Bill No. 128 - Energy Efficiency Act. - 2nd Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I am not surprised that the government is not supporting our bill, but I would have like to have heard them mention it. I suppose we'll wait for the future, when maybe they take some of these ideas under their own banner, which I certainly hope they do, and move forward with them.

I am starting with that word "proud," but I'm going to transition to some other descriptors: words like "stalled," "stagnant," and "disappointing," because the recent Energy Efficiency Canada scorecard put us in third place in the country. I will table that. These are my previous stats that I cited. That's not bad, but as my colleague for Dartmouth North said in her remarks, not bad is not good enough. We are in a climate crisis.

We talk about price tags. My colleague, the former minister, talked about price tags, but I think we need to think about price tags in a bigger way. We've talked about this a lot this session: What is the price of inaction? There is work being done but our progress has stalled. Our stalled progress, I would say, is the result of bad energy politics, privileging rhetoric over reality, and rates over bills.

Mx. Speaker, we have not seen any legislation come forward this session that addresses the bills that Nova Scotians pay. We haven't. Nothing. As I think another one of my colleagues mentioned earlier, despite the fact that all parties will intervene with the UARB, there is one party in this House that has an opportunity to make a real strategic intervention, and that is the government. The PC caucus can, in fact, change the legislation that governs the UARB so they can properly consider our energy needs and they have failed to do that.

They are not alone. In 2013, when the Liberal Party said they were going to address rates, they did that by effectively campaigning against efficiency and capping the rates. When they capped the rates, they also capped the efficiency investments, because the efficiency investments were tied into the rates. So yes, we did protect Nova Scotians' rates, but we protected them at the expense of their efficiency investments, and that's not the way either.

A different arrangement was made, but the Liberals succeeded in politicizing the fee. There was a campaign around a tax but in the end, that fee was folded into the rates, the rates were capped, the fee was capped, our efficiency progress was capped, and here we are at third.

Part of the problem is the way we talk about this. We talk about rates, but we don't talk about bills. What we need to talk about is: How much does every Nova Scotian pay for their power? In the end, that's the metric that matters. When we talk about energy poverty, when we talk about affordability, we're talking about how much money comes out of my bank account and goes to Nova Scotia Power.

Unfortunately, we have not successfully shifted that dialogue, so in the rate application from Nova Scotia Power we see these same old energy politics. Essentially, Nova Scotia Power is proposing a rider for efficiency - essentially, an efficiency tax. When the Halifax program was recently funded by the municipality - which we are very pleased went through - it was also discussed as an efficiency tax.

Why is it that efficiency is a tax, but everything else we pay for is just part of the budget? It doesn't make any sense. This is politics. When you call something a tax, people don't like it, so you often call it a tax if you want to have plausible deniability or political cover or to be able to go back on that. That's what we've seen.

We know from debates in this House - I think that we in the NDP caucus are fairly clear and buoyed by a lot of evidence - that Nova Scotia Power is not incentivized to help us cut our energy costs. In fact, Nova Scotia Power is incentivized to sell as much energy as possible. That is how it's structured.

I've argued in the House that we need a new regulatory system. I think we need to restructure the way that Nova Scotia Power makes its profit so that they are, in fact, incentivized to increase efficiency. Tie their profits to performance and lower bills for Nova Scotians. I think if you asked ten Nova Scotians if that made sense, at least nine of them would say yes, that makes sense, isn't that the way it works? It's not the way it works. We know that.

This is another debate - and I am straying from my bill - but I think the point I'm trying to make is that we can't use the same system and use the same thinking but expect different results.

Efficiency Canada finds us stalled. The second word that I want to use here is "stagnant." From 2015 to 2022, energy savings as a percentage of Nova Scotia Power's electricity generation has stayed at around 1.1 per cent. EfficiencyOne - our efficiency utility in its new 2023-2025 filing that came out recently - says that our rate of energy savings is stagnant. I'll table that.

Massachusetts and Vermont, similar to us in many respects, are over 2 per cent. When we look at the spending as a percentage of the utility's profit, the gap between our jurisdiction's spending on energy efficiency is even greater. We've talked a lot about the profit and who benefits from that profit. Spoiler alert: not our constituents - not most Nova Scotians.

The third word that's been used about our policies and legislation around efficiency lately is "disappointing." To quote Kim Fry from last November, "The surprising lack of comprehensive energy efficiency goals in the new Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act was another missed opportunity and disappointing because our province has traditionally been a strong leader in this area." She called energy efficiency targets "the missing cog in Nova Scotia's net-zero wheel."

