To the Editor,
To celebrate our heat pump’s first birthday, I’ve added up our home’s energy costs for the past 12 months and compared them with our costs for the previous year. We have an older gas furnace and a hybrid cold climate air source heat pump.
| Enbridge Gas | Hydro One | Total cost | Carbon pollution | |||||
| m3 | $ | CO2e kg | kWh | $ | CO2e kg | CO2 e[1] kg | ||
| 2023 | 1628 | 1023 | 3127 | 14,562 | 2279 | 437 | $3302 | 3564 kg |
| 2024 | 173 | 514 | 332 | 17,489 | 2751 | 525 | $3265 | 857 kg |
The heat pump was installed in mid-January 2024 by Embrun Energy, with electrical work by Ottawa Electric, for a total cost of about $9,000, including tax. Was it worth it? The machine works and bonus – we have AC in summer. And we’re glad to have reduced the carbon pollution coming from our house. However, so far, we are not saving much money. We are using 1/10th the gas but our gas bills are only down by half; this is due to Enbridge’s customer charge of about $30 per month regardless of how much gas is burned.
Our next challenge is to reduce the carbon pollution from our electricity consumption (525 kg CO2e), which already causes more carbon emissions than our gas consumption (437 kg CO2e). Unless we reduce our own electricity use, our consumption will cause even more carbon pollution in 2025, and more again each year, as Ontario increases its reliance on gas-fueled generation to meet electricity demand.
[1] Calculated by multiplying the amount of gas or electricity consumed, by CO2 emission factors of 1.921 kg CO2e/m3 for pipeline gas and 0.030 kg CO2e/kWh for Ontario electricity in 2023-2024. The CO2 emission factor for Ontario electricity in 2025 is 0.038 kg CO2e/kWh. Online reference viewed Jan.24, 2025: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/climate-change/pricing-pollution-how-it-will-work/output-based-pricing-system/federal-greenhouse-gas-offset-system/emission-factors-reference-values.html
Lynn Ovenden
Casselman
