The days of infinite growth in Alberta’s oilsands are over with the Alberta government’s blockbuster climate change announcement on Sunday, which attracted broad support from industry and civil society.

“This is the day that we start to mobilize capital and resources to create green jobs, green energy, green infrastructure and a strong, environmentally responsible, sustainable and visionary Alberta energy industry with a great future,” Premier Rachel Notley said. “This is the day we stop denying there is an issue, and this is the day we do our part.”

Notley and Environment & Parks Minister Shannon Phillips released a 97-page climate change policy plan, which includes five key pillars.

1) Carbon will be priced economy-wide at $30/tonne by 2018.

2) Coal-fired power plants will be phased out by 2030.

3) Oilsands emissions will be capped at 100 megatonnes (Mt) per year (recent Environment Canada figures predicted a 2020 output of 103 Mt from the sector), which amounts to allowing current construction to go ahead, but that’s it. That means to expand production beyond current projects, per barrel emissions will need to be reduced.

4) Methane emissions from oil and gas operations will be cut by 45 per cent in 2025.

5) 30 per cent of all electricity will be generated by renewables by 2030.

It is a staggeringly significant proposal, one that far surpasses anything the former Progressive Conservative government imagined in the course of its 43-year reign. The announcement — delivered at Edmonton’s Telus World of Science — was benefitted by appearances from CEOs of Suncor, Canadian Natural Resource Ltd. (CNRL), Shell and Cenovus, something far-right activist Ezra Levant dismissed by alleging the massive energy companies “don't represent the industry.”

Environmental groups such as the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada were also on stage. Getting all of those players in support of one climate strategy is a huge testament to the leadership of University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach, who chaired the climate change panel.

Climate Change Policy Plan Garners Broad Support

With the exception of the rabidly conservative Wildrose Party and former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, it seemed every serious player in politics and industry celebrated the announcement. The NDP-affiliated Broadbent Institute, headquartered in Toronto, concluded: “On a public policy Richter scale, Alberta’s new Climate Leadership Plan is an 11.”

Shell Canada announced that “these measures provide predictability and certainty and will help ensure that producers can responsibly develop and grow this significant Canadian resource while also addressing global concerns about climate change.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Notley in a tweet now favourited over 1,300 times as “a very positive step in the fight against climate change.”  Political blogger Dave Cournoyer accurately dubbed it a “pigs fly” situation.

All of this means a whole lot given the impending Paris Climate Change Conference (COP 21).

Canada ranks 15th out of 17th countries for greenhouse gas emissions according to the Conference Board of Canada, with Alberta contributing 36 per cent of national emissions in 2013 despite only accounting for 11 per cent of the country’s population.

The expected spike in oilsands expansion was widely expected to nullify all other sources of emissions reductions in the Canada. The fact that Alberta, and by extension Canada, is now going into COP 21 with a detailed plan to address the province’s largest source of emissions – oilsands development and coal-fired power plants – speaks volumes about the desire to be taken seriously on the world stage.

Climate Plan May Increase Social Licence for Oilsands Operations

Another component that ostensibly drove oil execs to hop on the green bandwagon was the need to accrue “social licence,” or the support required to build pipelines to export its products. The veto of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline represents what happens when such social licence isn’t secured.

By addressing runaway emissions, Alberta-based companies might actually stand a chance to build infrastructure like the Energy East pipeline, which would transport 1.1 million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta to Quebec and New Brunswick every day.

“The province’s climate strategy may allow our sector to invest more aggressively in technologies to further reduce per barrel emissions in our sector and do our part to tackle climate change,” said Tim McMillan, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

“We encourage the province to follow a balanced approach, recognizing that our sector can only become a global supplier of responsibly produced oil and natural gas if we are competitive on the world stage.”

The fight over pipelines is unlikely to dissipate. While Sunday’s announcement was a giant step in the right direction, it’s still not enough to avoid catastrophic global warming, according to a statement from Greenpeace.

“These policies are important first steps, but much bigger emission reductions will be needed for Alberta to do its part to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius,” Alberta climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema said.

Hudema also noted that the province still has no short or long-term emission reduction targets.

“Targets give an important signal to business, let the world know where Alberta is headed, and help ensure that direction leads to the reductions that science and equity demand,” he said.

