Unpacking the Growing Cost of Home Heating Bills

From EnergyNow.ca

Bills are one of life’s certainties, and in Canada, so is winter. When combined, the two add up to a growing affordability crisis across the country.

Lots has been said about the rising cost of daily essentials such as groceries and gas, but another factor weighing heavily on Canadians’ pocketbooks is the cost of heating their homes.

According to data from Statistics Canada:

15% of Canadians reduced or had to forgo necessities such as food or medicine for at least one month to pay an energy bill last year. To put that in perspective, based on the number of households there are in Canada today, roughly 2.5 million households had to forgo necessities in 2023.
14% of Canadian households kept their home at an unsafe or uncomfortable temperature because of unaffordable heating costs (approximately 2.3 million households).
High energy prices also caused 10% of Canadian households (approximately 1.7 million households) to be late or unable to pay their energy bills in the past year.

In total, nearly 27% of households (4.5 million households) said it was difficult, or very difficult to meet financial needs in the second quarter of 2023.

These numbers concern us, and we know they are also a big concern for women across Canada who have told us they are adjusting their living conditions to keep costs down.

Engaged women are making trade-offs

Hilary Krauss, a 28-year-old who lives with her partner Mitch in Vancouver, told us that their apartment setting is now fixed at an “affordable” temperature, and they are now bundling up and adding layers of clothing to compensate for lower house temperatures.

Even those who can currently afford their heating bill are considering investing in technology such as solar panels to lower home heating costs over time.

“I want energy security and care about the environment,” said Angela Chung, a Calgary woman who told us she pays $400 per month for her utility bill. “The heating costs for my modest home are exorbitant. If I invest in solar panels, it will have an upfront cost. But I may break even in a decade, saving money in the long run.”

With costs ballooning, and concerns rising about affordability, that drove us to ask what exactly we are paying for in our energy bills.

Taxes are driving up energy costs

The three main components of your heating bill are energy charges, delivery and administration (what you pay utility companies), and various government taxes, including the federal carbon tax.

Used energy (GJ or KWH)
The gigajoules or kilowatt hours of energy you used in the billing period. (This number can be an estimate or exact number.)
Delivery charges
Delivery charges include fixed and variable costs based on the length of your billing period and natural gas consumption. Both charges are often summed on your heating bill under “Delivery Total.”
Rate riders
Provincial utility commissions approve temporary charges/credits. Rate riders adjust for under/over collection of approved costs.
Transmission charge
A fee for accessing high-voltage wires and towers to transmit power from generation plants to distribution systems.
Federal carbon tax
A federal government tax on natural gas consumption.

These numbers vary across Canada based on different energy and home heating sources, so we collected bills from people in Alberta (Calgary and Sylvan Lake), Ontario (Barrie and Whitby) and British Columbia (Vancouver and Victoria) to compare.

Here’s what we found.

(1) Energy cost varies by province, and are rising every year

Just over half of Canadian households that reported having a primary heating system use a forced air furnace (51%) and one quarter (25%) use electric baseboard heaters, so we focused on these two sources.

Of the bills we looked at, people are paying an average of $135 per month to heat their home. With natural gas, the average winter month costs $160, compared to $110 with electricity.

Canadians are facing increased costs year-over-year for both natural gas (up 23.7% in 2023 over the year before), and electricity (up 1.6% in 2023).

The cost of electricity varies across Canada and can be a challenge to compare because there is a wide variation in market and rate structures.

Some provinces use tiered rates that increase or decrease based on usage, some provinces use flat-rate billing, and Ontario uses time-of-use rates where peak hours are billed at a higher rate than off-peak hours.

According to Statista, the average cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) for electricity in Canada is 19.2 cents, with the Northwest Territories paying the most, and Quebec paying the least per kWh.

(2) The carbon tax is nearly doubling home heating costs

The bills we examined show that the carbon tax accounts for 30% of heating costs for those who heat their homes with forced air furnaces that use natural gas.

In Alberta, for example, it costs about $1.80 per gigajoule (GJ) of natural gas, and an additional $3.33 per GJ in carbon tax. This means the tax is greater than the actual energy cost, nearly doubling the cost of a monthly bill.

For every $1 an Ontarian spends on natural gas, they pay an extra $1.66 on the carbon tax, according to the bills we examined. Again, the cost of the carbon tax is greater than the cost of energy used.

In Eastern Canada where home heating oil is the most used heating source, the carbon tax has been exempted (a fairness issue we’ve already explored in depth) so we have excluded it from this analysis.

Carbon tax increases will raise cost further

The federal carbon tax is set to increase by 23% on April 1, 2024, and it will rise every year until it nearly triples by 2030 over today’s rate.

