“While I like to put in innovative technologies, at the same time, what if it’s too good to be true?” Asani mused.

Still, he was interested enough to let REGEN evaluate one of Rogers’ buildings, the Sandstone Manor call centre just east of Toronto. After he read the analysis of the potential savings and risks, consulted with building operators and got answers to a barrage of questions, he agreed to a pilot test.

What REGEN offered was a system of wireless controllers that use “swarm logic” to better manage the operation of energy-intensive equipment. Just like bees, the company’s EnviroGrid controllers aren’t very smart on their own, but when linked together wirelessly and engaged in simple communication with each other they achieve a kind of collective, swarm-like intelligence, helping the equipment they control to operate more efficiently within a building – i.e., the “hive.”

The approach snagged Asani’s interest, as it offered a simple and affordable way to automate the company’s HVAC systems. He already knew about more centralized and costly building-automation systems that control HVAC and other variables such as lighting to reduce energy use. But those more comprehensive systems didn’t make sense for this call centre, which was too small and wouldn’t achieve enough energy savings to justify the investment.

REGEN’s technology, on the other hand, made it possible to reduce complexity and capital cost by focusing only on HVAC units, which typically make up 41 to 52 per cent of commercial buildings’ energy consumption. For each HVAC unit, customers pay only $1,200 to purchase and connect a controller. On top of that is a $1,200 charge for a modem, about $600 a year of telecom costs, and a small annual fee that goes to REGEN, according to company spokesman Michael Rose. The controllers are quick to install, said Rose, adding that customers typically enjoy a two-year payback on their investment.

For Rogers, REGEN estimated it could save the call centre 55,831 kilowatt-hours annually, reduce carbon emissions by 9,500 kilograms, and cut peak-power usage by 19.6 per cent. The cut to peak power is important. Building owners in many jurisdictions are charged a premium if their power demand exceeds a certain level during the day, so there are financial benefits to staying below those demand thresholds.

Typically, HVAC units handle their own areas individually, meaning they turn on when the temperature in that area falls outside of a specified range. But that means all the units in a building sometimes run at the same time – driving up peak-power demand – instead of alternating to even out the power use. Some units get overused, causing maintenance and reliability issues, while others remain underused.

REGEN’s controllers offer more value, as they communicate with each other via an Internet modem and coordinate when to turn individual HVAC units on and off to smooth the system’s power usage and maximize operating efficiency. They also shut the HVAC units off when associated parts of the building are closed.

The Rogers pilot test ran from September to November 2011, during which time 15 of REGEN’s HVAC-connected controllers were able to slash off-hours energy consumption by 66 per cent. Highest energy use happens on hot days, so REGEN is waiting for the summer to assess the Sandstone Manor system’s ability to reduce peak-power consumption during business hours. But based on its other clients, REGEN expects the system to deliver a 15 to 20 per cent reduction in peak demand, said Rose.

Who else should consider this? Ideal candidates should have at least six HVAC units with capacities of at least five tonnes each, Rose said. Big-box stores, for example, are often perfect because they tend to have big open areas with plenty of HVAC units on the rooftop, and fairly regular business hours.

Based on results so far, Asani is already considering installing the system in another Rogers building.

Click here to view our complete Tech Savvy series.

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Vale Canada, a subsidiary of the giant Brazilian mining firm, broke ground in April on a $2-billion retrofit of its Copper Cliff nickel smelter in Sudbury. Its Clean AER project, on schedule to be completed in 2015, will rank as one of the largest environmental investments in the province’s history. After receiving an extension from Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment back in 2010, the company will be reducing its sulphur dioxide emissions by 70 per cent, placing the company one-third below the provincial emissions limits of 66 kilotonnes a year. It will also target dust and metal emissions, aiming to reduce those by 35 to 40 per cent.

“It is the right thing to do as a company and the right thing to do for our employees and the local community to ensure the long-term sustainability of our operations,” said John Pollesel, chief operating officer at Vale Canada. The announcement is part of a $10-billion investment in Canada over the next few years. The company unveiled it after a string of setbacks that included a 10-month labour strike in 2010 and an explosion last year at the smelter, which it acquired from Inco in 2006.

The City of Greater Sudbury, which is home to about 30 per cent of the world’s nickel supply, has been a symbol of Canadian industrial pollution for decades. In the 1970s, sulphur dioxide emissions from the Copper Cliff smelter, then owned by Inco, peaked at two million kilotonnes annually. Faced with the widespread loss of biodiversity and poor air quality, an iconic 380-metre superstack was built, dispersing most sulfuric acid outside of the city. As conditions improved in Sudbury, Inco teamed up with the municipality, along with other commercial interests, to begin a comprehensive rehabilitation effort.

Lime was mixed into polluted soil by hand and aircraft. Millions of trees were planted. This effort was so successful that in 1992, Sudbury was given the Local Government Honours Award by the United Nations for its rehabilitation efforts. This was followed by a $600-million clean air investment by Inco, which reduced smelter sulfur dioxide emissions by 90 per cent from 1970 levels. The Clean AER project will expand these environmental restoration efforts, while setting a standard for emissions compliance in Ontario that goes well beyond required levels.

Zero: Northern Dynasty Minerals

Vancouver-based Northern Dynasty Minerals might want to take “broad public support” off its list of project strengths, as opposition continues to mount against its proposed Pebble mine in Southwest Alaska. The Pebble Partnership is composed of a 50-50 partnership with Anglo-American plc. The U.S. Geological Survey has described the area as the most substantial mineralized system in the world, one which would likely become the largest gold mine on the planet. The plan is to construct North America’s largest pit mine directly upslope from Iliamna Lake, home of the largest stock of sockeye salmon in the world. Locals are fearful that storing billions of tonnes of waste just upstream, along with power plants, port facilities and pipelines, would severely impact the $300-400 million local salmon industry by endangering the water supply, and ruin a way of life for rural Alaskans.

