Quebec bans oil heating in new homes starting Dec. 31 | Hacker News Reader

Quebec bans oil heating in new homes starting Dec. 31

cbc.ca

31 pointstentacleuno16 comments

I'm very concerned about these and similar (e.g., recent New York) sort of dictates that place large populations at the sole mercy of the electrical grid with no robust backup. If the electricity goes out - recalling recent events in Texas here - do you leave everyone to freeze to death? In the near future, majority electric cars means you won't have any transportation either? Not so many years ago, as a teenager, I recall a hurricane knocking out the electricity for several days. At least back then we still had working gas-powered vehicles and landline telephones. Particularly with some of the bitter winters in Canada I worry for the safety and security of your average citizens that aren't prepping with emergency generators, fuel reserves, and whatnot, and I hope there's a stronger motivation behind this than some politician's virtue signalling environmentalist scorecard.

Am I exaggerating the risks?

> At least back then we still had working gas-powered vehicles and landline telephones.

How did the gas pumps work without electricity? Or, if the gas stations have power, why would it be impossible to charge an electric car there?

Landlines having their own power just meant they could go down on their own (eg, it was possible to lose phone while still having power). I don’t see how that would be more robust than a cell network with independently powered cells during a natural disaster.

Landlines are backed by large -48V battery banks, the uptime on landline phone service is much higher than the power grid.

No you’re not exaggerating. I have both a high efficiency electric heat pump and a high efficiency natural gas furnace. Not only is the gas furnace significantly cheaper to operate, which surprised me given my heat pump is newer and among the most efficient available, but my gas furnace is also far more effective when the temperature is low (approaching freezing and below). The heat pump takes a lot longer to adjust temperatures and it feels like it struggles to keep up. The one complaint I have about my gas furnace is that it needs electricity to operate (ignition and blower fan) but that could theoretically be handled with a backup generator. There are alternatives that are fully independent of electricity though.

I’m also definitely wary of dependence on the grid and the sweeping rush to legislate every daily activity (cooking, driving, heating, etc) into that dependence. Over a decade back we had a bad storm that knocked out power for over 10 days. Luckily our natural gas and water service worked just fine, which kept us from freezing or starving. Ban based governance leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Bans such as these are for new construction, which as anyone who's been following house asset bubble inflation, housing crisis, homelessness, and home-affordability news over the past decade or five is aware is at dismally low rates.

Quebec 2020 new housing starts were 619k, 2016 census reports 3,531,660 units. That is, 17% or less of housing is new construction in any given year. (Not all housing starts finish.)

Starts: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/a1361030-c554-4bf1-83...)

2106 Census, Households: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/hl...

That is, a new-construction regulation will slowly phase out gas usage over time, and phase in additional all-electric homes (already a large fraction of all homes in Canada as TFA notes).

Issues, reliability, and mitigations (e.g., alternative emergency heating and cooking accomodations) can be assessed and developed as the plan proceeds.

People worldwide will have to transition off fossil fuels, and the only way to accomplish this will be through regulatory action.

This. I'm afraid too, being in NY, with a potential looming threat that wood burning might be banned some day down the line[1]. My entire house relies on wood pellet heating for a majority of the living area, and as I rent, this isn't a tenable option to just "give up". Sure, my landlord would have to adapt, but this is a ridiculous thing.

The NYC natural gas ban is equally silly when you realize that most of the power is coming from natural gas powerplants - so we're just shifting the point of use of gas back to the power grid itself while sticking consumers with ineffective electric equipment (since natural gas appliances are cheap -- fancy electric heat pumps etc are not.)

[1] https://www.localsyr.com/news/your-stories/your-stories-is-n...

> I recall a hurricane knocking out the electricity for several days. At least back then we still had working gas-powered vehicles and landline telephones

I know. I really feel like wireless landlines should have more protection against that sort of thing. With the ones I've had at least, if the hub connected to your phone line loses electricity, the handsets are essentially beeping bricks nagging you about a power cut. I really wish this was factored into the design more.

It would be interesting to see a wireless landline that also worked as a standard phone, when docked into the main hub. When you dock the phone in the hub, there's two copper prongs that make contact. Surely they could be used to pass-through analogue telephone signals in the event of lost power to the hub?

Oh, addendum: I actually have an old sage rotary telephone I can put my hand on, but of course the line doesn't support pulse dialling so you can't actually ring out on it (though it can take incoming calls). It can't 'press' numbers, either. Such a shame.

You can actually convert pulse to tone signals through something called a DTMF module. In short, you take apart the phone, move around some contacts, add one or two resistors (and of course the module) and you're off to the races.

Oh, while writing my comment I found out there's actually discrete modules for pulse to tone conversion that you MITM your rotary phone with, so no DIY required. You can buy them from a few online stores[0], too.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pulse+to+tone+converter

This ban doesn’t just end oil furnaces, but also prevents them from being replaced with any fossil fuel heating source, including natural gas furnaces. If the replacement forced upon everyone is so perfect, why isn’t it everyone’s natural choice? The modern political left has become obsessed with bans. This is a slippery slope and is incompatible with free societies where individuals have choice and agency. It’s one thing to encourage certain actions or educate people. It’s another thing entirely to override individual preferences and variations with a one size fits all dictate.

Fossil fuels carry massive externalties in both production and consumption which are not accounted for by the market. Since the market won't naturally incorporate full costs, other mechansims for imposing those costs, or otherwise manipulating behaviour, must be utilised.

The answer to all market failures is not in fact market-it-harder.

What is the backup for these systems when the temperatures drop below a range where the heat pump cannot keep up? Down south they use an “emergency” second-stage which is just electricity fed wires that glow hot and those are incredibly inefficient compared to a traditional gas fired furnace. However those temps usually happen a few days maximum every winter.

Heat pumps are great when operating within certain temperature range but aren’t they much better suited for milder environments where they function reasonably well? Quebec temperatures regularly drop to the point where such “emergency” heat is necessary many days in the winter.

Perhaps Canadian heat pumps are designed differently or have better backup mechanism? This article does not say whether other second stage heating sources than electricity are allowed but implies they are not.

Electric heating elements - hot wires - are 100% efficient; All the incoming electrical energy is converted to heat.

Wether they're more expensive than burning hydrocarbons depends on where you live - and hydrocarbons negative externalities remaining zero cost/outside the market.

I'm not sure what the costs are in Ontario (where the electricity is mostly nuclear+hydro), but Canada does have a carbon tax, although it's still very low.

> Electric heating elements - hot wires - are 100% efficient; All the incoming electrical energy is converted to heat.

The problem is that we're used to other methods working at much greater than 100% efficiency, combined with the need for lots more heating when efficiency drops to a mere 100%

Ground source heat pump systems can handle colder climates well. Underground, the temperature is rather stable through the year. This is especially true when the loops are installed vertically.

These seem nice but the Wikipedia article for GSHP implies only a million are installed globally - surely that cannot mean that Quebec is intending for this to be the predominant source of heating? Even with subsidization it seems the technology is prohibitively expensive for the average Canadian currently.

These bans are easy to legislate, but building codes (including for apartment blocks) should be updated to require Passivhaus and things like triple-glazed windows and ubiquitous EV charging.

I've been arguing for a number of years now that one of the biggest impacts of switching off fossil fuels will be the mirror of what switching on to them resulted in: complete transformation of the built landscape, land-use patterns, construction, and transportation behaviours.

Passivhaus and similar locale-aware construction methods would be an excellent adaptation.

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