Possible outlawing of baseboard electric heat!

[waynefromnscanada]

Province of New Brunswick Canada, becoming short of electricity, is considering the outlawing of baseboard electric heat in all new construction. Very interesting.

[Frxddy]

Sounds like a rumor to me. Canada has abundant electricity and electric heat is common up there. I have a friend in Quebec. He says you can't get cheaper heat.
I think long before they outlaw electric heat they will stop selling excess power to the USA. I live in Maine. We get a bunch of our power from Canada. Just last year they ran a new high tension power line down to us.

[Cariboocoot]

New Brunswick isn't Quebec, nor is it BC. W have abundant hydro power here. Except that we don't anymore. We've gone from exporting power to importing it. Rates are low but going up, and yet the rate increase can't be justified.

Outlawing baseboard electric for new construction seems like a good idea - on the surface. But in some applications it can be cheaper and use less energy over-all than central heat. New construction, ironically, is more likely to use it efficiently. But you can't really trade off one type of energy for another, as some people would have you believe.

It's a lot more complicated than it seems.

[russ]

How much more efficient do they claim other types of heaters are?

Or is this just a green whim?

I know baseboard heat is often looked down at as it is often on exterior walls where heat loss is maximum but -

Russ

[Cariboocoot]

Actually it's standard procedure to put any form of heating outlet on an exterior wall, under a window. This helps create the convection to distribute heat through the room and makes the cold loss through the window less noticeable - the room is more comfortable.

Whether or not you use electric heat is a matter of price and availability. Wayne is saying that NB figure the availability is going down; no cheap, abundant hydro electric in NB. So the idea is to eliminate all big users of electric that have an alternative. I wonder if they will outlaw electric hot water and clothes dryers?

[Frxddy]

Ahhh, yes, I should know better than to lump all our northern friends together. Here in the states electric rates vary widely between states, it is probably similar in Canada.
So, if they do force you to do something other than electric, what do you have for options? Oil? Natural gas? 80% of people here heat with oil. Virtually no one heats with electricity. Electricity isn't cheap here. Oil would have to approach $8 a gallon before electricity would make sense.

[russ]

Actually it's standard procedure to put any form of heating outlet on an exterior wall, under a window. This helps create the convection to distribute heat through the room and makes the cold loss through the window less noticeable - the room is more comfortable.

Whether or not you use electric heat is a matter of price and availability. Wayne is saying that NB figure the availability is going down; no cheap, abundant hydro electric in NB. So the idea is to eliminate all big users of electric that have an alternative. I wonder if they will outlaw electric hot water and clothes dryers?

Modern design is to place the heat source under a window? Kind of backwards - you get less residence time for the heat before it escapes through the wall. A higher temp against a wall will lose heat more rapidly than a lower temp.

The entire NB situation and solution sounds rather green to me - meaning a knee jerk reaction not seriously thought out.

[techntrek]

With high-efficiency heat pumps able to operate to much lower temps than before, I could see this happening - but at much lower latitudes than NB...

[waynefromnscanada]

Problem in NB is that they depend on Nuclear for a lot of their power. Safety upgrades to their Point Lepreau plant are three years behind schedule, $1 billion over budget and they don't have the money to pay for it. If they have to shut it down, NB could be in serious trouble. They also provide much of the electricity that the nearby province of Prince Edward Island uses, they having basically nothing but a few wind turbines as a local source. I doubt, especially after Japan, that this kind of thing is going to be unique to New Brunswick, but we shall see.

[BB.]

I am sure that they are not doing anything as stupid as this for renewable power:

The turbines, at a range of sites across Scotland, were stopped because the grid network could not absorb all the energy they generated. Details of the payments emerged following research by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF).

The REF said energy companies were paid £900,000 to halt the turbines for several hours between 5 and 6 April.

According to the REF research, the payments made cost up to 20 times the value of the electricity that would have been generated if the turbines had kept running.

Sounds like blackmail / payoffs going on somewhere here...

-Bill