Opposition to the mine has culminated in a series of setbacks for the developers this past year. A local ballot initiative approved last October banned mining permits from being issued in the area. The Pacific Seafood Processors Association has come out against the mine, having previously never taken a position against any project. Fifty major jewellers from around the world, including Tiffany & Co., have pledged to refrain from buying Pebble gold. Tiffany’s CEO recently stated that “there are some special places where mining clearly does not represent the best long-term use of resources.” The Pebble mine development has become so controversial within Alaska that many pro-mining conservatives are split on the issue. Opponents have included Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who died tragically in a plane crash last year, and the late former Republican governor, Jay Hammond. Opposition has been funded largely by Bob Gillam, recently described by Alaska Magazine as a “reclusive conservative and arguably the richest man in Alaska.”

Instead of taking a conciliatory approach, the Pebble Partnership has decided to become more aggressive in its public relations campaign, attacking Gillam and other opponents of the mine as beholden to out-of-state special interests. The CEO of the Pebble Partnership, John Shively, recently spoke about mining at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank. The inflammatory speech was titled “USA: A Second World Country?”

The Pebble wars are sure to continue, but Northern Dynasty has been looking to sell its 50-per-cent stake for the past year, a clear vote of non-confidence in the viability of the project.

Click here to view our complete Heroes & Zeros series.

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According to Sohbet Karbuz, a military energy analyst and former International Energy Agency official, there are multiple factors pushing the Department of Defense (DoD) to go green, including “increasing fuel costs, logistics pains and the delicate fuel distribution network.” The DoD is the largest consumer of liquid fuels on the planet, burning about 375,000 barrels a day to fuel over 500,000 vehicles, ships and aircraft. “Energy security concerns also exist, due to the heavy reliance on imported fossil fuels,” added Karbuz. “Then there’s the fragile domestic energy grid which powers the hundreds of domestic military facilities in the United States.”

Oil intensity per war fighter has risen 2.6 per cent a year for the past 40 years. Cheap oil and infrequent supply disruptions lulled the military into complacency for decades. It is the experience in Afghanistan and Iraq that sparked an overhaul of the DoD’s approach to energy issues. More than 3,000 American soldiers and contractors have been killed in attacks involving fuel convoys over the past 10 years. P.W. Singer, a senior fellow and expert in 21st century warfare at the Brookings Institution, laments the army losses. “A mere 1 per cent improvement in defense energy efficiency would have meant 6,444 fewer convoy missions, one of the most dangerous roles in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.”

In 2007, the Pentagon began to look at military energy reform in a more systemic manner. Until then, the value of fuel was measured by its wholesale price at the point of acquisition, neglecting the supply chain needed to deliver it to the destination. A policy change began to measure the fully burdened cost of fuel (FBCF, in dollars per gallon). In 2009 the National Defense Authorization Act institutionalized FBCF and added a series of new energy Key Performance Parameters. This altered the military acquisition process, changed the emphasis of research and uncovered the potential of alternative energy sources.

Military leadership has been central to this transition. David Petraeus, then U.S. commander in Afghanistan, wrote to troops last year citing how “high fuel use imposes risks to the mission and to each of us” and insisting “we can and will do better.” The creation of an office for Operational Energy Plans and Programs has helped institutionalize these changes, with one of its first acts incorporating supply lines into Pentagon war games. The DoD also moved to cut its energy intensity 30 per cent and reduce petroleum use 20 per cent, both by 2015, and to obtain a quarter of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. And it’s creating personnel codes for energy specialties around efficiency and renewables, which never existed before.

The most substantial targets involve individual branches of DoD, in particular the Air Force and Navy, which consume the majority of armed forces fuel. The Air Force is calling for half its domestic aviation needs to be satisfied with biofuels by 2016 (see “Green Shades of Jet Fuel” below). The Navy’s plans are similar, targeting a 50-per-cent alternative energy mix by 2020 – along with the creation of a fossil-fuel independent “Green Strike Carrier Group” by 2016. Last summer, the Navy unveiled a partnership with the federal departments of Energy and Agriculture that will work with the private sector to strengthen domestic biofuel refining capacity. The three departments have pledged to invest up to $510 million over three years to support the initiative.

According to Todd Harrison, a defense budget studies expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, aviation fuel represents nearly 73 per cent of DoD energy use. They’re working hard on getting planes to be much more efficient, he said. “At the same time they want the supply to not come from oil, so they’re working on biofuels that could be made in the U.S., or could be opportunistically derived from materials that they find in or near a theater of war.”

The biofuel purchases are not without critics. After a contentious Senate Armed Services Committee hearing with Mabus, Republican Senator John McCain decried the purchases as a waste of money, and is now threatening to strip the Navy of the ability to purchase biofuels in the next defense bill.

Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a long-time military energy advisor, believes these comments show limited understanding of the issues at hand; in particular, the role of energy efficiency and secure supplies of military energy as a force protector, a force multiplier, and a long-term source of tens of billions in budgetary savings a year.

“The naval leadership, both civilian and uniformed, is united on this issue, for reasons of strategic operational and tactical necessity,” said Lovins. “It’s a purely military argument of combat effectiveness, and has nothing to do with anyone’s political ideology.”

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Corporate Knights caught up with Rogers at the biennial GLOBE Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, in March. Here is an edited excerpt from that wide-ranging discussion, which touched on everything from the importance of collaborating with China to the job-creation benefits of emissions regulation:

CK: You said during your talk that you forecast a dramatic change in U.S. energy sources over the next five years. Can you explain?

ROGERS: I was looking at a macro trend. I believe that the use of coal in the United States is going to decline steadily. We’ve just put $7 billion down to build two advanced coal plants – a super-critical plant and a coal gasification plant. As a consequence of building this new capacity of 2,600 megawatts, we’re going to shut down 3,700 megawatts of old, high-emitting coal plants. There’s going to be about 50,000 to 100,000 megawatts of these (older coal plants) retired over the next 10 years. The use of coal is going to fall, and producers in the U.S. have already got that message and have begun exporting coal to China.

CK: Your comment about the importance of collaboration with China was interesting. Do you get any pushback on that, given that in certain circles of U.S. politics there is a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment?

