Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

The post Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie appeared first on Alberta Views.

Chris Turner says Yes

The author of How to Be a Climate Optimist, winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

I consider myself a climate optimist, even as an era of deepening climate disasters descends upon us. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season established a grim benchmark for the scope of the challenges humanity will face for the foreseeable future.

The engine of my optimism lies well outside the frame of news coverage of these disasters. But that doesn’t detract from its importance. That engine operates on the solution side of the equation, and it grows more powerful daily. I’ve been reporting on the global energy transition for 20 years and now routinely see numbers and details thought impossible only a decade ago. The one currently boggling my mind is 392 gigawatts—a rigorous estimate of how much new solar power was added to the world’s electricity grids in 2023 alone. This is virtually identical to the generating capacity of the world’s entire nuclear fleet. It’s also about four times as much solar as was installed on earth 10 years ago. That’s one year. Solar power alone.

And it’s very much not alone. The numbers are similarly staggering for wind power, electric vehicles, hyper-efficient heat pumps, energy storage—a comprehensive toolkit for climate action. All of it has quickly vaulted from margin to mainstream, defying even the rosiest estimates. And the 10 years just past show every sign of being mere prelude to the 10 years of transformative growth ahead, as prices continue to plummet and adoption curves for clean technology breach tipping points in one country after another (Bloomberg News counted at least 87 such countries as of October 2022).

The picture the International Energy Agency paints is an optimist’s dream. Electric vehicle use is expected to grow tenfold by 2030. Renewable energy will contribute at least 80 per cent of all new electricity generation worldwide from now until then as solar becomes the cheapest source of power virtually everywhere on earth. Electric heating and cooling (generated mostly by heat pumps) will overtake gas- and oil-fired boilers in market share. And fossil fuel use—first coal, then oil, then gas—will peak in overall demand before the decade is done.

Add that all up and it amounts to a clear victory. It likely won’t keep warming below 1.5°C, but credible analysis indicates the trajectory of current policies and pledges would land in the 2.1°C–2.4°C range by 2100. And there is every reason to assume ambitions will mount steadily as the energy transition toolkit becomes cheaper, more flexible and more familiar.

Let’s say modestly, then, that odds are at least even that the energy transition continues to accelerate over the next decade. That would surely generate the wherewithal to keep warming below 2°C (which until the 2015 Paris talks was seen as an ambitious goal). When I began searching for climate solutions 20 years ago, business-as-usual had a fossil-fuelled rocket strapped to its back pointed at 4°C or 5°C of warming—apocalyptic territory. That’s off the table now. The first generation of the energy transition has given us ample cause for optimism.

Andrew Nikiforuk Says No 

The author of Tar Sands, winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

Civilization has for 150 years burned cheap, portable fossil fuels to pave paradise and erect a complex network of concrete cities decorated by many parking lots. In the process we have eradicated wildlife, replumbed rivers, overpopulated the earth and changed the climate with the emissions from billions of our energy slaves, such as diesel trucks.

Many greens now propose to fill these parking lots with battery-operated vehicles and other digital gadgets highly dependent on energy-intensive mining. Climate optimists plan to either bury CO₂ emissions under parking lots or suck them out of the air with dubious, unproven and unbuilt technologies such as carbon capture or direct air machines.

But these techno solutions represent dead ends. Climate change, which is accelerating, is not a technical problem that can be solved solely by new technologies; it is social problem rooted in ruinous energy consumption patterns that will require behaviour changes. The “clean tech” transition won’t make a real dent in emissions until humans change our focus and embrace an energy descent by shrinking our energy footprint. That means fewer technologies, cars, people and parking lots.

In this age of the absurd, let me be clear. I’m not saying renewables aren’t needed, but rather that the material, money and time needed to replace 46,423 power stations run by oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy with 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar and hydrogen isn’t feasible and won’t reduce emissions. Furthermore, I recognize climate change as just one symptom of what ecologist Bill Rees calls “overshoot.” Too many people are spending finite volumes of energy to replace natural systems on the planet with materially intense artificial ones run by energy-intensive robots. Electrifying the Titanic will not remove the many icebergs in our path. The scale of mining, for example, needed to support an energy transition boggles the mind. We can’t build more solar panels, windmills or electric cars without extracting more copper, lithium, iron ore and aluminum along with rare-earth metals. That means transforming the carbon-rich peatlands in Ontario’s Ring of Fire into $67-billion-worth of metals and radioactive waste.

Many techno-optimists ignore the costs of mining and argue we’ll cut emissions through more-efficient technologies. Economist William Jevons documented the flaw in this thinking in the 19th century. He observed that as the efficiency of steam engines improved, industries simply employed more of them to produce new goods for more consumers. Efficient tech leads to more energy consumption, not less. Jevons’s Paradox partly explains why the world is producing more fossil fuels than ever. Global coal demand reached record levels in 2023.

The much vaunted low-carbon economy promises a chaotic extension of the status quo. British philosopher John Gray recently characterized the problem aptly: “Net zero will be remembered like having cancer and using candle therapy.”

Chris Turner responds to Andrew Nikiforuk

In Andrew Nikiforuk’s argument against climate optimism, he cites three experts (besides himself): a philosopher, an ecologist and a 19th-century economist. This might be a fine start for the faculty of a liberal arts college, but I’m not much convinced it’s the braintrust needed to produce durable climate solutions.

I have nothing but respect for the liberal arts—I’m a lifelong practitioner—but philosophers and ecologists are nowhere near the top of my list when I’m looking for an installer for my new high-efficiency heat pump. And I certainly wouldn’t trust any of them to manufacture one, let alone the millions now being churned out to reduce emissions from heating and cooling buildings worldwide.

To be clear (and a little less facetious): the task of taming the climate crisis is primarily one of building new clean energy systems for a technologically advanced, mostly industrialized planet of eight billion souls. And I remain a climate optimist even when the esteemed John Gray compares that work to candle therapy, because, to use the lingo of his native Britain, John Gray evidently knows bugger-all about the global energy transition.

There are several big hairy statistics in Nikiforuk’s argument, but in the absence of citations I can’t speak to their accuracy other than to suggest they don’t pass the eye test. If Nikiforuk has an authoritative source on why it will take 586,000 wind, solar and hydrogen power stations to phase out fossil fuels, he ought to share it right away with the International Energy Agency, Bloomberg New Energy Finance and other professional trackers of the energy transition—who have already revised their estimates for new solar installations upward for 2023 several times to track China’s mounting ambitions. The figure also seems to deny the existence of geothermal, biomass and any number of other new technologies still in (increasingly rapid) development.

There is nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming.

I have to assume the point of citing this strangely precise figure—586,000, no more, no less—is not to offer recourse to facts but to point in alarm at a big scary number. See also Nikiforuk’s reference to exactly $67-billion in minerals and metals to be dug out of northern Ontario, which displays a level of certainty and foresight not even the Ring of Fire’s most enthusiastic boosters generally trade in. Researchers just discovered enough lithium for more than 300 million electric vehicle batteries under the Salton Sea in California, and Toyota has bet its electric vehicle fleet on a solid-state battery made from sodium instead—does that affect this $67-billion bonanza Never mind. It’s a large number, and it is allegedly borne to your front door on a great geyser of radioactive waste. And so you should not want it.

Beyond the specious numbers, I take exception to Nikiforuk’s use of the word “feasible.” In his estimation, the energy transition now well underway, the machinery of which I have personally observed on four continents, is not feasible. Whereas “behaviour changes” are feasible, even though the exact kinds remain unspecified, and he presents no evidence whatsoever of the political, social or economic mechanisms that might, in the space of a decade or two, unite all humanity in adopting such behaviour changes, presumably more or less all at once.

Perhaps this will be the year strict vegetarianism is adopted by everyone on earth. In the meantime, I’ll continue to rely on the concrete evidence of the energy transition itself as my compass of progress on the climate front. Which, to cite one fact regarding feasibility, has already shifted the behaviour of investors, developers and governments to the point where renewable energy is the source of the majority of the world’s new electricity generation as we speak.

Ultimately, Nikiforuk’s is not an argument about solving the climate crisis so much as an argument against industrial capitalism. Fair, I suppose. But I’ve found no evidence, in 20 years of searching, that there’s a way to solve this crisis at anything less than industrial scale—there are eight billion of us and nowhere near enough room for us all to take up local, artisanal, pre-industrial subsistence farming or the like. Nor have I discovered any mechanism more efficient at shifting the gears on the great industrial apparatus of the global economy in the direction of lower emissions than market capitalism, ideally but not always under the guidance of a liberal democracy. (Notwithstanding China’s role in building much of the transition’s essential equipment.)

How exactly would humans alter our many irredeemable behaviours in time What system of organization would emerge to guide eight billion of us in more enlightened patterns of behaviour Nikiforuk offers no answer. In my 20 years of reporting, meanwhile, the energy transition has offered me a clear answer. An optimistic answer. One that grows more feasible by the day.

Andrew Nikiforuk responds to Chris Turner

I appreciate Chris Turner’s enthusiasm and optimism about the future, but I don’t share it. My reading of events, history and numbers suggest the green transition is a grand illusion. Nor is it green. Over time, it will not become cheaper, flexible or more familiar as Turner claims. Nor will it stop the runaway train known as climate change. Instead, the transition will become more chaotic due to material limits, growth of the technosphere, unmanageable complexity, geopolitical chaos, environmental degradation and political instability.

First off, reality should temper Turner’s enthusiasm. Climate change is accelerating, and thousands of scientists have warned that life on the planet is under siege. Wrote data scientist Christopher Wolf in the journal Biosciences in 2023: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.”

Meanwhile the non-fossil-fuel system Turner envisions hasn’t even been built yet. In 2022 electric vehicles represented only 2 per cent of cars on the road. In 2022 renewable energy (excluding hydropower) accounted for only about 7.5 per cent of global energy consumption. In other words, the metals and materials needed to build the solar panels, windmills, power lines, electric cars and batteries envisaged by Turner haven’t been mined or processed yet. And they’ll come with extreme environmental costs. There is no such thing as a clean revolution.

Second, transitions don’t subtract energy; they tend to add new kinds of energy. When the industrial world started burning coal, it didn’t stop cutting down forests. When it switched to oil, it didn’t abandon coal. And so on. Despite the recent growth of industrial solar and wind facilities, civilization’s dependence on fossil fuels has not diminished one iota. This is due to increases in population and per capita consumption. Renewables, for example, only met 42 per cent of increased energy demand in 2019.

So the world is not using renewables to retire fossil fuels but simply to spend more energy.

The materials needed for solar, wind, electric cars and batteries come with extreme environmental costs.

US sociologist Richard York, writing in Energy Research & Social Science in 2019, warned that there will not be any meaningful subtraction of fossil fuel demand until civilization faces the challenge of economic growth. “The rapid and continuing growth of total energy consumption—which is connected with continuing economic growth—makes it so that removing an energy source like fossil fuels is very difficult, even when the production of other energy sources is growing.”

My third point concerns material limits. The so-called green transition shifts the problems of extraction from oil to minerals. Renewables can’t operate without rare metals. Battery-operated vehicles require six times more minerals than a conventional vehicle. Mining is a rapacious and dirty industry. Lithium mining destroys water; child slaves mine cobalt in the Congo; rare-earth minerals have left behind a trail of poisonous radioactive waste in China. Canada is now proposing to mine the hell out of the carbon-rich Hudson Bay lowlands in the Ring of Fire to put more battery-operated vehicles on the road. Destroying vital carbon sinks to save the planet doesn’t sound like a moral solution.

Turner’s enthusiasm also ignores the demands of the technosphere. Civilization has used fossil fuels to build a semi-autonomous offshoot of the biosphere composed of steel, bricks, plastic, glass and cement, managed by digital machines. This ever-growing system has an insatiable appetite for dense, fossil-fuel energy. It gobbles oil and materials to expand while spewing streams of waste including CO₂. Plastics alone now outweigh all wild animals. The growth of the technosphere explains why more electricity from renewables will not help. Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, writes the engineer Peter Haff, “the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil-fuel use.” Artificial intelligence, for example, is expected by 2027 to consume as much electricity as Sweden.

Lastly, the scale of the problem has been sorely underestimated. Total electrical power in the world is roughly 27,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). According to geologist Simon Michaux, the extra capacity needed to phase out fossil fuels is roughly 37,000 TWh. The green transition “proposes to construct an electrical system much larger than the existing grid, using energy that is more expensive and not as effective as what we have now.”

In sum we need a different plan that changes human behaviours, relies less on energy-intensive technologies, relocalizes life and accepts limits to economic growth.

The post Should We Be Optimistic About Our Climate Future? appeared first on Alberta Views.

Their production potentials were equally impressive. Saddlebrook’s approximately 185,000 solar panels would generate 81 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough power for 20,000 homes. Foothills’s capacity was to be 150 MW.

But their differences were more striking. Saddlebrook was intended for a brownfield, land that has already tasted industrial activity of one form or another. For decades the land immediately east of Highway 2A between High River and Aldersyde has been zoned for industry. Cargill has been processing meat in this corridor since 1989. Its vast slaughterhouse and associated infrastructure sits only 2.5 km south of the middle of the TC Energy project.

The most noteworthy previous tenant at the Saddlebrook site was magnesium processor MagCan. This much-ballyhooed economic diversification venture is infamous for having sucked more than $100-million from Alberta citizens, then shutting its doors in 1991 little more than a year after opening. Today only bad memories and MagCan’s massive red brick building remain. In the Saddlebrook proposal, this edifice looms over hundreds of perfectly aligned rows of solar panels, many literally a stone’s throw from Highway 2A.

Foothills, on the other hand, coveted farmland. Since the provincial government doesn’t allow utility-scale renewables on public land, developers seek private land, often farms or ranches, for their projects. Elemental Energy proposed to lease some of Foothills County’s best land for growing spring grain.

That food-producing promise was largely hidden during my mid-spring 2023 drive to the Foothills site, less than 10 minutes east of High River. I saw no indication that several thousand migrating snow geese annually feed on waste grain in these fields.

The snow geese migration signals another key difference between Foothills and Saddlebrook—the former’s proximity to Frank Lake. A 3,100-acre low-lying wetland, Frank Lake is also an Important Bird Area (IBA), an international designation for significant bird and biodiversity habitat. The IBA regards the lake as “the most important wetland in southwestern Alberta for breeding water birds.”

