Energy
Unpacking the Growing Cost of Home Heating Bills
From EnergyNow.ca
By
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.
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
It is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s contention there’s no “business case” for exporting Canada’s abundant, inexpensively produced natural gas as LNG. But Canadians might do well to politely decline management consulting advice from a former substitute drama teacher who was born into wealth and has never had to meet a payroll, balance a budget or make a sale. Bluntly stated, someone who has shown no evidence of being able to run the proverbial lemonade stand. And one whose real agenda, the evidence shows, is to strangle the nation’s most productive and wealth-generating industry. With the first LNG ship finally expected to dock at Kitimat, B.C. over the next year and load Canada’s first-ever LNG export cargo, Gwyn Morgan lays out the business and environmental cases for ramping up our LNG exports – and having them count towards Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Pierre Poilievre’s Axe the (carbon) Tax campaign is a spectacular success. But the Conservative Party of Canada needs its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Paradoxically, it’s a fossil fuel that provides much of the answer.
Canada’s rich endowment of natural gas resources offers an immense opportunity to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions while also helping to rescue the Liberal-government-ravaged Canadian economy by exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, Japan, South Korea and the other coal-dependent Asia-Pacific countries. Switching from coal to natural gas for producing electricity and generating heat for buildings and industrial processes can typically reduce CO2 emissions by 50 percent for the same unit of output, while all-but eliminating the toxic compounds and lung-clogging particulates emitted from burning coal that shorten the lives of millions living in smog-stricken Asian cities.
More natural gas is urgently needed, since countries throughout Asia – especially China and India – are currently adding even more coal-burning power plants to meet rapidly growing electricity demand. The benefits of fuel-switching are not speculation, but a proven result: the United States’ pronounced switch starting in the mid-2000s from coal to natural gas for electricity materially reduced that country’s CO2 emissions (see accompanying graph), nearly equalling the entire European Union’s emissions cuts, as I wrote about in this previous column.
A study by respected consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, released in late 2022, determined the following:
- “Canada is well-positioned geographically…Western Canadian LNG is much closer to Asia relative to US Gulf Coast LNG, which needs to be shipped through the Panama Canal to get to Asia”;
- “LNG from Canada would be cost-competitive for northeast Asian importers…due to its relatively low shipping and liquefaction costs”;
- “LNG from Canada has lower emissions intensity than LNG coming from many other global LNG exporters”;
- “Asia will not be able to produce enough natural gas domestically to meet its escalating demand, therefore Canadian LNG is a compelling alternative: With its high environmental standards and stewardship, Canada would be a great partner to fill the LNG demand gap in Asia”; and
- “If Canada aggressively ramps up its LNG exports…the emissions displaced from Canadian LNG would total 5.5 [gigatons of CO2 equivalent] from 2022 to 2050 or 181 [megatons of CO2 equivalent] on average per year, which is equivalent to removing all Canadian cars from the road.”
These impressive benefits – not to mention the opportunity to create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs in our country and provide long-term returns to investors, among them millions of pension-dependent retirees – were recognized long ago by the energy industry, Western provincial premiers and former prime minister Stephen Harper. And for a time it indeed seemed that Canada was on the cusp of an LNG boom. By 2010, there were more than 20 LNG projects in the works in B.C., representing hundreds of billions in total investment. These included Exxon Mobil’s $25-billion West Coast Canada project, Chinese-owned CNOOC’s $36-billion Aurora project, Malaysian firm Petronas’s $36 billion Pacific NorthWest project, and the Shell-led $43 billion LNG Canada project at Kitimat.
Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
But through a decade of trying to navigate Canada’s increasingly obstructive and Byzantine regulatory process, project proponents dropped out one by one. Today LNG Canada is the only one of those major projects left standing. (Two much smaller LNG projects, Woodfibre LNG in Howe Sound at Squamish, and Cedar LNG just a few kilometres from the LNG Canada project, are also proceeding, and one other large project proposed by the Nisga’a First Nation is making regulatory progress.) LNG Canada succeeded only because South African project leader Andy Calitz, backed by the enthusiasm of the Haisla Nation which saw the immense potential to create a self-sustaining, wealth-generating economy for its people, refused to give up.