ROGERS: The differentiation is this: we’re working on infrastructure. If we can do it more affordably by working with the Chinese, all of our customers benefit, whether they are commercial, industrial or residential. For instance, take the Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear plant (being built in China). If they’ve built one or two of these, and we’re collaborating with them on building ours, we’re going to build it cheaper. You know, it’s like the old West Texas expression: the pioneers get the arrows, and the settlers get the land. It’s going to be smart for us. Already there’s a Chinese company that’s focused on the CAP1400, which is the next generation of the AP1000. So that’s one of many examples of where working together works, because if we can improve our infrastructure in this country, make it cleaner, maintain our level of reliability, and make it more affordable than a traditional build-out, then our people benefit.

CK: And the China bashing?

ROGERS: I understand the China bashing, but it’s not a smart way to think about the future. We’re better off in the U.S. to collaborate with the Chinese and work with them. If you go back to 1880, when the U.S. was having its wave of growth, if smart French, British and German companies had invested in the U.S., there would have been great opportunities. In the same way, we need to take advantage of China’s intellectual property of scaling, and their significant greenfield advantage. They can do things so much faster, scale better, and that can easily translate into lower cost.

CK: Clean Air Act amendments that came into force in December targeting mercury and smog-causing emissions have created quite a stir in the industry. What was Duke Energy’s position on these regulations?

ROGERS: Well, we didn’t oppose them. We have this modernization program that is allowing us to shut down 37,000 megawatts, which is going to reduce, rather dramatically, our cost of compliance and our ability to comply. Our industry has known for a decade that new sulfur and nitrogen oxides and mercury regulations were on the way. That’s why we started in 2005, 2006 building new generation to retire these old coal plants.

CK: Some call the regulations job killers. Others call them job creators. What do you think?

ROGERS: It’s a job creator, because if you have to retrofit your units it creates jobs. If you retire plants, and build new plants, it creates jobs. So in an interesting sense, yes, it increases (electricity) rates, but rates are going to go up anyway, and for 50 years the real price of electricity has been flat. So I do think these new regulations create more jobs than they destroy. What it really does is start the process of modernizing our generation fleet, which we’re going to have to modernize by 2050 anyway. This just gets us on that road.

CK: You mentioned rates are going up anyway. Presumably that’s a message customers don’t like to hear.

ROGERS: As the unit price goes up, you try to mitigate the bill. We can help our ratepayers along the way with our conservation efforts. An interesting thing is if you ask the average American what they pay per kilowatt-hour, they don’t have a clue. However, if you ask them what they pay for gasoline, everyone can rattle that off. This, despite the fact that people pay more per month for electricity than they do on gasoline! Again, the regulation was expected, and that is going to accelerate our modernization. If we really invest in energy efficiency we can mitigate the cost impact, and all while creating jobs.

CK: Controversial plans to build out oil and natural gas pipeline infrastructure seem to dominate the headlines these days. Are you surprised that we spend so much time focused on pipelines and so little time focused on transmission lines?

ROGERS: Let’s be real. All the guys in Congress who are telling me they’re for renewables, they won’t vote for eminent domain to build transmission. The provision in the Cheney bill (National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors) is not forceful enough to allow rapid transmission line construction. Gas pipelines basically have eminent domain, so you can just build them. You don’t have to get a corridor, and then go through years of litigation, and so no one has really faced up to it.

CK: Do you have a position on the Keystone XL pipeline controversy?

ROGERS: I’m very supportive of the president, but the (original) decision not to support the Keystone pipeline was a mistake. The network of underground pipelines that we currently have in the United States moves everything from natural gas to refined products to jet fuel. They could have deviated around Nebraska, if that was the big issue, but look at all the pipelines that currently go through Nebraska. I think that it’s a job-killing decision and a mistake for our country.

CK: The obsession remains bringing oil and gas from Canada, but what about electricity? We have $70 billion in oil crossing the border, but only $4 billion in electricity.

ROGERS: If you can do the math, and build the transmission, then that’s a good solution, but you’re not going to be able to build it all the way up to North Carolina. But you could go to New York, and you could go to the Midwest. The bottom line is that until politicians vote for eminent domain, it’s not going to happen.

CK: But are people lobbying hard, in the same way that they are lobbying for the pipeline?

ROGERS: I think they are, but the math doesn’t add up. Look at the cost of renewables, the cost of the transmission, the need to back it up with a gas unit so that you can make the economics of the transmission line work. We need to keep our product affordable. We’ve built 1,800 megawatts of wind and solar, but we have sold it to people who are close to where the wind is blowing. We are looking at building a transmission line that will bring power into California, but we think of that as a 10-year project, and a very difficult one. We’re investing a little bit, while recognizing that it’s going to take a change in the law to allow this to happen in an expeditious and profitable way.

CK: You talk about natural gas as a transition fuel to new low-carbon technologies, but doesn’t its low cost and abundance make it harder to transition to renewables?

ROGERS: The current price makes it very difficult. But I think you still have renewable portfolio standards (RPSs), which require the building of renewables in those areas. So I do not think it (cheap natural gas) slows it down, because of these RPSs. We’ve seen the demand fall in recent years, but we’ve also seen a rebound this year. We’re building 800 megawatts of wind and solar this year, and we didn’t expect to build so much in 2012, but there was this huge rush before the end of 2012 to take advantage of the tax credit.

CK: You also mentioned that you were building more natural gas-fired power plants in response to the shale gas boom?

ROGERS: We had this planned a number of years ago. We’re bringing on 2,630 megawatts of plants. Great heat rates and low gas prices – this is something that I haven’t seen in 24 years as a CEO. We are dispatching our combined-cycle gas plants as a baseload before all our coal plants, right after our nuclear plants. So we’ve changed the hierarchy of dispatch. I find it remarkable.

CK: Is that because it’s cheaper?

ROGERS: It’s cheaper, and it’s more efficient. So when you take the combination of the cheapness of the BTUs, coupled with the 7,000 heat rate, versus 10,000 heat rates in some coal units, you just burn it more efficiently. Plus there’s lower carbon footprint, no sulfur, no soot, etc.

