Heat Pumps

How ready for heat pumps is Toronto Hydro?

6/2025 - A TAF interview with Toronto Hydro's Julia McNally, Director of Climate Action at Toronto Hydro, on how the utility is preparing for BEPS.

Sparroway community event shows people interacting with design plans

Managing Carbon Footprint

8/2024 - NRU - Keith Burrows, Director Low Carbon Buildings, discusses the Sparroway retrofit project, emphasizing the importance of extreme heat mitigation for tenant comfort and safety.

More efficient homes plus new local jobs can create lasting affordability

12/2023 - Community benefits strategies for major public infrastructure projects are increasingly in play.

Canadian cities embrace a more climate-friendly form of cooling

6/2023 - NATIONAL OBSERVER - “By 2025 Toronto Green Standard will be strong enough to ensure most new buildings have heat pumps. For existing buildings and repairs, there’s no such policy requirement, but we want to see heat pumps everywhere possible,” Bryan Purcell

How a downtown Toronto condo defied the odds to save energy and money

5/2023 - TORONTO STAR: “This particular project, we were interested right off the bat because of the emission reduction potential for sure, but also because of this particular use of technology: A drop-in replacement for a chiller really has the potential to scale and we wanted to do what we could to make sure the project was a success,” said Keith Burrows, TAF's Director of Low-Carbon Buildings.

Heat pumps are ready for prime time. Bulk buying can pick up the pace.

5/2023 - One way to get heat pump purchases and installations faster in communities is to aggregate local demand and take advantage of bulk buying strategies, based on a new TAF-commissioned report. TAF Director, Ekaterina Tzekova’s new blog highlights what we learned.

Scaling Heat Pump Retrofits through Aggregation and Bulk Procurement

4/2023 - April 2023. Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. TAF commissioned Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors to conduct a bulk procurement study…

Reeling from home-heating costs? Meet the heat pump — an old idea that’s gaining new ground

4/2023 - It’s an old technology that’s experiencing a renaissance as a way to save money with the added bonus of reducing carbon emissions.

Guide to Measurement and Verification of Heat Pump Retrofits

10/2022 - October 2022. Government of Ontario. Space heating represents the largest energy end use in Ontario multifamily buildings at 54.6% Heat…

Toronto Housing’s Flagship Green Retrofit to Deliver 70% Drop in Energy Use

8/2022 - THE ENERGY MIX - New TAF retrofit is expected to garner at least $52,000 in annual utility savings, and 196 job years of local employment, establishing a model for other deep retrofits of similar buildings in TCHC’s portfolio and beyond that can be easily replicated.

Heat pumps – cutting costs while cooling tenants

7/2022 - THE GLOBE AND MAIL - The low-carbon HVAC system provides both heating and cooling to an apartment and uses a maximum of a third of the electricity of baseboards heaters.

Hybrid heat pumps can be a stopgap to an electric future

2/2022 - New case studies show the promise of hybrid heat pumps in the GTHA, and Erik Jansen of TRCA explores the upsides and downsides of the technology.