How Sweden electrified its home heating — and what Canada could learn

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).

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.

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.