But there's something that confuses me. I've long read that Natural Gas is the cheapest, most efficient way to heat your home. But looking at this graph, it seems that even the most pessimistic estimate of electricity costs is going to be much lower than the cheapest fossil fuel costs.
Now, I've been writing since late in the summer that natural gas prices were going up. But I wonder when the crossover point was - at what point did electricity become the economical option? Given that the gap between electricity and Natural Gas is still small, it's likely that the turnover was just this year.
Further speculation: How much slack would we create in the oil market if we got all houses off of heating oil ASAP? I'm going to have to look in to this further. My initial research shows about 7% of oil goes towards heating buildings. Freeing that up would be one way of bringing the price of oil down, and it would be a money-saver for the homeowner to boot.
This points to a new policy objective for Canada, by the way - one I've been advocating for a while: getting all Canadian homes wired for electric heating. (They said I was mad. Mad, I tell you!) Part of this would necessitate a national electrical exchange. Canada actually produces a large surplus of electricity, which is exported to the US (no surprise there.) Unlike fossil fuels, Canada has huge untapped potential for electrical generating capacity. We need a way to make sure that provinces can (and do) sell their electricity to each other at fair rates - and yes, this may very well mean that Ontario's hydro costs would go up. This might, incidentally, abrogate NAFTA. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment