Climate & Clean Energy | Blogs | David Suzuki Foundation

Trottier inventory points to inevitable low-carbon transition

2013-04-18T09:32:20Z

Portrait of Bill McKibben, author and activist. (Credit:Nancie Battaglia)

After reading the Trottier Project's Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada, what I find most striking about the results is how utterly unremarkable they are.

The findings on Canada's reserves of low-carbon energy are consistent with recent inventories of U.S. renewable energy assets. And the results are the same in Germany where, at a Canadian latitude, they're already generating huge amounts of renewable power.

What's remarkable is that we still go to great lengths to find deposits of filthy oil, when the wind blowing overhead somehow goes unnoticed day after day. While oil and coal are scattered in just a few places, the sun and wind are ubiquitous.

The good news about the Trottier Project report is its potential to put new pressure on Canada to continue an inevitable transition, from a petro-state toward something very different. All the evidence--on the rising tide of climate change, on the falling costs of low-carbon technologies, on the shining potential of a green economy--shows that the tar sands are the last gasp of an earlier era. But now, it's decision time, because if we burn them, we help foreclose the possibility and promise of the next era.

By pointing to a new direction for Canada, An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy adds to the overwhelming weight of evidence that the profit motive of the fossil fuel industry stands in the way of the low-carbon transition.If we could work around that, we'd be well on our way.

The report shows that the technologies and supporting deployment strategies are already within our grasp. Our task now is to continue building the momentum.

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org, one of the world's leading low-carbon advocacy organizations.

Thinking environment this B.C. election? Share this video

2013-04-08T15:10:53Z

British Columbians no longer take for granted that the future will be better for the next generation. And that's not right.

Leading scientists agree: climate change is one of the biggest threats our communities face. The good news is that it's not too late, but we need to act now.

Solutions can only be effective if British Columbians demand action this provincial election from their political leaders. Projects that could make our communities greener and better places to live are being stalled, or worse, cut completely due to a lack of investment.

That's why the David Suzuki Foundation launched a partnership and this video, with five leading organizations, called Better Future BC. We're asking candidates to show strong leadership to meet our climate commitments, while improving our quality of life through a more effective and fair carbon tax. We're calling it the Better Future Fund.

B.C.'s carbon pollution tax is showing signs of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and the majority of British Columbians support it. As the carbon tax has already proven, having a financial incentive to switch to low-carbon energy solutions keeps British Columbia economically competitive, drives innovation and provides thousands of new jobs that matter: now is the time to do even more.

If the province committed to increasing the carbon tax by $5 per tonne of pollution on all fossil fuels, each year over the next four years, we'd be investing in a brighter future for all British Columbians. For those paying at the gas pumps, that means an increase of just over a penny each of those four years. Pooling our pennies and closing the loophole that gives industrial polluters, like oil and gas companies, a free pass to pollute, will let the province generate up to $1 billion a year in new revenue: revenue to pay for transit, retrofits and support for renewable energy options, among other areas.

Want to make this a reality? So does David Suzuki. Share this video and help us show our politicians that British Columbians demand strong environmental leadership on election day.

Join us and learn more: www.betterfuturebc.ca

Download the David Suzuki Foundation's BC election kit

Low-carbon solutions and offsets: Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater

2013-04-08T09:11:50Z

(Credit: hern42 via Foter)

The B.C. Auditor General's report on the province's carbon neutral policy raises important questions about the effectiveness of carbon offsets. The report concludes that two of the biggest offset projects were not as worthy of offsets as previously believed. This has led to many legitimate questions about the value of the offset regime and of rewarding private companies like oil and gas majors with public dollars, when some projects demonstrate questionable benefits to the environment.

The justification for offsets is that they can offer a less-expensive way to reduce emissions by broadening emissions reductions to actors outside of the carbon neutral requirement and then allowing those actions (which are cheaper to achieve) to be used by the institutions covered by the requirement. Companies facing high costs to reduce their own emissions can invest in lower-cost initiatives elsewhere that achieve the same climate benefit. In practice, offset project developers can employ a new forestry practice or build a low-emission energy project and demonstrate that fewer emissions were emitted because of them. They should also be able to prove that the project would not have been economically viable without the sale of (and revenue it receives from) its carbon credits.

