The deal’s effectiveness in putting a lid on methane pollution will depend on details that are still under development. But experts say Ottawa already traded away the equivalent of 53 million tonnes of carbon reductions last November, when it first signalled that it would allow Alberta to postpone methane controls from 2030 to 2035.

Methane carries about 84 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year period when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies methane reductions as one of the cheapest paths to the quickest, deepest greenhouse gas emission reductions by 2030.

The agreement in principle, released Wednesday, cements a five-year postponement in Ottawa’s 2030 methane target that first appeared in the November 2025 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Canada and Alberta. If the two governments can agree on an “outcome-based equivalency agreement” under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, Canada will stand down its own methane regulations in deference to Alberta’s.

The two governments have also agreed to identify an independent third party “to conduct methane modelling, analysis of emissions reductions, and to assess methane reduction results.” That provision is being hailed as an important step, a week after analysis by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute concluded that Alberta’s methane emissions are up to 90% higher than the province’s official estimate, which relies on self-reporting by industry.

The agreement is to take effect on January 1, 2027, following a 60-day consultation on the draft plan.

The methane equivalency agreement was one of several commitments in the Canada–Alberta MOU that were meant to be finalized by April 1. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith now says that other elements of the deal, including a proposed new oil pipeline to Canada’s West Coast, will be delayed beyond next week’s deadline.

Canadian Climate Institute (CCI) president Rick Smith declared the agreement in principle a “positive step forward.” He called the provision for an independent third party “an important approach to reinforce policy ambition and integrity, and help ensure the regulations cover the true extent of methane pollution levels from Alberta’s oil and gas sector.”

But he cautioned that “the final details of the equivalency agreement, and follow-through on the commitment to independent and transparent verification of outcomes, will be critical to determine the agreement’s success.”

CCI senior research associate Alison Bailie says she has confidence in the agreement’s focus on “looking at the Alberta numbers, not just accepting them,” adding that methane measurement technologies have improved in recent years – with some of the gains achieved by Emissions Reduction Alberta with funding from the province’s Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system. “That’s where I see the hope and the benefits of doing this properly,” she tells The Energy Mix. “It helps Alberta’s own companies,” creating a business case for methane controls in Canada and enabling them to position themselves for methane-abatement projects overseas.

Bailie adds that Canada has “tended to see greater emission reductions” when federal and provincial governments actually work together. “That can work really well,” she says. “We’d like to see more.”

Aly Hyder Ali, senior program manager of oil and gas at Environmental Defence Canada, calls the five-year delay an “unnecessary concession” that represents a “bad deal for everyone outside the oil patch.” Citing Pembina Institute modelling, he says the carve-out would pour 1.9 million extra tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, the equivalent of 53 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period – or far more over a 20-year span.

Amanda Bryant, manager of Pembina’s oil and gas program, agreed in a release that independent, third-party verification is a “vitally important and positive step,” allowing Alberta to “report its methane progress more credibly.” She said the agreement “signals an end to the roadblock that had been preventing progress on this crucial element of climate and energy policy,” enabling industry to “invest and hire with confidence to advance the next stage of methane mitigation work.”

But so far there’s no clarity on whether the “independent party” responsible for monitoring Alberta’s methane controls will rely on theoretical modelling or actual measurement of releases from oil and gas infrastructure, or on whose data the monitor will rely. Real measurement “will be vital, both for an effective response to climate change and to ensure ongoing access to major international natural gas markets that are demanding provably low-emissions-intensity fossil fuel imports, such as the European Union, South Korea, and Japan,” Bryant said.

Last week, a Pembina technical analysis flagged data and regulatory gaps in Alberta’s current approach to methane controls, resulting in actual emissions that have been up to 90% higher than official government figures.

“Alberta should not be afraid to modernize its measurement data and methods, including vehicle-based systems, aircraft and satellites to effectively reduce its methane emissions,” Bryant said at the time.

But Premier Smith may have a different take on what to expect from the independent third party. During an unrelated media conference Wednesday, she said the goal is to arrive at “a common set of facts” after “some other reports that have been put out there kind of put us at odds,” iPolitics reports.

The agreement in principle states that “should third party analysis determine that emissions are higher than expected, Alberta commits to take the necessary corrective actions.”

Mitchell Beer is publisher of The Energy Mix, a non-profit community news site and e-digest on climate change, energy and the shift off carbon. This article first appeared on The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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“With this new partnership, we will not stop until the goals of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Canada Strong are reached,” Carney said, citing the Hindi term for “self-reliant India.”

The agreement will see Saskatoon-based Camemco deliver nearly 22 million pounds of uranium fuel between 2027 and 2035, CBC reports. India currently has 25 nuclear reactors in operation, eight under construction, and plans to boost its nuclear capacity from 8.7 to 100 gigawatts by 2047, the national broadcaster adds.

A wide-ranging joint statement issued by Carney’s office also puts liquefied natural gas (LNG), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), crude oil and refined petroleum products at the centre of the expanded trade relationship.

Carney “framed this new course as not just a return to how things were but rather an ambitious revisioning of what the two Commonwealth countries can do together in an uncertain era marked by instability,” CBC writes. Just prior to his meeting with Modi, Carney said he hoped to secure a wider free trade agreement with India by the end of the year, possibly in time for a signing at this year’s G20 summit at a Trump property in Miami. The two leaders affirmed that timing after their one-on-one.

“With India positioned to be the largest contributor to incremental global energy demand growth over the next two decades, beyond its current position as the world’s third-largest oil consumer and fourth-largest LNG importer, both sides acknowledged the significant potential to further expand bilateral energy trade,” the joint statement declares. “This includes increased oil and LNG imports by India from Canada, as well as the supply of refined petroleum products from India to Canada. In this context, Canada reaffirmed its plans to expand heavy oil export infrastructure and supplies of LNG to the Indo-Pacific market through Canada’s stated goal of producing 50 million tonnes of LNG per year by 2030 and up to 100 million tonnes by 2040.”

The statement calls for broader cooperation “across clean energy and climate-related value chains, including renewable energy, hydrogen and its derivatives, biofuels, sustainable aviation fuel, battery storage, and electricity systems modernization, recognizing the central role of these sectors in advancing shared climate objectives and energy transition goals.” It says the two leaders also “underscored solutions for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) as a key area of cooperation, offering a significant opportunity for the sustainable production of energy and critical minerals.”