The Pembina Institute has historically supported a higher carbon tax than what was proposed on Sunday – with $40/tonne in 2016, $50/tonne in 2017 and $60/tonne in 2018 — but the plan is an indisputably major upgrade from the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER), which taxed Alberta’s largest emitters (103 at last count) at the equivalent of $1.80/tonne.

George Hoberg, professor in the forest department at the University of British Columbia, notes there’s still plenty of work to be done but that: “Today is a day for celebration. Alberta has bent its carbon emissions curve, and provided a lever to Canada to show real climate leadership.”

Ultimately, the future of Canada’s environmental reputation may rely on the work that Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna complete during and after the Paris conference. But Sunday’s announcement out of Alberta sets quite the standard.

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Renewable energy — energy from natural sources that replenish themselves at the same rate they are used — accounted for sixty-seven per cent of Canada’s electricity generation in 2013. Biomass, wind, and solar power nearly made up a quarter of all renewable energy generation (heating, fuels and electricity) in Canada last year. 

Unfortunately there is no comparable national data available in Canada from any other year, so it is hard to know just how much Canada's renewable energy sector has grown. The findings for 2013 come from a newly expanded renewable energy database launched earlier this year by the Canadian Industrial Energy End-Use Data Analysis Centre (CIEEDAC), part of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. It is the first of its kind in Canada.*

“Financial analysts, renewable energy developers, policy-makers need solid, reliable and recent data on renewable energy in Canada to know what is happening in the sector,” Dan Woynillowicz policy director at Clean Energy Canada says.

“The irony of Canada calling itself an energy superpower is how difficult it is to get up-to-date accurate data on Canadian energy production here. Some of the better statistics actually come from the U.S.,” Woynillowicz told DeSmog Canada.

The Centre’s Renewable Energy in Canada 2013 report prepared for the Department of Natural Resources admits the database is only an “overview” and much work needs to be done to improve the quality of data it collects: 

“Many questions remain about the extent and nature of renewable energy production in Canada. In this regard, a number of opportunities exist to expand and refine the database and analysis,” the report states.

Ontario Leads in Wind and Solar, B.C. in Biomass, Nova Scotia in Tidal

The Centre estimates eleven percent of Canada’s capacity for energy production came from renewable energy last year, and most of this was in electricity generation. The lion’s share of Canada's renewable energy capacity is in waterpower or hydroelectricity — seventy-six per cent — followed by biomass (15 per cent), wind (8 per cent) and solar (1 per cent). 

Ninety-nine per cent of Canada’s solar power capacity was constructed in Ontario last year. Ontario led all other provinces in wind power installation ahead of Quebec and Alberta. B.C. was Canada’s number one producer of energy from biomass (mainly wood waste) and Nova Scotia was the only province to build new tidal power facilities on its shores.

The Nightmare of Collecting Data on Canada’s Renewables Industry

The renewable energy sector does not have its own version of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers or CAPP, a well-funded private sector-association producing statistics on the oil and gas industry on a regular basis. The creation of the renewables database was only made possible when supporting funds became available through Natural Resources Canada.    

An energy analyst trying to get a national picture of Canada’s renewable sector previously had to investigate data produced by the provinces and the limited information provided by Statistics Canada. This data varied in the units of measurement used to calculate energy and time periods analyzed making it all the more difficult to piece together a national mosaic for the renewable energy sector in Canada.

“Its like comparing apples to oranges,” Woynillowicz says from Vancouver.

“The database is a good step forward but it really only scratches the surface,” Woynillowicz told DeSmog Canada.

Professor Michael C. Moore, an energy economist at the University of Calgary published in 2012 his proposal for creating a Canadian version of the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. agency “collects, analyzes, and disseminates independent and impartial energy information” for the American public and is even used as a source for Canadian energy statistics.

Two years later neither the federal government nor any provincial governments have shown interest moving forward on creating a Canadian Energy Information Organization.

“It’s a thorough, well constructed proposal,” Woynillowicz says of Moore’s proposal.

“The proposed two and a half million dollar a year contribution from the federal government is about one tenth the amount that Natural Resources Canada will spend on advertising over the next two years,” Woynillowicz of Clean Energy Canada told DeSmog.