These differences between the projects guaranteed that Foothills would be controversial. Saddlebrook, on the other hand, wasn’t. The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC), the independent quasi-judicial agency responsible for evaluating power projects, approved Saddlebrook. It rejected the Foothills application in its entirety.

In August 2023 the province slapped a seven-month moratorium on all renewable power approvals. Premier Danielle Smith suggested the AUC wasn’t adequately addressing social, economic or environmental concerns in determining whether projects are in the public interest. But to disprove this you’d need only compare the Saddlebrook and Foothills applications. The approval of the one and rejection of the other shows how ham-handed the moratorium is, threatening billions of dollars in investment. In fact, as proven by the AUC this year, Alberta can green its grid while respecting other land uses and values.

One was intended for land that’s already tasted industrial activity; the other, for farmland.

Fossil fuels still provide most of Alberta’s electricity. But this truth hides dizzying change. In the blink of an eye, coal’s decades-long dominance in this province vanished. In 2014, 55 per cent of Alberta’s electricity came from coal. By 2022 this had collapsed to 17 per cent. By the end of this year, likely no electricity in Alberta will come from coal. Natural gas now wears coal’s crown, supplying 64 per cent of electricity to Alberta’s grid in 2022.

But the real revolution is the rapid rise of renewables. The Alberta Electricity System Operator (AESO), the non-profit manager of the province’s electricity market, reports that renewable generation is growing “by leaps and bounds.” Thirteen new utility-scale wind facilities came online over the course of 2021 and 2022, as did 25 new utility-scale solar projects. This boom will soon see wind and solar delivering 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity supply. Rystad Energy predicts we will overtake Ontario as Canada’s largest producer of utility-scale wind and solar power by 2025.

Policy and economics join Alberta’s bounty of wind and sunshine in explaining these shifts. On the policy front, Rachel Notley’s Climate Leadership Plan (2015) signed the death sentence for coal-fired electricity. It committed to phase out all coal-fired generation by 2030 and to increase the amount of electricity supplied by renewables to 30 per cent. Coal’s phase-out will happen seven years ahead of that schedule.

But technological change is probably more important to understanding the swiftness of the (now paused) renewables boom. The falling cost of solar and wind generation has been eye-popping. In April 2023 the price tag for an unsubsidized utility-scale solar facility was 83 per cent lower than in 2009.

This combination catapulted renewables investments to record levels. Recent changes in the mix of major power project investments are remarkable. Natural gas dominated Alberta’s investment ledger in 2016: $4.9-billion in natural-gas-fired electricity projects were on the books in April 2016, nearly four times the total investment in wind. At the time, the Brooks solar project, with an estimated price tag of $30-million, was the only utility-scale solar venture proposed.

The picture couldn’t be more different today. The investment balance has shifted strongly in favour of renewables. When the UCP government announced its renewables approvals moratorium in August, the Alberta Major Projects website reported that $11.5-billion in investment was being considered for solar and wind. Utility-scale solar had accounted for next to nothing in major project investments in 2016; in July 2023 it led the investment intentions pack at $8.2-billion. At that time the AESO predicted solar’s importance would continue to grow.

Humanity has forever converted landscapes to satisfy our ambitions, with Alberta renewables just one more chapter in that history. Utility-scale renewables compete for a place on the land with other human priorities, such as agriculture, oil and gas production, urban development and natural areas.

Southern Alberta, the preferred terrain for most of our province’s solar and wind projects, is already a very busy landscape. All the aforementioned uses plus more figure in 2014’s South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, ostensibly a land-use management blueprint for the region.

Land conversion is a downside of the renewables boom. The first generation of Alberta solar panels and wind turbines often were erected on lands previously set aside for agriculture. Native grasslands are Canada’s most threatened ecosystem. The Nature Conservancy of Canada estimates that since 1867 the prairie provinces have lost 75–90 per cent of their native grasslands. In southern Alberta, those grasslands, already sacrificed for cities, farms, ranches and oil and gas wells, have a fragile hold on the landscape. Only 1.3 per cent of the province’s grasslands are legally protected in a way that satisfies the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s protected area definition. This dramatic shrinkage and these weak laws are why most Alberta species at risk are from grasslands. Utility-scale renewables threaten their further decline.

Between provincehood in 1905 and the Second World War, grasslands were converted to farming and ranching. Some of this land was later used for petroleum exploitation and urban expansion. Albertans became concerned about the loss of farm and ranch lands, so the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan was designed to “(m)aintain an agricultural land base by reducing the fragmentation and conversion.” In addition to threatening native grasslands, utility-scale renewables threaten farming and ranching livelihoods.

We can green our electricity grid while respecting agriculture and wildlife habitat.

The AUC decides the fate of utility-scale electricity projects. Its decisions can’t be overturned by the provincial cabinet; they can only be brought before the Alberta Court of Appeal on questions of jurisdiction or law. The commissioners who make the call on proposals such as Saddlebrook and Foothills are provincial government appointees. Most are lawyers, with engineers a close second, and most have joined the AUC since 2020.

The AUC has considerable discretion to decide the extent of public involvement in its proceedings. Generally, participants must show that a project “may directly and adversely affect” them. The law must recognize whatever right they assert. The AUC can allow still more Albertans to participate if they might contribute “relevant information.”

Taken together, the AUC decisions in the Saddlebrook and Foothills cases are promising. They tell us that a robust renewables future in Alberta doesn’t have to come at the expense of wildlife or agriculture. Saddlebrook’s approval was arguably an ideal utility-scale project, increasing renewable electricity supply without converting land otherwise useful for farming or wildlife habitat.

The MD of Foothills’s development plan forcefully commits to protecting farm and ranch lands. The Saddlebrook project respected that priority; the MD didn’t need to defend its farming and ranching heritage before the AUC. Heather Hemingway, the MD’s director of planning, considered Saddlebrook a good use of lands already zoned for industrial purposes.

Saddlebrook’s brownfield location also reduced its threat to wildlife. The government’s Wildlife Directive for Alberta Solar Energy Projects identifies site selection as “the first and most critical factor” in preventing harm to wildlife habitat. Saddlebrook wasn’t risk-free from this perspective, but wildlife managers concluded Saddlebrook presented few issues.

The project was a “win–win,” promising green electricity at a minimal cost. It met the AUC’s public interest test and was approved on December 17, 2021.

Elemental Energy’s Foothills project, however, was a very different story, and faced opposition on agricultural and environmental grounds. The MD, as a landowner in the project’s immediate vicinity, obtained standing to participate in the hearing. Hemingway told the AUC the MD couldn’t support Foothills, as the project failed the responsible-development test by proposing “to take high quality farmland out of production when there are other locations available on marginal land and outside of the area.”

But ultimately it was the potential environmental and wildlife harms of Foothills, not its appetite for farm and ranch lands, that sank the project. These revolved around Frank Lake.

For someone who spent much of his youth on Kootenay Lake in southeastern BC, I found Frank Lake’s environmental significance well hidden at first glance. Approaching the lake on Highway 23 just after dawn, it struck me as most prairie lakes do—small, shallow, unremarkable. But I stopped at the lake’s edge and was treated to the birdsong signalling its importance. American coots grunt and croak while cruising through reeds and grasses near the shoreline; courting northern shovellers bob their heads up and down; common terns hover in the air above the shallows before diving to chase a meal. But the American white pelicans, avian versions of Hercules air transports, were the most impressive that morning. They flew effortlessly, silently, just above the water before gliding to land amidst dozens of their kin.

Of the 256 bird species that frequent Frank Lake, 60 are at risk. Greg Wagner, the lake’s volunteer IBA caretaker, was a vital participant in the Elemental project’s hearing. The AUC described him as “a credible, helpful witness” who provided “material and relevant information” derived from decades of professional and volunteer experience.

The “lake effect” hypothesis made the Frank Lake site controversial. The phrase theorizes that, to certain birds, solar panel arrays resemble waterbodies; they become life-threatening attractants, especially to waterfowl. Birds will collide with the panels. If they aren’t killed outright, their injuries make them easier prey. This effect can be especially threatening to water-obligate species—species that can’t take off from land. Grebes, cormorants, coots and loons are among the water-obligates frequenting Frank Lake.

The AUC commissioners didn’t hear definitive answers about whether the Foothills project would lure many waterfowl to injury or death. Foothills’s consultant, referring to data from Alberta and the US, concluded “there are no data to better suggest that the [project] represents high risk to water-obligate birds than to suggest it does not represent high risk.”

Wagner agreed: no data definitively proved the project would threaten birds. But he wasn’t sanguine about this. He told the commission he viewed uncertainty, and the absence of mortality data from a comparable case to Frank Lake, as reasons to exercise caution. He reiterated Alberta Environment and Parks’s own conclusion that the project posed a high risk to birds. He cited the Canadian Wildlife Service’s conclusion that the location was too risky. Consequently, Wagner said, it would be poor land-use planning to allow Foothills to be built so close to an important conservation site.

Elemental Energy argued it had followed to the letter the legal standards. One of these is that a “solar energy project must not occur within 1,000 m of a named lake…” The Foothills proposal followed this standard… with six metres to spare. The southwest corner of its array would sit 1,006 m from Frank Lake.

The province’s wildlife directive also lists best management practices (BMPs) that “may assist” with site selection. These “are provided for information and consideration in the planning of solar energy projects to support better conservation and protection of wildlife and wildlife habitat.” But they’re not mandatory. Only one BMP pertains to site selection: “(T)he solar energy project should not occur within 1,000 m of a wetland-based Important Bird Area…”

Elemental Energy ignored this recommendation. Roughly 50 per cent of the Foothills site was within the IBA, and only 20 per cent was beyond the BMP’s 1 km buffer. The buffer error apparently was due to an environmental consultant’s having conflated this Frank Lake with another Frank Lake in northern Alberta.

The Commission wasn’t satisfied that Foothills, with 80 per cent of its project lying within the BMP’s 1 km setback from the IBA boundary, could justify ignoring the recommended buffer. This failure, together with Frank Lake’s significance to birds, concerns about the lake-effect hypothesis, and other direct and indirect negative impacts in the vicinity of Frank Lake, was enough to doom the project.

The Commission rejected Foothills. The project posed “an unacceptably high risk to the environment and is not in the public interest.” The AUC found the environmental risks so compelling, in fact, that it based its decision only on these grounds.

An orphan well site in southern Alberta that’s now a “brightfield,” with solar panels.

This decision is striking. The AUC has never before rejected a utility-scale solar project. Its 2022 Brooks Solar Farm decision reduced that project’s footprint but nonetheless approved the rest of the proposal. The array had initially been partially sited on native grasslands, and the AUC concluded this posed an unacceptable risk to grasslands-reliant species. The approved project excludes those lands.

In the face of uncertainty about the lake effect, the Commission effectively invoked the precautionary principle, a favourite of conservationists. The principle shifts the burden of proof from project opponents to proponents. The latter must demonstrate that their actions will not create unacceptable harm. The potential risks to birds compelled the Commission to reject Foothills. Caution won the day.

Taken together, the Saddlebrook and Foothills decisions point to how Alberta can increase clean electricity generation without compromising other values. They model an approach to renewables where “win–win” outcomes are more likely. They suggest that Alberta’s approval process isn’t flawed, and that a moratorium on renewables isn’t needed.

These decisions should push our government to insist that solar installations be built on brownfields. Saddlebrook shows that placing utility-scale solar on such sites significantly reduces potential harm to agriculture or the environment. Foothills suggests that environmental values should figure importantly in AUC decision-making.

Small solar arrays can accelerate oil and gas reclamation and reduce costs by over 50 per cent.

Putting solar installations on brownfields converts them to “brightfields,” a label the Bill Clinton presidency attached to a 1999 climate change initiative. That government called for repurposing old industrial sites and locating solar arrays there, thus converting them to sources of pollution-free electricity. Today, US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act appears to be accelerating such conversions.

This is the path Alberta should follow once the misguided moratorium is lifted—especially given the alarming growth of oil and gas liabilities and brownfields in the province. In March 2023 the Auditor General reported that we now have more than 100,000 inactive oil or gas wells, more than twice as many as in 2004. The Alberta Energy Regulator estimates the closure liability of these wells—the cost to clean up and restore the land to its original condition—at $30-billion.

Keith Hirsche, founder and president of RenuWell Energy Solutions, wants to tackle this blight by converting abandoned oil and gas properties to brightfields. In the MD of Taber, RenuWell spearheaded a pilot project on two Orphan Well Association sites, called Barnwell and Fincastle. The MD plus a handful of governmental, corporate and educational actors support the project. The province’s Municipal Climate Change Action Centre and the Irrigation Canal Power Co-op invested $2.3-million and $1.5-million, respectively, in the project. The Power Co-op owns both small solar projects and uses the electricity generated to offset power used for irrigation.

A few minutes southwest of the town of Taber, the Barnwell site sits in the middle of fields branded with the telltale circular patterns of centre-pivot irrigation. Just north of it a canal cuts through the land, supplying Chin Lakes water to the pivots. During my informal tour of the Barnwell site in June, I heard that, since coming online at the end of March 2023, Barnwell has exceeded both its power and its revenue-generation predictions. Unlike some oil and gas companies that have reneged on their legal duty to pay taxes to MDs and make lease payments to landholders, the Barnwell project is no deadbeat. And its panels aren’t going to negatively affect the adjoining potato field that my boots sank uncomfortably deep into.

I asked Keith Hirsche about RenuWell’s claims that these brownfield-to-brightfield conversions would accelerate oil and gas reclamation and reduce costs by more than 50 per cent. He said the cost savings are related to the transfer of access roads, power lines and the vegetation restoration responsibilities from the oil and gas company to the solar operator. Removing roads and restoring vegetation are the most costly and time-consuming steps in the reclamation process.

This pilot project offers a small, sweet taste of what’s possible. If only half of the 3,000 inactive wells in the MD of Taber were converted to brightfields, 465 MW of electricity could be generated. This is how much power the Travers solar project, Alberta’s largest installation, produces. But Travers took 3,330 acres of farmland out of production; brownfield conversions wouldn’t remove one acre.

A variety of measures could put Alberta firmly on the brownfield conversions path. Our government should create a version of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “RE-Powering Mapper.” This interactive online tool provides data for over 190,000 brownfield and related sites in that country. The US National Renewable Energy Lab has developed criteria for this tool to identify sites with renewable project potential. The EPA is working with the Lab to produce feasibility studies of where brownfields could profitably be converted to brightfields.