And it celebrates a “comprehensive institutional framework to advance bilateral collaboration across solar, wind, bioenergy, small hydro, energy storage, and capacity-building” while recognizing India’s “leadership and capacity in large-scale solar and grid-level energy storage technologies along with scalable models in rooftop solar and other forms of distributed renewable energy solutions.”

CBC has a list of smaller deals that were announced or re-announced this week, including a 1.2-million-tonne coal export contract for British Columbia–based Elk Valley Resources, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Canada will also join the 112-member International Solar Alliance, first conceived by India in 2015 and launched by India and France in 2017.

News coverage of the announcement has focused extensively on the warming of relations after the former Justin Trudeau government concluded and the Modi government denied that India had conducted foreign interference in Canada. “Touting an approach he calls ‘values-based realism,’” The Globe and Mail writes, Carney “has largely sidestepped questions over meddling by New Delhi in Canada, including the allegations it was behind the 2023 murder of a Canadian Sikh activist. Last year, a public inquiry report flagged India as the ‘second most active country engaging in electoral foreign interference in Canada’ after China.”

“But, with Carney at the helm, the relationship has become friendlier with much more diplomatic dialogue – with even more to come after the prime minister invited Modi to visit Canada sometime soon,” CBC reports.

Uranium sale has ‘implications’

Just ahead of Carney’s visit, India’s high commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik, said the country would be open to buying Canadian nuclear technology or taking an ownership stake in the country’s uranium mines. “We are willing to take whatever,” he told CBC. “Nuclear is a huge field in which we want to work together.”

The Canadian Press says Saskatchewan is the only province that exports uranium. And in New Delhi Monday, Premier Scott Moe declared it a “great day” for his province. “Saskatchewan’s always a big winner when it comes to export deals,” he said. “Saskatchewan will certainly benefit from the agreement signed today, but all Canadians benefit as well. I think that’s important for us to remember.”

In a Globe and Mail opinion piece in December, Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, and Erika Simpson, president of the Canadian Peace Research Association, raised the prospect that the uranium deal – then valued at $3.94 billion – would make it easier for India to divert some of its existing nuclear fuel stockpile for military use.

“India is not a routine customer,” they wrote. “It is a nuclear-armed state that has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the agreement meant to anchor global efforts against the spread of nuclear weapons. In selling it uranium, Canada appears willing to extend to India the kinds of benefits normally reserved for states that accept international inspections on all nuclear facilities and abide by NPT treaty obligations.”

With “one of the world’s largest stockpiles of civilian plutonium, separated from spent reactor fuel,” India could already produce as many as 2,686 nuclear weapons if it chose to redesignate the material for military use, Edwards and Simpson say. “Doing so would require only a political decision. The risk is not hypothetical. It sits just outside the boundaries of our public policy discussion.”

Mitchell Beer is publisher of The Energy Mix, a non-profit community news site and e-digest on climate change, energy and the shift off carbon. This article first appeared on The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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The post As the global oil industry contracts, Carney waits for pipeline developer appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On Tuesday and Wednesday in Berlin, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson launched a major LNG export push, including new port infrastructure under consideration in Churchill, Manitoba, and Montreal, with Hodgson saying that the first shipment could go out in “as little as five years.” Canada and Germany also signed a “joint declaration of intent” to cooperate on critical-mineral supply chains.

The announcement has Canada positioning itself as a key supplier of gas and critical minerals to Europe’s energy transition and resource security, with Carney pledging major investments in infrastructure to allow exports to Germany and beyond, Clean Energy Wire reports. Hodgson said industry proponents are talking about building pipeline and harbour infrastructure in time for a first shipment in “as little as five years” and developing it “in an environmentally responsible way.”

“I think you’re probably talking about five to seven years,” he told Politico EU in an interview Wednesday, adding that he’d been surprised by long-term interest from German industry in LNG supplies that are typically seen as climate-unfriendly. “They believe that there will be more LNG required and for longer as a transition fuel,” he said.

A ‘deeply irresponsible’ bet on European LNG markets

But independent analysts say there’s been little or no change in projections over the last few years that show a global natural gas glut on the horizon and demand going into permanent decline this decade – meaning limited if any export prospects in Germany by the time Canada could get new LNG projects up and running. “We currently see no specific projects on the Atlantic coast that are in the start-up or investment phase,” Andreas Schroeder, head of gas analytics at Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS) in Düsseldorf, told Clean Energy Wire.

With projects like Goldboro LNG and Atlantic Coast either abandoned or insufficiently advanced, Schroeder adds, it’s “difficult to imagine that Canada will be able to meet Germany’s wishes in the short term, but rather only after 2030. LNG export terminals are technically very complex projects with long lead times and high financial volumes.”

But by then, “in the medium and long term, we’re not anticipating an increase in gas demand, certainly not in Western Europe,” Pawel Czyzak, Europe program director at the Ember energy think tank, told The Energy Mix in an email Wednesday. The continent’s gas demand fell 17% between 2021 and 2024, spurred largely by the energy shock following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and projections show another 7% drop through 2030 as Europe electrifies its economy. That means the continent “is already heavily oversupplied towards 2030,” Czyzak says, and “that oversupply will get even more severe if the questionable fossil fuel imports from the EU-U.S. trade [and tariff deal] are implemented.”

Czyzak also casts doubt on the widely held view that artificial intelligence will drive up gas demand. In Europe, he says, there are already signs that data centres may be “moving outside of traditional hubs like Frankfurt towards grids that are less congested and more green,” in places like Scandinavia. “So we don’t anticipate Germany needing gas for AI specifically,” especially since heavier reliance on gas “would just ramp up electricity prices and push these data centres away even more.”

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Michael Sambasivam, Toronto-based senior analyst at Investors for Paris Compliance, says it’s “deeply irresponsible” to prioritize federal resources for an LNG terminal to serve the European market. “We’ve already seen European LNG demand drop from its peak, with significant resources targeting the decarbonization of its energy supply,” he tells The Mix, so “the fundamentals that have driven proposed LNG terminals on Canada’s East Coast to fail in the past remain. LNG is not cost-competitive with renewables, and glut projections suggest that any new eastern Canadian project will have a very hard time remaining viable through its lifespan.”

Against those risks, Sambasivam says, public subsidies for new LNG infrastructure “would mean further entrenching our economy in fossil fuels and placing stranded asset risk on the public books.” Hodgson’s office did not answer questions about this long-standing analysis.