However, the Auditor General concluded that while it's a nice theory, it hasn't been the case in practice. Offset projects in the B.C. government's portfolio were not as leading-edge as they purported to be, and the offset payments were a layer of cream on top of viable business models. In short, the projects would have been undertaken anyway, so the payments were unnecessary. As a result, most offsets do not actually represent credible emission reductions. This is the problem with offsets: it's incredibly difficult to prove what type of action is really the result of the payment received.

The response, however, has been to paint the offset requirement as a boondoggle. Tit-for-tat shots have been launched between the offset administrator, Pacific Carbon Trust and the Office of the Auditor General, and between B.C.'s political parties. Many climate policy experts are weighing in as well, slamming the policy. Criticism has spread from the offset requirement to B.C.'s carbon policy in general. CTV even ran a ridiculously erroneous headline implying that the Auditor General was slamming the carbon tax. And many of the comments generated after the report came out cited how ineffective B.C.'s carbon policy was. Now the Liberals, days later, have announced that they plan to freeze the carbon tax. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What the report didn't describe was just how influential the offset requirement was in getting public institutions covered by the net-zero commitment to change their behaviour. Instead of paying $55 per tonne of carbon pollution (when combining the B.C. carbon tax and the $25 per tonne offset credits), many public institutions have decided to invest in modernizing their facilities in leading-edge energy-efficient technologies that reduce their emissions internally.

Take Vancouver Coastal Health. It operates 200 buildings, mostly clinics and hospitals in Metro Vancouver. These buildings emit 120,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually with their natural gas boilers and heating systems. On top of the $30 per tonne carbon tax they pay on natural gas (which adds 63 per cent to the cost of gas), VCH also pays an additional $25, making the carbon price effectively $55 per tonne. VCH's total carbon price incentive is $6.6 million a year and the offset requirement is $3 million per year. VCH has a real incentive to use systems that are less carbon intensive and is evaluating those opportunities. What the offset requirement did was strengthen the financial incentive for the public sector to lead on carbon solutions and energy-saving technologies. VCH's learning by doing -- system integration, deployment and stakeholder relations and other best practices -- can be disseminated to many businesses and organizations to help them lower their costs and reduce the challenges of implementation.

But it may not be fair to expose only public institutions to this higher price. If they have to do it, why not everyone? Ultimately, this gets into the murky world of politics and tradeoffs. Sometimes it's okay for government to lead, to set a higher standard than businesses or households. Government has more power and ability to do so. One powerful policy lever available to government is "procurement", or choosing what it purchases. The carbon-neutral requirement was a procurement policy in a way; it required the public sector to lead in the province.

Sometimes we need to walk before we run when it comes to big transitions to cleaner alternatives in our energy systems. For government to take the lead isn't preposterous or inequitable in the long run. In the end, we're concerned about effectively and efficiently reducing emissions. The offset requirement looks like it's a dead duck, but a stronger carbon price incentive for the public sector is working for all British Columbians. It helps modernize our public sector buildings, reduce carbon pollution and save on energy in the future.

The reconfigured grid in a low-carbon energy future

2013-04-05T03:39:45Z

The Trottier Energy Futures Project's Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that our supplies of sustainable, low-carbon energy will be more than enough to meet our needs through 2050.

But one of the biggest questions is how to get that energy from there to here.

As the TEFP team worked on the first-ever comprehensive inventory of the country's sustainable energy resources, we realized we had to rein in the raw numbers. With insolation of 130 watts per square metre through much of southern Canada, the solar resource alone exceeds all our foreseeable energy demand. With capacity factors as high as 30 to 50 per cent in some parts of the country, wind's contribution to meeting Canada's energy needs in 2050 is not constrained by the size of the resource.

Even wave power could theoretically exceed the country's total energy demand.

All of this is good news, possibly even great news. But it doesn't tell us very much about what a 2050 energy system might look like.

From supply sources to system

One of the most important takeaways from the Inventory is the need for an integrated energy system that combines individual technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable energy services. With the electrification of space heat, personal transportation and some industrial processes that prevail in many low-carbon energy scenarios, a decarbonized grid will depend much more heavily on a larger number of smaller, distributed sources.

