We held an open house the other day (October 9, 2024) with presentations on Heat Pumps and Electric Vehicles. Over 40 customers turned up to hear the presentations and engage with the presenters and NOTL Hydro staff. Thank you to those customers for their interest and participation.
The idea is to provide information so as to make informed decisions. Everybody should still do what is right for them and this will depend on personal circumstances.
Copies of the presentations can be downloaded at: https://www.notlhydro.com/open_house/ .
The heat pump presentation was provided by Mike Peddle of Environmental Heating & Cooling. Some of the key takeaways in my mind were:
- There are different types of heat pumps for different weather environments. Make sure what you get is a match.
- Heat pumps work by extracting the ambient hot (for heating) and cold (for cooling) air from outside and transferring it to your house. They do not actually heat or cool the air. This process makes them more efficient.
- In Canada, you will most likely need a back up source of heating for the very cold days when the heat pumps will not be able to keep up. This could be a legacy gas furnace if you have one or an electric heater for a new installation.
- Heat pumps are competitive with natural gas and less costly than other alternatives such as oil, electric heat and propane. Heat pumps use electricity for all their energy.
The electric vehicle (EV) presentation was provided by Plug’n Drive. They also had two vehicles (a Chevrolet Equinox and a Polestar 2) available for test drives. Some of the takeaways from this presentation included:
- North America is moving to the Tesla charging connection as the standard. Conversion kits will be available for those using the other current charging connection.
- The variety of EV models and their range continues to improve with all new EVs having a range over at least 300 km.
- There is a developing used car market for EVs. An EV battery should last the lifetime of the car, is simpler to maintain as it has fewer moving parts and can get software updates during its life.
- EVs are currently 12-13% of new cars sold in Canada (this is lower in Ontario) and this is still growing.
One of the common themes with both EVs and heat pumps are the rebates that are available. These are both federal and provincial and are constantly changing. If you are thinking about either of these purchases, make sure you talk to the vendor about the rebates. It should be in their best interest to provide these to you.
At the event, a few customers spoke to me about all the outages over the summer. Most of them had seen the article in the Lake Report https://lakereport.ca/ on page 15 of the September 19, 2024 edition.
As per the article, the number of outages was the highest we have seen in a three-month span. The charts below, which can be found on our website at https://www.notlhydro.com/outages/outage-statistics/ , show this. SAIDI measures the average duration of outages while SAIFI measures their frequency. On each chart the horizontal line is the five-year average.
As reliability is a key part of our service, we track our outages closely. We have examined the summer results and there is no consistent pattern. The outages are in different parts of the town and, as reported in the article, had different causes. Either this is some manifestation of climate change or, more likely, just a string of bad luck. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and implement the changes discussed in the article.