Tax and regulatory changes would help too. Alberta could follow the example of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and offer tax credits for renewable electricity projects on brownfields. Regulatory change could treat smaller-scale brownfield conversion projects (generating less than 5 MW) like large-scale micro-generation (between 150 kW and 5 MW). This would relieve proponents from paying interconnection and meter infrastructure costs and make investing more attractive.

The Saddlebrook and Foothills projects provide a clear lesson: brownfield conversions allow us to generate more renewable electricity while avoiding much of the controversy and harms that come from the conventional project-siting path. If Alberta’s UCP government and rural municipalities are genuinely concerned about losing valuable farmland to renewables, this is the path forward.

Ian Urquhart is a professor emeritus of political science at University of Alberta and former editor of Wild Lands Advocate.

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The strongest argument for Alberta to embrace a transition is that we have no choice. This isn’t because the federal government set a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target for 2050—which can’t be reached without action in Alberta—or even that worsening climate disasters compel us to act. No, we have to change because Alberta’s future as an energy-exporting province hinges on policy created in Washington DC, Beijing, New Delhi and Brussels. It’s here that the trajectory of demand for oil and gas, the key factor influencing the future value of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, is being set.

The pace of change on climate action is accelerating worldwide. While current pledges do too little to limit warming to 1.5°C, the promises made by governments worldwide would see oil demand soon peak before declining sharply. “The International Energy Agency, oil majors like bp and Equinor, and research consultancies like Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Rystad… all indicate that if climate policy action, technological development and economic momentum continue at least at the same pace as has been observed in recent years, oil demand will begin to decline before 2030, and is not projected to recover,” notes a December 2022 Pembina Institute study. A world where technological progress and clean energy deployment goes even faster could see oil demand fall to roughly half of current levels by 2040.

In Alberta one could easily miss this global trend. In early 2022, for example, only some 3 per cent of our personal vehicle sales were fully electric. But the story around the world looks very different. EVs now account for over 20 per cent of sales in China. Even the US, while off to a slower start, is seeing accelerating change, with 6 per cent EV sales in the third quarter of 2022, up from only 2 per cent two years before.

Climate promises worldwide will see demand for oil declining sharply.

This rapid transformation leads to an apparent paradox: the world will continue to demand oil and gas, and Alberta will continue to produce oil and gas, and yet that production won’t power Alberta’s economy and fill government coffers the way it once did. We’re already seeing less reinvestment by oil and gas companies in projects, even when oil prices spike. Capital is instead being returned—at record rates—to shareholders. The change is further reflected in employment. While Alberta job numbers have recovered from the COVID decline, they remain well below the 2014 peak, with companies focusing on efficiency improvements rather than job-intensive production growth.

The global demand for oil has grown for over a century, creating a seemingly unbreakable certainty across the history of the modern use of hydrocarbons. The reversal of this trend over the next decade stands to upend that century of wisdom. It changes everything.

Another pandemic or war resulting in an oil or gas supply crisis could throw the market into disarray. But Alberta can’t focus on short-term volatility and price spikes at the expense of longer-term planning. The issues Alberta faces require solutions to be in place before fundamental changes are felt—from addressing government revenues, to initiating public investment in new industries, to supporting workers and communities in transition, to ensuring companies take care of their environmental liabilities rather than dump them on the public.

Revenues from royalties on non-renewable resources (NRRs)—at least when oil and gas prices are high—have long allowed this province to keep taxes low while providing strong public services. But where some perceive an “Alberta Advantage” others see a nauseating resource roller-coaster. When commodity prices inevitably fall, just like a roller-coaster, Alberta hangs on desperately. The next price rise triggers a recovery in government revenues and a balanced budget. This cycle has repeated itself for decades, with NRRs making up anywhere from 6 per cent to 77 per cent of Alberta government revenues. The last large decline in NRR, in 2015/2016, saw the provincial budget move from a surplus of $1.1-billion to a deficit of $6.4-billion.

The roller-coaster has started back up the hill. Alberta’s August 2022 fiscal update shows the province took in $14.6-billion more in non-renewable resource revenue than it had budgeted for. The government now expects non-renewable resource revenue to comprise some 37 per cent of its revenues, up from 6.5 per cent in 2015/16 or 24 per cent in 2021/22, and much higher than the 22 per cent initially projected for 2022/23. In late November the province said it expected a $12.3-billion surplus for 2022/23.

But what happens when—in the looming era of shrinking oil demand—the ride stops Alberta companies will likely continue to produce oil for a long time, but as global demand shrinks, the value of the resource will fall. At the same time, oil companies will be attempting to achieve their own net-zero targets, which will increase their costs and reduce their profits.

Governments have no shortage of options when it comes to raising revenue from sources other than non-renewable resources. Long before oil demand was headed into a permanent decline, economists were proposing various options in Alberta such as a sales tax, higher income taxes, higher corporate taxes or property transfer taxes. Each comes with various pros, cons and political dimensions. But another tax stands out for its direct link to the decarbonization challenge—a tax on carbon emissions.

We already raise billions of dollars in government revenues annually by taxing carbon. Alberta taxes emissions from large industrial facilities. A federal tax covers most of the remaining carbon emissions, largely from consumers. The principle of both is straightforward: by taxing carbon, governments can tackle two policy goals at once, creating an incentive to reduce emissions while generating revenue.

Carbon pricing remains a hot-button political issue in Alberta. But the provincial large-emitter tax was introduced by a Conservative government and is almost two decades old. The federal tax is rebated to individuals and families in a lump sum based on the revenue raised in each province. Most Canadians actually get more money back from the rebates than they paid in carbon tax, making the policy progressive. And two federal elections have confirmed broad nationwide support for a consumer-level carbon tax.

Partisanship seems to be a strong predictor of support for carbon pricing, and may be more important than the actual cost of the policy in determining an individual’s level of support. The use the revenues are put toward also affects how much public support a carbon tax attracts.

Oil and gas won’t power our economy and fill government coffers like it once did.

In an economy undergoing transition, the role of government is more important than ever. This goes beyond simply fixing market failures to shaping and creating markets. In 2022, for example, the US government’s Inflation Reduction Act encouraged climate action through far-reaching industrial policy.

But we don’t have to look outside Canada or even outside this province for examples. The development of steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) opened up the largest growth so far in Alberta’s oil sands. This breakthough technology came via considerable investment by the provincial and federal governments. Peter Lougheed’s PC government gave the equivalent of $1.4-billion (in 2019 dollars) to the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA) to develop and prove the technology. The early-stage deployment of SAGD unlocked development and economic growth in this province—a lesson for the government to follow again today.

Large government investments come with risk. The Lougheed and Getty governments were sometimes criticized for unduly influencing public investment decisions, leading to the occasional disaster (e.g., over half a billion dollars lost on NovaTel). Today, Alberta Innovates, a Crown corporation tasked with funding the province’s research and innovation priorities, makes investment decisions at arm’s length from government.

Alberta must walk a fine line, leveraging existing capabilities and expertise in the province while also looking to new and disruptive opportunities within the broader energy sector and beyond. It’s risky to focus too closely on the existing oil and gas resource or to attempt to manage risks that come from other governments’ decisions, as the Kenney government learned the hard way in 2021 after spending $1.3-billion on Keystone XL, a pipeline subsequently cancelled by the US government.

Technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen produced from gas certainly might play a role in a net-zero global energy system. Alberta has already committed $1.2-billion through 2025 to two commercial-scale CCS projects. But our government should also be wary of overinvesting in technologies to decarbonize oil and gas production. Public money shouldn’t replace funding from investors and companies when a project’s economics justify private investment. Indeed, our provincial carbon tax is supposed to be creating an incentive for companies to decarbonize without using public money. Instead, the government should work to understand the barriers to investment, differentiating between concerns over a lack of policy certainty and cases where companies simply want subsidies.

Using future revenues to pay for cleanup obligations looks like a pyramid scheme.

While change can create opportunities for Alberta as a whole, our provincial government has a responsibility to support the workers and fossil-fuel-dependent communities that face a larger share of the burden during a transition. This could be a rural community where a junior oil or gas company doesn’t reinvest, or an oil sands company automating operations with self-driving ore-hauling trucks, in either case cutting jobs. True “just transition” policies go even further, creating new opportunities for workers and communities that have historically been excluded from economic opportunities.

Simply injecting money into the economy shouldn’t be the goal. The role of the government should be to support workers and communities, not private companies and investors who have chosen to take on risks of change within markets. Supports should include retraining/re-employment with income and benefit supports as needed, as well as pension bridging for people close to retirement. These were elements of Alberta’s successful Coal Workforce Transition Program.

Much like the energy system itself, whole communities will be reshaped by the coming transition. Supports must be flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances and different community members. For example, some Albertans will require entirely new services such as childcare as well as education and retraining support before they can re-enter the workforce. Providing early access to retraining funds can create smoother transitions. Managing other potentially disruptive social impacts of transitions will be critical. The basic elements of community life—families, social networks, schools, local organizations, even cultural identity—can change as a jurisdiction shifts its economic focus.

Whatever proactive action Alberta takes, a significant bill is waiting to come due: the costs of cleaning up outstanding environmental liabilities generated by oil and gas production across the province. In principle the rules are clear and simple: the companies that chose to develop, sell and profit from Alberta’s oil and gas resources are responsible for cleaning up and safely closing the sites at the end of production, and these costs are a part of the overall economics of production. Reality, however, is more complicated.

The cleanup costs for Alberta’s oil sands, for example, are managed through the Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP), while conventional oil and gas falls under the Liability Management Framework, both enforced by the Alberta Energy Regulator. Both approaches have so far failed to create real security (e.g., cash or other funds such as a letter of credit) against future liabilities. This is due to poor program design that relies too heavily and too optimistically on the future value of the resource and that requires companies to take action too late, when they very well may no longer have the financial ability to do so. The programs also have little transparency on the determination of the costs of existing liabilities. The upshot is that today over half the money in Alberta’s orphan well fund, the vehicle that’s supposed to ensure conventional oil and gas cleanup costs are paid by industry, comes from loans from the federal and provincial government. On the oil sands side the MFSP holds only pennies on the dollar in actual security against the outstanding liabilities—less than $2-billion for a cleanup cost expected to exceed $33-billion. Some estimates put the eventual oil sands cleanup cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

We must address these failings without further delay. The story emerging from the US thermal coal industry should serve as a cautionary tale. Coal companies are legally required to restore the land when the mining is complete. But as the value of the US coal market has declined over the past decade, companies aren’t holding up their end of the deal. Instead, they’re transferring assets and mining permits to smaller companies that lack the capital to complete the cleanup. When these companies prove unable to cover their environmental liabilities, the costs—along with outstanding health and pension obligations—fall to the public. Once an industry has gotten to this state, governments and regulators can do little.

The Government of Alberta should heed two important lessons. The first is an underlying design issue that’s incompatible with an industry in transition. As long as a sector is growing, revenue from future projects can pay for the cleanup of projects at the end of their life. However, when large structural change looms—such as a global decline in demand for oil—the use of future revenues to pay for prior obligations looks less like prudent fiscal management and more like a pyramid scheme. It’s critical that we require that actual funds from existing production be available to cover the eventual cleanup costs. At the same time, in order to ensure these funds are sufficient, we need more transparency and third-party verification of liability costs.

The good news is that the volatility that can create high prices in the transition period also creates an opportunity for Alberta to make up for lost time in collecting this security.

The second lesson is in how asset sales and bankruptcies can be used to offload liabilities, ultimately onto the public, even when such liabilities are legally a company’s responsibility and even when that company has funds that could be used to pay for cleanup. To protect the public, these loopholes must be closed.

The current liabilities management system will leave Albertans on the hook for a multi-billion-dollar cleanup that should be paid for by the companies who made the mess. The boom–bust cycle of the oil and gas industry exposed these risks previously, but the current global energy transition risks making this problem unsolvable if our government continues to do nothing.

The challenge before Alberta is no small task: to navigate a massive change to global energy systems and the accompanying volatility, a disruption that—due to the nature of our economy—hits our province particularly hard. Our government can look to its past for policy solutions to deploy today in new ways. But in a period of rapid change a narrow focus on the past can also lead us astray through assumptions that things will continue much as they have (“Please God, let there be another oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time”).

Significant cultural and political barriers remain to implementing the solutions Alberta needs. It’s easy to fight policies such as higher carbon taxes with false narratives about their unaffordability, or to resist federal just-transition efforts by misrepresenting their purpose or calling them “extreme environmental[ism].”

Our government must instead create a compelling narrative of a positive future and build coalitions of support. Success in navigating this transition will require confronting the issues of a changing global energy sector head-on and redeploying the province’s resources to meet the challenge, while ensuring everyone is brought along. We simply have no other option.

Sara Hastings-Simon is an assistant professor at the U of C and hosts the Energy vs. Climate podcast.

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Duane Bratt says yes

MRU professor and author of Canada, the Provinces and the Global Nuclear Revival (MQUP)

The last few years have seen active discussion of introducing nuclear energy in Alberta due to the emergence of small modular reactors. SMRs have been used in nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers since the 1950s. What’s new is that they are now being commercialized for civilian electricity generation. The “small” part of SMRs comes from their generating between 50 MW and 300 MW (compared to over 1,000 MW in traditional reactors). “Modular” refers to their standardized construction and their being shipped to sites by rail and truck. This makes SMRs substantially cheaper than earlier nuclear reactors, which were each one of a kind. SMRs also include new features that make them safer.

In fall 2018 Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) released its SMR roadmap; this was followed by its SMR action plan in fall 2020. Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick signed memorandums of understanding (MOU) on SMRs in December 2019. Alberta joined that MOU in August 2020. The original three provinces completed a feasibility study for SMRs in March 2021, and in March 2022, now joined by Alberta, released a strategic plan for their deployment.

The main motivation for Alberta’s interest in SMRs is to lower the province’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are the highest in Canada. In particular, the oil sands (identified in the roadmap as one of three locations for SMRs) would see its emissions significantly reduced through the use of nuclear energy instead of natural gas to produce bitumen. Although the Kenney government is an outspoken opponent of the federal consumer carbon tax, it continues to levy a provincial carbon tax on large-scale emitters as a way of incentivizing lower GHG emissions from electricity producers and oil and gas companies. By levying a price on carbon, the UCP government is also improving the business case for nuclear energy (very low emitting) vs. natural gas (high CO₂ emissions).