Canada moved up to fifth place in the world for doing business in the renewable energy sector according to this month’s renewable energy country attractiveness index (RECAI) conducted by Ernst & Young. Ontario’s green energy policy has helped lift Canada’s global clean energy ranking.

The Canadian Industrial Energy End-Use Data Analysis Centre believes its renewable energy database can improve by exploring the economic costs and benefits associated with renewable energy, expanding regional reporting, validating the quality of data coming from renewable facilities and making the database more representative of the diverse sources of energy in the sector.

Maintaining and improving the database will depend on critical funds from Natural Resources Canada, although some concerns have been raised regarding the current federal government's low-priority view of data collection.

* An early version of this article stated the CIEEDAC database was new, rather than recently expanded. 

Image Credit: Wind turbines photos by Chris Cook (some rights reserved), all other images provided by the Canadian Industrial Canadian Energy End-Use Data Analysis Centre.

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This is the first installment of a three-part series. Read Part 2, Is the German Energy Transition Everything It’s Cracked Up to Be? and Part 3, Building a Popular Front Against Climate Change.

Last Sunday, German voters handed Chancellor Merkel a comfortable mandate for a third term in office in elections billed as “the most boring federal elections ever.” 

The victory of Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) was nearly a foregone conclusion. With Merkel’s hardline policies on the Euro safeguarding the German economy in the midst of a Europe wracked by crisis, and her main rivals the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) failing to offer any serious alternative, German voters saw no reason to try any new experiments.   

But behind the bland façade of German prosperity major changes are afoot. What the predictable election results don’t show is the ongoing long-term transformation of the German energy sector, referred to as the Energiewende or energy transition. Building on the support of an unlikely coalition ranging from radical environmentalists to conservative CDU/CSU voters, the Energiewende aims at the kind of progress on energy and climate that most western governments argue is both politically and economically unfeasible.

The headline figures on the energy transition thus far are fairly impressive: renewable energy in Germany now accounts for 25% of total electricity production. 65% of the electricity generated by renewables comes from a decentralized network of small-scale producers, ranging from individuals to cooperatives to small communities. The official government target is 80% renewable electricity by 2050, with some expecting that number to be closer to 100%.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

According to German climate justice activist and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation energy researcher Tadzio Müller, these numbers are an important strategic indicator for the global environmental movement. “What the Energiewende shows is that ecologically and socially relevant transformative effects can be achieved at something much smaller than the global scale,” says Müller.

For Müller, the 2009 COP15 conference in Copenhagen was a watershed moment for activists fighting to stop climate change. Despite intense pressure from tens of thousands of activists on the streets and close media scrutiny from around the world, the conference ended in failure. Understanding that failure means rethinking the framing of climate change as an issue that activists can effectively tackle at the international scale.

“Projecting energy issues at the global level, as environmental organizations have done since the Rio Summit in 1992, has turned out to be a dead end,” argues Müller. “We simply won’t get an international climate agreement because economic growth is so strongly tied to fossil fuels. More economic growth means more emissions.”

In spite of his critique of the global framework for climate politics, Müller insists on the importance of a global perspective. Müller is a veteran activist of the anti-globalization movement, more accurately described by its French name, altermondialisme, or the movement for a different globalization: one created in the interests of people rather than profit.

Anti-globalization protests coalesced around international summits such as G8/G20 meetings and WTO negotiations. Müller argues that these summits functioned as global flashpoints where something was truly at stake, such as whether developing countries would be subject to punitive terms in so-called free trade agreements. Choosing these summits as a target for protest meant choosing a frame in which activists could potentially exert real influence on the direction of international development.

By contrast, international climate summits such as this year’s upcoming COP19 in Warsaw, Poland do little more than stage the appearance of meaningful negotiations. With rising emissions hard-wired into the ever-expanding global economy, national representatives have little room for manoeuver at the international level without altering the global economic paradigm of endless growth.

Müller’s point is not that we should accept defeat and resign ourselves to the inevitability of climate change. Instead, he argues that climate activists can be more effective by focusing their efforts where they have the greatest strategic leverage. For now, that means the local, regional and national level.

Germany is a case in point. For years, members of the German environmental movement engaged in local struggles over issues like nuclear waste storage and public control of utilities. While they may not have looked like much on their own, taken together these struggles transformed the broader social consensus on energy issues. As a result, climate denialism is essentially non-existent in Germany, and the massive expansion of renewable energy enjoys the support of all major political parties.