CK: What carbon price do you use when making long-term projections? Rogers: We use a scenario of prices, from $30 to $50. The reality is that if you’re building a plant for 60 years, I operate in a world where there is going to be carbon regulation at some point. I operate in a world that if I can find a way to create zero emissions generation, that’s the tack I should be on. I was active in pushing for U.S. carbon legislation, which will ultimately be necessary going forward. I’ve come to believe that by doing the things we’re doing in China, developing technologies, doing pilots with startup companies, we’re going to do more to achieve that (carbon reduction) objective than most utilities. If you look at the change-out of our basic fleet, some was recession-driven, and now it’s driven by new technology, like burning gas before all our coal units. Our carbon footprint is going to be as low as it would have been under Waxman-Markey by 2020. It’s an interesting confluence, and obviously the recession is not a good factor, but that confluence is putting us on a long-term path to decarbonizing our generation fleet in America.

The post Is bashing China bad for U.S.? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In Denmark, the burning of waste has been an accepted practice for over 40 years. Jan Gehl, a well-known Danish urban design architect, believes that this originally stemmed from space constraints in a country 38 times more densely populated than Canada. “We’ve never had the luxuries that North Americans enjoy, where you can easily find an inexpensive location for large-scale garbage disposal out of sight and out of mind. In the 1970s, we simply ran out of room, and this was our only option.”

But the Danes quickly realized the combustion of waste had other benefits, such as the production of electricity and heat. Incineration now falls more broadly into the waste-to-energy category. Countries such as Denmark and Japan have located their incinerators in urban centres so that the steam can be used to power or heat nearby homes.

Even as incineration facilities have proliferated throughout Europe and Asia over the past several decades, North America has been reluctant to embrace them. No new incinerators have been built in Canada or the United States for the past 15 years, due to well-organized public opposition. According to the Canadian Energy-from-Waste Coalition, only eight facilities exist in Canada, processing 3 per cent of the country’s municipal solid waste. Denmark, a country of just 5.5 million people, diverts 54 per cent of its waste to 29 incineration plants, many of them using the most advanced technologies on the market.

With Canada’s municipal waste volumes rising steadily on a per capita basis since 1980, there has been a growing need to find alternative waste disposal methods. Local opponents to new landfills, who express strong concern about soil and water contamination, have effectively convinced municipalities over the past decade to continue operating existing facilities that are rapidly filling up. To meet existing demand, Ontario alone maintains 32 large landfill sites, along with 958 smaller ones. Over 2,000 sites have been retired over the past century, according to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.

As Canada struggles to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, leading sources of methane expulsion have faced greater scrutiny. Environment Canada reported that Canadian landfills in 2010 accounted for 20 per cent of national methane emissions. This is one area where utilities and private companies have been active in waste-to-energy, by setting up systems to capture and combust methane emitted from the breakdown of organic materials. The introduction of methane capture technology at 42 disposal sites in Canada has resulted in 25 per cent of methane emissions being transformed into energy. Methane capture systems have grown in popularity in Canada over the past decade compared to garbage incineration plants. They are less expensive to install, face muted community opposition and have received federal tax incentives and funding from pools of money, such as the Green Infrastructure Fund.

So is it better to burn or bury waste for clean electricity generation? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analyzed this question in a comprehensive life-cycle report published in conjunction with North Carolina State University in 2009. They determined that, if paired with a high diversion rate, the newest incineration technologies generate significantly more energy, while reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions and habitat loss that come from traditional landfills.

More than a decade since the last Canadian incinerators were built, municipalities are beginning to consider new waste-to-energy systems as part of their overall waste management strategy. Proposed facilities in Vancouver and Durham/York County, north of Toronto, each received city council approval last July. Since then, however, they have become ground zero for local opposition.

Resistance falls into two camps. The incinerators that the Canadian public has previously been exposed to, like the Algonquin energy-from-waste facility in central Ontario, are decades old and outfitted with obsolete technology. Residents of Vancouver and Durham/York fear these plants will bring about similarly-reduced air quality. Former Canadian Idol contestant Shane Wiebe has even written a protest song about it, called “landfill in the sky.”

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, however, says the science doesn’t support those fears. He states that most of the particulate matter, which used to be released by incinerators, is now captured by scrubbers and filters before being released into the air. Christian Nobel, a specialist in waste management at the Danish environmental consultancy Veksebo, points out that similar facilities easily pass Danish emissions standards, which are some of the strictest in the world. “Compared to other sources of air pollution human activities create, concerned citizens should not be focused on dioxins.”

The other suspicion, shared by many opponents of incineration, is that modern waste-to-energy plants undercut municipal recycling and diversion programs by creating a constant need for waste. Former Toronto mayor David Miller, a vocal opponent who instituted a ban on incineration within Toronto and fought the proposed Durham/York waste-to-energy plant while in office, describes incineration as “expensive and polluting, but most of all damaging to recycling efforts.”

Nobel, however, disputes this claim. Danish municipalities have placed diversion at the top of their list, recycling 54 per cent of their waste, and burning 42 per cent. What can’t be burned safely is diverted to one of only two landfills in the country, and chemicals, paint and electronics are processed at special facilities.

A strong recycling system, explains Matt McCulloch, director of corporate consulting at the Pembina Institute, is paramount to constructing successful incineration facilities within Canada. “Waste-to-energy is not an excuse to ignore or sideline community recycling systems. Carefully sorting through waste to recycle as much as possible, while diverting the rest to waste-to-energy facilities, is the optimal scenario for Canadian municipalities.”

Several other projects have been developed or are in the works within Canada that produce energy in a different manner from combustion or methane capture. A plasma gasification facility in Ottawa, run by Plasco Energy Group, recently signed a new deal with the city to continue processing unprocessed and unsorted solid waste. A proposed waste-to-ethanol plant in Edmonton, run by Montreal-based Enerkem has received provincial funding and is currently under construction.

The private sector has grown more enthusiastic about Canadian waste-to-energy opportunities as well, led by industry leader Waste Management of Houston, Texas. While continuing to invest in methane capture throughout North America, the company set up a venture capital arm about five years ago to invest in startups focused on expanding recycling and managing waste. It has spent hundreds of millions since then, including the purchase of an 11 per cent stake in Enerkem in 2010. More recently, it invested $8.5 million directly into Enerkem’s waste-to-ethanol facility in Edmonton.

“We’re really focused on finding those technologies and processes that can help us efficiently segregate materials that are in our waste streams,” says Joe Vaillancourt, managing director in the organic growth group at Waste Management. Once segregated, some materials can be recycled, some turned into green chemicals, some into energy. “We’ve got about 40 investments so far,” he says.

