The more infrastructure they lay and the more customers they connect, the harder to shut them down. The more bail-worthy they become.

Because we live in Canada and our design day heating energy requirement is typically far greater than our design day cooling energy requirement. Add in the fact that best pump efficiency falls way off at design day heating (to half or less of design day cooling) and you end up with equipment that may be able to do heating and cooling but is way oversized for cooling, so lots of people opt to save capital (and potentially maintenance) money by relying on gas heat for the coldest days.

Because water heating with heat pumps is currently garbage on the residential scale... the heat pump capacity on residential water heaters is quit low, which is fine for keeping the tank warm but not for dealing with a half decent draw, so they all include full electric capacity which means you need the service size and associated operating costs to go along with it. Commercial heat pump water heating isn't much better, it may get better once CO2 or propane take off as a refrigerant here.

Because more and more buildings are putting in emergency generators, which require either natural gas, propane or fuel oil. One of those is significantly easisr to install and maintain than the other two.

The boat salesman says you need a boat.

YOU pay for the infrastructure, YOU pay for the maintenance, YOU pay for the gas. Why would they stop now?

Because number has to go up. Always. Forever. Unending.

Because money.

The problem is, they aren't going anywhere. They'll just funnel money to politicians to stop any attempt to stop them.

That's great for climate goals, but can someone tell me how we're supposed to heat our homes? Electricity?

Annnnnd this is exactly why we need the carbon tax.

Probably same reason as here in Australia.

The gas companies have managed to create a multifaceted cult where they've brainwashed people into thinking electricity is unclean (despite things like heat pumps being 500% efficient), unreliable and expensive.

Also, it helps that people who paid too much for their ICE cars are scared and they know that their cars will increasingly drop in value as people transition away from gas and fossil fuels.

Natural gas infrastructure and heating could be transitioned to hydrogen or biogas.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In 2022, buildings accounted for 13 per cent of the country's emissions, making them the third biggest source of greenhouse gases by sector, after oil and gas and transportation.

It was overseen by provincial and territorial regulators whose key goal was to ensure safe and reliable energy at fair rates for customers.

It aimed to incentivize developers "to choose the most cost-effective, energy-efficient choice," but the board was overruled by the Ontario government, so the original plan will go ahead.

Kate Harland, lead author of the Canadian Climate Institute report, said utility regulators' mandates should be changed to include climate targets, as has been done in the U.K. And they could change "obligation to serve rules" in order to consider alternative technologies, such as electrification, energy efficiency measures or thermal networks to provide heating to customers.

It is the perfect method to allow gas utilities to transition and keep or increase their annual profit, while at the same time reducing the customer's energy bills, according to Schulman.

Harland says current incentives alone won't drive down customer demand for gas quickly enough and energy policies need to change.

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