As we will see in the following installments in this series, the Energiewende is no magic bullet for the climate. Victories at the local level are important, but the challenge of scaling up to create a global movement for climate justice remains. As a step in that direction, we can see the energy transition as part of an ongoing process that is changing not only the way Germany produces electricity, but also how social power is distributed across German society.

“The Energiewende can reduce emissions and change the social playing field because it can generate more community power vis-à-vis corporate power,” says Müller. The more utilities are brought under public control and the more electricity is generated by small-scale producers, the less power large corporations will have over the energy sector. Beyond the transition to green energy, it’s this social transformation that should make Canadian climate activists stand up and take notice.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 in this series.

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Canada has many times more energy in untapped wind, solar and hydro resources than it ever will from the Alberta tar sands a new report released today finds.

"Canada could be the world's green-energy superpower, the potential is nearly limitless," says Tyler Bryant, an Energy Policy Analyst at Vancouver's David Suzuki Foundation. "We have more than enough to meet our current and future needs," Bryant said in interview.

In fact Canada has far more green energy than it could ever use according to the report "An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada."

"This is a long-overdue look at how much green energy potential Canada has," he said.

The report is part of the Trottier Energy Futures Project, partnership between David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Trottier Family Foundation. The project is looking at how Canada could reduce its energy-related carbon emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050, based on emissions in 1990.

"There are no physical limitations to prevent Canada from becoming a low-carbon society," said energy expert Ralph Torrie, managing director of The Trottier Energy Futures Project.

"Our renewable energy resources are enormous," Torrie told DeSmog Canada.

The biggest challenge is integrating all this largely de-centralized renewable energy into existing electricity grid. However the 'smart grid of the future' already has its toe in the door. Companies like IBM and Google see energy use as a 'data problem' and are investing heavily in smart energy technologies he says.

Significant investments are also going into energy storage systems including new catalysts that use renewable energy to cost-effectively make hydrogen fuel.

Canada has it's own energy storage system in the form of 58,000 square kilometres of hydro reservoirs. At night when energy demand declines wind power could pump water to top-up reservoirs lowered to produce hydro during the day, says Bryant.

Other countries are moving quickly to pollution-free green energy. Iceland has 81 percent renewable energy. Scotland has a mandate to achieve 100 percent renewable power supply by 2020. Denmark passed laws requiring that the whole energy supply – electricity, heating/cooling, and transportation – be met by renewable resources.

The Trottier report did not look at costs. Cost estimates are difficult to do more than a few years into the future given the rapid changes in energy use and technology. For instance, energy use has been in decline the last few years in Ontario and other provinces. Canadians are also driving less every year. Energy consumption predictions are also very challenging says Tyler pointing out that in the 1970s Natural Resources Canada energy experts projected that Canada would need to build a hundreds nuclear reactors a year to keep pace with energy demand today.

Canada's size and relatively small population are big advantages in becoming a low-carbon energy society. Few realize Canada has almost as much solar energy potential as the US. Germany, the industrial powerhouse with more than twice as many people, gets nearly five percent of its total electricity from solar. Not only is it a smaller country it has far less solar potential given its generally gloomy weather — think winter in Vancouver. 

Canada's wind energy potential is far higher than Germany or the US — literally too-big-to-measure when offshore wind is considered. Canada's half of electricity from hydropower and could get a great deal more from a combination of large and small scale hydro projects.

Geothermal is a barely touched energy source. Ground-source heat pumps for buildings are only small part of this resource. There is enough heat in the ground in parts of Alberta and BC to generate thousands of megawatts of steam-generated electricity and make money doing it the report found.

Wave and tidal are other too-big-to-measure resources. Canada already has the 20-MW Annapolis Tidal Station in Nova Scotia and new underwater turbines are being used in other countries.

Electric vehicles can reduce non-renewable gasoline and diesel use but it is unlikely long-distance transport trucks will be electrically powered says Torrie. Canada will need to produce biomass fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. Using non-food plant or woody material Canada could easily produce many times more biomass fuels than at present.

"This would have to be carefully managed to keep carbon emissions low and prevent damage to natural ecosystems," he says.

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