Mx. Speaker, I will remind the House that we attempted to bring in many of these amendments. While some amendments were accepted, we heard from the minister the day before that bill was to go to the Committee of the Whole House that no amendments would be entertained, that the work was done. But more work needs to be done and more work needs to be done on this missing cog, which is efficiency. I'll table that.

My colleague, the member for Dartmouth North, in her earlier comments mentioned a little bit about what's at stake. I will reiterate some of it. We have ambitious targets for GHG emissions reductions but our plans for replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy generation is tenuous. The Atlantic Loop is not a solid plan yet.

We're seeing Quebec enter into agreements with New York, I think, and other U.S. states to sell energy. We hear a very different tune coming out of the Premier and the government now than we did at the beginning of the session, about the Atlantic Loop and our options there. The federal government has poured cold water on it. In the meantime, what do we do? Energy conservation is key to helping us meet out targets.

We're also among the top contenders in this country for the highest child poverty rates and the highest power bills. We know that Nova Scotia Power has just proposed to increase these rates by 10 per cent in a little over two years. This is all happening in the context of inflation, rising interest rates, soaring gas prices, and economic precarity brought on by the pandemic.

We're proposing that we need to be aggressively targeting energy efficiency to help us meet our climate goals and to lower our energy bills. We proposed in this bill first of all that we should have an energy efficiency resource standard, like our renewable energy resource standard that sets targets that we need to meet. It should be legislated, and we should work back from those dates with plans.

The new filing from EfficiencyOne, while there is much to praise, would still only get us to 1.2 per cent energy savings as a percentage of Nova Scotia Power's electricity generation. What we're proposing is the creation of targets and a plan to get us to 1.5 in 2023 and at least 3 per cent by 2030 - so close to a tripling of the current ambitions.

Part of our efficiency plan also needs to include expanding EfficiencyOne's mandate to include getting Nova Scotians off of home heating oil and on to other sources of heat, like heat pumps. I was glad to hear my colleague agree with that and note that that's pretty common sense, but as he noted, it's not just across the Causeway. I know that there is more plentiful natural gas here with respect - I have big questions about whether the time has passed for natural gas as a bridge, but anywhere.

My own home, which was built in the 1960s, came with an oil furnace and an oil tank. It's $20,000, $25,000 for me to convert my heating system. There are rebates but they're not that big. We need more work because we need to get off heating oil for so many reasons.

We've also said that we should have energy efficiency ratings on homes at the point of sale so that people know what their energy bills will be and where they're coming from. International research shows that this increases the value of houses and it increases an extra incentive for people to do energy efficiency upgrades before they sell.

Now we don't really need to increase the value of houses right at the moment here in Nova Scotia, but we want to increase the real value. What we see now is a bubble, but what we really want to see is people understanding what they're getting. Though there are worries that this will increase delays in getting home energy audits, the vice-president of the Canadian Association of Consulting Energy Advisors has said that the industry is a place where it can be done - this profession is exploding. I'll table that.

Municipalities should also be able to set and implement more stringent building codes. This is another amendment we tried to bring to EGCCRA that was voted down. We've seen many cases that municipalities like Bridgewater are leading the way in tackling energy poverty through efficiency. We need to make sure that they have the tools that they need in their jurisdictions.

In this province, there is the Low Carbon Communities program. There have been pilots of the Energiesprong technology, deep retrofitting. This is encouraging, but we need to move beyond pilots. We're seeing this technology scaled up in Europe and we could be doing the exact same thing here. In Europe, the Energiesprong model depends on market development teams, and we need that kind of implementation here. If we are to increase our ambitions, we need to make sure that we're working in new coordinated ways that connects homeowners, contractors, and manufacturers.

We first proposed a green jobs plan in 2019, which would have brought multiple sectors to the table to see how we could capture the benefits of the green economy. It's now 2022. We have legislation, but in short, we need to do more - and we needed to do more yesterday. We need to do more to combat the climate crisis.

We need to do more to deal with power bills, which again, there is nothing before this House that is going to change any Nova Scotian's power bill in this province except for maybe the under 5 per cent of solar users. We especially need to deal with energy poverty. We need to move towards a just transition of our energy system. We can do it all by massively increasing efficiency as called for in this bill.

While I know that the government has said before they heard from us that they are not supportive of this, I really hope that the ministers are listening and that they are willing to take action on efficiency. It's low-hanging fruit. It creates jobs. It saves money. It combats the climate crisis, and we could be leaders in the country. We were, we can do it again, and we're here to help. Thank you.