Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:32 on 2022-07-25 Permalink Reply  

• mare 10:48 on 2022-07-25 Permalink

  We looked into this for our 5-plex ten years ago, but the total quoted price of an installation was much higher than the $35,000 mentioned in the article, especially if all apartments were going to be converted. And there were only very limited subsidies for existing construction. The electricity to run the thermopump (always on) was already more than we used on electricity ourselves all year, and if we added all apartments we couldn’t legally change the rents with $50 or so per month to include heating, the increase had to be spread out gradually. So the time to recoup our investment was going to be very, very long.
  On top of that, the mess was going to be huge: they would destroy the garden, and installing hot water radiators in all apartments (2 and a tiny one in the bathroom with supply hoses running through the ceilings of the apartment below) would also cause a major mess and be quite costly.
  Converting the old ground floor heating system from oil to electric and upgrading the electric heaters in the apartments to more efficient ones made economically and environmentally more sense, so we did that instead. For new construction the ROI is slightly better, but it’s also rarely done. In Quebec alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar and wind have to compete with our existing ‘green’ energy infrastructure. (Whose environmental damage and massive use of construction materials makes it much less ‘green,’ but that has already happened.)

  But yeah, when the whole economy is going to move away from fossil fuels (which is not going to happen very fast when oil and gas still get huge subsidies from our government; so IMHO we’re already royally fucked) it will put a higher strain on the electric grid. Our hydro installations have quite some excess capacity, but that might change if the current snowfall and river runoff up north is going to diminish in the future, which is uncertain.

• Kate 11:04 on 2022-07-25 Permalink

  I wondered about the stress on the grid from “l’électrification de divers secteurs de l’économie” – maybe that means transportation, but I certainly hope it doesn’t mean more cryptocurrency farms.