With enthusiasm for new landfills waning and utilities hungry for further energy generation, more cities are sure to follow Vancouver’s and Ottawa’s lead in considering incineration in the years ahead. But it promises to be a tough haul.

The post Burn after reading appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To start with, we need a coherent vision of what we, as a nation, want to be when we grow up given our world-scale abundance of energy resources.

Last year, environmental action group Tides Canada conducted a series of workshops resulting in a document called “A New Energy Vision for Canada.” It outlines the broadly accepted vision for a national energy strategy that:

• Provides accessible, fair and efficient energy services to citizens with minimal risk to future generations;

• Leverages our considerable renewable resources and existing institutions to increase our share of the global market for low-carbon goods and services, spurring new jobs, investment and innovations;

• Reduces the risk of climate disruption by lowering carbon emissions to a level, and at a pace, recommended by the global scientific community;

• Protects and restores air, land and water resources by setting hard caps on cumulative ecosystem and atmospheric impacts; and

• Encourages local stewardship over low-carbon energy production and resources.

 Though there is no shortage of chatter about the shape and scope of a Canadian energy strategy, these are really the minimum specifications of any plan, provincially or nationwide, that could set us up for truly long-term prosperity by sparking an incredible wave of innovation.

Even with a national vision, however, it is the provinces that hold the jurisdictional power and responsibility to deliver. And the biggest mistake our provinces could make is to focus on “resource development” as opposed to focusing on the “energy services” we need. To state it bluntly, people don’t really care about energy resources; we care about the services they bring us, such as mobility, light, warm homes, electronics and cold beer. These desired services won’t change much, but the resources that make them possible will.

Take mobility. During the preceding century, petroleum overwhelmingly provided this service. We continue to use barrels of oil as a metric of future energy demand and often point to the growing demand for oil in China. But China does not really care about oil; it cares about mobility. If and when that economy can provide its people with mobility by another means that is cheaper, cleaner, domestically produced, more accessible and higher performance, it will do so rather quickly. In other words, meet the electric car.

Today, Canada is a powerhouse in the last century’s dominant energy currency. But as times change we need to adapt and be positioned to be a competitive player in this century’s emerging energy technologies. This means each province must ask itself: How are we going to compete in an “energy-technology” focused global economy? Where should we start?

Different priorities will exist for each province, but across the country each should focus on: pricing pollution, steadily reducing limits on total pollution, properly valuing the benefits of renewable energy, and investing in energy efficiency.

First, each province should put a fiscal incentive in place to reduce and eventually eliminate environmental impacts. Translation: tax carbon. Look to British Columbia for a strong model to build from. Use the levies from pollution to reduce income taxes, protect low-income energy consumers and further invest in energy efficiency. The sooner each province sends the signal that it costs to pollute our environment, the faster we will innovate and implement cleaner solutions.

Next, impose progressively stricter pollution standards on all sources of energy-related emissions. Use these performance-based standards to drive innovation that will in turn purge pollution from the energy sector. A good example is regulations on coal power plants – regulations that force utilities to either eliminate emissions or shut the plants down. For my home province of Alberta, the priority should be setting scientifically informed limits on total cumulative environmental impacts of the oil sands.

Finally, provinces should use a combination of standards, incentives, pricing, community planning and education to capitalize on the incredible opportunities in energy efficiency across all energy services – home heating, mobility, entertainment, and more. Look to Manitoba for a portfolio of leading efforts on energy efficiency.

Each province can tweak these actions to suit its particular political realities but if we Canadians want our fair share of the rapidly growing trillion-dollar cleantech sector, we need to act like the future matters to us. As global population grows, resource constraints increase and pollution threatens us all, one thing is certain: societies that create and market clean energy solutions will thrive. This is our best chance to make a positive contribution to global challenges, and along the way regain respect on the world stage.

Marlo Raynolds is a senior advisor to the Tides Canada Energy Initiative and the Pembina Institute (pembina.org). He is currently living in France on a sabbatical. This article represents his views and not necessarily those of any organization to which he is associated.

The post Provincial power appeared first on Corporate Knights.

B.C. is home to 160 cleantech companies, representing 23 per cent of Canada’s total, according to Ottawa’s Analytica Advisors. The province’s green innovation strengths lie in transportation, renewable energy, fuel cells and smart grid technologies, reflecting the influence of utility B.C. Hydro and fuel-cell pioneer Ballard Power.

“B.C. companies have a long history in power management, including power conditioning and battery storage, while the province’s diverse geography and historic forestry industry support a range of alternative generation technologies such as wind, solar, biomass and tidal energy,” according to consultancy KPMG.

Celine Bak, a partner with Analytica, said long-term public investment in green innovations developed and spun out of B.C. universities has also played a major role. Another boost has come from the B.C. government’s Innovative Clean Energy (ICE) Fund, which since 2008 has contributed more than $72 million to 56 clean energy projects. In addition, the introduction of a provincial carbon tax in 2008 created opportunities for firms such as Nexterra, which helps industries reduce their carbon footprint by generating electricity from biomass.

Ontario, with 221 companies (31 per cent of the total), may lead the country in absolute numbers but still lags B.C. when measured per capita. Even so, it has been most successful at attracting venture capital for its green-themed startups.

Instead of a carbon tax, Ontario’s landmark Green Energy Act and feed-in-tariff program – and its ambitious commitment to phase out coal-fired generation by 2014 – have established the province as one of the best places on the continent to develop renewable energy and smart grid innovations focused on energy management, storage and efficiency. A relatively new Water Opportunities Act aims to make Ontario a leader in water conservation and treatment technologies.

Government funds aimed at green innovation development and smart grid technologies, as well as support for community power, have added to the province’s allure. The MaRS Discovery District in Toronto has become one of the nation’s leading incubators for clean technology innovation, while several universities in southern Ontario – including University of Waterloo, University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Queen’s University – are generating both green innovations and entrepreneurs with the right business skills to take clean technologies to market.

“You can’t take a great technology developer and expect them to be a wonderful business developer,” said Vicky Sharpe, chief executive of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the federal agency that gives grants to cleantech demonstration projects. You need both, she said.