Opening the door to LNG infrastructure

On Tuesday, Carney was focused on LNG as an opportunity, Clean Energy Wire writes. “The number one focus of this government is to build [energy] infrastructure, and particularly infrastructure that helps us deepen our partnership with our European partners and particularly Germany,” the prime minister said, during a news conference Tuesday with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “There is a huge range of immediate opportunities with respect to critical metals and minerals, and there are medium-term opportunities with respect to all forms of energy, including LNG and hydrogen.”

Asked whether the federal government would help finance any of the projects, Hodgson told media in Berlin there are tools at Ottawa’s disposal, such as the Canada Infrastructure Bank or the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund. Hodgson’s predecessor, Jonathan Wilkinson, had ruled out public support for new East Coast LNG infrastructure in 2022.

“I want to make it abundantly clear that the prime minister and I are not speaking in the abstract,” Hodgson added Wednesday in a speech at the Canadian embassy in Berlin. “This is about delivering real projects that strengthen German industry, create Canadian jobs and build transatlantic security. This is about selling Canadian resources to our allies, sooner rather than later.”

Hodgson placed the recently adopted Build Canada Act, previously Bill C-5, at the centre of the government’s effort to “make Canada investable at scale, to support our own industries and our closest allies,” by getting projects approved in time, keeping rules and regulations stable after investment decisions are made, and scaling supply chains “fast enough to meet the market window” for exports. “Unlike the previous Canadian government, which closed the door to LNG exports, Prime Minister Carney’s government has opened it,” Hodgson declared. “If the demand is here, and the infrastructure is built, Canada will deliver.”

On Tuesday, Carney said his government was “in the process of unleashing half a trillion dollars of investment” in energy, port and intelligence infrastructure. The first round of investments will be formally announced in the next two weeks, he added. Early deals could include “reinforcing the port of Montreal, Contrecoeur [and] a new port, effectively, in Churchill, Manitoba, which would open up enormous LNG plus other opportunities, and other East Coast ports for those critical minerals.”

Mixed signals on LNG markets

This isn’t the first time Canada has considered its options for supplying Europe with LNG. The last round of proposals fell flat, with Spanish oil and gas giant Repsol SA and Calgary-based Pieridae Energy (now Cavvy Energy) abandoning their plans for East Coast export terminals. Those projects fell apart largely on the need for massive new port and pipeline infrastructure to transport the fuel to the coast, liquefy it and ship it to Europe, Clean Energy Wire writes. But as recently as September 2024, the former government of then-chancellor Olaf Scholz was also throwing cold water on the idea that Germany had much need for Canadian gas.

“All studies show that the market is going to shrink,” Jennifer Morgan, the country’s first-ever state secretary and special envoy for international climate action, said at the time, citing projections that showed Europe’s leading economy cutting its gas imports 30% by 2030 and 96% by 2050. “Germany will be driving forward on renewables, and gas demand will decline,” said Morgan, a former executive director of Greenpeace International and global climate director with the World Resources Institute.

Since then, Canada has opened an LNG export terminal on its west coast to deliver gas to Asia, and Hodgson is expressing strong interest in new LNG deals. “I know there are buyers,” he told CTV television host Vassy Kapelos last week. “What I can tell you from the conversations that the prime minister has been having, the minister of foreign affairs has been having, the minister of international trade has been having, the conversations I’ve been having, our allies are very interested in Canadian LNG.”

This week, Hodgson and German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche facilitated talks between businesses from both sides of the Atlantic, Clean Energy Wire says. “We had very good discussions on Germany’s interest in Canadian liquefied natural gas and on continuing the development of ammonia and hydrogen supplies from Canada to Europe,” Hodgson told a media huddle afterwards. “The government is going to use all the tools it has to responsibly develop projects, to do it in a way that’s responsible for Canadian taxpayers and do it in the right environmental way, and in conjunction with First Nations.”

The German Gas and Hydrogen Industry association welcomed Canada’s bid. “In these times, it is a very important offer, which could help us gain another partner for the diversification of our energy supply,” the group’s chair, Timm Kehler, told CLEW. “I hope that our stakeholders will also take advantage of this opportunity,” he said, adding that German industry needs affordable gas and long-term contracts are “the right way.”

Long-term trends diverge from short-term demand

But the uncertainty around how much Canadian gas Germany and the EU will need, and for how long, is old news. Europe sought to find new suppliers following the halt of gas supplies from Russia in the aftermath of the war against Ukraine. Russia was the main supplier of oil and gas to Europe, and Germany received it only through pipelines.

The war and the resulting energy crisis pushed the EU into a scramble for energy independence that saw Germany build domestic LNG import terminals to help diversify its supply – even after the independent E3G climate think tank warned that the move could double the country’s energy costs and waste €200 billion.

Germany’s first temporary import terminal was inaugurated at the end of 2022, with the United States filling some of the gap through LNG deliveries from its Gulf Coast. Now, countries on both sides of the Atlantic are moving to reduce their reliance on the United States, with Carney committing to cultivate more “reliable” trading partners to secure Canada’s economy and sovereignty.

In his CTV interview last week, Hodsgon touted Canadian gas as “much cleaner than the American in terms of carbon footprint,” a frequent industry claim that rests on the electrification of Canadian LNG terminals but often leaves out or underestimates emissions of climate-busting methane from gas extraction and transport.

Lower-carbon or not, Europe is also aiming to become climate neutral by 2050 – Germany by 2045 – and will have to largely phase out the fossil fuel by then. Overall demand has long been projected to decline over the coming years and especially decades, increasing the risk that new gas pipelines and terminals will ultimately become stranded assets.

Hodgson said German businesses have still signalled interest in new export/import deals. “There seems to be a desire on the part of Germany to buy our natural gas, and we have a desire from proponents, a province, and First Nations to develop that for German customers,” he said. “What we all realize post-Ukraine, post what is happening with AI, is that natural gas is going to be a transition fuel that is in greater demand in Germany and for a longer period of time,” he told media, creating an opportunity for Canada to be a “great partner” to Germany.

But beyond the projected decline in European demand, multiple analyses show the wider world heading for a glut of supply, producing risks for new gas projects in Canada. Over the five- to seven-year frame that Hodgson is suggesting, analysts say the gas glut brought on by a recent wave of new LNG construction could be in full swing. Modelling by the International Energy Agency shows a dawning “Age of Electricity,” with global demand for all fossil fuels peaking this decade before going into permanent decline.

