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How Sweden electrified its home heating — and what Canada could learn | CBC News
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Science


HOW SWEDEN ELECTRIFIED ITS HOME HEATING — AND WHAT CANADA COULD LEARN

In the 1970s, most Swedish homes were heated with oil boilers. Today,
electric-powered heat pumps dominate, and have drastically cut emissions from
single-family homes. How did that happen? And are there lessons for Canada’s
transition away from fossil fuel heating?


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SWEDISH HEAT PUMP INDUSTRY VETERAN MARTIN FORSÉN RECOUNTS THE COUNTRY'S
TRANSITION FROM OIL HEATING

Emily Chung · CBC News · Posted: Apr 12, 2023 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: April
12

Houses in the Bromma district in Stockholm, Sweden, are mostly heated with
ground-source heat pumps. Single-family homes in Sweden have almost completely
transitioned away from oil to electricity. (Jessica Gow/AFP/GettyImages)
4780
comments

In the 1970s, three quarters of Swedish homes were heated with oil boilers.
Today, electric-powered heat pumps have all but replaced oil in single-family
homes (most multi-family homes rely on district heating). That has
driven greenhouse gas emissions from oil heating of buildings down 95 per cent
since 1990, according to the Swedish Energy Agency, said Martin Forsén a Swedish
heating industry veteran and president of the European Heat Pump Association.

So how did that happen? And are there lessons for Canada's transition away from
fossil heating?

Forsén, manager of international affairs for NIBE Energy Systems, shared his
personal account of the Swedish transition last week at the Heat Pump Symposium
in Mississauga, Ont., organized by the Heating, Refrigeration and Air
Conditioning Institute of Canada.

"It has been truly a great success for us," he told a sold-out crowd from
Canada's HVAC industry.

Canada's federal government aims to cut building emissions by 37 per cent below
2005 levels by 2030. Given that about half of Canadian homes are heated with
fossil fuels and 78 per cent of building emissions come from space and water
heating, electrifying homes that burn fossil fuels is key to meeting emissions
reductions.

Heat pumps are an energy-efficient form of electric heating that the Canadian
government says will make home heating more affordable while fighting climate
change. But as of 2021, heat pumps represented just 6 per cent of Canada's
residential heating (although it may be higher now due to new incentives).


AT THE BEGINNING, 'IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY'

Forsén says Canada is in the first phase of the transition to this technology —
its introduction, which for Sweden, was roughly the years 1994 to 2000.

He said at that point, the media tends to portray the technology as an
"interesting technology" in the Sunday papers. He said "Not even the HVAC
[heating] industry is convinced it's a good idea to go in that direction" and
may discourage customers who want to install a heat pump.


Martin Forsén, president of the European Heat Pump Association and manager of
international affairs for NIBE Energy Systems in Sweden, described Sweden's
transition from oil heating to heat pumps at the Heat Pump Symposium in
Mississauga, Ont., last week. (Anette Persson)

At that stage, "it's all about the money," Forsén said — the price of the new
technology compared to the old.

In Sweden's case, it had introduced a carbon tax in 1990 that pushed up the
price of heating oil.

"It was a pain for the consumers," he said. "So they really had to think about,
'Can we do anything about it?'" 

Meanwhile, Sweden had a surplus of electricity that made electricity cheap,
nudging homeowners toward heat pumps.

Canada introduced its own carbon tax in 2019 and will keep ramping it up yearly
until 2030, which will likely cause the price of fossil fuels to rise relative
to electricity.

While building codes can force new construction to incorporate new technology,
retrofits of older homes often need to be encouraged with subsidies. Forsén said
there are two reasons for this: To overcome the higher initial cost, and to
encourage people to plan for installation, instead of waiting until their
furnace breaks down in the middle of winter, at which point installing new
technology is much more difficult.

Canada has started subsidizing heat pumps with programs like the Oil to Heat
Pump Affordability Grant and the Greener Homes grant and loan programs.

