Toronto has a massively ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2040. One city councillor has already done just that.
On May 25, Toronto city councillor Mike Layton and his wife realized a long-held dream — Enbridge Gas cut them off, and now they’re running their house, summer and winter, without fossil fuels.
It will require homeowners who can afford it to step up and invest in new appliances and home water and heating systems, and require massive funding from all three levels of government to motivate them and help those who cannot afford to make the investment themselves. It will require a veritable army of construction trades to be schooled in new technologies.
“Thirty, 40, 50 years on, we’re going to see parts of Toronto that are uninhabitable due to flooding. Most of the summer is projected to just be one long heat wave above 30 degrees C.” There are health benefits. Electric vehicles will mean cleaner air and less noise pollution. Switching from gas appliances — which can leak methane into the air — will improve indoor air quality.Layton’s gas bill is now zero and his electric bill for July was a credit of $5, although his expenses are slightly higher overall because he is paying off the money he borrowed to make his home energy efficient.
Batteries like it have already started saving Toronto Hydro money — instead of having to build new infrastructure to supply homes with power, residential homes are becoming mini-generating stations. Retrofitting a house to bring it to net zero emissions can run as high as $70,000 to $100,000, if you include things like new exterior cladding, according to the city. This is in line with what some homeowners we interviewed have spent or intend to spend.Toronto Hydro is also predicting, and smaller increases for several years after that, as it gears up to provide three times as much electricity in 2040 as it does now.
“Let’s be realistic here, I think it would be like trying to put out a fire with a watering can to try to get at this problem at the scale we need with the dollars that are allotted to it,” she says. “We know the governments, when the chips are down, can put their differences aside and work together to roll out unprecedented programs,” Buchanan says.
Their studies have shown that by 2030, Ontario will need to triple its workforce to 400,000 skilled tradespeople to meet the demand both for new construction and retrofitting current buildings. De Berardis says a two-tiered approach is needed on the labour front, one that includes focused immigration, and extensive and aggressive campaigns to get younger generations already here into the skilled trades.
“We really see ourselves as bridging the energy needs of our customers from now into the future,” says Malini Giridhar, vice-president of business development and regulatory, Enbridge Gas Inc.
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