This isn’t a top-down approach. If anything, the Kenney government in its SMR discussions is simply following the private sector’s lead. Utilities, oil and gas companies (Suncor, Imperial Oil, Conoco Phillips) and industry associations (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance) all actively participated in the SMR roadmap/action plan process. A consortium of companies called “Oil Sands: Pathway to Net Zero” has identified SMRs as a major way for them to reduce GHG emissions.

Small-scale nuclear can also be used as part of Alberta’s coal phaseout. Alberta used to be dependent on coal electricity, but starting with the Notley government and continuing today, coal is being replaced largely by natural gas (with a smaller contribution from wind, solar and biomass). But since natural gas produces half the GHG emissions of coal, and nuclear’s emissions are roughly equivalent to renewables, replacing coal with nuclear would be better for Alberta’s environment.

Theresa McClenaghan says no

Executive director and counsel at the Canadian Environmental Law Association

Canada’s nuclear industry has generated hype of late, especially around small modular reactors. Almost $100-million has been given by the federal government to private companies, and agreements are in place to support SMRs in New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. But new nuclear energy is unnecessary, introduces serious risks and will delay genuine climate action.

SMRs are a wasteful expenditure and detract from serious climate action. Nuclear power isn’t necessary to reach Canada’s net-zero carbon emission goals. The surest and cheapest way of lowering emissions is through expanding renewable energy generation and improving energy efficiency. There is room for renewables to provide a much higher percentage of our energy. Conservation and demand-management have barely been tapped. In fact, when conservation potential has become evident, it’s been scaled back in some jurisdictions so as not to reduce demand too much! The costs of both approaches—renewable energy and conservation—are falling yearly, and technology around energy storage is improving rapidly. Alberta in particular has huge potential for additional wind and solar, whose commercial viability has already been demonstrated by existing projects in the province. In contrast, the cost of nuclear power greatly exceeds current costs of renewable energy sources, including wind, solar and geothermal.

Worse, new nuclear SMR technology won’t be ready in time to meet the emission goals laid out by climate scientists. The proposed technologies haven’t been built anywhere; any new nuclear SMR projects will take a decade or more to even get to a demonstration scale, let alone commercial viability.

The second reason to avoid new nuclear power is that it would introduce new risks, especially the potential for catastrophic accidents, with releases of radioactive substances presenting dangers to people and the natural environment. Despite industry propaganda, even SMRs can undergo accidents. Transporting nuclear material adds another risk, not only from damage to the vehicles or containers but from increased risk of diversion of nuclear materials to terrorism by non-state actors. This makes it difficult for Canada to ensure we meet our international non-proliferation commitments. Proliferation risk is especially concerning with SMR technologies because they would use enriched uranium, rather than the natural uranium used in Canadian nuclear plants today, or plutonium fuel from reprocessed nuclear fuel waste. Diversion risks would occur across the whole fuel chain, from the point of reprocessing through to fuel fabrication, transportation and use.

And not least, the proposed SMR projects would also result in a greater range of nuclear fuel wastes, some even more hazardous than the current Canadian nuclear fuel wastes, which are already incredibly toxic, with the resulting hazard lasting hundreds of thousands of years.

Duane Bratt responds to Theresa McClenaghan.

Theresa McClenaghan offers a critique of SMRs, although some of it is just a critique of traditional nuclear energy. I’ll respond to each point in turn.

McClenaghan is correct that wind and solar costs are coming down. However, she then compares those costs to traditional nuclear. One of the benefits of SMRs is their modular design, which includes standardization of design and economies of scale. This drops the costs of SMRs significantly.

Renewables have their place. I’m a supporter of energy pluralism (except for coal). Renewables, however, cannot produce the steam required for use in the oil sands. The key target for SMRs in Alberta is the oil sands. Lowering emissions intensity is in everybody’s best interests. This is why the Alberta government and the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero are so bullish on SMRs for the oil sands.  

McClenaghan maintains that SMRs “won’t be ready in time.” Ironically, this same scaling up issue is often thrown at renewables by the fossil fuel industry. SMRs have been operated by militaries for decades. From a commercial perspective, Russia has operated an SMR since 2020 and China will have one by 2026. In Canada, a demonstration SMR will be constructed at Chalk River by 2026, Ontario Power Generation will have a 300 MW SMR at its Darlington site by 2028, and another one in New Brunswick by 2029.

Terrorism is another argument used against the nuclear sector. Terrorists acquiring a nuclear bomb is a staple of novels, TV and movies. But not in reality. This is because it’s very difficult to do, due to security and technological complications. Even if terrorists successfully bypassed security and acquired enriched fuel from an SMR (because of its small size, a very low amount), they would still need the technology to enrich it from 20 per cent (reactor grade) to 90 per cent (weapons grade). As Iran is demonstrating, even countries with a vast scientific establishment and resources have great difficulty in developing weapons-grade enrichment.

High-profile nuclear accidents took place at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). While these generated massive media attention and public fear, nobody died at Three Mile Island or Fukushima. Chernobyl caused 31 deaths and, longer-term, several thousand thyroid cancer cases. This is much lower than major oil or coal mine disasters. In fact, when you compare death rates from accidents and air pollution, nuclear (0.07/per terawatt hour) is similar in safety to solar (0.02) and wind (0.04). All of these sources are well below coal (24.6), oil (18.4) and natural gas (2.8).

We need an all-in approach: wind, solar and geothermal, but also small modular nuclear reactors.

Waste is the Achilles heel of the nuclear sector. But several points can be made here. First, nuclear waste is much smaller in volume than waste from fossil fuels. Second, much of what is called waste is spent fuel, which has 96 per cent reusable uranium. Advances in technology could greatly reduce nuclear waste by recycling used uranium back through a reactor. Third, all energy sources (even renewables) generate waste. For example, cadmium, a major ingredient of solar panels, is incredibly toxic. Fourth, nuclear waste has been safely stored at reactor sites in Canada for decades. Finally, it can be permanently stored for thousands of years with a deep geological repository (DGR), a “multiple-barrier system,” with nuclear fuel bundles placed in copper-coated canisters and encased in bentonite clay boxes 500 m underground.

Finland is building a DGR and Canada is going through an extensive site selection process led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. This process started with 22 interested communities and is now down to two: Ignace and South Bruce, both in Ontario. A DGR can safely store waste from natural uranium reactors (traditional CANDUs) and enriched uranium (Canada’s research reactors and SMRs) alike.

As I say, I support the expansion of renewables. But McClenaghan ignores two of renewables’ weaknesses. The first is capacity factor—the ratio of actual electricity divided by the maximum possible electricity. Nuclear’s capacity is over 90 per cent, while wind is 35 per cent and solar is 25 per cent. Nuclear produces electricity 24/7; wind and solar are intermittent. Geothermal’s capacity factor is higher, at 75 per cent, but currently no geothermal is being produced in Alberta. The second is footprint. Wind farms require 360 times more land and solar plants 75 times more land than an equivalent nuclear plant.

Likewise, energy conservation is desirable. Virtually all experts, however, believe that electricity demand is expected to go up significantly through, for example, the increased use of electric vehicles. Converting to electric vehicles reduces/conserves oil, but not electricity.

Reducing Alberta’s emissions will require an all-in approach. This means expanding wind, solar and geothermal, but it also means introducing SMRs.

Theresa McClenaghan responds to Duane Bratt.

Duane Bratt’s main argument is that it is better to replace coal with nuclear than with natural gas. This is simply a false choice. Many choices other than nuclear or natural gas exist if one wants to replace coal. While the exact mixture will vary from place to place, many energy modellers have shown how adding renewables—mainly but not exclusively solar, wind and hydropower—reducing demand for energy, and increasing our capacity to store  small amounts of energy will enable us to reliably meet the fluctuating demand for energy.

Managing variable power generation is an old and solved problem: grid managers do it all the time. Many of these methods provide greater resiliency to an electricity system, with more dispersed sources of generation and less reliance on a single, centralized system. For example, decentralized systems are less prone to impacts that can hit a widespread grid at the same time, such as the eastern North America blackout in 2013. Similarly, a more dispersed set of power sources puts society at less risk from unexpected developments that can shutdown a whole category of complex technology, such as occurred in Japan following the Fukushima accident.

SMRs are new versions of old reactors that have not been commercialized due to unresolved technical problems. (Yes, nuclear reactors are used by the military for submarine propulsion, but these operate with military-grade fuel and are designed for a different set of objectives; they have very little to do with the electrical-power-generating SMRs currently proposed by the nuclear industry.) The SMR that is the most developed in the US, for example, NuScale, has been mired in the design phase for more than 15 years.

The nuclear industry proponents of SMRs have been advocating, and securing, an erosion of public oversight in the development of nuclear power in Canada. A notable example is the SMR roadmap that Bratt mentions. That “roadmap” was a document produced by the Canadian Nuclear Association, and it did not consider social and environmental implications from a non-industry perspective. Nor was there any public engagement on the subsequent action plans and memoranda of understanding between the industry and governments.

Social and economic costs, including accident risk and fuel wastes, have had inadequate public debate.

SMRs will be expensive. Proponents have studiously avoided talking about the costs to build their projects or made unrealistic claims about the costs of their theoretical reactor designs. Even the SMR roadmap—produced by nuclear advocates—projects the electricity will cost $163/MWh; in comparison, the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated in 2021 that a utility scale photovoltaic plus storage system that can provide backup for four hours would cost US$77/MWh, and this cost is fast declining. Without massive subsidies, SMRs are simply unfeasible, because private-sector investment is only a minuscule fraction of the necessary capital to build these expensive technologies.

This is, of course, not new: traditional nuclear power in Canada has been developed with unparalleled amounts of public money and unique protections from accident liability, whereby suppliers to nuclear operations are completely protected from any liability, and the operators are protected from lawsuits beyond low limits of coverage. No other sources of energy have these unique liability provisions, and the nuclear industry made it clear to the Canadian government in the 1950s that it wouldn’t develop the industry without this government protection.

It gives one pause to consider that Alberta is considering SMRs to enable continued production of bitumen. The bulk of the GHG emissions associated with the use of oil and gas is created when a fuel is burned. Trying to lower the emissions produced during the extraction of these fuels, while continuing to produce and export bitumen, will make only a minuscule difference. Especially when placed against the requirement that the world must halve emissions by 2030.

The need for fast emission reductions is another strike against SMRs. The earliest an SMR could be up and running, even under optimistic assumptions, is the mid-2030s. The proposals and demonstration projects currently proceeding with public funding are years away from results. They all have considerable cost risks and none have been licensed anywhere.

As a result of recent changes to environmental impact legislation, some of Canada’s proposed SMRs are exempt from the federal impact assessment process, meaning that social and economic costs, including the pros and cons of accident risks, generation of new types of fuel waste and risks to nuclear weapons materials proliferation will not be considered in a public review. These issues have had inadequate public debate, and there is no justification for imposing these risks on Albertans. Small modular reactors should not be Alberta’s answer to climate change.

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Consider three big solar installations recently erected on prairie soil in southern Alberta. Each stands in a different field not too far from Lethbridge. There’s one outside Vulcan, another near the hamlet of Monarch, a third not far from Coaldale, which at least lends it some poetic irony. They vary in size and capacity from 20 to 80 megawatts, together generating enough electricity all told to power 20,000 or so homes, in the industry’s preferred scaling analogy. I prefer a more telling parallel: once they’ve begun generating electricity by the end of 2022, these three solar farms will add power-producing capacity equivalent to roughly a quarter of the Keephills 1 coal plant near Edmonton, which was decommissioned in late 2021, just as steel support pilings began to spring stalk-like from the snow-crusted earth in those three spots in southern Alberta.

These three facilities will join other solar and wind installations, as well as natural gas conversions and some geothermal, to accelerate the end of burning coal for electricity in Alberta by 2023. The phase-out target set by Alberta’s NDP government had been 2030, a goal often scoffed at by then-opposition leader Jason Kenney as he united the right behind a great many antiquated notions that included digging and burning more coal to make electricity. (As recently as 2014, Kenney’s forebears in the PC government had been planning to allow the burning of coal in Alberta for another 40 years.) Alberta’s new solar plants might not be monumental architecture, but they are evidence of a real triumph.

Alberta’s wind and solar resources are world class, and the Notley-era coal phase-out is helping renewables too.

The context for this is that the globe is transitioning from energy sources that emit greenhouse gases to those that do not. This transition was still considered marginal if not downright fanciful as recently as 2010, when Alberta’s government could be found taking out ads in the New York Times and Washington Post to defend the virtues of the Keystone XL pipeline. But the pace has accelerated rapidly over the past decade, exceeding the expectations of even its boosters. The energy transition is now a mainstream phenomenon worldwide. Wind and solar power in particular have seen astronomical growth and become the world’s primary sources of new electricity. China now routinely adds more solar power to its grid each year than existed everywhere on earth in 2010. Several European energy companies are planning gigawatt-scale offshore wind installations—comparable in size to a major coal-fired power plant. “For projects with low-cost financing that tap high-quality resources,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced in its 2020 World Energy Outlook report, “solar PV is now the cheapest source of electricity in history.”

In 2009, 74 per cent of the generating capacity on Alberta’s grid came from coal plants, with wind chipping in just 2 per cent of the balance and large-scale solar non-existent. There were barely 100 rooftop-scale solar installations in the province back then. By 2017 renewables—mostly wind—had expanded to 16 per cent of the grid, but the province’s first utility-scale solar plant (a 17-megawatt solar farm near Brooks) had only just been completed. Skip ahead to the end of 2021, and witness the birth of a genuine boom: a dozen solar plants were up and running, nearly 8,000 rooftop-scale systems were in place province-wide, and half of all the new wind energy installed across Canada that year and the overwhelming majority of the country’s new solar developments were in Alberta. This includes the country’s largest solar farm, a 132-megawatt facility near Claresholm. It will soon be dwarfed by the massive 465-megawatt Travers Solar installation being built by Calgary’s Greengate Power east of Vulcan. It all lends credence to the boast of the company’s CEO, Dan Balaban, that Alberta is now “the Sunshine State of the North.”