 * New $250M federal grant program will help offset costs of switching from oil
   to heat pumps

 * Why oil and gas heating bans for new homes are a growing trend


GOING MAINSTREAM WITH PEER PRESSURE

Forsén said the market started to grow in Sweden beyond early adopters after
2000. At that point, people who had heat pumps installed were sharing with
friends and family how pleased they were, saying the devices were saving them
money more quickly than expected and providing more comfortable heat. Those
testimonials, along with more subsidies, began to make heat pumps very popular.


The green squares represent boreholes for ground-source heat pumps in this map
of Bromma district in Sweden, published in 2023. (Swedish Geological Survey)

Forsén had his own heat pump installed in 2002. In Sweden, most heat pumps were
ground-source heat pumps, which required a borehole to be drilled in the yard
(since cold-climate air-source heat pumps, currently popular in Canada, were not
yet available). That summer, he said, "there was a drilling rig in the
neighbourhood pretty much every single week" and neighbours would discuss whose
yard it was happening in. "It ... became, like, this kind of a [social] pressure
from everyone. All of a sudden, they knew: you have to make a shift."

By the mid-2000s, Forsén said, Sweden had reached a tipping point — everyone was
familiar with the technology, and no longer needed financial incentives to try
it.

Today, he said, even if heating oil prices dropped dramatically, no one in
Sweden would consider an oil boiler: "It's obsolete."

And heat pumps are now so ubiquitous, Forsén said, that recently in a popular
Swedish novel, he found a passage casually describing how the main character
returned home to the heat of his ground-source heat pump.

 * This Sudbury, Ont., homeowner is sharing how he saved money on his green
   renos


WHAT WILL IT TAKE IN CANADA?

So what about Canada? 

Moe Kabbara is vice-president of the Transition Accelerator, a group focused on
how Canada can meet its 2050 climate goals. He attended Forsén's talk, and
agreed that Canada is still in the introduction stage for heat pumps.

He noted that Sweden managed to overcome many of the same challenges we face,
such as ramping up a new industry, and making a quick transition.

"They were able to do it," he told CBC News in an interview Tuesday. "And it
actually worked in a cold climate." 

Of course, he said, Canada's situation is a little different. Sweden
transitioned from oil, while Canada is largely heated by gas, which has been
much cheaper. He noted that unlike Sweden, Canada also has a number of provinces
that produce oil and gas. On the other hand, due to advances in technology, we
now have access to cold-climate air-source heat pumps — an option that Sweden
didn't have.

 * Does your heat pump need a backup heat source? Well, it depends

Regardless, he said, a really important lesson from Sweden is that transitions
like this don't "just happen," and require incentives and policies, both
"carrots" and "sticks,"

"It takes deliberate action from not just government [but] from industry, from
different stakeholders," he said.

The Transition Accelerator aims to bring those groups together through a new
initiative called the Building Decarbonization Alliance.

Forsén agrees that policies and incentives are needed to make the transition in
Canada.

When asked in an interview if the current carbon tax and heat pump subsidies in
Canada were enough for us to move past the introduction stage, Forsén said, "No,
I think you need more."

He noted that Europe is now introducing minimum energy performance standards for
existing buildings that would need to be met whenever they were sold or rented
to someone new. "I think that's quite a good idea," he said, noting that
renovations and retrofits typically happen when a building changes hands.

The federal government has proposed developing such a "model retrofit code" by
2024.

Forsén also suggested that because testimonials and social pressure play a role,
change could happen more quickly if small geographical areas were targeted at a
time.

He told CBC News that regardless. he thinks Canada will transition over to heat
pumps. 

"I don't think it's a question of 'if.' It's just a question of when."


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Chung

Science, climate, environment reporter

Emily Chung covers science, the environment and climate for CBC News. She has
previously worked as a digital journalist for CBC Ottawa and as an occasional
producer at CBC's Quirks & Quarks. She has a PhD in chemistry from the
University of British Columbia. In 2019, she was part of the team that won a
Digital Publishing Award for best newsletter for "What on Earth." You can email
story ideas to Emily.Chung@cbc.ca.

 * Subscribe to the What on Earth newsletter

CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News
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RELATED STORIES

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