The federal carbon tax was intended to incentivize people to consume less oil and gas, but we know from our national research that more than half of engaged women (52%) feel it isn’t working because it isn’t changing behaviour. It’s also putting undue pressure on remote and rural communities where alternative energy sources are not available.

Home heating is a necessity, not a luxury, and many Canadians do not have options on how they heat their home. With 46% of engaged women across Canada telling us they are concerned about energy affordability, it begs the question: Do you think what you pay for home heating is fair?

Let us know what you think about rising heating costs and these findings, and reach out to tell us how you’re managing the rising cost of living.

Related Topics:#CanadaPoweredByWomen #EnergyNow.CA #HomeHeatingBills #Inflation

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Energy

Tech giants’ self-made AI energy crisis

Published on May 18, 2024

Todayville

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity. Now the grid they’ve helped gut cannot possibly supply their growing AI needs.

ALEX EPSTEIN

MAY 16

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind.

Now the grid they’ve helped gut can’t supply their growing AI needs.¹

For the last decade, tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have, through dedicated anti-fossil-fuel propaganda and political efforts, promoted the shutdown of reliable fossil fuel power plants in favor of unreliable solar and wind.

Tech giants have propagandized against reliable fossil fuel power plants by falsely claiming to be “100% renewable” and implying everyone could do it. In fact, they have just paid utilities to credit them for others’ solar and wind use and blame others for their coal and gas use.²

In addition to their “100% renewable” propaganda, tech giants directly endorsed people and policies who shut down reliable fossil fuel power plants.E.g., The RE100 coalition, including Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, advocates for policies to “accelerate change towards zero carbon grids at scale by 2040.”³

Companies’ propaganda that solar/wind could rapidly replace fossil fuels has proven false.
Statewide blackouts in California (2020) and Texas (2021) were caused by the failure of solar/wind—which can go near zero at any time—to make up for lack of reliable fossil fuel capacity.

Thanks in significant part to tech giants’ advocacy, we have now shut down enough reliable power plants to be in a nationwide electricity crisis.

For example, most of North America is at elevated/high risk of electricity shortfalls between 2024-2028.⁴

The anti-fossil-fuel, pro-unreliable solar and wind political climate that tech giants have fostered is getting much worse, as the Administration has pledged to further reduce reliable electricity supply via power plant shutdowns and add artificial demand through EV mandates.

Biden’s EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid

ALEX EPSTEIN

APR 22

Biden's EV mandate: a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid

Biden’s de facto mandate of over 50% EVs by 2032 is a dictatorial attack on the American driver and the US grid that will 1. Force Americans to drive inferior cars. 2. Place massive new demand for reliable electricity on a grid that is declining in reliable electricity supply.

Read full story

While for years tech giants didn’t seem to have any concern about the electricity supply disaster their propaganda and policies were bringing about, they are now very interested because of the accelerating power requirements of computing, above all the hyper-competitive AI space.

To function at its potential, AI requires massive amounts of power. E.g., state-of-the-art data centers can require as much electricity as a large nuclear reactor.⁵

Electricity demand from US data centers already doubled between 2014 and 2023. Now with the fast growth of energy-hungry AI, demand from data centers could triple from 2.5% to 7.5% of our electricity use by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group.⁶

In large part due to AI, nationwide electricity demand is projected to skyrocket. Official 10-year projections for the US have summer and winter peak demand rising by over 79 gigawatt and over 90 gigawatt. 90 gigawatt is equivalent to adding the entire power generating capacity of California (!)⁷

Given the woeful underpowered grid that AI giants have helped bring about, dramatically rising demand from AI will not only contribute to massive electricity shortages, but it will also destroy a lot of potential for AI to occur in the United States.
Limited and expensive electricity will force data centers to operate with higher cost or lower capacity within the US—or take a performance hit in the form of increased latency (which can drastically reduce the value of the product) by moving offshore.
Not only is offshoring data centers destructive from an economic standpoint, it also poses a substantial security risk. E.g., Building a data center in China—which we already depend on dangerously for critical minerals—gives the CCP physical power over more parts of our economy.

Economically, data centers are a gold mine of opportunities.Globally, data centers employed 2M people full-time in 2019, many in high-skill/high-pay jobs—and this number is forecast to increase nearly 300K by 2025.

Our gutted grid will cost many Americans these opportunities.⁸

In the face of woefully inadequate electricity supply for their AI goals, tech giant CEOs are finally speaking up about the lack of power.
E.g., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that energy will be the #1 bottleneck to AI progress.