Quebec, with 152 companies (21 per cent), has traditionally been strong in industrial manufacturing, water and waste management technologies. Bak attributes this strength to its having “a regulatory framework that is very smart and very proactive in terms of recycling.” Rather than setting up a dedicated government fund to support development and commercialization, Quebec recently decided to invest in the sector through venture capital firm Cycle Capital Management.

Nova Scotia, with 50 companies, stands out on the East Coast for its strength around green chemistry, biofuels and renewable energy, such as wind and tidal power. In the prairies, Alberta’s 88 companies, operating in a province known for its oil sands resources, are largely focused on soil, water and emissions remediation technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration.

Said Bak: “Each province or region is taking a slightly different approach.”

The post Different shades of green appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Bush’s prediction that environmental protection would cause an economic apocalypse in the region proved to be unfounded. Rather, job losses in the forestry sector were more than offset by a boom in new types of employment. Economic growth was driven by the arrival and expansion of high-tech firms, like Sony and Hewlett-Packard, and federal programs that retrained former loggers and mill workers for diverse new employment opportunities, including in the high-tech manufacturing sector.

Every socioeconomic indicator showed that, far from facing economic ruin, former resource-dependent communities responded positively to increased nature conservation. Over the following decade, the region’s graduation rates increased, income levels rose, poverty fell, and the unemployment rate remained unchanged despite a 91 per cent reduction in logging on public lands. Today, despite being the historical timber-basket of the U.S., Oregon now credits high-tech manufacturing with producing 10 per cent of its economic output – more than eight times the national average.

To the north, in the Chilliwack Forest District of southwestern British Columbia, resource-dependent towns that were built on logging and milling ancient forests into two-by-fours now support a far more diversified employment base as well. The proportion of employment from logging in the region now represents less than 1 per cent, compared to growing film production (2 per cent), high-tech (8 per cent), and tourism (10 per cent).

This shift in employment patterns is partly because many former resource-dependent communities located near larger urban areas have been successful in attracting diversified businesses – drawing city people who want to shift gears and enjoy the benefits of living in a community more connected with nature.

For many firms, the motivation to establish workplaces in communities like Eugene and Portland in Oregon and Victoria, B.C., or nearby bucolic bedroom communities, is a recognition that employees benefit from access to nature and improved quality of life. As the mayor of the mill town of Springfield, Oregon, told the New York Times shortly after logging restrictions came into effect to protect the spotted owl, “It wasn’t blind, dumb luck that helped us land Sony; the company wanted a pristine place on the river.”

Indeed, many of today’s most successful companies are recognizing the importance of quality of life for their employees – at work and at home. Many are willing to locate their operations closer to nature, and to green their own workplaces. Thus we have seen a boom in the number of green roofs, green walls and rain gardens integrated into the design of office complexes.

This green wave in the workplace has been bolstered by the many positive benefits of green time over screen time. Over the last decade, researchers from fields as diverse as biology, psychiatry, ecology, horticulture and medicine have come to the conclusion that spending time in nature is good for our own health and well-being. Their research has shown that access to natural assets like parks and green spaces can improve our physical and mental health while enhancing community.

University of Illinois researcher Frances Kuo has documented that access to nature close to where people live and work can result in less stress and more job satisfaction among employees, as well as increased productivity and reduced absenteeism and employee turnover.

In addition to health benefits, nature also provides a myriad of non-market economic benefits, according to research by the David Suzuki Foundation and others. These benefits come in the form of services provided by the community’s natural ecosystems, or natural capital. Forests purify the air and keep the city cool in summer. Wetlands filter drinking water and protect communities from floods. Fields and farms provide local food and habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.

The benefits of easier access to nature have not been lost on governments. Ontario has permanently protected more than 700,000 hectares of near-urban green space and farmland through its internationally renowned Greenbelt. Quebec recently announced its plan to wrap Montreal and Quebec City in protected greenbelts as well, and the federal government plans to create Canada’s first urban National Park, in the Rouge Watershed in the heart of the Greater Toronto Area.

These initiatives to protect nature, literally in the backyards of millions of people, are happening at a time when fewer Canadians are visiting our existing system of far-flung wilderness parks. Visits to the National Parks system are down 7 per cent across Canada as a whole, down 10 per cent in Quebec and Ontario, and 18 per cent lower in the Maritimes. Parks Canada officials are now openly talking about the creation of the new Rouge National Park as a “gateway park” for the Canadian public, with the hope that citizens will become better connected with nature in their backyards and more likely to visit Canada’s cherished wild spaces.

The fact is, nature is clearly worth much more than we think. It provides essential services and produces health and economic benefits that far exceed the short-term gains obtained from its destruction.

The post The nature effect appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Then came Hansen’s kicker.

“That may not sound like much,” he remarked, “but when added up over the whole world… it’s the equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. That’s how much extra energy earth is gaining each day.”

According to Hansen, this may be an unfortunate precursor to what could amount to global sea-level rise of between one and five metres during this century.

Welcome to the new normal.

The new normal is a period of human history when natural disasters tied to climate change and political uncertainties related to economic and financial distress are all too common. Yet, it’s mainly the economic and financial crises we face that dominate the concerns of businesses, governments and citizens. After all, there are bond haircuts, eurozone panics, morally dubious investment banks, unmanageable consumer debts, employment uncertainties, and popular protests surrounding the “one per cent” to contend with.

But organizations and people tend to adjust in a reactive fashion to our predictably unpredictable business climate – what some experts describe as one of “permanent volatility” – and the deteriorating condition of our planet. To be proactive in this unstable operating environment would require that companies, as well as local, regional and national governments, prioritize resilience. Put another way, they need to build and retain the capacity to cope with various shocks in the system, including those related to energy, sovereign debt, currency markets, supply chains, consumer sentiment, employee concerns, as well as that contentious wild card, climate change.

Embedded in the concept of permanent volatility is the underlying risk of being blindsided by unexpected circumstances not just once, but again and again. Permanent volatility requires that organizations develop the capacity to be knocked down, to get up, and to take steps to re-stabilize. This is the rationale for why resilience is central to adaptation amid the 21st century’s “uncharted waters,” an era future historians may judge to have endured the greatest public loss of political, economic and financial flexibility in modern history.

