It is not commonly known, but we use as much energy to heat our homes in Canada as our electric system delivers for all purposes. Most of that heat energy comes from burning fossil fuels. That raises a challenge, Canada must reduce its carbon emissions, but we also need to heat our homes, and there’s a way to do both: thermal networks of insulated underground pipes that distribute heat from residual process heat, renewable solar and biomass sources, and even nuclear reactors, using infrastructure like the systems that carry electricity, water, and natural gas.
Clean heat infrastructure can distribute heat harvested from nuclear reactors and other fossil-fuel-free sources and send it as far as 100 km to our homes, schools, hospitals, and shopping malls greatly reducing the demand for electricity and heating fuel while also making space on the electrical grid to accommodate growing demand from EV chargers and heat pumps. Like other infrastructure built for the social good of Canadians, the cost of installing such networks could be amortized over many decades and paid by consumers as part of their heating bills, making such a system cost competitive compared to our existing natural gas heating infrastructure. As many as 70 per cent of Canadians live in communities that could be connected to thermal networks.
The paper lays out the challenges of clean heat for Canada and how Thermal Networks must be considered a crucial and market ready cornerstone in the set of solutions to its decarbonization.
The position paper was co-authored by McMaster University (J.S. Cotton, N. Walton, K. Friedrich), The Boltzmann Institute (M. Green, M. Wiggin) and Canadian Nuclear Association members (R. Walker, M. Lynch, P. Spekkens)
