No easy answer for keeping warm without going broke

Dave Mabell
LETHBRIDGE HERALD
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They're stirring excitement among Alberta's environmentalists.
Battery-powered cars might not only keep our air cleaner, but they could put an end to those weekly gasoline fill-ups. Geothermal heating and cooling, meanwhile, could mean life without natural gas bills.
But both can trigger huge spikes in demand for electricity. And Lethbridge city council has been told both could force the city to instal beefed-up distribution circuits and transformers to avoid brown-outs on cold winter days.
Those new technologies, warns Ald. Tom Wickersham, can also send residential power bills through the roof. A handful of Lethbridge homeowners have already called him to complain about suddenly high power bills.
"They're significantly more," he says. And because their power consumption is far higher - three or even four times the city's typical home readings - local owners find they're bumped up into a different price structure.
They're soon paying on the same "demand" basis as a medium-sized business. And if they're unable to reduce their peak usage periods, that can prove pricey.
Wickersham has asked city officials to report on how the city's power rates can be modified to ease the pain. While only a few dozen Lethbridge owners have invested in geothermal equipment, he predicts many more may soon be driving plug-in vehicles.
What they should realize, he says, is how those decisions will impact their power bills. While they won't be charged for natural gas, they'll be paying to run big circulating pumps which draw warm water up from deep in the earth's crust - or send it back down in summer.
In Alberta, many homes with geothermal systems also rely on electric heaters for extra warmth in the winter. And if they're heating water for showers and laundry, they'll also find electric systems more expensive to operate than natural gas - adding further to those power bills.
At the same time, Wickersham warns they'll be putting a lot more pressure on the city's "wire system" of power lines and transformers, which feeds power into every home.
Otto Lenz, manager of the city's power utility, says it's not just geothermal heat and plug-in cars that will be creating high power demands in residential areas.
"We have people who have three swimming pools," he reports.
Running hot tubs through the winter can run up the power bill, too.
Anticipating higher residential demand, he says the city has boosted the carrying capacity when it instals underground power lines in the city's new neighbourhoods. But Lenz warns providing additional, higher-capacity transformers there - and across the city - could prove far more expensive.
To help recover those costs, he says the city's electric utility calculates bills for high-usage homes on the same basis as larger commercial or industrial customers. Whether they're buying the actual power from the city or another retailer, they'll still be paying higher distribution charges.
The city also instals a "demand meter" which tracks peak usage. If owners learn to even out their power needs, Lenz says, they can keep those "demand" charges under control.
But Lenz cautions Lethbridge-area motorists and homeowners to think twice before abandoning conventional technologies. Battery-powered cars don't fare well in the cold, he points out - and replacing a dead battery in an electric car is very expensive.
For Albertans, he suggests, natural gas remains the lowest-priced, lowest-polluting fuel for home heating.
While electricity produces no greenhouse gases when it's consumed, Lenz points out 65 per cent of the province's electrical power comes from coal-fired generating plants.
"When you're burning extra electricity, you're just pushing the pollution to another place."