After five years of construction, the LNG Canada liquefaction facility and loading terminal are nearing completion, with the first LNG ship scheduled to sail to China in 2025 (possibly even this year). The Kitimat plant itself is just one component of Canada’s first LNG export project. TC Energy Corp.’s (formerly TransCanada Pipelines) $15 billion, recently completed Coastal GasLink pipeline will carry the required natural gas from the northeastern B.C. gas fields to the Kitimat terminal. And additional billions of dollars have been invested in drilling natural gas wells, proving up the immense reserves needed to feed the LNG facility for decades to come, and constructing field production systems.
The economic benefits are myriad. Aside from the jobs created and the wealth generated for the participating companies, B.C.’s annual natural gas royalties are forecast to double from $700 million in 2024 to $1.4 billion in 2027. Benefits for First Nations include significant employment and business opportunities, such as HaiSea Marine’s 50 percent interest in a $500 million contract.
And that’s just LNG Canada’s Phase 1, which will produce 14 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG, or approximately 1.8 billion cubic feet (bcf) per day. With that one project coming on-stream, about 10 percent of Canada’s total natural gas production will be exported to international markets, earning premium prices. Construction of Phase 2 is scheduled to begin in 2026 and will double the facility’s output, with first delivery scheduled for 2032. A report from Canada Action estimates that completion of both phases will reduce CO2 emissions in Asian countries as much as would removing 18 million cars from Canadian roads. That is a far more efficient and realistic way of reducing emissions than the Trudeau government’s current scheme to force everyone into electric vehicles within a decade.
A major barrier for LNG project sponsors has been Canadian regulators’ fixation on a project’s domestic emissions – which come mainly from producing the energy needed to operate the liquefaction and storage process and loading facility. These emissions are miniscule compared to the enormous emissions reductions when natural gas is used instead of coal in consuming countries. But in their zeal to force Canada to “net zero” emissions, government authorities initially tried to veto LNG Canada generating its electricity and compression power using some of the natural gas that will be already piped to the site, insisting instead upon hydroelectric power. This seriously delayed the project due to the need for B.C. Hydro to first build a new dam to supply the required power, along with a new, $3 billion transmission line that has not even begun its environmental review process.
Regulators finally waived their objection so the project could be finished, and it will initially use natural gas for power. But the same objection is now being raised with respect to another major LNG venture proposed in the same region. The Ksi Lisims LNG project would utilize a floating liquefaction and loading facility docked at lands owned by the Nisga’a First Nation north of Prince Rupert. Its natural gas would be supplied through an already-approved but never-built pipeline planned for one of the cancelled LNG projects. The $10 billion venture would have approximately two-thirds the capacity of LNG Canada Phase 1. The facility would be powered by hydroelectricity.
Ksi Lisims sounds like a great addition to Canada’s modest LNG lineup, one that British Columbians should applaud. Instead, the proponents have been assailed by objections over the greenhouse gas emissions from the facility and the natural gas production process, and concurrently the B.C. Wilderness Committee is calling on the province’s NDP government to veto any further LNG development. None of these zealots acknowledge the vastly greater reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that will be achieved as consuming countries switch to natural gas.
Prior to the December 2018 UN Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland, Canada’s Conservative Party urged leaders of their nation’s delegation to propose that the use of imported natural gas to displace coal and thereby reduce emissions in one country should count towards the exporting country’s emissions reduction targets. But this made far too much sense for our Prime Minister and his team of anti-fossil-fuel eco-zealots. A new federal government that encourages LNG projects might well see a return of those other big sponsors that were driven off.
And that brings us back to Pierre Poilievre and the need for a Conservative alternative to Trudeau’s carbon tax. LNG export would be not only vastly superior in reducing emissions, it would also create tens of billions of dollars in economic benefits for a beleaguered Canadian private sector. It is beyond high time. A Macdonald-Laurier Institute report, Estimating the True Size of Government in Canada, concludes that Canada’s private sector has shrunk to just 36 percent of the nation’s GDP. That’s right – Canada’s public sector now represents nearly two-thirds of the Canadian economy, if one includes in that measure the vast amounts governments spend on tax credits and other tax-related expenditures, plus the economic impacts of regulating the pricing or outputs of private industries. This is appalling.
Even more incomprehensible is a research report from the Harvard Kennedy School noting that “Communist” China’s private sector generates “approximately 60% of China’s GDP, 70% of its innovative capacity, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs.” By those measures, the private sector in ostensibly free and democratic Canada, with its allegedly market-based economy, has been reduced to barely half the relative size of the private sector in authoritarian China.
