Texas, I never saw, nor requested an “energy audit” of my Camry, Sienna or Avalon. The “energy audit” eco-zealots croon about should be an average of the kilowatt hours used per year. When I had my HVAC system replaced, I had to be very firm with the AC contractor that I wanted a one and a half ton unit, I’ll come back to this in a second. They installed a two-stage unit that runs at 70% capacity unless there is a high demand for cooling. I have overriden the default to make the unit run as long as possible to stay in stage 1, so I get close to the sizing of a 1.5 ton unit. Now, how did I know I only needed a 1.5 ton unit? Because I hired another contractor to perform a Manual J inspection.
Looking at the details indicates that they are advocating the use of air heat pumps because they are so efficient. I have to wonder if they realize that those become more or less useless below freezing and the solution is to add resistance heating elements too. That makes them much less efficient.
Also requiring electric for heating makes the winter peak that much greater and the problem that solar is not every efficient in Ontario in the winter that much worse.
Two problems with air-heat pumps. One they are not all that efficient below freezing and depending on the temp delta they may have to be large BTU/tonnage units in the winter. Two, they are mechanical devices that tend to run mostly all year, especially in more “neutral” climates (unlike an air conditioner combined with a much simpler gas furnace which splits the mechanical workload). Most are designed to provide some heat transfer even when grossly inefficient and using electric resistance backup heat. Because of this they don’t last as long and replacement is expensive. I doubled the life of mine (relative to neighbors) by adding a low temperature cutout; but even so, I will never have another one.
As per a commentary above it appears that in a previous brain fart the g of O built a stupid amount of wind power. Anybody surprised? They spent 2 billion dollars to NOT build two gas fired power plants. Then they had to sell $400 million worth of wind power for 1% of cost! Not a typo! Now, through a stroke of genius, they’ve figured out that by forcing people to spend money to switch to higher cost fuel; they can use up the idiot excess they never should have built in the first place. It’s unbelievable! The original mistake was bad enough. Now the citizens of Ontario have to pay more, -forever-, to bury the goof! Stupidest voters on the planet.
$7 billion will do nothing for the non-problem they purport to combat. All that means is that they will be back for more. If they are allowed to. In the interim, the people of Ontario will spend $7 billion – to raise their energy costs by more than double and have poorer service.
But it’s good for the electricity providers although they will complain about all the adjustments they have to go through – to raise their rates. Different government with different details, but Illinois is forcing the closing of nuclear plants by subsidizing wind and raising costs for the disfavored to generate while restricting their revenues. Net result is the same: More expensive to consumers, more costs to taxpayers, less reliable, more government, no benefit. But the environmentalists, control freaks, blind allegiance to indoctrination and fear types and socialists (attn: Department of Redundancy Department) will be happy – On second thought, no not really.
Mad dog Commies chasing their own wind powered tails.
I like your turn of phrase!
Aren’t geothermal and fracking the same thing? They both involve drilling deep into the earth and injecting water and chemicals. I’m outraged that Ontario’s “green” government would allow this. (sarc)
Ah great! At the same time as the government is deliberately jacking up hydro prices and blowing billions on solar subsidy farms & swindlemills.
So the government is going to give people $1000 for a $25,000 job…and demand that they do it
There’s big money in this…..
They won’t give you ANY money. Governments never do. It comes from taxpayers.
They recently introduced a new subsidy for electricity for poor households… they just add it as a new line item to everyone else’s bill. That’s revenue neutrality in Ontario.
This will also just drive one side into the other
“Subsidy for electricity for poor households”. Have you looked at how poor you have to be to be eligible for the subsidy? And what the max value of it is? People at that level of poverty don’t have hydro bills to subsidize…they couldn’t afford it at any price.
As a part of the plan, Premier Wynne will give the taxpayers a detailed justification for her plans – precisely what impact the new policies will have on global temperatures measured in degrees. / sarc
You have to wonder if they understand what they are saying. Gasoline with less carbon? The only carbon-reducing trick would be to add more heavily subsidised ethanol, which, if you look at the whole farming/distilling process involved in making the ethanol, may not result in lower CO2 emissions on a life-cycle basis.
Isn’t low carbon gasoline the same thing as low energy gasoline? So let’s make our gasoline less efficient by adding ethanol. Then we’ll need to burn more to get the same effect?
Adding ethanol to gasoline increases the carbon content. It does not make it low carbon. It is the equivalent of adding a molecule of water (H2O) in place of a molecule of hydrogen (H2).
The amount of heat of combustion you lose by adding ethanol, is just about the heat of combustion of one molecule of H2.
That is why you get poorer gas mileage with ethanol.
Exact same problem occurs if you use an ether instead of an alcohol. Such as MTBE or ETBE that we used to get in our “oxygenated” gasoline.
G
Until we stand up and fight they will just go down the Ven Zoo La La Land trail.
When it all fails the Commies will still blame citizens and dream up more taxes and rules to bind our lives to their corrupt lies even more.
We are insane for not taking a stand before they got this far on the ruin path.
I’m no scientist, but if we can’t produce enough electric via solar and windmills for the amount we already use how will we produce it for a an even higher electric demand?