Pincher Creek is the wind farm capital of Canada; strong winds have turned turbine blades across the region for nearly three decades. Alberta’s large-scale embrace of the sun’s power is a more recent development. Lethbridge is drenched in sunshine 333 days of the year.

Albertans, long wedded to digging energy resources from deep underground, have begun to discover that the province is also blessed with extraordinary untapped power from above. Strong, steady winds have turned turbine blades across southern Alberta fields for nearly three decades now, but the large-scale embrace of the prairie sun’s power is a more recent development. Lethbridge, for example, receives at least some sunshine 333 days of the year on average—2,507 hours in all. That’s about 300 more hours of annual sunlight than shines down on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. This state of affairs has, of course, not attracted many sunbathers to southern Alberta farm fields, but it does mean that the southern third of the province is some of the best solar energy terrain in the country. Add to this the plunging cost to generate solar, which has fallen by more than 80 per cent in the last decade, leading the IEA in 2020 to declare solar “the new king of electricity.”

The trio of solar farms in Vulcan, Monarch and Coaldale emerged together from a partnership between Concord Green Energy, a renewable energy developer, and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), the governing body of the Dene peoples of Fort Chipewyan, downstream from Alberta’s vast oil sands mines.

“It’s a source of revenue that will always be there for future generations.” Allan Adam, Athabasca Cree First nation chief. Photo: Green Energy Futures.

“I think it’s the right move not only for green energy,” ACFN chief Allan Adam said when the projects were launched, “but to promote ACFN and go down that path, because it’s a source of revenue that will always be there for future generations.”

There is a powerful symbolism in the ACFN’s solar investments. Fort Chipewyan has a particularly complex relationship with the energy business. Oil production upriver along the Athabasca has forever despoiled the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples throughout the region and cast dark shadows over local food production and public health. Industrial-scale energy has been an uninvited, outsized, damaging incursion on the landscape in northeastern Alberta, and the Indigenous peoples of the region have had no real voice in the scale or pace of its development and growth. At the same time, several First Nations—including the ACFN—profit directly from the oil sands industry, running lucrative oilfield services companies and the like. This has perhaps placed them in a better position than most rural communities to venture into energy development projects themselves.

When it comes to electricity, Fort Chipewyan (like many places in the North) has long been dependent on diesel-burning generators for the bulk of its power—an expensive and heavily polluting source vulnerable to supply disruptions. In the winter, the community is heavily reliant on diesel tanker trucks navigating the treacherous ice road from Fort McMurray. Which is to say the status quo has few champions.

In any case, when ATCO came looking for an Indigenous partner in a local renewable energy project in 2017—grants were available for energy developers open to such partnerships—the ACFN jumped at it. The community’s other local Indigenous groups (the Mikisew Cree and the Fort Chipewyan Metis Association) were soon brought in as partners, and Three Nations Energy launched to bring a community-scale solar power plant to Fort Chipewyan. “Many in and outside the community view this as a landmark achievement,” the ACFN’s Community Energy Plan noted in 2018, explaining that it represented not just a way to introduce the community to the renewable energy business but to encourage wider co-operation between the local First Nations.

In November 2020, 2.2 megawatts of solar power began feeding the local grid in Fort Chipewyan, ready to provide as much as 25 per cent of the community’s annual electricity needs and displace 800,000 litres of diesel fuel.

The ACFN’s move into renewable energy is not simply a matter of replacing diesel generators with solar panels. It’s the seed for a wholly new relationship between the First Nation and the energy business. The ACFN is not providing ancillary services to an unwanted corporate behemoth whose profits and decisions flow to and from distant boardrooms in Calgary or Houston or London. It’s the co-owner and developer of new energy resources, which by their smaller scale and much more widely distributed nature encourage community participation and control in ways the fossil fuel industries never could.

“The reason I’m so excited about these projects is we’re part of an expanding demonstration of the real economic potential of solar energy, and more broadly renewable energy, in Canada and here in Alberta,” says Rob Macintosh, senior partner at GreenPlanet Energy Analytics, which is advising the ACFN on its solar projects in southern Alberta. “We’re also seeing now that, done properly, we’re able to take risks and still get the financial backing of major lenders, who themselves understand how the tides are turning and the true investment potential and economic viability of renewable energy.”

This would represent a promising new direction anywhere for the industries charged with providing vital energy resources. But Alberta is in a particularly sweet spot—obliged by legislation to find promising new avenues beyond fossil fuels, blessed with the assets for doing so, and boasting the talent to make it happen. If Alberta had a different kind of government right now, it might well recognize there is no better face to put on the province’s embrace of the future of energy than a First Nation from the heart of the oil patch that has become a partner in building some of the largest solar farms in Canada.

The 2.2 MW solar farm at Fort Chipewyan. The project is owned jointly by the Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations and the Metis Association of Fort Chipewyan. It provides locals with 25 per cent other electricity needs and reduces the need for diesel. Photo: Green Energy Futures.

The potential to reposition Alberta’s economy as a clean energy powerhouse extends far beyond solar panels and wind turbines and offers opportunities at global as well as community scale. Consider the curious case of Eavor Technologies, founded in Calgary in 2017 to pursue one of the most elusive but potentially massive prizes in clean energy: affordable, ubiquitous geothermal. There’s no trick to the ubiquitous aspect—the ground beneath our feet everywhere on earth is warmer than the surface in colder weather, and cooler than the surface in warmer weather. Exploiting that differential for human purposes is a practice as old as the first prehistoric hominids to bathe in hot springs. Even advanced applications—heating buildings, generating electricity—are well established in places where geothermal energy is especially abundant and easy to access, particularly islands such as the Philippines and Iceland that are perched atop active volcanoes. Harnessing affordable energy from the heat beneath the earth’s surface everywhere else, however, has proven much trickier.

Eavor emerged from Alberta’s long-standing expertise with drilling wells in the oil and gas industry. The company’s co-founders—a group of oilpatch veterans led by engineering physicist John Redfern—were playing with ideas for what to do with the orphan wells scattered across the province. Paul Cairns, now the company’s head of business development, suggested the idea of a closed-loop system of pipes like a car radiator, with cool liquid piped underground and then directed horizontally to gather heat before the warmed liquid rises up the far side of the loop to be used to heat buildings or generate steam for power production. Its heat spent, the cooled liquid would again descend through the loop to gather more geothermal energy. The gravitational rise and fall of the liquid in the loop means very little energy is required to circulate it, which in turn keeps costs low. The technology to build and operate the loop is mostly off-the-shelf gear already in use in the drilling business. And a single one of these “Eavor-Loops” (the company’s name rhymes with “ever”) can generate enough heat to keep 16,000 homes warm in the harsh prairie winter, though it’s more likely to be harnessed to generate electricity. This amounts to a potentially huge breakthrough in an elusive sector of the clean energy economy.

“The closed-loop approach could be a game-changer in the geothermal sector and within the broader clean energy transition.” Michael Liebreich, Eavor advisory board

Within a couple of years of the company’s founding, Eavor had seed funding from Alberta Innovates and Emissions Reduction Alberta and a test site up and running near Rocky Mountain House. Michael Liebreich, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance—among the world’s most authoritative sources on the clean energy industry—joined the company’s advisory board in 2020. “I believe its closed-loop approach could be a game-changer in the geothermal sector and within the broader clean energy transition,” Liebreich said at the time. “We may have, in Eavor, a clean power and heat technology that can work almost anywhere in the world, scale to very large projects, benefit from strong learning curves, and be dispatchable. That is a very exciting prospect.” Which is to say that unlike other geothermal applications to date, Eavor promises to generate industrial-scale energy, regardless of the quality of the geothermal resource, which would get cheaper and easier to install as it proliferates, and would provide power on demand.

The following year, Eavor attracted more than US$40-million in venture capital, with the investment arms of oil giants BP and Chevron among the contributors, and Natural Resources Canada chose the company as one of three geothermal innovators to back with federal money. The company has found potential customers in Japan and the US and cut deals in Germany. Alberta might not be the very best place to operate its closed-loop systems—the province’s “geothermal gradient,” the rate of increase in temperature as you dig deeper into the earth, is not as steep as other locations—but Eavor is still very much an Alberta company. “Alberta is a great place for geothermal because we have the people and the knowledge and expertise,” Eavor executive Neil Ethier explained to an oil industry trade journal. “We are drilling geothermal wells the exact same way as we drill an oil and gas well, with the same men and women running the rigs.”

For Alberta, which has both high-quality resources and decent financing options, the energy transition has swept across the prairie despite little in the way of recent government encouragement. The NDP’s coal phase-out plan did oblige the Alberta Energy System Operator (AESO) to commission a number of large wind farms, but neither Rachel Notley’s government nor the United Conservatives have been particularly aggressive on solar power. Suppliers and customers of renewable energy alike are flocking to Alberta on its own merits.

The AESO estimates that the rest of the decade will only see accelerating growth—as much as 3.6 gigawatts of new wind power and 2.7 gigawatts of new solar in Alberta by 2030 in its “clean tech scenario,” which is built on the assumption that the province’s emissions-cutting efforts, including the coal phase-out and the federally mandated price on carbon, will yield economic opportunities. This new renewable generation would be just a little shy of the generating capacity of the province’s current fleet of natural-gas-fired power plants, which generate the bulk of Alberta’s electricity today. And even the AESO’s near-term estimates for the cost of new renewables are roughly equal to or cheaper than the cost of natural-gas-powered combined cycle plants.

These are almost certainly underestimations of the energy transition’s potential. Virtually every expert energy analysis from the IEA on down dramatically underestimated the growth in renewables worldwide over the past decade. A 2009 Pembina Institute study, meanwhile, didn’t even consider utility-scale solar in Alberta and saw only a negligible role for “micropower” technologies such as rooftop solar arrays.

Alberta’s advantages as an emerging renewable energy hub are significant. In addition to the resources themselves, Alberta’s coal phase-out has created significant momentum for renewables. And its fully deregulated electricity market, which simplifies gaining access to the power grid and eliminates much of the foot-dragging elsewhere in Canada by incumbent monopolies with “hydro” in their names, makes it the easiest place in the country to develop new wind and solar.

Many of the projects driving this provincial wave are well outside the scope of the phase-out—independent deals cut between local developers and international companies keen to add emissions-free power to their portfolios. Amazon, for example, has an agreement in place for 400 megawatts of the solar power expected to be produced by the mammoth Travers facility. This doesn’t mean Amazon facilities in Alberta will ever be connected directly to the solar array but rather that the company has provided the financing for a share of the facility’s power equivalent to its use of polluting power elsewhere—a sort of “virtual power plant’ connection to green energy increasingly popular among major international corporations pursuing net-zero emissions targets.

It’s intrinsic to the nature of the global energy transition that every jurisdiction need not reinvent the clean-energy wheel. Alberta has ample solar and wind resources, but the panels and turbine blades will be manufactured in China, the developers may be based in Ontario or BC, and the main customer could be in Seattle. But Alberta will have to slash emissions in every facet of its economy. Grid, transportation, industry, homes and businesses—all of it. And there are niches where Albertans can lead. Eavor is surely the exact type of company Calgary Economic Development had in mind when it commissioned a study in 2021 to explore the scope of the economic opportunities presented by the energy transition. The study estimated that as much as $61-billion and 170,000 jobs could be generated in Alberta from now until 2050.

That transition will happen with or without local leadership—Alberta is beating its coal phase-out target in part because global market forces are moving much faster than the tepid ambitions of its lawmakers. Right now, though, the whole world is looking for solutions, from low-cost, ubiquitous geothermal energy to the carbon-capture technology that sometimes seems like the only kind of emissions reduction our provincial government wants to talk about. There are big opportunities for Alberta. This is the best way to look at those generic solar farms in fields outside Vulcan, Monarch and Coaldale—not as another hundred megawatts on a grid but as the start of a much greater force. Emissions-free, Indigenous-backed, part of a global transformation of the way the world makes and uses energy. A whole new Alberta advantage, if we want it.

Chris Turner has won numerous National Magazine Awards. His newest book is How to be a Climate Optimist (Random House).

The post A Clean Energy Powerhouse appeared first on Alberta Views.

Before that, the Victoria, BC, native spent his first eight years after high school in heavy machinery repair and steel fabrication, often on oil field equipment such as flare stacks and rig platforms. He says serving the oil field’s needs was “the bread and butter” of his work, with an occasional job building renewable-energy equipment such as parts for a biofuel facility.

“I really loved that job,” he says, but opportunities in the North called and he spent the next half dozen years in the oil sands, doing similar work, primarily during spring and autumn, when sites get set up and stripped down. He found it exciting, interesting—and lucrative.

Then came the downturn. As international market forces sent the price of Western Canada Select plummeting from close to $100 per barrel to at times less than $20, oil sands operations struggled to survive, especially as the break-even price for many operations was as high as $80 per barrel. The opportunities that brought thousands like Lliam north evaporated.

“It was crazy,” he says. “Every single day in the lunchroom we were having conversations about who was getting laid off… and when would we be laid off?”

Worldwide, the price crash saw more than 440,000 petroleum jobs disappear. Bloomberg UBS predicts that between a third and as many as half of those 440,000 jobs will never return. In Canada 46,000 oil and gas workers were laid off, mostly in Alberta. Pipeline purgatory and the spectre of fossil fuels’ decline dominate public and political rhetoric on the subject.

What hasn’t been at the forefront is talk of an escape plan for tens of thousands of oil workers. In the past, when industries from carriage makers to cod fishers suddenly crumbled, workers were abandoned. Now the hope is for a “just transition.” The concept of just transition holds that when an industry or sector declines, particularly if that decline is mandated by government policy, the workforce is entitled to planned support to move people to new gainful employment, ideally in their own community.

In theory it’s a grand concept and one of the best ways to gain support for climate change policies from the affected workforce. In practice, “just transitions” have had mixed results.

Alberta and Canada had a practice run in coal. Canada’s coal phase-out got its start in 2012 when the Harper government imposed emissions limits for coal-fired power plants that effectively guaranteed their shutdown. Technological solutions that would sufficiently lower emissions at these generators weren’t cost-effective, especially in the face of coal’s declining competitiveness worldwide.

