At the recent Globe conference, in an illuminating talk (literally, pun intended) energy guru Amory Lovins provided an analysis of how we have illuminated our homes over the last 200 years or so. We tend to forget how many energy sources have come and gone – from whale oil to kerosene to the electric light bulb. The fundamentals of the transition were consistent – we switch energy sources when something better comes along.
North American society stopped using whale oil in lamps not because of higher costs or a lack of supply. Kerosene was better. And so on. His last slide was of a child in a hut in Africa, without electricity, but lit by a small handheld solar light.
Lovins summarized the end of whale oil for lighting, “They ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.” (For those wanting more data and solutions, see Lovins’ 2011 book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era.)
It is largely the same point made decades ago by former Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani, “The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones.” Bronze tools were better.
We are already seeing a movement of investment away from coal, oil and gas. 2014 was the first year in which global investment in renewables outpaced global investment in fossil fuels. And 2015 was the second year in which investors moved to green energy.
Human society is now at the tipping point of a massive transition away from fossil fuels. While the primary driver for the shift is the threat of climate change, the benefits of such a change will touch on nearly every aspect of a better world. An end to fossil fuel dependence will have geo-political benefits. We will no longer fight wars over access to oil. Moving away from fossil fuels will undercut the power of some political actors we don’t like very much. It doesn’t take long to recall the dictators whose regimes were – and are – fueled by oil.
Our air will be cleaner, reducing deaths from respiratory illness. The rapid ramping up of wind, small-scale hydro, geo-thermal, tidal, photovoltaic solar and the infrastructure that serves them will employ hundreds of thousands of people in Canada – millions around the world.
Done right, a shift to renewables can democratize energy. The model of massive mega-projects with inefficient wires leading to homes and businesses could be a thing of the past. With this democratization to localized power sources, our economy can be far more resilient. The current monopolistic mega-utility model is so fragile that a single rogue tree branch shut down power to millions. Recall that massive outage on August 14, 2003. Over 55 million people in Canada and eight states in the United States were without power due to the failure to trim a tree in Ohio.
Imagine a more resilient distributed energy system. Denmark has succeeded in reducing waste of thermal energy by maximizing district energy. It mapped its thermal grid as well as its electricity grid and designed housing to benefit from waste heat from one building to warm others. It married its strong wind programme to local ownership of wind mills in housing cooperatives. When the wind generated electricity exceeds demand, the Danish wind power is sold to Norway where its energy system stores the wind power by using it to pump water into existing reservoirs. When Norway needs the power, it opens its sluices and the work of gravity allows a steady and reliable hydro-powered system to produce electricity. It is so elegant – homeowners owning wind power to sell to Norway to make hydro.
Globally, the signs are everywhere that we are on the cusp of a major shift to clean energy. In addition to the shift in investment dollars to renewable energy in 2014 and 2015, both years represent the first time in post-Industrial revolution history when economic performance unplugged from growth in Greenhouse gases. In other words, we may have peaked in emissions as growth in GHG stalled in the absence of a massive economic downturn.
China has shut down over 70 gigawatts of inefficient coal plants, while pledging to bring on stream 200 gigawatts of solar and 150 gigawatts of wind power by 2020. China hit its 2015 targets for renewable energy and these huge 2020 commitments appear to be real. (just a small reminder – a gigawatt is a billion watts.)
So where is Canada in all this? Under the previous conservative government, we put all our eggs in the bitumen basket. Canada is the only industrialized country and one of only a handful of countries in the world not to have joined the International Renewable Energy Agency when it was founded in 2009. We have lost precious years as other countries ramped up their technological capacity in clean and renewable energy. Even so, there are more jobs in Canada today, and were even before the price of a barrel of oil plummeted, in clean tech than in the oil sands. We need to grab this opportunity and get out in front of it for the benefit of the environment, but also for Canadian competitiveness and prosperity. We are far behind other countries.
The best way to catch up is to set ambitious goals to get all fossils out of electricity by 2025. This is doable. And it will spur development, employment and economic opportunities. It needs federal leadership in investing in massive upgrading and better linkages of our east-west electricity grids. It will also benefit from programmes that give consumers incentives to install their own renewable generating capacity. Solar panels should be a required feature of every new building, as well as maximum insulation, double-glazed windows and energy efficient furnaces, and heat pumps.
We also need to remove interprovincial trade barriers and more obscure disincentives. Does Hydro Quebec prefer to sell to New York than to the Maritimes because of the impact such sales have on its equalization payments?
By all means let’s support the Trudeau administration in its collaboration with other orders of government. But let’s also insist that collaboration has a healthy dose of political leadership. Provincial-territorial and federal conversations are not a replacement for decisive action. The federal government has scope and jurisdiction to start leading by example. Set the goals and meet them. The benefits to Canada’s economy and to our social capital are enormous.