Until recently, energy analysts believed electric power systems could only draw about 20 per cent of their total supply from distributed sources without compromising reliability, not to mention affordability. But the Inventory captured two recent developments that will transform future energy systems:

•Renewable electricity costs, particularly for wind and solar photovoltaics, have been plummeting, making affordable, low-carbon electricity a realistic prospect.
•The 2012 Renewable Electricity Futures Study by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) showed that "non-dispatchable" renewables--solar and wind resources that can't be turned on and off to match fluctuating system demand--can supply up to 50 per cent of U.S. electricity needs by 2050.

Building the smart grid

With raw resources that are practically limitless, Canada's use of solar and wind will still be constrained by our ability to integrate them into the daily operation of the grid. In an energy-efficient, low-carbon Canada, with total electricity demand of 600 TWh (a terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours) and non-dispatchable renewables limited to 50 per cent of that total, solar and wind could each supply 150 TWh without approaching their technical potential.

But today's electricity grid, an antiquated system designed to serve a more limited network of larger, centralized supply sources, is not the high-tech web that will hold a low-carbon energy system together. The "smart" electricity grid of the future will use information technologies to balance a wider range of supply sources, energy storage, interprovincial transfers of electricity, and a wide variety of energy management and efficiency tools.

That grid will combine:
•Dispatchable and non-dispatchable generation
•Conventional renewable and non-renewable generation
•Energy storage
•Inter-grid transfers
•Responsive demand
•A transmission and distribution infrastructure that supports a high degree of connectivity and multi-directional flows of energy and information.

A low-carbon energy transition will call for significant capital investments in storage, transmission infrastructure and the backup capacity required to ensure the continuous, reliable electricity supply that Canadians need and take for granted. But this is actually an ideal moment to invest in the future electricity grid: the existing one is due for an overhaul, so a smart grid strategy could mean redirecting some of those investments with a reconfigured system in mind.

As with so many other elements of low-carbon energy futures, the economic gains and job creation flowing from smart grid investment may show up in unexpected places. Keynote speakers at utility conferences these days are as likely to be from Google or IBM as from Edison or Westinghouse. At one recent public forum, we heard the suggestion that IT infrastructure specialists who lost their jobs after the dot.com bust might find a new home--and fascinating new challenges--in smart grid development. Best of all, with the right commitment of policy and capital, the amount of work to be done between now and 2050 makes it very unlikely that those jobs will go away.

Download a copy of An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada.

Canada has no shortage of low-carbon energy

2013-03-27T13:18:16Z

Solar photovoltaic and wind energy could each provide 150 terawatt-hours of electricity per year by 2050— half of Canada’s current electricity consumption. (Credit: franky242 via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If anything limits Canada's transition to a low-carbon energy system, it will be integration, economics, and politics, not the lack of energy itself.

An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada, the Trottier Energy Futures Project's second research report, shows that Canada will have no shortage of renewable fuels and electricity by mid-century. But our ability to hit an 80 per cent target for reducing our energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will depend on an integrated energy system that combines individual technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable energy services.

We're often told there are no substitutes for the high-quality energy that fossil fuels supply. At the same time, we're told fossil fuel reserves are depleting and leading to ever-higher prices. We're told renewables can't compete with the reliability and versatility of fossil fuels, wind farms would have to be massive, biofuels would reach some unimaginable scale, and solar power arrays would have to cover vast tracts of land, just to eat into our demand for fossil fuels.

So the Inventory research addressed two basic questions: Whether Canada will have enough low-carbon energy to meet its energy demand in 2050, and what the implications of a transition to low-carbon sources would be.

Any country's raw renewable energy potential is essentially a function of land area. With the second-largest land mass in the world, Canada is endowed with an enormous amount of renewable energy -- so enormous that the raw numbers are almost meaningless in any practical energy scenario. In theory, enough solar energy lands on Canada to supply all our energy in any conceivable scenario. With our long coastlines, the theoretical potential of wind, wave, and tidal energy is practically limitless. Even with a finite annual stock of raw material, all our available wood cut, agricultural residues, and biomass waste would supply 70 per cent of the energy we currently consume in Canada, although only a fraction of that would be available as a sustainable energy feedstock.