Cooperation on critical minerals, but little relief from tariffs

Canada and Germany also signed a joint declaration of intent on cooperation on critical minerals. The two countries aim to push for the diversification of supplies of critical minerals, which are increasingly important in products needed for defence, the energy transition and clean technologies. A major objective would be to promote and strengthen cooperation and trade in the critical-minerals value chain, with a focus on midstream technologies, including mineral processing, refining and recycling, the declaration said.

“On rare earths, Canada is in a position to develop the only mine-to-magnets, complete supply chain outside of China in the world,” Hodgson said. “It gives us a really great card with our allies, our like-minded allies, and it takes a card out of the hands of people who might have a different perspective in the world,” he added.

Stable and reliable supply chains are of central importance to companies in both countries, German economy minister Reiche said. “The supply of critical raw materials in particular is key to the competitiveness of our economy.”

Jamie Kneen, national program co-lead at Mining Watch Canada, said the joint declaration “would be laudable if it were diversifying Canadian trade and diminishing dependence on U.S. markets. But it’s not. The only specific agreements are for early-stage projects, several years from production if they even get there, so any tariff relief is pretty distant.”

Even as a way of building longer-term trade relationships and value chains, he told The Mix in an email, “it’d make more sense to link to less complex and/or problematic projects.”

There’s also “a very real risk that projects that should never see the light of day are pushed forward and even into production without Indigenous consent and without adequate scrutiny of their impacts, leading to short- and longer-term conflict and potentially grievous environmental and social consequences,” he added.

While the Canadian delegation was in Berlin, companies from the two countries signed three memoranda of understanding to cooperate on raw material extraction and processing, Clean Energy Wire reports – between Montreal-based Torngat Metals and Vacuumschmelze, Toronto-based Rock Tech Lithium and Enetrag, and Toronto-based Troilus Gold and Aurubis.

The original version of this story first appeared on Clean Energy Wire as part of a joint reporting project by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Republished by permission.

The post Canada plans to sell gas to Europe despite doubt over demand appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Efficiency Canada is urging the government to recapitalize the Greener Homes Loan program in its fall budget and turn it into a permanent statutory program, warning that the $600-million top-up it received in the December 2024 Fall Economic Statement will run out by mid-November in the absence of new funding.

The program offers 10-year, interest-free loans between $5,000 and $40,000 to help cover home retrofit costs like insulation, air sealing, new windows and doors, smart thermostats, efficient space and water heaters, solar panels and inverters, and climate resilience improvements.

“This loan program was part of the promise that has been made to Canadians across two different prime ministers now and on multiple occasions to ensure middle-class Canadians have an opportunity to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs,” the organization’s senior director of policy strategy, Brendan Haley, told The Energy Mix.

“The skilled trades sector is watching, homeowners are waiting, and contractors who’ve built their businesses around this program shouldn’t have to wonder if they’ll have work next year,” Efficiency Canada added in a LinkedIn post this week.

Running out of cash

The concern that the program will soon run out of funds traces back to a July 10 access-to-information request from government relations consultant Fernando Melo, text of which The Mix has seen, asking the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) the total value of loans the program had approved to date. “We have not had an update on the usage rate of this program in quite some time, and understanding the remaining duration is critical for the stability of energy retrofit companies and the general public,” Melo wrote.

A CMHC official responded that the program had committed to 115,751 loans under the wider, $2.78-billion program, including 6,052 that used up $155.3 million of the $600-million top-up, as of June 15. The agency estimated that new loans were being approved at a rate of 3,500 per month.

Based on those numbers, Efficiency Canada says the loan program risks running out of cash by about mid-November.

“It definitely shows that there’s an interest in the loan program, and I don’t think that interest should be unexpected,” Haley said, after federal loans and grants boosted the country’s annual energy retrofit rate from 0.5% to 1.7% of the residential building stock between 2020 and 2024.

In a pre-budget submission [pdf] that cites the Carney government’s own policy priorities as a call to action, Efficiency Canada urges Ottawa to:

• “maintain and evolve” the Canada Greener Homes Loan program with long-term funding, beginning with a $4.3-billion infusion over four years

• prepare to develop a Canadian version of the Energy Star program and to market it internationally if the Trump administration shuts down the widely acclaimed U.S. version

• increase funding for low-income energy efficiency to $2 billion under the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program

• use Canadian technologies and expertise to double the pace of energy-efficiency improvements – and treat the work as a nation-building project

The ‘business transformation’ Carney craves

“It’s a great time in the government’s mandate to rethink a program like this,” Haley told The Mix. “The Liberal Party platform had a very firm commitment to fund home retrofits and lower energy bills. Mark Carney’s leadership platform, when he promised to get rid of the consumer carbon tax, included some quite clear promises to have both loans and grants for home energy retrofits. It’s quite consistent with the government’s stated mandate priorities around affordability and careers in the skilled trades. And it is a loan program, with the repayment booked as an asset in the government’s balance sheet, so it meets the criterion of not having a significant operational spending cost for the government.”

With the Carney government focused on business transformation, Haley added, a revamped energy retrofit initiative would enable contractors to boost productivity and introduce more innovative business models, while offering consumers a simpler retrofit process that delivers the funding they need, when they need it. That might mean an efficient, fast-turnaround funding mechanism to help homeowners out when a furnace or air conditioner breaks down, or a staged, co-financed plan to coordinate energy-efficiency improvements with other home upgrades.

Either way, Haley said, “we can deliver more value for both the consumer and those skilled trade-oriented businesses, and that should really be of interest to the current government.”

No more boom and bust

But it wouldn’t be the first time a federal energy retrofit program ran out of funds ahead of schedule. In May 2021, Efficiency Canada executive director Corey Diamond was at the table with Trudeau-era cabinet ministers Seamus O’Regan and Carla Qualtrough when they announced a $10-million fund to train 2,000 new energy auditors across the country. “Energy-efficiency policies and investment are the right path,” Diamond said at the time. “It’s impossible for Canada to meet its international climate commitments without reducing the amount of energy waste across the country.” He added that activity would create hundreds of thousands of jobs while helping out “the 22% of Canadians struggling to pay their energy bills every month.”