It is clear that for Canada, getting out of the way of privately-driven growth in LNG exports would be a vastly superior environmental alternative to Trudeau’s economically destructive and politically divisive carbon tax, while also helping to reverse the decline of what was once a proud, thriving nation into an indebted, unproductive, government-dominated basket case.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
Energy
Anti-LNG activists have decided that they now actually care for LNG investors after years of calling to divest
From Resource Works
Qatar is building or chartering 104 LNG carriers, and plans to double its LNG output by the end of 2030. It would then produce 142 million megatonnes of LNG a year — more than 20 times the 7 million from the LNG Canada plant.
Strange to see activists opposed to LNG development in Canada publicly worrying about whether such projects are economically viable for investors.
One group has been arguing “the reality is that in the coming years the world may no longer need BC.’s LNG” and that could mean “the risk of future stranded assets.” Of course, they aren’t at all concerned about investors; they’re just desperately throwing every brick they can think of in organized and well-funded political campaigns to influence government.
Meanwhile, two of their prime targets proceed with their government-approved plans: LNG Canada moves steadily toward overseas exports in 2025, and Woodfibre LNG is moving toward construction, and shipping pre-sold exports in 2027. BC has also approved Fortis BC’s planned marine LNG terminal on the Fraser, which would provide LNG as fuel for visiting ships, and could also handle export cargoes from an expanded FortisBC plant in Delta.
And First Nations are working on the Haisla Nation’s Cedar LNG project, and the Nisga’a Nation’s proposed Ksi Lisims LNG operation. Odd how the activists refrain from criticizing the First Nations Peoples who want to export LNG to help their communities thrive .
And, somehow, the activists’ messages fail to impress LNG developers in the U.S., Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Qatar. For context, Qatar is building or chartering 104 LNG carriers, and plans to double its LNG output by the end of 2030. It would then produce 142 million megatonnes of LNG a year — more than 20 times the 7 million from the LNG Canada plant.
The critics’ climate issues and concerns are indeed legitimate, no argument. World emissions hit a record high in 2023, the International Energy Agency reports. Emissions in advanced economies fell to a 50-year low, but rose in China and India.
China in 2023 accounted for 35 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions. The U.S. stood at 12.5 percent and India at 7.7 percent. While China has indeed made much progress on renewables, it and India continue to burn more and more coal.
Why Canadian groups think they can solve world issues by focussing on relatively modest LNG proposals in Canada is beyond us.
Our Canadian LNG will be environmentally cleaner than LNG from many rival suppliers. And buyers can use it to generate more of their electricity, replacing coal-powered generation that produces far more emissions. That’s an environmental plus.
LNG Canada will have an emissions intensity of 0.15 percent of carbon dioxide per tonne of LNG produced, less than half the global industry average of 0.35 percent per tonne, and 35 percent lower than the best-performing facility.
Woodfibre LNG will be the world’s first net-zero LNG export facility — 23 years ahead of government net-zero goals. Woodfibre LNG will have an emissions intensity of just 0.04 percent — and that’s less than one sixth of the global industry average.
The Haisla’s Cedar LNG project will have an emissions intensity of just 0.08 percent of CO2 per tonne of LNG. That’s less than a third of the global average. Its plans call for emissions to be near zero by 2030.
And the Nisga’a Ksi Lisims project promises to be operating with net-zero emissions within three years of the project’s first shipment.
Our LNG has another advantage over U.S. LNG: The shipping distance from BC to prime Asian buyers is about 10 days compared to 20 days from U.S. Gulf Coast LNG plants. That means 50-60 percent lower emissions from the ships carrying the LNG.
Canada produces only 1.5 percent of world greenhouse-gas emissions. As Canada’s independent parliamentary budget officer reported in 2022: “Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change.”
Thus the First Nations LNG Alliance points out: “You could shut the entire country down — no energy, no industry, no jobs, no transportation, no heat, no light — and that reduction of 1.5 percent of emissions could be wiped out by new energy development and new emissions in other countries in a matter of some months or perhaps a few years.”
And so the Alliance says: “So we have government punishing taxpayers, First Nations and industry by putting on blinkers when it comes to LNG. Ottawa views Canada as a geographical silo in which we must meet our emissions targets, regardless of what others do.
“It’s long past time, indeed, to act locally — but think globally.”
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