So it's good to know that the availability of raw resources won't limit Canada's embrace of low-carbon energy futures.

The more interesting question is how much of that raw potential can be turned into actual, delivered energy. The answer depends on the cost of harnessing the energy, the challenge of integrating it into the existing system, and for bioenergy in particular, the sustainability of the source materials and the ecosystems that support it. These and other factors make a precise figure for Canada's low-carbon energy supplies a moving target.

The Inventory concluded that solar photovoltaic (PV) energy and wind could each provide 150 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year (540 petajoules, or PJ, from each source) by 2050. That's half of Canada's current electricity consumption. Hydroelectricity could supply more than 100 TWh, about 45 per cent more than current generation, and some of the estimates indicate no need for large, new dams or their environmental impacts. If bioenergy supplied another 3000 PJ of energy, that would represent a four-fold increase over our current use.

But it would take a concerted effort from industry and government, plus greater engagement from ratepayers and citizens, to make it happen. To hit the low-carbon target, production would have to increase 15 per cent per year for solar PV, seven per cent per year for wind, four per cent per year for biomass, and one per cent per year for hydro. In total, Canada could produce 6000 PJ of carbon-free energy -- a sizeable amount, but still much less than our current consumption of 10,000 PJ. Left unfettered, energy consumption will continue to rise as our population increases and the economy grows.

All of which points to a challenge that underlies any low-carbon energy scenario: To achieve an 80 per cent GHG reduction, Canada will require an energy system in which fuels and electricity are both produced and consumed much more efficiently than they are now. This implies not only a transition in which our energy technologies are transformed, but also a fundamental shift in the underlying habits, behaviours, policies, and practices that shape our energy use. It'll take significant changes in the physical shape of our society -- and in the decisions outside the energy system that determine our urban, transport, communications, manufacturing, shipping, and industrial systems -- to hit the 80 per cent target.

The Trottier Energy Futures Project is dedicated to addressing these challenges and outlining the path forward to a low-carbon energy system.An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that the renewable energy resources will be available to us, but that's just the beginning of the story, not the end.

A transition in petroleum's future?

2013-03-08T04:00:19Z

(Credit: domdeen via FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

As U.S. President Barack Obama moves closer to a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, the dire warnings about the future of Canada's petroleum resources are reaching a fever pitch.

But alongside the familiar arguments about buying oil from friends instead of enemies (for the U.S.) and sustaining a cornerstone of the national economy (for Canada), there's a new line of attack that almost sounds perverse.

When Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi spoke up for Keystone [download podcast] on CBC's The House a couple of weeks ago, one of his more memorable arguments was that Canada has only a small window of opportunity to fully develop the Alberta oil sands before a decarbonizing energy system forces us to leave a great economic opportunity forever untapped.

At first, I thought Nenshi was offering up a soft toss for green-energy advocates to hit out of the ballpark. Think about it: If Henry Ford is laying waste to your established business in horse-drawn carriages, do you try for another record sales year for horseshoes, or bow to the inevitable and begin converting your stock? (Horseshoes, eh? How lucky do you feel?)

As our managing director, Ralph Torrie, points out, this isn't the first time we've heard a use-it-or-lose-it argument for a specific energy megaproject. For example, liquefied natural gas (LNG) proponents might warn that an export terminal has to be approved and built immediately, before other sources outbid Canadian suppliers in Asian markets. But if the market is that volatile, a quick decision may lead to a different kind of risk if it misses factors that will make the contract uncompetitive within the amortized life of the project.

But the other flaw in Nenshi's argument is the assumption that a low-carbon future will mean the end of the fossil fuel industry.

In the Trottier Project's modelling and analysis so far, oil and gas production doesn't disappear. Without major advances in carbon capture and storage technology, an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would mean cutting fossil fuel production and consumption to a fraction of today's levels. But that fraction would still be a part of the energy mix, and there would still be money to be made serving specialty markets that represented the highest and best uses for a complex, irreplaceable resource.

So the industry as we know it would be transformed, just as our civilization has shifted its relationship with another well-known natural resource. The way we buy, sell and value gold has changed fundamentally since the days when the Egyptians and Incas used it as an everyday decoration: Today's gold traders can make a good living because they've adopted a business model based on scarcity, in which their product is measured by the ounce and assigned a market value that matches its limited availability.

