The Future of building heat and the natural gas network in a net zero Canada

The Canadian Climate Institute (CCI) mitigation team selected ESMIA to perform modelling as part of a project to provide policy guidance to accelerate the decarbonization of heating in Canada’s buildings and avoid costly dead-end pathways. A central thrust of the project was modelling technological pathways to attain decarbonization goals and understand the economic viability of Canada’s gas networks within them. The results of the technical analysis were then used to develop policy recommendations in the report Heat Exchange.

For this project, ESMIA modelled credible technological pathways for decarbonizing the building sector in line with achieving net zero emissions by 2050 in Canada and performed an assessment of the impacts on the gas networks. ESMIA used its powerful NATEM modelling package to build out various scenarios to 2050 and beyond, representing an array of space heating and cooling technologies, fuel and energy types, and energy efficiency and deep retrofit measures. The second phase of the project was devoted to the modelling of impacts on gas and electricity rates and changes, the quantification of decommissioning and stranded asset costs from the potential gas distribution abandonment in different provinces, and the assessment of future residential bills for different household archetypes. The quantitative analysis ESMIA performed elucidated viable policy opportunities by assessing multiple criteria including total costs for the gas distribution network and utilities, and for households and end users.