All new customers who connect to the Énergir network will be required, from April, to consume renewable natural gas (RNG). A decision by the Régie de l’énergie allows the distributor to exclude traditional natural gas from its offer for new connections.
“It made no sense to add new customers who consume fossil gas when our goal is to be carbon neutral in the building sector by 2040,” says Stéphanie Trudeau, executive vice-president at Énergir.
A decision from the Régie de l’énergie published Monday allows Énergir to force new customers to consume RNG, or gas from organic residues.
The new measure “targets only new connections, i.e. new connections and meters installed following a service request from a customer,” we can read in the Régie’s decision.
The measure could be deployed as early as April, specifies Énergir. “Concretely, this means that from this moment on, all new customers in the residential, commercial or institutional sectors should have a 100% renewable natural gas contract. »
“We know that there will be fewer connections in the residential sector; there will be practically no more because the GNR offer or the dual energy offer with GNR is not that interesting compared to electricity,” says Mme Trudeau. The market will remain competitive for the commercial and institutional sectors, according to her.
Remember that Énergir is required by regulation to increase the quantity of RNG in its network to 5% in 2025 and to 10% in 2030.
In 2022, the company reported difficulties finding buyers for the RNG it had acquired. “Millions of m3 » of RNG had not been sold and Énergir had missed the regulatory threshold, then established at 1% of the gas consumed. GNR today represents 2% of the quantity of gas transported in its network.
In its request for the imposition of 100% RNG, Énergir said it noted that the number of customers consuming traditional natural gas continued to increase. This growth generated cumulative increases in greenhouse gases which, in fact, pushed the distributor further away from the targets it had set itself, year after year.
The decision of the Régie de l’énergie “gives us free rein to more fully deploy our vision of decarbonization,” says Stéphanie Trudeau.