By February 2024, industry sources were warning of “massive fallout” as Natural Resources Canada prepared to wind down a wildly popular Greener Homes grant program that ran through its available funding so quickly that it was deemed too successful to continue. Less than a month later, advocates were urging the government to salvage the grant, with the home retrofit sector in chaos and consumers abandoning ship. “I can’t recall another instance where the government ended a program because it was too successful and we had to ask them to renew it,” Environmental Defence programs director Keith Brooks told The Mix at the time.

“Oh, sure, the layoffs have started,” said Kai Millyard, EnerGuide service organization manager at Green Communities Canada. “A lot of people had bookings to enrol in the program, but almost all of them cancelled because the incentive matters. It works. It makes a difference in enabling people to go ahead and do retrofitting.”

That’s not an experience the Carney government should want to repeat, Haley said this week. “A boom-and-bust cycle for a program like this is incredibly disruptive,” he said. “It can kill businesses. It can destroy the careers of the skilled trades the government says are one of its top priorities. It can reduce the productivity of our country because it creates incentives for Canadians to make unproductive decisions by chasing government support, rather than undertaking retrofits in a planned way that saves them the most energy at the lowest cost.”

The $600-million top-up saved the Greener Homes Loan program from that kind of disruption in the run-up to this year’s federal election, Haley said. Now, “it’s important to remember the history here. When the grant program was abruptly cancelled, the loan program was presented as the main avenue for middle-income Canadians to continue to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and costs. When the federal government took the carbon price off oil, the loan program was the key to their messaging about the supports they would offer Canadians. Then when Carney promised to get rid of the consumer carbon tax, it was again the grants and loans for home energy efficiency that were put up front as the new policy.”

The best way to make good on those provinces would be to fund energy retrofits as a “statutory program that is available when Canadians want it,” Haley said. “It needs to go beyond a project stage and be automatically funded as a service that is going to be consistently available for Canadians.”

Mitchell Beer is publisher of The Energy Mix, a non-profit community news site and e-digest on climate change, energy and the shift off carbon. This article first appeared on The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

The post Funding shortfall looms for signature energy retrofit program in Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The data reinforce concern that the Danielle Smith government’s controversial renewable-energy moratorium two years ago and the regulatory uncertainty that followed it have been driving investors out of the province that previously led Canada in new project development.

The new numbers were published on LinkedIn last week by Jason Wang, senior analyst of electricity at the Pembina Institute. A chart based on data from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) shows renewable-energy projects under development peaking above 25,000 megawatts between October 2023 and January 2024, dipping well below 15,000 megawatts by November 2024, then recovering somewhat before hitting a new low last month.

“This volume may rebound somewhat,” Wang wrote, citing an administrative deadline later this fall. “But without reversing some of its policy decisions, including in the current electricity market redesign, I expect to see more cold feet from investors.”

In May, Pembina said Smith’s decision to launch a constitutional challenge against the federal government’s watered-down Clean Electricity Regulations would add new uncertainty to the province’s electricity market. “At a time when other governments across this country and across the world are attracting investment in low-cost, secure, clean power, and modernizing their electricity grids to be fit for the needs of the next century, Alberta is introducing yet more uncertainty to its electricity market,” Wang said at the time. “This will further undermine investment confidence at the worst possible time.”

Later in the month, Pembina pointed to a wider series of new and prospective policies that were already bogging down the sector. “These include outright bans and ambiguous restrictions on areas of land where wind and solar projects can be built, new requirements relating to equipment recycling and land reclamation, and changes to transmission legislation, all of which will likely add new regulatory burdens and upfront costs to renewable energy developers,” the Calgary-based institute wrote. “It is notable that many of these new requirements are not being equally applied to other industries, including other energy sectors such as oil and gas.”

Wang’s latest analysis appeared just a couple of days before B.C. Hydro issued a call for 5,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity “from large clean or renewable projects in partnership with First Nations and independent power producers,” CTV News reported, equivalent to the output from the Site C hydropower megaproject. B.C. Premier David Eby took the opportunity to invite U.S. clean energy producers to turn their attention to Canada after Donald Trump described the wind turbines near his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland as “ugly monsters,” CTV said.

“We’re doubling down on renewable power, expanding our grid, and supporting First Nations leadership in energy development, all while helping communities and businesses access the clean electricity they need to grow,” Energy Minister Adrian Dix said in a statement.

In Nova Scotia, Premier Tim Houston announced that his province had designated Canada’s first four offshore wind areas. “With some of the top wind speeds in the world, Nova Scotia has the potential to become a clean energy superpower,” he said in a release. “With the right infrastructure, we’ll have the opportunity to send our wind west to power other parts of Canada. By becoming an energy exporter, we can secure long-term prosperity for Nova Scotians.”

On LinkedIn, Crux Energy Consulting founder and CEO Heidi Leslie warned that those projects may be more complicated than they seem. To hit its goal of five gigawatts of wind by 2030, she said the province will need grid transmission to get its power to market and commercial agreements that make sense to developers. “Nova Scotia has world-class wind resources,” and “offshore wind has huge potential,” Leslie wrote. But the projects will likely take 10 or more years to develop, they’ll require billions of dollars in investment per gigawatt, and experience in the United States suggests that the output from early projects will be expensive until supply chains mature and economies of scale begin to show up.

“Offshore wind isn’t plug-and-play,” Leslie said. “Developers need clarity on who will buy the power, how it will get delivered, and what policy support is in place. Without that, the designated zones are just lines on a map.”

At the same time, “this announcement matters,” Leslie added. “It gives developers, the province, utilities, and the federal government time to do the legwork: regulatory prep, environmental review, Indigenous engagement, fisheries planning, grid planning, supply chain development, etc. If we do that well, Nova Scotia can be ready to compete when offshore wind economics and market needs align.”

This article first appeared in The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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As The Energy Mix Weekender reported Sunday, the sudden, unexplained loss of $500,000 in confirmed funding has left The Resilience Institute (TRI) scrambling to decide which front-line projects and staff jobs will be affected.

“We’re going to have to back out of several relationships. We have commitments to communities. We have commitments to staff,” Laura S. Lynes, TRI’s president and CEO, told The Energy Mix. “We have at least four multi-partner initiatives where we have committed to coming to the table with staff, and in some cases with funding, to do multi-year project work in small, rural and Indigenous communities across Canada. That’s the work that is at risk.”

We don’t just take money from anybody. We enter into relationships very consciously. And this has thrown us.

