With 18% of Canada’s GHG emissions flowing from the building sector, and more than 77% of building emissions coming from combusting fossil fuels for space and water heating, a switch to non-emitting heating sources is needed to achieve the ambitious target of zero national greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. As noted in The Transition Accelerator’s Pathways to Net Zero report, the replacement of fossil-fuel fired furnaces and boilers with electric heating equipment (electrification) is the most compelling pathway to widespread building decarbonization.
In the residential sector, more than 6 million or 40% of homes use electric heating, and more than 850,000 of those homes use heat pumps. Although Canadians’ adoption of heat pumps is already increasing, Canadian households are not on track to electrify their space heating by 2100, let alone by 2050. In this context, this report serves as a tool to understand the current state of adoption of heat pump technologies in the residential sector, and the rates of adoption that are needed to reach Canada’s 2050 goals.
The projections in this report do not reflect the impact of the current policy environment for building decarbonization. Instead, they show the rate of progress necessary to address the climate crisis. This assessment provides policy makers and advocates with a simple but powerful depiction of the rate of adoption required to achieve our climate targets, without prescribing specific policies to increase this adoption.
La version française de ce rapport sera disponible sous peu.