MONTREAL — The head of Hydro-Québec’s energy-expertise division wants the province to mandate the use of smart thermostats in all newly built homes, according to documents obtained by The Logic. 

Doing so would help reduce energy consumption by allowing “easy access to residential power management,” according to the documents. The proposal underscores efforts the country’s largest utility is making to manage peak demand so as to reduce strain on its networks—and, some believe, to increase its ability to sell more power beyond Quebec’s borders, where it fetches a premium.

Etienne St-Cyr gave a presentation called “Standards and challenges in the buildings sector: Reflections on an innovative regulatory approach” during a March 10 workshop on energy regulation in Quebec. The provincial energy and natural resources ministry and HEC Montréal co-organized the event.

A PowerPoint document St-Cyr presented at the workshop cited a “worrying trend” in the decrease in the number of central heating systems in Quebec homes, from 21 per cent of homes in 2005 to 16 per cent in 2018. It further lamented a similar decrease in the number of programmable decentralized thermostats. “Forcing the installation of smart thermostats in all new construction,” “banning wall-mounted and central air conditioners” and “obligatory thermopumps” are listed as ways to reverse these trends.

Hydro-Québec’s Hilo subsidiary began selling its own line of energy-saving products and services last year. Its smart thermostat retails for $99.99. The utility said Hilo products can reduce users’ electricity bills by 15 per cent, though many customers have complained about bugs, according to the Journal de Montréal. The thermostats are just one part of what it hopes will be a suite of clean-energy products, which it hopes will become a new revenue stream. 

“The goal here is not to reduce energy consumption, but to provide ‘turnkey’ access to new owners to manage their power easily,” St-Cyr told The Logic, about the possibility of making smart thermostats mandatory. Requiring thermopumps in air conditioning units, which would allow them to produce hot air as well as cool, would allow houses with existing fossil-fuel heating to instead be heated with electricity, St-Cyr said.

Hydro-Québec spokesperson Cendrix Bouchard said the utility has yet to petition the provincial government to mandate smart thermostats or ban air conditioning units without thermopumps. “[St-Cyr] is one of our experts about energy efficiency and we very much value his work. However his presentation was based on his personal positions and was in no way meant to be Hydro-Quebec’s official position,” Bouchard said.

Nevertheless, the use of devices like smart thermostats that can be controlled by electricity utilities are more and more prevalent in Quebec and beyond. Ameren Missouri, a natural gas and electricity utility in Missouri, gives smart thermostats to customers who sign up for its Peak Time Savings Program, which can throttle power use so as to avoid overburdening the electrical grid at peak demand times.

“No one is talking about a utility deciding if you freeze in the dark all winter. But there’s a bunch of programs out there where the utility will say, ‘Hey, if I give you 50 bucks a year, within certain bounds, would you allow me to take control when there’s a weather event?’ And they do very minor adjustments to people’s thermostats, dropping it maybe a half a degree, in order to spread the peak out,” said Philippe Dunsky, a Montreal-based energy consultant.

Because hydroelectricity doesn’t produce carbon emissions, reducing electricity consumption in Quebec doesn’t reduce the province’s carbon footprint, per se. But as Dunsky pointed out, reducing Quebecer’s electricity usage also reduces the need to build more dams. “It also frees up more power to export, and allows you to achieve this goal with less investment,” Dunsky said.

Hydro-Québec sells electricity at higher rates outside the province than to Quebecers themselves, who benefit from a subsidized “heritage electricity block” rate of 3.01 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to an average of 4.2 cents per kilowatt hour for its exported power. In 2020, the utility sold 31.3 terawatt hours to its neighbours, representing 15 per cent of its sales volume and 23 per cent of the utility’s net income. 

It has led some to suggest the utility should charge more to those Quebec customers availing themselves of Hydro’s bounty to charge their electric vehicles. During a presentation at the same roundtable, HEC Montréal’s Sylvain Audette, guest professor and member of its energy-sector management research chair, said Hydro-Québec should install separate meters and increase rates for home EV charging—an idea Hydro-Québec itself shot down. 

“We are not considering a separate meter for home charging of electric vehicles. In Quebec, electric-vehicle owners are paying the domestic rate, one of the lowest rates in North America, which contributes to the transition toward electric vehicles,” Bouchard said.