Considering the series of once-in-a-civilization coincidences that made the petroleum era possible, it might not be a bad idea to cultivate a similar attitude toward our remaining fossil resources.

In a business frame in which the hydrocarbon industry is expected to grow or die, investors are beginning to fret that "oil and gas multinationals could lose up to 60% of their market value if the world cuts its carbon emissions to limit climate change," according to a February 3 report on the Responding to Climate Change (RTCC) blog.

Citing a report by HSBC Global Research, a top-five global bank with more than $2.5 trillion in assets, RTCC listed Statoil, BP, Total and Shell as oil giants that would be left with unburnable assets in a low-carbon future. But "a bigger risk is that reduced demand for fossil fuels could force down oil and gas prices, meaning that between 40 and 60 per cent of leading fossil fuel firms' current market capitalization--essentially their net worth--could be at risk."

If HSBC is right, and if the current momentum for climate change action translates into real results, the fossil fuel industry is in for major shifts in its business model--but the industry has a future. Between now and 2050, the Trottier Project's time horizon, the sustainable prosperity of Naheed Nenshi's city and province may well depend on whether the industry gets out in front of the transition ahead, or continues fighting tooth and nail for today's energy economy.

What's a barrel of oil really worth?

2013-02-28T04:00:17Z

Credit: Renjith Krishnan via FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

What is a barrel of oil really worth?

The answer starts out sounding like a joke that begins, "An oil producer, an economist, a consumer and an ethicist walk into a bar..."

The oil producer would say the value of the barrel is the cost of getting it out of the ground and cleaning it up for further production, plus a reasonable return on investment and risk.

The economist would reply that it's worth whatever the producer can get for it.

The consumer might conclude that the barrel of oil is worth nothing in itself. The value it holds is in its contribution to delivering the end-use services like comfort and mobility that people need and want.

The ethicist would say the answer depends on how our appropriation of the oil will affect future generations.

But if a scientist pulled up a chair and joined our little group, she just might conclude that a barrel of oil is priceless, considering the once-in-a-civilization combination of resources and coincidence that made it possible. Each event was unlikely enough in its own right. The sequence is never likely to repeat. And for all of humanity's formidable technological prowess, we could never in a billion years replace the world's reservoirs of crude oil.

• Crude oil originated as organic matter, mainly plankton and algae from ancient marine environments that existed tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. It took 3,000 tonnes of organic matter, mostly dead plankton, to produce one barrel of oil.
• An unlikely mix of conditions transformed the plankton into petroleum. As the plankton died and settled, about two percent converted to kerogen, a carbon-rich petroleum precursor. After a million to 10 million years, the kerogen became buried deep enough, but not too deep, at the pressure and temperatures necessary for petroleum to form. Then, over thousands of years, some fraction of the carbon in the kerogen converted to petroleum.
• In the final stage, when conditions were right, the petroleum began to migrate ever so slowly, until some small fraction encountered an impermeable cap rock or trap that caused it to accumulate in what we call a petroleum reservoir.

Petroleum is a cornerstone of Canada's economy, and it will still be a factor through 2050, the target date for an 80 per cent reduction in Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the Trottier Project's modelling and analysis so far, fossil fuel production doesn't disappear. However, by 2050, a large share of today's market for oil and gas could be offset by a steady increase in energy productivity that has already begun reshaping our energy economy over the last 40 years. Much of the remaining demand could then be met by distributed, renewable sources that are either low-carbon or carbon-free.

Will oil lose its value in such a future? Not in a million years. It may be the end of the industry as we know it. But it's interesting to think about which business opportunities would be foreclosed, and which ones would open up, if we simply asked ourselves what a barrel of oil is really worth.

It took exacting conditions and physical geology to refine trillions of tonnes of organic matter over millions of years, just to make the petroleum era possible. If we kept that in mind when we prepared to drill a well or dig a hole to get at the stuff, we might be more inclined to save it for its very best, most irreplaceable uses. The result would be a very different fossil fuel industry operating in a transformed, largely decarbonized energy economy. But there would still be business opportunities galore, in fossil fuels and in the wider energy sector.