this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Just to share some climate change context, as of 2020, natural gas usage by buildings (mostly for heating) accounted for 54% of community-wide emissions in Toronto. Transportation only accounted for 33%, so reducing our use of natural gas for heating is something Canada needs majorly to focus on if we don't want to burn.
To me, it's absolutely crazy that AC units are even still marketed. An air conditioner is just a heat pump that only work in one direction (cooling). All that is needed to allow it to work for both heating and cooling is one extra valve. If you're going to install a heat pump (in the form of an air conditioner) and a furnace anyway, you might as well let the heat pump provide heating as well. That way, your furnace is only required on the coldest nights. For most of the year, the heat pump is sufficient.
With the caveat that at lower outdoor temperatures (think below about -20C), heat pumps become increasingly ineffective at heating up indoor spaces.
For places that reach those temperatures in winter (most of the prairies and northern Ontario) you also need supplemental heating of some sort.
Well, everywhere in Canada outside of maybe Vancouver does dip deep below -20 once in a while. But for the "Quebec City to Windsor corridor" (which is where about half of Canada lives eg GTA) you theoretically should be able to get away with some electric space heaters as a backup heating source. They'd be expensive to run but it would likely only be for a few days per year.
"Pay for more electricity" might not work very well, if everybody in a region uses resistive heat at the same time. I'm not sure what the solution is... maybe an overprovisioned power grid, cheaper battery tech, or tanks of renewable backup fuel like dimethyl ether?
Local power storage.
If you're home had a battery bank, it could slow-charge pretty much all the time, then help pick up large on-demand loads like heating/cooling (air, water, food, etc).
Then the power grid would see a relatively steady load from each home with the batteries smoothing out spikes in usage.
Add on local generation like solar or wind to further reduce that load on the grid.
Heat pumps often have the option of a heater strip that lets it work at those temperatures.