Alberta followed suit in late 2015 when the Notley government announced similar limitations as part of its Climate Leadership Plan and soon after mandated that at least 30 per cent of Alberta’s electricity grid be powered by renewable energy by 2030. At the time, coal fed over half of the province’s electricity needs, and its production here was greater than all other provinces’ combined. Coal directly supported roughly 3,150 jobs in Alberta, mostly in mining and processing rather than plant operations. Coal workers include engineers, welders, mechanics, electricians, heavy equipment operators and maintenance staff. The economies of some 20 communities were tied tightly to the industry.

Pipeline purgatory and the spectre of fossil fuels’ decline dominate public and political rhetoric.

Hanna is one of those coal towns, and perhaps the poster child for the phase-out thanks to its vocal mayor, Chris Warwick, and the town’s concerted efforts to meet the phase-out head on.

Hanna’s population is 2,500, 210 of whom work in the nearby Sheerness coal mine and power plant. The mine operations prop up the town’s economy, inflating incomes above what would be expected in a remote farming community, allowing business and public services to thrive where they likely wouldn’t otherwise.

While Warwick’s efforts have focused on the town’s economic transition, councillor Connie Deadlock devotes her time to the workforce. “There have been a lot of conversations about just transition from the provincial and federal governments, as well as everyone else,” she says. The mine and the power plant are still operating, but the town is already affected by the inevitable changes, and residents are anxious.

“Not only do we have to worry about the direct job losses, there is no other industry, so many people and families will have to relocate,” Deadlock says. “Housing prices have already been declining, our schools are affected, our businesses, and the list goes on and on.”

She says that because the power plant will convert to run on natural gas, not everyone will lose their jobs, but the new operation will require far fewer employees.

Immediately after the phase-out announcement in 2015, Hanna’s leaders scrambled to find a way not only to keep the town alive but to maintain its quality of life. They contracted Calgary’s Urban Systems to make an analysis of the town’s predicament and attributes and outline a path forward. The resulting Cactus Corridor Economic Opportunities Report has good news and bad for the little town.

“Be realistic,” it recommends. “Living in a community/region can make one unrealistic about its potential.” Also, expect some decline, because “it’s unlikely high wage primary industry jobs can be replaced. If workers in these industries want to stay in the community, they may have to accept a reduction in income and work with less status.” Don’t rely on ongoing subsidies or bailouts, it adds; don’t look for a panacea; establish a sense of urgency.

Coupled with the phase-out, Hanna, like many coal communities, is also rural. It is already subject to the pressures of rural decline, making it even harder to replace coal in its economy.

Hanna does have some business opportunities. Urban Systems points out it has some of the best solar power potential in the country, and likely good wind power possibilities too. As a farming community, it is surrounded by arable land and a fair water supply.

Government hasn’t abandoned Hanna and other coal towns, either. In addition to setting an end date for coal, the NDP government had the foresight to consider the transition—especially important given the phase-out only had 50 per cent public support province-wide. The government wanted widespread support as it made major changes to the way Alberta dealt with climate change issues.

The provincial government gave Hanna $450,000 to set up community action teams and help establish an economic plan. Unfortunately, Hanna was left off the list when the government committed funding at the end of 2018 for the municipal training centres many people say are integral to a successful labour transition.

“Our community has so many ideas for business and expansion, but no funds to bring them to fruition,” says Deadlock. “The employees at the mine don’t feel they will benefit very much from any programs that are offered. There needs to be some significant changes.”

Disconnect between what workers say they need and what the transition programs actually offer is a pervasive problem in Canada’s just transition efforts for the coal industry. “The most requested thing is for the government to offer training and other programs while people are still employed, [but] none of the programs are a benefit while still working,” says Deadlock. “Employees feel that if they could do some upgrading, training or education while still working and having an income, they would have a better chance.”

In response to how initial transition programs were designed, Jamie Kirkpatrick of Blue Green Canada says, “I think that was stupid.” Blue Green is a collaboration of labour unions and civil and environmental groups that has spent the past 10 years advocating for workers affected by environmental issues. It has primarily focused on the fate of Canada’s coal workers as coal-fired electricity comes to an end. Kirkpatrick says requiring workers to lose their jobs before they can begin retraining for a new career sets them back from the start. He and Deadlock agree the reason transition programs often don’t resonate with labour is because many of the plans were made without on-the-ground consultation.

“You actually learn more talking to people who are going to be affected by this than telling them what’s going to happen,” Kirkpatrick says.

Governments issuing decrees rather than including affected groups in the decision-making has been a major sticking point among workers and labour unions throughout the phase-out, seriously eroding any support the decision may have garnered from those most immediately affected
by it.

In the past, when industries from carriage makers to cod fishers suddenly crumbled, workers were abandoned.

Alberta did have a coal transition task force, and in April 2018 the federal government struck its own phase-out task force, including union representatives. That group’s report and recommendations were issued in March 2019. A combined $70-million in funding was allocated to support the transition.

After a year of work the federal task force had found that “coal workers, their families and their communities fear that without careful and inclusive planning, they may face devastating impacts from the coal phase-out. Workers and community members expressed their dissatisfaction with how the government decided and announced the phase-out in the first place, pointing to limited or no consultation about the impacts for both provincial power grids and for the coal mine and electricity-generation workforces… Many expressed sincere doubt about the ability of government to support them through a transition….”

“We cannot leave affected workers and communities behind during the transition to a low-carbon economy. They too must have hope for the future… The phase-out of coal-fired electricity must be done thoughtfully and with full recognition that there is a duty to care for affected workers and communities,” declares the report.

It suggests government, industry and unions share the responsibility for labour in the face of the transition, and recommends creation of local transition centres to help workers identify their skills, learn what retraining they need and what other professions their qualifications may apply to.

Among other things, Alberta’s coal transition plan had offered payments of up to $5,000 in expenses for workers who relocate at least 40 km to start a new job; a maximum $12,000 in tuition vouchers for any post-secondary education and career retraining started within five years of the layoff; career counselling and job-search skills training at affected worksites; transition services to help develop individualized plans to identify existing skills and administer short-term courses in skills development; and help in establishing worker adjustment committees to arrange training or match skills to job openings.

After the election of the UCP government, the transition plan was in limbo until the release of the budget on October 24, 2019. In it, $4.7-million was allocated to the coal workforce transition program. The UCP had never espoused much love for the coal phase-out. Premier Jason Kenney had promised a line by line inspection of all budget items to determine whether they merited continuing. That left everyone involved in the details of the transition hanging. As one Alberta coal worker asked the task force, “Is coal done or what?”

Alberta has 50 times as many oil and gas workers as coal workers, many wondering when they will be asking the same question about the oil sands: “Is it done or what?”

Before 2014 the province had 140,000 jobs in oil and gas drilling, servicing, supply, downstream, midstream, exploration and production roles. A third of them have been lost. Many Albertans are painfully familiar with the recession that began in the oil sands and reverberated throughout the province’s economy. It contributed to the fall of two successive provincial governments and helped create today’s political climate.

The collapse in the price of oil forced the industry to find long-term cost-saving measures. Chiefly, labour costs have plunged as computerization, automation and artificial intelligence take over manual work. Everything from drilling platforms to mine hauling trucks can now operate with fewer than half the staff thanks to automation. Energy research group Wood Mackenzie projects global petroleum demand to continue to rise until 2036; but despite growing demand, improved oil prices and steady production increases, many jobs will never return.

Alberta Labour says direct oil and gas jobs currently make up 7.6 per cent of the province’s workforce, while the petroleum sector still accounts for 28 per cent of Alberta’s GDP (as of 2017 and 2016 respectively). How should the province respond to structural changes in the oil industry?

“People always resist change that hurts,” says Jamie Kirkpatrick of Blue Green about why any kind of managed decline is a touchy subject. For the past three years Blue Green Canada has held a two-day Just Transition Conference in the Edmonton area. It has primarily been in service of academic discussion of the coal phase-out, but Kirkpatrick says last year’s conference saw attendees from the oil sands, curious about what they could do in the same predicament.

“People can see the parallels,” Kirkpatrick says of the declining coal industry and possible fate of the oil sands. “They came to us and talked about the fact that they see the impacts of a changing economy.” Oil sands workers fear the effect of oil’s long-term decline on jobs.

Kirkpatrick says it’s never too soon to plan for an industry’s decline, especially given the size of the oil industry’s workforce. “There’s still a long window, [but] oil sands in particular need to be engaging in just transition planning, because if you can actually be prepared you’ll be much better off.”

In all petroleum transition discussions, the question of transition to what is the most difficult. Rachel Notley’s government incentivized petrochemical diversification through royalty tax credits, and allocated hundreds of millions of dollars in carbon tax revenues to 2,000 “green” projects in roughly 300 communities—everything from LRT expansion in Edmonton to solar panels atop Barrhead’s regional aquatic centre. By that government’s estimate, carbon tax revenues would create 25,000 jobs.

Notley’s team was criticized by some Albertans for diversifying too cautiously; by others for funding such efforts at all. Jason Kenney has expressed support for the NDP’s petrochemical program, but famously killed the carbon tax—and its diversification efforts—with 2019’s Bill 1.

“We stand at a critical moment in Alberta’s history,” concluded the Cactus Corridor Economic Opportunities Report, “facing the harsh realities of sector trends and an ever changing and dynamic labour market that is largely determined by external pressures… More so than at any other time, the province’s relative success in the serious pursuit of diversification will hold more weight in predicting future economic prosperity than the continued heavy reliance on a single commodity sector.” This is the report that the leaders of Hanna had thought might give them hope for the future of their town.

Liam Hildebrand points to the green economy that seems to so irk oil field promoters. He says that in those anxious lunchroom chats about who would be laid off next, many of his co-workers agreed oil sands crews were perfectly suited to build the country’s renewable energy infrastructure.

He notes that oil labour forces are predominantly made up of welders, steel fabricators, crane operators, heavy equipment operators, power engineers—people who should be able to put together a wind turbine or biomass generator with minimal retraining.

“We all agreed it was critical to diversify into renewables because that’s where the world is going,” he says. “The biggest concern is, where are all the jobs A lot of oil sands workers would take the renewable energy job if it were available.”

Where the jobs are has always been the catch. Hildebrand says he often talked with his co-workers about climate change and the green economy. “In the oil sands, a lot of workers are very environmentally conscious and supportive of things to address climate change, but have a real visceral hatred of Greenpeace and organizations they think are trying to shut down the oil sands overnight.”

The reason they haven’t all thrown their support behind the green energy transition is that repeated promises of a renewable energy job boom have come to very little relative to what the oil and gas economy has given Alberta.

When jobs dried up in 2015, Hildebrand and three of his colleagues founded Iron and Earth. Leading the organization is now his full-time job. Iron and Earth advocates for renewable energy industry growth and oil workers’ suitability for making that happen. As to who is responsible for helping a workforce transition out of an industry that everyone is aware can’t last forever, Hildebrand says it’s everyone.

“We obviously can’t grow our oil sands forever, because we’ll burn up the planet and because we’ll run out of oil. If government wants to be a prudent manager of our resources, be they social resources or natural resources… it’s of critical importance to start looking into the future and where things are going and start diversifying.”

Suzy Thompson is a communications professional based in Calgary.

Respond to this story at letters@albertaviews.ca.

The post Just Transition appeared first on Alberta Views.

A lot of Albertans now feel similarly stuck. Our province has a new government and a new climate plan that proposes to change everything, especially for the energy sector. We’re phasing out coal and putting a higher price on carbon. New environmental regulations loom for the energy industry. Oil prices are down sharply as global competitors flood the market. Unemployment is up and corporate revenues are down. Everyone says we must diversify, but no one knows how. A lot of capital is tied up in idle rigs and abandoned wells.

Alberta, however, has the resources, the know-how and the interested parties to create a new energy specialty: geothermal. “To me, this is an exciting opportunity,” says Craig Dunn, the president of Calgary-based Borealis GeoPower. As a geologist, he knows that oilfield wellheads often erupt with brine, oil, gas—and steam. To him that means “Albertans have direct access to the earth’s heat.” What oil companies have long seen as a hazardous nuisance, Dunn’s company sees as a renewable resource that can be turned into a commodity. Already, engineers are retooling oilfield equipment to drill for heat. Even abandoned oil wells can be repurposed for geothermal energy.

Our province also has technical advantages we could sell to the world. Iceland may heat 85 per cent of its buildings with direct geothermal heat, but “they’ve just drilled their first horizontal well,” says Dunn’s colleague Alison Thompson, president of CanGEA, the Canadian Geothermal Association. “We’ve been doing it for years.” Alberta has plenty of drilling rigs on hand, she adds, but “Germany had to build their own.” Another surprising opportunity lies in existing provincial oil well maps, which could reduce geothermal’s exploration expenses, usually one-third of costs.

As Dunn says, “We have some of the smartest people in the world in resource development. We should be using them.” Thompson agrees and puts the situation more provocatively. “Alberta is the biggest geothermal producer in the world,” she says, “but we throw it all away.”

“We’re the biggest geothermal producer in the world,” says Alison Thompson, “but we throw it all away.”

Geothermal has been called the “holy grail” of renewable energy. Clean, stable, emissions-free and long-lived with minimum maintenance, geothermal can also provide stable baseload power that neither solar nor wind can promise. The sun sets and the wind ebbs, but it’s always hot beneath earth’s surface.

Every geothermal method extracts heat from the earth for human use. Even in Alberta’s coldest winters, the ground 3  km beneath our feet is reliably 90–100°C or warmer, due to decaying uranium, thorium and potassium radiogenic rocks. Urban areas such as Calgary have an 8–12°C temperature difference in the first 200 feet of soil.

Engineers apply that heat to a wide range of purposes. They might use heat pumps to stream direct heat from hot springs to nearby buildings. Or they may install smaller, hip-high pumps outside homes, to extract heat air-to-air or ground-to-air. In milder climates, the electricity to run the pump may be the only heating cost.

Bigger buildings or colder climates call for “geoexchange” methods. Here, builders lay flexible pipe loops at some depth in the soil (from one to several metres) and pump water in a constant loop, bringing hot water up and sending cold water back down. Where space is tight, they drill straight down to create boreholes to hold the loops. Compressors leverage the temperature difference to heat or cool buildings. The geothermal grand prize is to capture heat intense enough—such as at a hot springs—to spin a turbine and generate electricity.

As of 2014, 24 countries had geothermal power plants, producing more than 12 GW in total. Eighty countries had projects under development to produce almost another 12  GW. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, and a MW is enough to power about 1,000 homes (at a kilowatt apiece). A gigawatt thus powers a million homes. The US industry was producing about 3.5 GW of geothermal electricity annually by the end of 2014, up from 3 GW in 2010.

