[treespace88]

Winters in Calgary regularly go to -20c at night with periods of -30 to -40c.

How will we able to heat our homes? I can’t imagine how much more electricity it would take to replace national gas, it could be many times our current electrical production.

[avianlyric]

Moving to a district heating system that used a high efficiency combined heat and power system, that produces electricity and captures the waste heat, would substantially increase the heating efficiency of peoples homes. It would also substantially reduce the amount of emitted CO2. Doesn’t eliminate the use of fossil fuels, but has the potential to substantially reduce the environmental impact to something more sustainable.

This isn’t even a new idea, most homes in Russian cities are heated using district heating. At scale it’s so efficient that they don’t even bother metering the heat.

Additionally with a district heating system, geothermal, and ground source heat pumps start to make a significant amount of sense. Their both technologies the benefit significantly from very large installations.

[doodlebugging]

>How will we able to heat our homes?

Don't worry Canadian-bro. Texas has you covered. An alarming amount of the natural gas produced in the Permian Basin is flared or manages to sneak out of leaky fittings and tanks as fugitive emissions. We put off building out the infrastructure necessary to capture and use this resource because it was expensive to build and natural gas prices were low. Since our state government would never make a corporation or an industry self-fund anything expensive, there was never any money in the budget to build it.

We're doing the easy work of pumping the whole atmosphere full of methane so that everyone can stay warm, even our friendly neighborhood Canadians.

/s of course.

[nwiswell]

> Approximately 49% of Alberta’s natural gas production is consumed here in Alberta. Alberta's residential and commercial sectors account for 17%. The remaining 83% of natural gas consumed in Alberta is used by the industrial, electrical generation, transportation and other sectors. Natural gas is also an important raw material for the province’s oil sands and electric power-generation industries.

https://www.alberta.ca/natural-gas-overview.aspx

You're gonna be fine.

[lazide]

It might force a switch back to bio based fuel sources (aka trees in some form) and actual work to increase insulation in the multitude of places that currently go ‘meh’.

Also a return of the proper coat as casual indoor wear?

[MandieD]

Heating a whole free-standing house to comfort in long sleeve t-shirts and jeans (68F/20C) in a cold climate is a luxury that’s only a few decades old, especially taking into account how much average houses in the US and Canada have grown over the past century. Open floor plans are also a modern extravagance in cold climates.

Before that: smaller houses, closed off rooms, wearing sweaters inside all winter, sitting around a fireplace/stove most of the evening, and using thick down comforters half the year (if you could afford one).

[mfer]

> Also a return of the proper coat as casual indoor wear?

Can you honestly see droves of people doing this by choice? I can't.

When was a proper coat last casual indoor wear? 200 years ago it wasn't. In a cabin with a fireplace you don't need this.

[lazide]

The ‘beauty’ of hyper expensive fuel is most will happily do that over the alternative - going bankrupt and/or freezing to death.

And those cabins were always a minority over folks in the cities. Being able to afford to hire someone to bring wood or coal is different from just going outside and chopping down whatever looks ready. (Though really you need to season it, and that takes time)

It certainly isn’t everyone that is so poor that it is a concern, but Dickens used the theme for a reason.

[moralestapia]

>Can you honestly see droves of people doing this by choice? I can't.

If it's either that or dying I can see most people choosing the former.

[Factorium]

Areas of high density can be heated with nuclear power, tapping directly into existing district heating systems.

Insulation and design standards need to be stepped up, with passivhaus the standard if it isn't already.

[ClumsyPilot]

"Areas of high density can be heated with nuclear power, tapping directly into existing district heating systems."

This is already done in Russia

[Johnny555]

A ground source heat pump may work well in that situation since it will run just as well at -25 outside temperature as at +25 -- with a COP of 4, it will use 25% of the electricity that you would have used with resistance heating, and at that point, it's probably better to burn the natural gas in a power plant than to burn it in your furnace.

Though it's expensive to install in an existing house, and needs a lot of land (or a well).

[tzs]

How long are those periods where it gets colder than -25℃?

Mitsubishi's heat pumps with their "Hyper-Heat" feature are able to work at 76% of their capacity down to -25℃. If those colder periods aren't too long, a heat pump combined with good insulation might be enough to get through that.

[ClumsyPilot]

Fortinately Scandinavia, some of the coldest places on Earth, has figured this out decades ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

[dzhiurgis]

Modern air to air heat pumps works up to -20.

New homes built to A++ standard need so little heating people are just opting to use electricity and use saved cash to build solar plant (provided your grid lets to store power long term).