Between 2007 and 2010, for example, funds allocated by the United States, European Union and other G8 nations to promote macroeconomic stabilization amounted to roughly $17 trillion, according to political economists Stephen Gill and Isabella Bakker at York University in Toronto. A significant percentage of these monies was dedicated to private-sector bailouts. These funds are unlikely to be recouped and thus may contribute to the public sector’s lack of financial flexibility in countering long-term risks, including the potential need to restructure long-term debt, as well as find additional funding for civil preparedness and infrastructure hardening related to climate adaptation.

Permanent volatility and resilience are two sides of the same coin. Heads is about potentially dramatic spikes in input costs and debt financing affecting social, economic and institutional spheres – the stuff of daily life. Tails represents the capacity of citizens, communities, institutions, businesses and governments to adapt to abrupt shifts in normalcy. A reduction of political, economic and financial flexibility caused by rising sovereign and consumer debt is one area that could negatively impact societal resilience. The other enemy of resilience is a lack of preparedness, where credible warnings from climate science, for example, are disconnected from political consensus and thus fail to elicit institutional commitment.

Gordon Price is director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. As a six-time city councillor he’s acutely aware of the municipal planning process and how aligning long-term risk assessment with immediate political and economic reality is an increasingly tough challenge. About two years ago, Price started hearing about resilience in planning circles. “There was recognition that with climate change we won’t be able to stop or mitigate it,” he said. “So how do cities respond to circumstances that are locked in?”

One conceptual approach is the resilient city. According to Price, “a resilient city is probably more compact, with infrastructure that is newer and well maintained, thus more able to respond to emerging threats such as sea-level rise.” Price has also explored adaptation to change through methods such as scenario planning. “I’ve been to some scenario casting, looking at implications of the opening of the Northwest Passage (due to accelerated melting of Arctic ice),” he said. “You run into problems because there’s a trade-off around what you’ll do today for an unknown risk tomorrow. “Certain actions have been taken (to counter risk), but does it match up to the scale of the threat? Probably not.”

Indeed, the scale of the threat is staggering: the most credible recent estimate of climate change impacts between now and 2200 – globally, across water, health, infrastructure, coastal zones and ecosystems – equates financially to a stunning $1,240 trillion, according to estimates from a 2009 study by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, both based in London, England. The study estimated that spending $6 trillion on adaptation during that period would reduce impacts by $350 trillion. Clearly, adaptation pays off.

Like public institutions and government, corporations must manage trade-offs between market reality and long-term strategic planning. Based on my work in corporate futurism, some business strategists do understand the long-term threats posed by permanent volatility. Yet, they’re hamstrung because organizational resources are taken up in addressing today’s challenges surrounding volatility – not tomorrow’s. Thus, as one would predict, adapting to today trumps adapting to tomorrow.

Rob Abbott is a consultant based in Victoria who has worked with clients such as Walmart Canada on corporate sustainability initiatives. “The resilience discussion is dominated by the sectors you’d expect: academia, some non-governmental organizations and governments,” said Abbott. “The question when people talk about resilience is what they mean by it. At present, just as with sustainability, the concept risks being balkanized into economic resilience, social resilience, environmental resilience, and so on, just when we’re entering a period of long-term disequilibrium and should see the bigger picture.”

The challenge of addressing permanent volatility through resilience must not remain at the margins of business operations, but should extend to the core. For the past decade, Fortune 500 organizations, such as FedEx, UPS and Walmart, have emphasized adapting global supply chains to contingencies such as natural disasters, sea-level rise and regional political disturbances. Disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown last year in Japan, for example, have raised fundamental doubts about the practicality of just-in-time manufacturing among both businesses and governments. This is in part because such a masterfully choreographed approach to manufacturing and delivering products to market isn’t resilient enough, even when unexpected events may limit disruption to only a few days.

“Have we put in the necessary investments that will allow us to adapt to the change and seize the opportunity for transformation?” asked Abbott. With regard to crisis and opportunity, he added, “It’s only an opportunity if we are prepared.” And that, truly, is the key to resilience. Are we – as individuals, communities, corporations, and municipal, regional and national governments – prepared for the contingencies for which we have solid evidence?

It appears we are not. The commitment isn’t there, and neither are the investments. Resilience is de rigueur in some quarters precisely because it indicates we’re facing dire conditions for which we’re not adequately prepared. The language of resilience is a warning sign that civil society must get ready to absorb large-scale setbacks to business – and to life – as usual.

A time of permanent volatility is, in essence, a time of constant readiness, of tapping into the deepest well of strength and wherewithal that would empower highly intelligent and humane responses to catastrophic disruptions.

“Few I talk with in the corporate movement understand resilience in the long term,” said Gregory Greene, a documentary filmmaker and resilience commentator who worked on a project called “Confronting Comfort” for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a think tank and mobile laboratory aimed at stimulating discussion and ideas around environmental and social responsibility. “You have to lay out the ideas and the context, so when an oil or financial shock comes, you have the people with the ideas and the answers. In that moment, you can implement some of those ideas.”

Greene may be right. The wise only speak when people will listen. And many of us, individuals and organizations alike, aren’t ready to listen. Those who are up for listening may not be in a position to act. Either way, little progress will be made until a serious strategic conversation about resilience takes place and is acted upon.

The new normal, after all, is here.

The post Adapting to the new normal appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With a single 15-minute phone call to NASA, Spears had learned all he needed about the American research team’s role in the project. His e-mail query to the NRC, however, would spend nearly a full day pinging from inbox to inbox, as NRC communications officers fretted over the wording of their background materials, “massaged” replies, and debated whether an interview was necessary. Eventually, the most senior communications bureaucrat in an 11-message e-mail chain decided it wasn’t.

The Citizen ran its story without comment from the NRC or anyone else in the Canadian government, making only passing mention of the NRC’s participation. The newspaper also filed an access-to-information request, eventually uncovering the byzantine bureaucratic communications chain through which a dozen NRC employees had spent six hours deciding not to grant an interview. When the Citizen posted the full document on its website, it quickly became the talk of Canada’s science journalism community, confirming what many of them had experienced firsthand: in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, it had become nearly impossible to ask a government scientist a simple question.

