Last week at one of my regular community gatherings, an elderly constituent asked me what I was going to do about her power bills. She lived alone in a mini-home and like so many other New Brunswicker, her most recent bill had spiked reflecting a jump in consumption for which she could not account. She had brought her bills to show me just in case I doubted her word.

With the coming of winter, combined with NB Power’s 12 percent rate increase, her power bill was taking a bite out of her monthly pension like never before and she wanted an explanation.

Power bills go up in colder weather. We all know that, and it’s no surprise. The power rates increased last April, so colder weather was making that very apparent. Still, something seemed wrong. NB Power’s explanation that nothing was out of the ordinary wasn’t convincing the public, so Premier Holt asked NB Power to hire a third party to investigate. The recent cold snap is going to send power bills into orbit, so she no doubt is hoping the inquiry comes up with something more than ‘it’s cold outside’.

It didn’t have to be this way. The ongoing obsession of NB Power’s brass and successive Liberal and Conservative governments with nuclear power has come home to roost. The immense debt at NB Power largely represents the money borrowed to build and then re-build the nuclear reactor at Point Lepreau. The perpetual increase in power bills is driven by the unreliability of the nuclear plant, the high cost of its repairs, and by its loan payments.

Like a nuclear chain reaction caused by splitting the atom, the decision to re-build Point Lepreau delayed the move to more affordable and greener renewable sources of power by a generation.

We should ask why we need so much energy to heat our homes in the first place. Heating costs would only be a minor part of our household’s monthly costs if our homes and apartment buildings were designed to be super energy efficient. We’ve known how to do this since 1977.

That is the year that the Saskatchewan Research Council built its Conservation House to demonstrate how a home could deliver low heating costs to its residents despite the bitter Prairie winters. Super-insulated, effectively sealed from the bone-chilling drafts borne on bitter Prairie winds, and designed to take advantage of the sun’s energy when it was streaming through the windows, Conservation House’s heating costs were 15% of those in standard houses.

The approach captured the imagination of the young generation at the time, as ideas about transitioning to a Conserver Society were being discussed and debated across the country in the face of growing ecological degradation.

I was part of a generation of twenty-somethings who were struck by the idea that if we tempered society’s demand for energy and materials, there would be less pollution, less environmental degradation, and no need to build expensive, risky and toxic waste producing nuclear power plants.

I lived in Toronto in the early 1980’s, where the Pollution Probe Foundation decided to apply the energy saving techniques used in the Saskatchewan Conservation House in the retrofit and renovation of a 100-year-old house, called Ecology House (see photo above). The Conservation Council of New Brunswick did the same in Fredericton to create its Conserver House. Both were opened to the public as demonstration and resource centres. If these superinsulation techniques were really going to make a dent in our energy use, the existing housing stock needed to become far more energy efficient, while the new super-insulated houses got built.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Building codes and government financed energy-efficient retrofit programs failed to bring about the transformation of our housing stock. If they had, no one would be burdened with unaffordable power bills today.

Instead, politicians and power commissions continued to be fixated on the supply side of the energy equation, at the expense of moderating demand. In fact, New Brunswick is still using a National Energy Code that is 14 years out of date and a building code that is almost as old.

It’s not too late. We need to set ambitious targets for getting the energy consumption of our homes and buildings down to a sustainable level and provide energy efficiency and financing programs that will get the job done. And we need to stop handing out permits for the construction of new apartment and commercial buildings that barely scratch the surface for the energy savings available, but institute up-to-date building codes, with incentives to go further.

The less energy we consume, the cheaper our heating costs will be, and our footprint on the planet will be lighter.

David Coon is the leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick and the MLA for Fredericton Lincoln.