Canada has zero geothermal electricity production, either active or underway, despite the best efforts of mainly Alberta-based geoscientists and engineers. Canadians do participate in other countries’ projects, however. CanGEA says Canadian companies produce more than 20 per cent of the world’s geothermal energy. Enbridge owns 40 per cent of the Oregon Neal Hot Springs project, for example, which has been producing geothermal electricity since 2012.

The Geological Survey of Canada estimates that “Canada’s in-place geothermal power exceeds one million times Canada’s current electrical consumption.” Even if only a fraction of this potential is developed, that’s an immense amount of energy.

Like solar panels and windmills (or computers), geothermal technology has evolved from expensive and erratic into relatively accessible and reliable. As equipment improves, engineers are heating or cooling huge spaces using a paltry 10°C temperature difference between the surface and the earth. They’re practically spinning gold from straw.

Homeowners and engineers often use an odd-sounding measure for the geothermal craft, talking about working at several times “100 per cent efficiency.” I heard this phrase from Dale Poloway, proud geothermal homeowner. He uses a monitoring program to calculate his home’s overall efficiency rating—for example, 359 per cent efficiency. For each energy unit put into his system, Poloway’s compressor put more than three and a half times as much energy into heating his home. He estimates his heating costs are about half what they’d be if he used natural gas.

“I’m an early adopter,” says Poloway. “I knew I’d pay a premium for the technology.” He spent three and a half years building a handsome two-storey geothermal house in Calgary’s Inglewood neighbourhood. In his basement, pipes bring up warm water from four 200-foot boreholes to a five-ton heat pump (equivalent to a 50,000 BTU furnace) that captures the heat. The now-cold water goes back down the pipes into the earth to warm up. The pump transfers the captured heat to a circulating system, which runs warmed water through three levels of concrete floors: basement, first and second. Poloway says this system “gives very even temperatures throughout the house.”

The sophisticated Web Energy Logger (WEL) software that monitors his system today displays the results among real time statistics for hundreds of homes across North America at welserver.com. (Poloway’s house is WEL0584.)

Thermal Creek has built dozens of geothermal homes in and near Calgary. While owner Koen van der Maaten has worked on projects as small as a 2,000 ft2 bungalow retrofit, most of his projects are much larger, including a Canmore fourplex and a Calgary MP’s 14,000 ft2 home. Over at Thermal Creek’s website, you can track daily utility activity and costs for a 4,200 ft2 home in Bearspaw. Here, van der Maaten and his crew drilled eight 145-foot boreholes and carved massive channels in the dirt to carry more ground loops. Since 2011 this geothermal system has heated the house and provided hot water without any other heat source—for about $350 a year. Fluctuating fuel costs don’t affect these homeowners.

I’d thought that geoexchange only worked in certain places, but van der Maaten corrected me. “You can do shallow geothermal anywhere on the planet,” he says. “We just finished a project outside Whitehorse, a house on a large piece of land. We buried pipes at about 15 feet deep in 300-foot-long trenches and we’re extracting energy. It all comes down to putting enough pipe in the ground.” He estimates that an average geoexchange system in a new home would cost about $28,000, many times the cost of a typical furnace system. But, then, a geoexchange system doubles as a cooling system too, making it twice as valuable.

What oil companies have seen as a nuisance—hot water—others see as a renewable resource that can be reaped in the form of electricity.

Where geoexchange systems really meet their sweet spot, says Edmonton engineer Jacob Komar, is with commercial buildings. “Commercial buildings achieve economies of scale not available in building a house,” he says. “For instance, the cost per borehole drops. At around 50,000–60,000 ft2, commercial buildings only need a year or two to pay back the cost difference for installing a geothermal system.”

Komar was lead engineer for the Mosaic Centre, a 30,000 ft2 net zero office building completed in 2015 in Edmonton’s Summerside neighbourhood. “Net zero” means that a building consumes no more energy than it produces. “The premium to go geothermal was $80,000,” he says, “which was less than 1 per cent of the Mosaic Centre’s $10.5-million budget.”

Cooling is where geothermal really pays for itself. “We found the Mosaic Centre’s cooling load was greater than its heating load,” he says. “Alberta is a very sunny province. We get a solar load on any south-facing glass. Once the people arrive and the sun heats the glass, the building switches over from heating and starts cooling.”

Here again Alberta has an advantage. Any time you get a large number of people in a building, cooling becomes important. “I’d argue this is the best climate for geothermal on the continent,” says Komar. “In Virginia [where he trained earlier] they’re cooling most of the year, but the geothermal systems are inefficient because the ground temperature is too high to accept the heat the system rejects. In Alberta we can reject heat into the ground with outstanding efficiencies.”

At the University of Alberta, geochemist Jonathan Banks has been working for 10 years to develop the hottest form of geothermal energy: using scalding water to generate electricity. He predicts this could one day be a billion dollar industry in Canada. “Every other nation on the Ring of Fire [the Pacific Ocean perimeter, marked by volcanic activity] has geothermal power,” he says.

With the oil industry in decline, geothermal advocates want to capitalize on all the exploring and drilling already done here. Banks, the lead researcher on an international multi-university project in conjunction with Alberta Innovates–Energy and Environmental Solutions, is using oil company data to find geothermal resources—reservoirs hot enough to drive a turbine. “It’s all public data,” he says. “Whenever a company drills a well in Alberta, they’re obligated to file certain kinds of information with the government, and anyone can have access to that.” Not everyone can interpret the data, though. U of A computers have software that helps interpret the numbers.

Banks’s team is using the data to look for wells filled with water, as happens when a gas field becomes depleted. “We’re looking for reservoirs with temperatures higher than 100°C, which is hot enough to generate electricity,” he says. “Alaska produces electricity at Chena Hot Springs with water at 74°C. One reason they can do that is the air is so cold there, it creates a greater temperature difference, and warmer water vaporizes in the cold.”

Banks is doing the groundwork to make it possible for smaller cities such as Rocky Mountain House to turn nearby geothermal potential into power plants. He has contacted town councils along the eastern edge of the Rockies, from Grande Prairie to Hinton, to point out that they’re very close to excellent geothermal resources—that is, potential riches. “We want the towns to have the information so they can attract investors,” he says. “We’re doing an energy budget for each reservoir, calculating how much energy is in each and how much can be drawn, as well as a precommercialization study for each town.”

Calgary-based CanGEA has also been reviewing data and has put up an online national geothermal database and three provincial favourability maps.

Meanwhile, Borealis Geopower is working on two power-generation projects—Canoe Reach and Lakelse, both in BC. With its exploration permits secured, Borealis is trying to raise funds to identify the precise heat sources. Likewise, DEEP Earth is fundraising to drill exploratory heat wells near Estevan, Saskatchewan.

Pipes bring hot water from boreholes to a pump, which transfers heat to a circulating system. Water re-enters the earth to warm up.

“We have lots of low-hanging fruit in Alberta,” says CanGEA’s Alison Thompson. “We have thousands of abandoned oil wells that could be topped with geothermal loops and turned into microgenerators.” A series of a dozen or more of these little generators could build up a town-sized load. Others have suggested the mini-generators could produce up to 5 MW each. This could power a town and some light industry.

Speaking to post-secondary geoscience students worried about their career prospects evaporating, Thompson assures them their skills will transfer from oil and gas to geothermal. She says that’s what’s exciting about downturns. “We’re now in a wonderful era of technological innovation. When oil prices are high, all the engineers are busy. When prices drop, we get the benefit of technology transfer.” Necessity: the mother of invention.

What, then, is holding Alberta back Our province does have some 2,200 geoexchange buildings that draw heat from deep boreholes. But with all of Alberta’s traditional energy advantages—coal, gas, oil, solar and wind—geothermal has been left to slowly grow by itself, without much encouragement, oversight or regulation.

Cost remains the biggest barrier. With federal and provincial governments committed to pursuing renewable energies, “We have a window right now,” Thompson says, “but we have major barriers because we don’t have tax symmetry with other energy industries. We can’t write off dry wells the way oil and gas exploration can.” CanGEA’s research suggests that tax law could be easily amended by adding “geothermal” to the definition of resource exploration and development.

Although home-scale and commercial-scale geoexchange systems have come down in price because they can be mass-produced, geothermal power plants have to be custom-built—and they remain breathtakingly expensive. “Plant cost depends on size,” says Banks. He quotes US estimates of between $3,000 and $4,000 per KW, which works out to $3-million to $4-million per MW. That’s for a standard plant. “For a 1 MW demonstration plant, we estimate costs at $20-million to $25-million. That’s for a prototype,” he hastens to add. “Costs would go down in the future.” In other places, geothermal power has tended to get a foothold and then grow incrementally. The California geothermal field known as The Geysers saw its first small geothermal plant in 1960 and now has 22 power plants which have no fuel costs. That state now produces 4.8 of its energy from geothermal sources.

Cost, however, can be influenced by governments, and not only through carbon taxes and other incentives. “Geothermal energy would be very expensive right now. So The oil sands were expensive [decades] ago,” says ATB chief economist Todd Hirsch. “The province put public money into researching the oil sands because at first the resource was too marginal for a company to make money on.”

Regulatory changes would help too. “Right now the province recognizes subsurface mineral rights,” Hirsch says. “If you have the leasehold and can prove there are minerals under that land, you can get a loan. Heat isn’t a mineral. It doesn’t count as an asset. The province has to recognize geothermal energy as an asset before the banks will.” A few forward-looking US states do so.

“I’m interested in promoting the idea that Alberta has to look beyond hydrocarbons,” he adds. “We could invest in more solar and wind, but that’s just buying somebody else’s technology. I keep coming back to ‘What kind of technology are we developing here in Alberta?’ Everyone knows the heat is there—it’s not like drilling for oil or gas—but there’s a technical problem with getting at it. Can we apply the bright minds in this province to cracking that nut?

“Alberta’s geology is more typical than the Ring of Fire. If we could solve the technical end, we could sell our technology everywhere that people are trying to get off coal and oil.”

Indeed, heating buildings without creating CO2 emissions would help all countries meet their Paris COP21 goals. Canada is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Residential and commercial heating, ventilation and air conditioning generally account for 40–50 per cent of a country’s energy use. Geothermal in every new building would whittle that down.

Post Paris COP21 and post first ministers’ conference, geothermal power is still a sorely overlooked energy source in Canada. Premier Rachel Notley’s plan to phase out coal by 2030 calls for renewables to provide two-thirds of the replacement power, but suggests the emphasis will be mainly wind. The new federal budget gives Natural Resources Canada $82.5-million over two years to research and develop clean energies. But the federal plan for northern Canada—largely dependent on dirty diesel for its heat and electricity needs—notes only wind and solar.

As Hirsch and others point out, our province already excels at exploiting marginal resources. What geothermal advocates want is a bit more government support. With that—like the oil sands—another Alberta billion-dollar industry might not be an impossible dream.

Penney Kome has published six non-fiction books and hundreds of articles. She was editor of straightgoods.com, 2004–2013.

The post Hot Treasure appeared first on Alberta Views.

We don’t take electricity for granted in the country; we have a longer memory of life before the light switch. But lately the ratepayers in MD 9 (as it’s known locally) have been discovering that two major actors in the planning and distribution of electricity in Alberta—the not-for-profit Alberta Electrical System Operator (AESO) and the for-big-profits transmission company AltaLink—have, in fact, been taking us local yokels (and all Albertans, really) very much for granted. 

When their engineers drive down from Calgary and look at the Porcupine/Pekisko rangelands lying north of Highway 3, in the vicinity of Lundbreck, they don’t see what we see: a sublime scenic commons belonging to all Albertans and shared with any stranger passing through. They don’t see how the lion-coloured foothills to the west foot the cloud-hung ramparts of the Livingstone Range like supplicants at the hall of the mountain king. The forests there, as I write this, are limned in the sharpest chiaroscuro from the night’s frost, left behind this morning by swirling mists that the sun is now burning off. 

Nor do they value, as they stand under the leading edge of a chinook arch, how the eastward sweep of aspen groves, hay meadows and rough-fescue-covered ridges that lie between the mountains and the timbered redoubts of the Porcupine Hills seem almost as they did in pioneer days. From here, you can’t see the gangs of elk, herds of deer, the furtive cougars, bobcats, wolves and sloths of black and grizzly bears that wander these buttes and ridges, or the thousands of bald and golden eagles and other raptors migrating along the crest of the Livingstone Range in spring and fall.

These vistas of ranchland and river valleys are the heart of Alberta sublime. They lassoed the imaginations of moviegoers who flocked to see Open Range and Brokeback Mountain. They draw people from abroad (part of a $5-billion tourism industry) to drink in this last, best west stretching from Longview to Waterton. Small wonder that Oldman chose the North Peak of the Porcupine Hills to create the first people from a ball of mud after the great flood. That storied height was once a nunatak that stood alone above the ice sheets covering the region. Jealous of this ancient buffalo range, Blackfoot raiders, led by Medicine Calf, attacked the first wagon train of crazy honkies to venture north, in 1867. Like sacrificial lambs, they watered this earth with their blood, and you can see the hill from here, known as Massacre Butte, where they made their final stand. Take a look quick, before somebody massacres our history with platoons of gigantic wind turbines and ranks of transmission lines.

Wind turbines, when properly planned and located, can indeed contribute to renewable power in Alberta. They offer a few construction and maintenance jobs and contribute to the local municipal tax base ($1.54-million in 2008). They seduce some property owners into leasing their “wind rights.” Amounts earned aren’t typically disclosed, but in 2007 a local expert told me that a 1.3 megawatt (MW) windmill such as the ones in MD 9 can generate $150,000–$200,000 a year for its operator and $4,000–$6,000 for the property owner.

Wind power is a small but growing part of the provincial electrical grid. According to Alberta Energy, Alberta now has 805 MW of wind power. That equals 6 per cent of our total installed capacity of 13,447 MW, up 2 per cent since 2007. AESO’s goal is to add as much wind power to the grid as is feasible. Some 11,000 MW is currently proposed, according to Shan Bhattacharya, vice president of transmission for AESO. About 7,400 MW of that is to be here in the south.

We’re treating a renewable resource in a boom-or-bust way, like fossil fuels. Can’t we even get green energy right?