In the halls of a government increasingly hostile to basic scientific research and the potential obstacles it might present to its resource-extracting energy-superpower agenda, the muzzling of scientific discourse had achieved an absurd apex. The government was unwilling to discuss what it knew about why snow fell. “This is the kind of process that occurs when you’ve turned information into something that has to go through a bureaucratic grind,” says Stephen Strauss, a veteran science journalist and president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. “You’ve heard about the satanic mills of the Dickensian era? Now we’ve seen the satanic mills of Stephen Harper’s information era.”

Until recently, journalists on the science beat enjoyed the same collegial relationship with government scientists as they did (and still do) with university researchers. Background detail or a colourful quote was rarely more than a quick phone call away. Since 2008, however, government scientists in every field have been obliged to pass on even the most mundane queries to their affiliated media departments, which almost always insist on seeing written questions before approving interviews (a break with many generations of standard journalistic practice) and rarely provide much more than background detail and bland, canned talking points.

On topics deemed sensitive or controversial, government media reps have sat in on interviews and even banned government scientists from talking to the press about their work. When Kristina Miller of the Pacific Biological Station published a groundbreaking report on collapsing salmon stocks in the prestigious international journal Science in early 2011, for example, her media minders killed a planned press release and refused numerous requests for interviews from major national and international media outlets. And at a recent International Polar Year science conference in Montreal, Environment Canada’s research contingent was accompanied by a phalanx of government media observers who monitored their colleagues’ presentations and obliged the scientists to refer any follow-up queries to their handlers.

To Strauss, this routine muzzling represents a misuse of government resources and a breach of the public trust. “The purpose of our taxes is not to prevent government scientists from talking to a free press and explaining to journalists what they’ve found in a way that they make sure doesn’t upset government priorities and programs. That’s not the purpose of us (taxpayers) funding this research. We are funding the research to find out how nature works, how things work. And because they are our servants – that is, the scientists – they should be able to speak freely to the press and explain what they have found with our money.”

The muzzling trend would be worrisome enough on its own, but it has been accompanied in recent months by a furious round of federal budget cuts to basic research – particularly in the field of environmental science – and increasingly ferocious rhetorical attacks on environmental groups. This is not, in other words, simply an extreme case of the Harper government’s legendarily strict message control; it appears to be part of a concerted effort to limit the Canadian public’s access to basic knowledge about the scientific implications of government policy – particularly when it comes to resource extraction and energy production.

In its first year as a majority, the Harper government has displayed a clear pattern of mounting hostility to environmental science, environmental activism, climate research and the monitoring of industry’s environmental impacts. The 2012 budget cut funding for the measure of industrial emissions, closed an oil spill monitoring facility in British Columbia and a global water quality monitoring centre in Ontario, slashed funding for atmospheric research – resulting, among other things, in the partial closure of a vital research station in the High Arctic – and killed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which had been created by the Mulroney government.

At the same time, the budget bill came freighted with legislation intended to “streamline” environmental review processes in the hope of fast-tracking oil pipelines and other large energy infrastructure projects, and it has handed the Canada Revenue Agency $7 million to intensify its scrutiny of environmental charities – especially the ones labelled “foreign radicals” by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver in a fiery Globe and Mail op-ed calling for approval of Enbridge’s $5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to the coast of northern B.C.

“This smearing of environmental groups, this undermining of the role of environmental organizations in the environmental debate, is blatant and aggressive and gratuitous,” says Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence. “This is not something we’ve ever seen before.” Smith points out that his organization has worked closely and amicably with the Harper government on a range of issues from toxic chemical regulation to consumer product labelling – in sharp contrast to the “outright anti-environmentalism” of the 2012 budget.

“We’ve been a respected charity in this country for 28 years,” Smith explains. “We’re not going to be intimidated. We have a long track record of productively working with this government and that speaks for itself.” And the government’s own agenda, he argues, isn’t being served by its hardball tactics. “It’s made the people angry, it’s needlessly inflaming the government’s relationship with first nations, it is alienating local communities who feel disempowered and disenfranchised in the planning process. This attempted expediting of infrastructure projects with this circumventing of democratic debate is going to backfire on the government in the end.”

Several environmental groups, including Environmental Defence, have seen donations grow markedly since Oliver launched his first rhetorical attack, while two of the groups most active in their opposition to Northern Gateway – ForestEthics and the David Suzuki Foundation – have restructured to avoid a government crackdown on their “advocacy” work (which by law can only comprise 10 per cent of a registered charity’s activity).

Smith also notes that the repercussions extend beyond the debate over any given pipeline – under Harper, the Canadian government has become a global laggard on basic climate science. “The capacity of our federal government to generate important climate change science, to monitor climate change impacts, is absolutely threadbare after this latest round of cuts proposed in the budget,” says Smith.

It’s a point echoed by James Drummond, an atmospheric scientist at Dalhousie University and principal investigator at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL). The lab, which is located on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic and monitors atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion and climate change, saw its operating funds vanish in the recent round of budget cuts. The cuts to PEARL’s funding are particularly surprising, Drummond says, given the Harper government’s rhetorical emphasis on Arctic sovereignty and Arctic exploration. “Sovereignty is not just a matter of military presence,” he explains. “Sovereignty is a matter of knowing the region, of understanding the region, and being able to effectively represent that region to the rest of the world. And we’re falling down on the job.”

Though PEARL may be able to reopen for part of the year under a new pool of Environment Canada atmospheric research funding (which will have to bankroll a broader range of research with 30 per cent less money than the funding channels it replaces), it likely won’t be able to operate as it had previously through the long Arctic winter night. PEARL was the only research station taking measurements during that cold dark time – data which, as Drummond points out, would be vital to operating large-scale oil drilling operations year-round in the region. “If we are going to do resource extraction in the Arctic, which seems to be something that we’re told is going to happen, then we really ought to know what’s going on in detail, because the Arctic is an extremely fragile region.”

From the roof of PEARL, Drummond notes, you can still see the tire tracks of the construction equipment that built the facility in the 1990s. Even the building of a small research station leaves a permanent mark on the Arctic. If and when the Harper government and its industrial partners arrive, they’ll be stumbling blindly through this landscape, lost without scientific guidance in the long Arctic night.

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