Quote:
Originally Posted by belsarius
And having a lot of elder family living in Newfoundland and knowing how much of their pension goes to heating oil, I actually have a lot of sympathy and understanding for not taxing it. Their options are oil or wood. Sure there is electric pumps, but when the power goes out for a couple of days in a snowstorm that doesn't exactly help.
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I don't know, a heat pump with a wood backup is a pretty common setup in areas that are prone to power outages and it would save anyone using oil for heat thousands of dollars every year. And it eliminates the need to use a generator to keep your furnace fan running in outages.
Yeah, sometimes change is slow. But heating oil was gone from heating 34% of residences in Newfoundland 20 years ago to just over 12% now, so I don't see why the remaining ones (beyond a few edge cases) can't do the same in the near future with all the incentives and rebates that exist. And over 30% of people who use oil for heat in Newfoundland already have a wood backup, so it'd be an even easier transition.