– Laura S. Lynes, president and CEO of The Resilience Institute

Some of those projects involve front-line research with Indigenous communities in Treaty 7 territory in southern Alberta, and in the heart of oil-sands extraction in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. Lynes said she’s heard of several other charities that received similar treatment, but their boards are afraid to speak up.

TRI’s programming portfolio includes:

• Stories of Resilience, a “thematic learning program” to collect stories of climate resilience that can “change our hearts and minds” and “if shared, have the potential to change futures”

• Front-line, multi-year climate-resilience initiatives with several Indigenous communities and groups across Canada, including many in Alberta such as Fort McKay First Nation, in Wood Buffalo where Suncor operates and Piikani Nation in Treaty 7, where Suncor’s head office is located,  as well as coastal communities in Atlantic Canada

• Roots for Resilience, a national  partnership with the Canadian Red Cross to reduce vulnerability to climate disasters in small, rural and Indigenous communities by bringing climate adaptation and disaster-risk-reduction strategies together

• A review of community housing, poverty and insurance in a changing climate that is partly supported by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation

• A program on nature-based climate solutions that uses the ecologically and culturally significant plant sweetgrass “as a connector between partners”

The chronology of a breakup

When the Canada’s Clean50 newsletter brought the story to a wider audience earlier Friday, executive director Gavin Pitchford wrote that TRI – recipient of the Clean50’s 2025 Project of the Year award – “has been ghosted by Suncor Energy, their substantial multi-year promised funding cancelled without any warning.”

Suncor Energy Foundation (SEF) cancelled the pledge “after it was due and without an explanation,” Pitchford added, and “with some not-so-veiled threats from Suncor’s lawyers who suggested that complaining publicly would be ‘flying too close to the sun.’”

Lynes traced the chronology of the breakup in a LinkedIn post last week, and in a more detailed interview Friday evening. “I had hoped not to have to share this information, but our charity has experienced an unexpected setback that we have been unable to resolve,” she began. “The intent in sharing this information is to ensure that the consequences of this setback do not reflect on our good reputation with Indigenous and rural communities, or with the many academic, corporate, and other institutional partners that we have the privilege to collaborate with.”

More than five years ago, TRI began accepting funding from SEF, a separate legal entity set up by Calgary-based Suncor Energy, Canada’s second-biggest oil-sands company.

At the time, TRI thought it was working with a like-minded partner. “We don’t just take money from anybody. We enter into relationships very consciously. And this has thrown us,” she told The Energy Mix.

Following a strategic review in early 2024, shortly after fossil industry veteran Rich Kruger took over as Suncor Energy CEO, SEF “assured us that our work aligned fully with their updated funding priorities,” Lynes wrote on LinkedIn.

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Several past grant recipients saw their relationships with the foundation end at that point, but TRI was invited “to submit a renewal for a three-year term and a total of $900,000, emphasizing the importance of long-term planning.” That pledge was approved in March 2024, and TRI received a first instalment of $400,000 shortly afterwards.

TRI was supposed to meet with its Suncor Foundation representative in December. After multiple attempts to reach them, the charity sent in its annual written update, then got back “this very strange request for more information, but it was almost like a form,” Lynes recalled. “It didn’t have anything to do with our update . . . it just seemed like a witch hunt, to be honest.”

Among the questions on the form, shared with The Energy Mix, Suncor asked whether any TRI senior leadership or board members received consulting or professional fees from the organization, and whether any current or former SEF staff had received “any personal benefit” from the charity.

“The question was not did we contact any SEF staff. It was whether there was any direct or indirect benefit to any Suncor Energy staff,” Lynes said. “And of course it was no. Of course not. We’re a national, registered charity. We follow the rules.”

After TRI filled out and returned the questionnaire, SEF cut ties. Weeks after a second instalment on the pledge was due in April 2025, “we were informed that our work no longer aligned with SEF’s strategy and no further funding would be provided,” Lynes wrote. “We had not received any explanation for this abrupt shift from full alignment to none. While we understand that things change and relationships break up, we also believe that how you break up matters.”

Suncor’s reputation for ‘trust-based’ philanthropy

Before long, TRI learned that other charities and post-secondary institutions, not all of them working in the climate space, had received similar treatment. “The concern is, quite honestly, that it’s not just about us,” Lynes said. “Suncor was known for its trust-based philanthropy. They were leaders in it. And the way they’re behaving? Corporations don’t do that.”

Even if Suncor’s strategy changed that quickly and drastically, “why not just pay out the charities?” Lynes asked. “Five-hundred-thousand dollars for them is a rounding error, and it was a commitment. So I don’t see how they could get in trouble for paying that out.”

TRI has no legal recourse because the funding was a pledge, not a contract. The purpose of that legal distinction, Lynes explained, is to protect individual donors or small businesses that make commitments in good faith but legitimately can’t follow through when circumstances change.

We are in the business to make money and as much of it as possible, and everybody starting with me needs to see how they do that.

– Richard Kruger, CEO of Suncor Energy

“It is not there to protect billion-dollar corporations that can pay a pledge,” Lynes said. “They’ve used that clause to get out of [their commitment], and that affects others.”

Sources have told The Energy Mix that Suncor has fired all the foundation’s former staff except for one administrator. The senior adviser responsible for TRI’s funding, Dani DeBoice, announced on LinkedIn in November 2024 that her 10-year stint at Suncor had come to an end.

A warning not to fly ‘too close to the sun’

After receiving only minimal responses to two lawyers’ letters to SEF, the second one “maybe a bit nicer than a demand letter,” Lynes said she issued two LinkedIn posts – one on the TRI page, the other on her own professional profile – that explained the situation without calling Suncor out by name. “We are shocked to learn that one of our major donors has informed us of a decision to renege on a multi-year pledge,” she wrote. “We had no advanced warning, no chance to prepare. It is our understanding that many other charities across Canada are suddenly experiencing the same circumstance from this same donor. The corporation is known for its integrity and business ethic so, we are hoping that they will do the right thing.”

The two posts received just a handful of responses.

“It is not ok to turn your back on commitments, period. Especially with charities and even more appalling is with a charity that works with communities (Indigenous and non-Indigenous),” wrote TRI board member Justin Bourque, president and founder of Fort McMurray–based Âsokan Generational Developments. “I hope they realize this and do the right thing.”

“A poignant analogy and reminder, Laura,” wrote former SEF executive director Laurie Hewson, in response to Lynes’s personal post on the situation. “How to transition well, and with minimal impact to others, is something for all of us to be reminded of.”

