Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Jean‑Pierre Finet. I am an analyst and spokesperson for the Regroupement des organismes environnementaux en l'énergie, made up of nine environmental groups, including Greenpeace, Nature Québec, Fondation Rivières and the Association québécoise des médecins pour l'environnement.
We mainly take action with the Régie de l'énergie on gas and electricity matters, as well as in parliamentary committees, mainly in Quebec City, and in public hearings on environmental issues.
I prepared my points in the form of a list, because I didn't have a lot of notice. I tried to answer your questions. I wanted to talk about various things, but the government's announcement today has slightly changed what I had to tell you.
We're talking about end-use electrification, but we have to be careful about peak demand, as the previous witness from the Canadian Gas Association told you. Gas is not necessarily a necessary evil.
There are various strategies that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These include electric technologies such as heat pumps. However, if they are ordinary heat pumps, whose limit is -8°C or -10°C, they won't do the job. We need cold climate heat pumps.
Even with those, there is a way to manage peak demand without having to use gas. It can be done, including through heat accumulation systems, such as bricks, which, in Quebec, are subsidized by Hydro-Québec to the tune of $22,000 for a combined heat pump and heat accumulator. We are very much in favour of shifting loads over time rather than eliminating loads in favour of a polluting fossil fuel.
I also wanted to talk to you about the problem of shared incentives. When tenants pay the bill, the landlord doesn't necessarily have an interest in making energy efficiency improvements. That seems to be another weakness in the program that has just been announced.
The program that was announced today seems to avoid targeting gas, when gas consumption is the first thing we should reduce. In Quebec, we have a dual-energy program that aims to efficiently convert about 70% of the volumes of gas used for electricity, thanks to heat pumps. We are in favour of dual energy using existing equipment. What we don't want to do is upgrade gas equipment just to handle peak demand. There's a way to manage the peak by shifting the load over time, and you don't need gas for that.
If you really want to target low-income clients, I can say, as EfficiencyOne does, that the direct installation programs do the job, because low-income clients often don't have the down payment to contribute to them. Even if they are subsidized, it is often not enough.
That's pretty much what I wanted to talk to you about. There is techno-economic potential to improve energy efficiency, but there are barriers, particularly the problem of shared incentives between landlords and tenants. That means that even tenants who pay the bill often have to get permission from landlords before they can install a heat pump.
There is also dynamic pricing, which shifts expenses over time. For that, ideally, heat accumulation systems need to allow loads to shift over time. On that note, this fall, we are going to test wall heat accumulators. They are a bit like convection heaters, electric baseboard systems with bricks in them. In Nova Scotia, for example, this type of system is subsidized for apartments. Ideally, heat pumps should be installed in homes and combined with heat accumulators, which will save money on bills by shifting loads through dynamic energy distributor pricing. In fact, BC Hydro also has a time-of-use pricing program, which means that electricity is less expensive outside peak demand and more expensive at times of peak demand.
At those times, the heat stored in the bricks is used to provide heating rather than electricity from the grid, which is in high demand. We will have the results of our pilot project soon and will be able to share them.
What we are promoting is really removing fossil fuels, including gas, which is not necessary for new buildings. There are ways to construct buildings without using gas. We don't need to perpetuate the use of gas. Ideally, before installing heat pumps, it would be a good idea to reduce building consumption and improve building envelopes rather than oversizing a piece of equipment, a heat pump, on a building that is a sieve.
Thank you.