Save A Buck, Save The Planet
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the Director of News Content for Acadia Broadcasting and Huddle.
I’ve rented apartments and owned buildings in the south end of Saint John for more than 25 years. Heating these cavernous, poorly insulated places, all more than 100 years old, with oil and gas furnaces is expensive.
Around 10 years ago, we installed heat pumps in the house we live in now, keeping the natural gas system as backup on frigid days when our heat pumps don’t work effectively. This varies according to the kind of units you purchase; some can function properly at much lower temperatures. We usually need to turn on the natural gas furnace when the temperature drops below -15C.
Not being the numbers guy in the family, I asked my wife Janet how much money we’d saved over the years. She conservatively estimates around 25 percent per year, with an upfront capital investment of approximately $12,000 to install five heat pumps in the house. There were no subsidies so we had to recoup that investment over time in the yearly savings we achieved.
It was a purely financial decision. Our heating bills were high and unpredictable because of fluctuating commodity prices. It was only recently that I realized we had made the right choice for the environment as well, with heat pumps being promoted as an affordable, effective way to help reduce greenhouse emissions, alongside things like solar power and driving electric cars.
A recent podcast interview with influential environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben inspired me. On The Ezra Klein Show, he said there’s no reason for us to continue to burn fossil fuels when the alternatives are becoming cheaper and plentiful, not just good for the planet.
“We could stop combustion, stop the spark in your spark plug, stop the fire that’s burning in your basement to heat your home… and replace it with the fact that the good Lord hung a large ball of burning gas 93 million miles away in the sky and we know how to use it,” he told Ezra Klein.
In a piece on Substack, McKibben argued that heat pumps are a part of the solution. He said the U.S. should focus on supplying Europe with millions of heat pumps, not on increasing exports of natural gas to replace the supply from Russia. He rightly noted that many electricity grids are still powered by fossil fuels, but “as we build out ever-cheaper sun, wind, and batteries, the grid that supplies these heat pumps is going to get greener.”
This is true in New Brunswick. Saint John Energy will soon have a wind farm supplying power to its grid and NB Power has green sources of power like wind and nuclear. Both have plans to increase the supply of renewables over time.
The issue of cost is critical. With inflation creating a cash crunch in households and businesses, subsidy programs are important because upfront investments are difficult, even with long-term savings. We made the full investment in heat pumps years ago, but it would be harder now with the pressure of inflation on our daily living costs.
So, it’s good that the provincial and federal governments are providing some support to low- and middle-income families. In November, the federal government announced a $250-million grant program that would provide up to $5,000 to offset some of the cost of installing a heat pump system. In New Brunswick, the provincial government announced a $40-million investment in NB Power’s Enhanced Energy Savings Program to help low- and middle-income families insulate their homes and install heat pumps.
The federal government says homeowners can save from $1,500 to $4,700 a year if they replace oil furnaces with heat pumps as their main source of heat. The New Brunswick government says its program that provides a heat pump and funds for upgrading insulation could save people $500 a year.
Nova Scotia has a standalone organization called EfficiencyOne that provides subsidies for residents and businesses that do things like install heat pumps, solar panels, or increase insulation. It also provides consulting services, with some employees assigned to large businesses around the province to help them find energy efficiencies in their operations.
On this week’s “Insights” podcast, Don Mills and David Campbell chat with CEO Stephen MacDonald about EfficiencyOne, which has already helped Nova Scotia’s energy consumers realize more than $1 billion in energy savings and contributed to 24 percent of the province’s greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
The goal for all of us is to make the transition to renewables as cheaply as possible. Our economic and environmental objectives must be twinned in this way to get us on the right path to save the planet from the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Podcast: How EfficiencyOne Has Helped N.S. Reduce Energy Costs By More Than $1-Billion
MacDonald says energy efficiency is key to these efforts; his organization operates on an “efficiency first” principle. If you reduce energy use by finding efficiencies, then you lessen the need for costly new generation and transmission infrastructure.
“What this means is that the utility should invest in energy efficiency before considering investments in infrastructure,” he says. “Investments in efficiency avoid the need for higher costs [that come from] investments in generation and transmission distribution. The key concepts here are cost-effectiveness and reduced costs for customers.”
Saving the planet by “finding efficiencies.” Hardly the kind of message that inspires crusading activists. It reminds me of the headline for the McKibben piece, “Heat Pumps for Peace and Freedom.” But it can be the mundane, everyday solutions that achieve meaningful results.
It’d be nice if I could claim we installed heat pumps for the good of the planet, but we did it to save a buck. That’s okay, though, if the outcome is the same.
And for those of you thinking about heat pumps, there is another benefit. They act as air conditioners in the summer. Not that we need them ourselves, because we have Nature’s air conditioner on the Bay of Fundy in Saint John – the fog.