“This is appalling, Richard Kruger,” added communications consultant Sofi Papamarko. “Do the right thing and donate $900,000 of your nearly $40-million annual salary to The Resilience Institute to make good on your promises.”

That’s when things got heated.

“Within 24 hours, their lawyer called our lawyer,” expressing concern about the institute’s social media activity, Lynes recounted. “Our lawyer said, ‘Are you talking about two posts that don’t even mention Suncor or SEF?’ And their lawyer said it’s a small community, and people can make inferences.”

When TRI responded that Suncor was fretting over its reputation when this was a matter of integrity, “the lawyer said we want you to know that your client is on our radar and they’re flying too close to the sun. End of conversation.”

“We were very clear in our messaging that we do not have any interest in making them look bad,” Lynes told The Energy Mix. “We have an interest in making sure this circumstance does not reflect poorly on our reputation and on us financially. What I would really love to see is for Suncor to say, ‘We made a mistake, we’re sorry, here’s the funding, and we all move forward in good ways.’ Maybe somebody made a mistake. But to double down on that and be defensive . . . who does this to charities?”

A month after he took over as CEO in April 2023, Kruger made it clear that Suncor’s operating philosophy was about to change. “I consider myself to be reasonably decisive and very competitive,” and “I play to win,” Kruger told analysts in May. “We are in the business to make money and as much of it as possible, and everybody starting with me needs to see how they do that.”

Suncor, which reported $1.6 billion in profits on record production for the first three months of this year, has not responded to a Friday-afternoon email and voicemails to its media team from The Energy Mix, requesting comment for this story. Suncor Energy Foundation sent an auto-reply indicating it can’t reply to all queries.

Suncor’s website still brags about the more than $24 million SEF distributed in 2023, and the more than $284 million it handed out in the 25-plus years since its inception. “The Suncor Energy Foundation (SEF) believes in connecting business and community strengths to make a positive difference in society,” the website states. “Through partnerships and relationships with those who are seeking solutions, we aim to spark change and propel progress for generations ahead.”

But a link to the foundation’s 2023 contributions report no longer points to the actual document. A link to its voluntary employee donations program, SunCares, states that “due to changes to the Competition Act, pending regulatory guidance, this document is provided for historical information purposes only and does not constitute an active or current representation of Suncor Energy Inc. Suncor fully disclaims any liability for the use of such information for any purpose.”

That was a reference to new anti-greenwashing provisions that prompted the Pathways Alliance, of which Suncor is a member, to scrub all messaging from its website after legislation passed Parliament in June 2024. Lawyers representing anti-greenwashing organizations have repeatedly responded that companies won’t face any pushback if they just tell the truth about their activities, and the federal Competition Bureau confirmed last month that the legislation allows any marketing claims that aren’t false.

Mitchell Beer is the founding publisher of The Energy Mix.

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here. 

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The research by Abacus Data found that, assuming both were priorities, 67% of Canadians “would generally favour clean energy projects such as critical minerals, renewable power and transmission, and energy storage,” Clean Energy Canada explains. “The remaining 33% would prefer conventional fossil fuel projects like oil and gas, including [liquefied natural gas] development.”

Among the 2,585 Canadians who took part in an online panel between June 2 and 5, 87% said clean energy will be “very” or “pretty” important, and 83% said the same of fossil fuels. Some 45% said clean energy would be “very” important, compared to 36% for fossil fuels.

The research uncovered overwhelming support – a margin of 76% to 24% – for shifting Canadian climate policy to align more with Europe, rather than the United States. And “as Canadians face another summer of wildfires, support for continued climate action remains extremely strong, with only 14% of Canadians saying the federal government should do less to combat climate change and transition the country to clean energy,” Clean Energy Canada writes.

But while a large plurality of respondents, 44%, wanted Canada to do more on climate, 41% said governments are doing about the right amount. The European Union is currently far ahead of Canada in its efforts to drive down climate pollution and shift to renewable energy technologies, and analysts have pointed out that Canada would be by far the biggest per capita emitter in any new trade relationship with the EU.

The Abacus research also found that Canadians support building new homes with lower-carbon, sustainable materials by a margin of 64% to 15%, while 70% definitely or likely want to see EV hookups and heat pumps in new homes as long as the cost is minimal.

“It’s easy to wonder whether views on important issues have shifted as Trump, tariffs, and national security dominate headlines and the worried minds of Canadians,” Trevor Melanson, Clean Energy Canada’s director of communications, said in an online statement. “And yet the consensus on climate action and the transition to clean energy remains overwhelmingly positive. What’s more, as Canada forges stronger trade relationships with the likes of Europe and Asia, we may see a growing economic and values alignment with jurisdictions that are all-in on clean energy.”

This article was first published in The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here. 

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That’s true across the globe, as the climate emergency becomes an ever-present danger. And it’s true here, in Canada, as we grapple with setting a path to net-zero that has widespread buy-in because it makes sense and is necessary. 

It’s a problem that Corporate Knights has devoted the better part of a year trying to solve. The fruits of that labour are contained in an extensive new analysis from our Climate Dollars project, which lays out the capital investments that will be needed to shift nearly all of Canada’s energy use to electricity and set a realistic path to a zero-emission economy by 2050.

Climate Dollars shows that we can well afford to confront and solve the climate emergency, at less than it would cost to perpetuate the obsolete, polluting, 20th-century energy system that we have today. We can still get it done by the middle of this century. And the solutions on offer will keep us safer in the local climate disasters on the horizon while making Canada stronger and more self-reliant against threats to our sovereignty.

With its extensive modelling of the country’s electricity, buildings and transportation sectors, Climate Dollars represents the next inflection point in the response to the global climate emergency. The analysis asks two basic questions:

• What do we have to do to quickly and effectively address one of the most urgent crises facing humanity?

• What is the gap between the capital investments required to decarbonize Canada’s economy and the dollars now being devoted to that task?

Climate Dollars is an ambitious but achievable road map to transform Canada to a zero-emission economy over the next 25 years, at a cost that is comparable to what households, businesses and financial institutions already devote to capital expenditures each year. 

The supply scenario includes upgrading hydroelectric facilities, installing millions of new solar panels, and completing the commitments already made to rebuilding old nuclear plants. But wind energy emerges as the workhorse in any feasible pathway to a zero-emission electricity system in a decarbonized Canada by 2050.