Estimates about new generation vary, however, depending on who you listen to. For example, according to Alberta Energy, another 8,994 MW of thermal (or non-renewable) power is also proposed. This means the province would increase its total capacity to 30,796 MW, an amount that’s over double our current capacity. Meanwhile, peak demand—the most electricity we use at a given time—actually went down last year, from 10,236 MW in 2009 to 10,196 MW in 2010. Yet power brokers will tell you we risk having brownouts and blackouts if we don’t start producing more power (than we require) and revamp the grid. AESO’s mantra is we must build “in advance of need” and have a “congestion-free” grid to attract new industry. This includes the controversial new power line from Edmonton to Calgary, which is currently subject to a court challenge. Why we can’t wait until need has been demonstrated is never mentioned.

Power producers are happy, and no wonder. In the olden days, producers paid half the costs of new lines, but in 2005 the PC government decided that you and I should foot the entire bill. The cost to upgrade our transmission network was then pegged at $1.5-billion, but has ballooned to $16-billion. And swelling.

Although some consumers argue that upgrades are needed, I found no unified support for Alberta’s current grandiose plans. In a leaked letter sent to the PC caucus, the Industrial Power Consumers Association of Alberta (IPCAA) lambasted AESO’s proposed lines as “unnecessary,” “irresponsible,” “unaffordable” and “lacking common sense.” Instead of attracting investment, the plan, they claim, will drive industrial users out of Alberta or force them to generate their own power, leaving domestic users to pick up even more of the tab. Even the Fraser Institute, an industry cheerleader, is opposed. 

Alberta Energy spins a fairytale predicting $24–$36 more for the average annual household bill. Meanwhile, the actual costs of AESO’s projects in real life doubled in just 12 months. The IPCAA warns that in a worst-case scenario, homeowners will pay $400 more per year. An estimate from ENMAX Corp., the Calgary utility, pegs the annual increase at $300.

Here’s the kicker: when all the upgrades are done—at citizens’ expense—we’ll get to compete with US consumers for the power we produce. Alberta Energy insists the new lines will be for our needs only, while AESO says it’s “inaccurate” to say the new lines are for export. AESO claims we have to import electricity because we simply don’t produce enough. In fact, we import less than 6 per cent of our electricity, mainly from BC when cheap hydro is available. BC also buys power from us to stay running while they refill their hydro reservoirs. No power for export Tell it to Encana Corp., which applied to the National Energy Board this February to export 5,000,000 MWh to the US over the next 10 years. What the hell is going on here?

Albertans will pay $16-billion for new power lines—”a massive overbuild”—for the benefit of private companies and US consumers. 

It’s quite simple, really. California needs 40,000 MW of new power by 2016, and by law, 20 per cent of it must be renewable (read: wind) by 2015. They need to be 33 per cent renewable by 2020. And they expect Canada to supply a lot of it. Go online to find “Canada–Northwest–California Transmission Options Study,” prepared for the Northwest Power Pool by a joint US/Canadian team, including two representatives from AESO. The study was done “…because there are vast undeveloped generation resources in Canada… that would require capacity increases in the transmission system to deliver energy to west coast load centres.” You’ll find maps showing our generator sources, including syngas projects in the tarsands, the coal plant at Wabamun and wind power down south. Transmission routes are shown leading south from Lethbridge, and west via the Crowsnest, then into Washington and on to California. The options are very specific. Projects must be available within 15 years, technically doable and already under consideration and, most importantly, not needed for meeting domestic load. 

Alberta Energy and AESO: when telling tall tales, remember the old proverb that “Enough is enough, but too much is plenty.”

Like Alberta Energy, Canada’s windpower industry gives good quote, in this case on all of its “clean” aspects. I suspect, however, that some of this greenwashing has more to do with greenbacks. Dawn Farrell, a TransAlta vice president, put the issue in perspective for investors a few years back: “What we love about wind is that from a decision to cash is a very short period of time.” Indeed, the industry is as aggressive at getting its way as any oil company.

The trend was established in 1993, when the first commercial windfarm in Canada was set up on Cowley Ridge—probably the worst possible location from a “viewshed” protection perspective. It dominates the ridge-to-mountain tableau by skylining a row of 23 pairs of revolving spikes on lattice towers, permanently vandalizing the view. At a more typical, newer site, the hub heights from ground vary from 65 m to 105 m, with blade swaths of 90 m. This might give an engineer a frisson of joy, but anyone who worries about homelier issues, such as the decline of the little brown bat in southwest Alberta (their lungs burst at wind power sites when they fly through a rotor arc), or anyone who loves our open spaces and knows what effect linear disturbances such as power lines and access roads have on plants, animals and water quality, will wilt in despair. 

In 2007, with many larger turbines built and applications increasing, our local council tried to impose conditions on windfarm siting to protect land values. The wind industry mounted an attack, led by none other than Ralph Klein, then on the board of Canadian Hydro, to pressure council into backing off. This was particularly galling given the hostility to wind power (which I witnessed) from the PC government and its petroclients prior to 1993, when Klein was Minister of Environment. There are now 239 windmills in MD 9 alone, with 47 more under construction and 145 more approved. 

New windfarms mean new power lines, and more money for AltaLink and its parent company, Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin. One of AESO’s and AltaLink’s current obsessions is Southern Alberta Transmission Reinforcement (SATR), a project designed to carry windpower to market. The community is polarized between those who want unrestricted development and those, led by the Livingstone Landowners Group (LLG), who want a say in how lines are planned and located. (The LLG is a not-for-profit association of ranchers and country dwellers with a conservationist land ethic. I’m a former director, but the thoughts expressed here, especially about windpower, are my own and aren’t endorsed by the group.) 

At a meeting with the LLG, an AltaLink engineer once described his role in transmission route selection as “a stick” that goes about probing the ground for hornet’s nests. In 2008, a tentative probe came by way of a curious map in the Pincher Creek Echo. It outlined, vaguely, a proposed power line south of Highway 3, connecting Goose Lake substation and the Crowsnest Pass, where it would connect with the Langdon-to-Natal, BC, line. The proposed line appeared to follow an existing power right-of-way. That seemed reasonable given AltaLink’s 2007 land-use policy as stated by CEO Scott Thon: “We must be more efficient in how we use the land by reusing rights-of-way and maximizing the capacity of new infrastructure.”

The curious map, I later learned, was published after AESO had made a “needs” case for its line before the Alberta Utility Commission (AUC) in November 2008. Wind power developers attended the hearing to support AESO. But ENMAX intervened to oppose the project, arguing that “approval… was not in the public interest because it: circumvented the regulatory process by seeking approval for too many projects for too long a period, well in advance of provable need, thereby saddling consumers with a huge stranded asset risk; significantly increased consumer transmission costs by requiring a large capital investment in transmission…; and did not support a fair, efficient and openly competitive electricity market in Alberta.” Ouch.

ENMAX’s “white knight” objection was examined and dismissed. AESO’s preferred route, known as “1A” (the route shown in the Echo), was approved. AltaLink was “strongly advised” by the AUC to stay within the swath. A substation in the Crowsnest that had long been an impediment to moving wind power was okayed for improved as well, so that, in a year or so, wind developers would be able to move their power west without hindrance. California, here we come. Can you say ohm?

Encana has applied to export more power to the US over the next ten years. What the hell is going on here?

Things were humming along, with AltaLink planning for new lines while the “hornets”—we citizens of MD 9—were blissfully unaware. Flash forward to the fall of 2010, when AltaLink decided to kick the hornet’s nest apart. AltaLink is supposed to consult with landowners before final routes are selected. One day, a map and a brochure arrived in the mailbox—well, in some mailboxes—and Route 1A had vanished. Instead, the map showed a brand new substation called “Fidler” on the Oldman River reservoir and a gridwork of 240 kV transmission lines bisecting and transecting the rangelands north of Highway 3, including two swaths cutting across the Porcupine Hills. The lines were to tie in to Langdon–Natal via one of three substations (all called Chapel Rock for some reason) lying west of Highway 22. AESO’s 2008 “needs application” hadn’t mentioned either Fidler or Chapel Rock, or any lines north of Highway 3.

The map infuriated locals. Some of us are still deeply suspicious of AESO and AltaLink as a result of the 2007 scandal at Rimbey, in which private investigators were hired by the Energy Utilities Board to spy on members of the Lavesta group, who opposed the Calgary/Edmonton power lines planned by AltaLink. That scandal resulted in the project’s (temporary) cancellation. (The EUB was dismantled as a result and the AUC rose from its ashes.)

“Don’t kid yourself,” was the buzz among local ranchers. “They already know which route they’ll take.” AltaLink soon flooded the area with open houses manned by blue-vested employees spreading the good news among the unconverted. They seemed genuinely bewildered that local people distrusted their motives. “We’re only here to keep the lights on,” one young fellow put it.

A number of LLG members had received no maps or communication whatsoever from AESO or AltaLink, even though the new proposed lines were shown traversing their property—in some cases right over barns and houses. Residents were worried about property devaluation, fragmentation of wildlife habitat, watershed protection, health issues due to magnetic fields, the destruction of scenery and the general blunt-force approach to planning displayed by the utility.

The question foremost on most minds: “What happened to the line they were approved to build Who gave them approval for this?” The simple answer is that AESO gave itself approval, despite the AUC’s “advising” them to stay in the existing right-of-way. Some arrogant technocrat, with the click of a mouse, decided that the route to Chapel Rock is exactly the same as the route to Crowsnest—though a major river and 40 km of countryside and a number of landowners separate the proposals.

Incensed at being reduced to a pesky afterthought, the LLG began fundraising to ready itself for a legal fight with AESO and AltaLink that could involve challenging the need for the entire project. Last October, the AUC warned AESO it was setting itself up for a fight in the courts. AESO’s reaction was basically “So what?”—an applicant at court flipping the bird at the judge. As I write this, LLG is sitting down with AltaLink to see if an alternative route can be found. The group is also urging the company to bury some of the line—a request made by landowners up and down the Calgary/Edmonton corridor as well—to lessen landscape impacts.

According to the AESO, “Wind resources in southern Alberta are a current example of where investment has been stalled as a result of a lack of transmission infrastructure.” This statement, constantly repeated, is notable for what it does not reveal.

The trouble with bulk electricity, in the absence of hydro, is our inability to store it. The power supplied to the grid must be in balance with the power withdrawn at all times. Wind farms cause variability when wind speed changes and power ramps up or down too quickly. Wind energy has to be backed up by generation that can cut in fast, and in Alberta that means, in particular, gas-fired generators (at least when hydro isn’t available). These have to be kept running, and therefore emitting CO₂, so the operator can dispatch power when the wind drops.

But windmills have a huge footprint more broadly speaking. They have to be spaced so that turbulence in the lee of one machine doesn’t unbalance the next one. Twelve 3 MW windmills producing 36 MW may require from 250 acres (if sited in a single row on a ridge) to one square mile if sited in rows of four in other terrain. By comparison, ENMAX’s Shepard combined-cycle plant in Calgary will, when opened in 2013, produce 800 MW and supply half of Calgary on a footprint of 80 (urban) acres. ENMAX claims the plant will produce half the CO₂ per MW of a conventional coal-powered plant. If the wind blew all the time, you might require from 9 to 22 square miles of windmills to produce 800 MW—but since it blows only 25 per cent to 38 per cent of the time, you’d need far more land, and you’d produce a lot of CO₂ to back them up.

In 2005, imbalances in the grid caused AESO to order a 900 MW cap on wind energy construction. The cap was lifted only after ENMAX completed a new 1,200 MW gas-fired plant near Calgary. The company told the Financial Post (April 20, 2007) that the plant would “help boost the provincial grid’s reliability after Alberta’s aggressive expansion into wind energy made it vulnerable to power disruption.” “We now have so much wind power generation that we need to fall back on reliable sources of power,” said Peter Hunt, an ENMAX spokesman. 

So if unrestrained development of massive windfarms isn’t the solution to clean energy, what is Well it turns out that, gee, what a surprise, there are many solutions. Carefully sited, widely dispersed windfarms that don’t destroy our natural heritage are winners. Even better, building generators closer to power consumers is advocated by everyone from environmentalists to the Fraser Institute to ENMAX. Let’s go back to the roots of windpower, where each farm would have one turbine (and could sell its surplus power to the grid—what happened to that happy, green dream?). Combined-cycle generation (reusing waste heat) and landfill methane plants are part of the answer, as is cogeneration at pulp mills and other facilities. Solar and run-of-river hydro are part of the package. Research on gasification of coal (in which China now leads the pack) is a key component for some authorities. And most of all, we have to commit, each of us, to conserving electricity—because that’s always going to be the cheapest form of energy we can create.

Fortis Alberta is our electricity distributor. When we lose power here in rural southern Alberta, the company responds as quickly as it can, and the lineman who comes out to troubleshoot problems is also a member of our MD of Pincher Creek council. So I can heckle him about new subdivision plans while he resets the breaker on our power pole.

But when it comes to Alberta’s plan to bring more wind power online, I’m left with more questions than answers. It saddens me to think that in this province we can’t even get green energy right. We’re treating a renewable resource in a boom-or-bust way, the way we do fossil fuels. It’s obvious to me that the owners of “wind rights” (who granted these, by the way?), if not regulated, will continue to industrialize southwestern Alberta, without public awareness let alone consent, and proudly create the Fort McMurray of wind farms. How generous of Alberta to destroy its sublime landscape so California can have “green” energy.

As for the transmission lines, wiser people than yours truly have made it clear that we don’t need this massive overbuild. As a society, we need to speak out and stop this folly. For starters, here’s an outrageous suggestion for all you red-blooded power entrepreneurs: why don’t you pay for those lines yourselves, bill the cost to California and leave us out of it I suspect that if these companies were footing the bill, they’d examine the costs—and the need for the lines—a hell of a lot more carefully. And AltaLink, a.k.a. SNC-Lavalin: if you must build them, at least bury the damn things in the ground in sensitive areas, cleverly putting an end to wind and ice storm damage and 64 m high towers, and reducing your maintenance costs while preventing bird strikes and putting health fears to rest. Frontier days are over; it’s 2011, not 1911. Time to show some basic respect for rural Albertans, and for the land we love and cherish. 

Sid Marty has published five books of non-fiction and three of poetry, mostly on natural history. He and his wife live near Pincher Creek.

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