It is not enough for tech giants to warn us about the lack of reliable power. They need to take responsibility for their anti-fossil-fuel advocacy that helped caused it. And they need to support energy freedom policies that allow all fuels to compete to provide reliable power.

End preferences for unreliable electricity

ALEX EPSTEIN

DECEMBER 14, 2022

End preferences for unreliable electricity

Today’s grids are being ruined by systemic preferences for unreliable electricity: 1) no price penalty for being unreliable 2) huge subsidies for unreliables 3) mandates for unreliables Congress should end these now. The Opportunity America, given its combination of abundant domestic energy resources, technological ingenuity, and free-market competition, has …

Read full story

An example of a tech giant influencer not taking any responsibility for causing the electricity crisis is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who pushed companies and governments to adopt “net-zero” policies using mostly solar/wind, but now admits they can’t power AI data centers!
A better attitude toward electricity was expressed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “There will always be people who wait and sit around and say ‘we shouldn’t do AI because we may burn a little more carbon’… the anti-progress streak” and this “is something that we can all fight against.”⁹
America faces a choice. We can either continue our current trajectory, descend into a Third World grid, and become totally inhospitable for AI, or we can adopt energy freedom policies and become a world leader in both AI and electricity.
Share this article with tech giant CEOs and tell them to publicly apologize for damaging our grid and to commit to energy freedom policies.Google: @sundarpichai ([email protected])
Apple: @tim_cook ([email protected])
Meta: @finkd ([email protected])
Microsoft: @satyanadella ([email protected])

Michelle Hung contributed to this piece.

Energy

New Report Reveals Just How Energy Rich America Really Is

Published on May 17, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By DAVID BLACKMON

A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a nonprofit dedicated to the study of the impact of government regulation on global energy resources, finds that U.S. inventories of oil and natural gas have experienced stunning growth since 2011.

The same report, the North American Energy Inventory 2024, finds the United States also leading the world in coal resources, with total proven resources that are more than 53% bigger than China’s.

Despite years of record production levels and almost a decade of curtailed investment in the finding and development of new reserves forced by government regulation and discrimination by ESG-focused investment houses, America’s technically recoverable resource in oil grew by 15% from 2011 to 2024. Now standing at 1.66 trillion barrels, the U.S. resource is 5.6 times the proved reserves held by Saudi Arabia.

The story for natural gas is even more amazing: IER finds the technically recoverable resource for gas expanded by 47% in just 13 years, to a total of 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet. At current US consumption rates, that’s enough gas to supply the country’s needs for 130 years.

“The 2024 North American Energy Inventory makes it clear that we have ample reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal that will sustain us for generations,” Tom Pyle, President at IER, said in a release. “Technological advancements in the production process, along with our unique system of private ownership, have propelled the U.S. to global leadership in oil and natural gas production, fostering economic benefits like lower energy prices, job growth, enhanced national security, and an improved environment.”

It is key to understand here that the “technically recoverable” resource measure used in financial reporting is designed solely to create a point-in-time estimate of the amount of oil and gas in place underground that can be produced with current technology. Because technology advances in the oil and gas business every day, just as it does in society at large, this measure almost always is a vast understatement of the amount of resource that will ultimately be produced.

The Permian Basin has provided a great example of this phenomenon. Just over the past decade, the deployment of steadily advancing drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has enabled producers in that vast resource play to more than double expected recoveries from each new well drilled. Similar advances have been experienced in the other major shale plays throughout North America. As a result, the U.S. industry has been able to consistently raise record overall production levels of both oil and gas despite an active rig count that has fallen by over 30% since January 2023.

In its report, IER notes this aspect of the industry by pointing out that, while the technically recoverable resource for U.S. natural gas sits at an impressive 4.03 quads, the total gas resource in place underground is currently estimated at an overwhelming 65 quads. If just half of that resource in place eventually becomes recoverable thanks to advancing technology over the coming decades, that would mean the United States will enjoy more than 1,000 years of gas supply at current consumption levels. That is not a typo.

Where coal is concerned, IER finds the US is home to a world-leading 470 billion short tons of the most energy-dense fossil fuel in place. That equates to 912 years of supply at current consumption rates.

No other country on Earth can come close to rivaling the U.S. for this level of wealth in energy mineral resources, and few countries’ governments would dream of squandering them in pursuit of a political agenda driven by climate fearmongering. “And yet, many politicians, government agents, and activists seek to constrain North America’s energy potential,” Pyle says, adding, “We must resist these efforts and commit ourselves to unlocking these resources so that American families can continue to enjoy the real and meaningful benefits our energy production offers.”

With President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump staking out polar opposite positions on this crucial question, America’s energy future is truly on the ballot this November.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.