Electricity: Building out the Trans-Canada Transmission Link

The vision of a decarbonized, interconnected, resilient national power system is at the heart of the Climate Dollars analysis. It requires capital investments in solar, wind and storage technologies that average $34.8 billion per year over the next 25 years, in addition to the roughly equal amount of capital needed to electrify the buildings and vehicles.

“The level of investment required is well within the capability of Canadian investors,” says Ralph Torrie, director of research at Corporate Knights, who led the modelling effort. “In fact, in the power sector, capital expenditures have been growing in recent years and are already where we need them to be for decarbonization. The challenge is to shift priorities for that spending to align with the technologies of the new grid.”

The scenario shows Canada nearly doubling its electricity consumption by 2050, from less than 600 to more than 1,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year, and meeting that demand with existing hydroelectric resources plus 178 gigawatts of wind power and 50 GW of solar – including 36 GW from utility-scale solar farms and 14 GW from rooftop arrays. Without a national grid, the necessary wind capacity jumps to 261 GW.

This is our fire drill moment, and it will require the motivational equivalent of war.

—Ralph Torrie, director of research, Corporate Knights

The system is brought together by the Trans-Canada Transmission Link, a coast-to-coast, high-voltage DC line that will foster interprovincial trade in electricity to bring down the cost of decarbonization. The link will cost $30 to $40 billion to build, including converter stations in each province, and deliver three to four times that much in cost savings.

The interprovincial transactions along the Trans-Canada Transmission Link will be a win for all provinces, whether they’re buying or selling electricity. The prospect of stable domestic markets will increase the incentive for hydropower-rich Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia to develop their wind resources. And the easy availability of electrons will help out provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario that will be hard pressed to independently develop all the renewable generation they’ll need to decarbonize their economies by 2050.

Buildings: Heat pumps lead the way

In an electrified energy system, the building stock is converted to use heat pumps for space heating. It will take an all-in effort to phase out fossil-fuel-powered heating and cooling by mid-century in Canada’s residential and commercial buildings, but the required average investment of $14.8 billion per year is just 11.5% of the $129 billion Canadian households and businesses already invest in the existing building stock every year.

Even with the efficiency of heat pumps, all this electricity use for heating creates an annual peak in electricity consumption in early January. It is this winter peak that determines the amount of generating capacity needed, and therefore the amount of capital required to build the system out. An aggressive program of deep energy retrofits could reduce the capital needed to provide for the winter peak by $100 billion, but with current industry costs and business practices, the retrofits would cost five times that much. With its focus on heat pumps, the Climate Dollars modelling defaults to the simplest, least expensive path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the midst of a global climate emergency.

Transport: The battery under your hood

Canada’s shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles is already well under way. EV sales are growing exponentially, and drivers can look forward to a clean energy dividend from fuel and maintenance savings of up to $1.2 trillion through 2050, after subtracting the cost of the electricity to run the vehicles.

The Climate Dollars modelling also reveals a powerful opportunity that places the battery under the hood (or maybe the floor) of your electric car at the centre of the plan to bring Canada’s emissions to zero by 2050.

Short-term energy storage is the key to the renewable grid, delivering the flexibility to match the peaks and valleys of intermittent electricity supply with constantly fluctuating demand. In the Climate Dollars scenario, the most affordable way to deliver that reliability is with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems that allow EVs to charge when solar and wind are abundant and cheap, then release part of that charge to the grid when demand is highest.

The Climate Dollars modelling places the extra cost to electrify all cars and trucks and build the V2G-supporting charging network at $306 billion, an average of $12 billion per year. The challenge will be to get those cars and trucks on the road soon enough to support a 2050 decarbonization deadline, and to build out the charging network fast enough that it doesn’t become a barrier to EV adoption. The average vehicle stays on the road for 15 years or more, so there is no time to lose in scaling up EVs in Canada. The Climate Dollars decarbonization scenario includes annual investment in this sector that peaks at $17.5 billion in 2035 and then begins to decline as EVs reach and surpass price parity with combustion vehicles.

By mid-century, transportation will become a major electricity-using sector, consuming 150 TWh a year, as much electricity as all of Ontario consumes now. V2G cuts the cost of grid decarbonization in half, power companies save $10,000 per vehicle compared to the higher cost of utility-scale storage, and drivers receive a steady flow of V2G revenue if they choose to share part of their battery capacity with the grid.

The bottom line

The in-depth modelling behind Climate Dollars shows that we can renew local and provincial economies and strengthen the Canadian federation while delivering reliable, affordable energy, every hour of every day of the year. The cost of an effective, comprehensive energy transition is far less than what we are already beginning to pay for the impacts of climate change, across Canada and around the world.

And there’s every reason to believe that taking action at the pace and scale we need will drive down the cost of the energy transition itself as solutions scale up, efficiencies accumulate and unit costs are reduced.

The bottom line? The modelling shows that we can bring the economy to zero emissions at a cost of about $1.5 trillion, or $60 billion per year, largely by reallocating some of the more than $640 billion that private and public investors already pour into capital expenditures every year. Or we can drive that cost up by $100 billion or more if we fail to build the Trans-Canada Transmission Link, choose a more expensive option for electricity storage, or build new nuclear generating capacity that costs $45 to $65 billion more than competing renewable-energy options.

“This is our fire drill moment, and it will require the motivational equivalent of war,” Torrie stresses. “We need to get to the point where we are responding to climate change as an emergency. We need to make smart choices and we need to build quickly, not only to respond to climate change but to secure Canada’s position in the emerging sustainable economy.” 

The scenario analysis shows that the cost of the transition can vary by hundreds of billions of dollars depending on whether we make smart choices about east–west connections and how we provide the storage the renewable grid requires. It also shows that expensive, slow measures like new nuclear builds, deep residential retrofits and transit megaprojects drive up the cost of the transition and are less effective than electrification and an integrated, renewables-based grid.

What’s next

As Prime Minister Carney said, speed and imagination are two must-have ingredients for Canada. We won’t succeed by tinkering around the edges of an existing system that needs to be reimagined and rebuilt from the ground up. 

That’s why the decisions we make today will determine our path to success or failure – and to succeed, we’ll need to think bigger and more ambitiously than we have in a very long time.

Mitchell Beer is publisher of The Energy Mix, a non-profit community news site and e-digest on climate change, energy and the shift off carbon.

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