Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have made common cause in promoting nuclear energy. Indeed, the prime minister has indicated that the federal climate strategy relies on construction of low-carbon power for a national electrification effort, and nuclear is central to that vision.

This fall, Carney and Ford together announced $3 billion in funding for Ontario’s purchase of four BWRX-300 SMR reactors from Hitachi GE Vernova, a joint Japanese and U.S. company. Ottawa will shoulder $2 billion of that amount through the Canada Growth Fund. In a news release, the two leaders boasted that Canada will become the first Group of Seven country to build an SMR reactor. The prime minister said the federal investment “will extend Canada’s world leadership in clean energy.” Ontario is also pursuing plans to build large-scale reactors.

However, critics argue that the industry’s cost estimates are unreliable. They point to overruns and delays at other “first of a kind” nuclear installations. At the same time, Ontario will rely on a U.S.-based supplier of enriched uranium to fuel the SMRs, unlike its current fleet of Candu reactors that run on non-enriched Canadian sources.

“They’re taking a flyer off Mount SMR and the world is sitting back to see how much of a splat there is,” says Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental studies at York University. The reliance on a U.S. fuel supplier “makes absolutely no sense given our quest for energy independence and security,” he adds.

Pitting nuclear against renewables

Provincially owned Ontario Power Generation (OPG) plans to purchase four Hitachi GE reactors for $20.9 billion, although it has committed to only one at a price of $7.7 billion, including $1.1 billion for infrastructure that would serve all four units.

In addition to the direct support, OPG will benefit from federal investment tax credits of 15% that support investment in clean electricity. The tax credits will be paid out in cash to provincial and municipally owned utilities that are not taxable.

OPG received a construction licence for the SMRs last April from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. It is now preparing the ground at its Darlington site, which currently hosts four larger Candu reactors that have been refurbished in a decade-long, $12.8-billion project that was completed on time and on budget.

OPG cites work by the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to back its bet on SMRs as a cheaper alternative to hybrid options of wind, solar and batteries to supply an additional 2,200 megawatts of low-carbon, baseload power. An IESO paper released in August concluded that it would cost up to $34 billion to meet additional baseload demand with SMRs, while a hybrid renewable system would cost $47 billion. Wind and solar would also entail more transmission and land development costs, the IESO said.

Nuclear facilities operate at far higher capacity factors and, unlike wind and solar, the electricity is constantly generated. IESO assumes that nuclear plants operate at 93% capacity, while that figure for wind is only 38% and for solar, 24%.

OPG also defends the nuclear option by pointing to the large supply chain and workforce in the province that is currently focused on refurbishments at its Pickering site and at Bruce Nuclear and will benefit from further investment in reactors. However, critics argue that cost estimates for nuclear are notoriously unreliable, especially for first-of-a-kind projects like OPG’s deal for the BWRX-300. There have been SMRs of different designs built in the world: two in Russia, one in China and one in Argentina. In every case, there were delays and higher-than-promised costs.

How transforming Canada’s electricity grid could drive decarbonization, save billions

The Crown utility – and ultimately Ontario ratepayers and taxpayers – will be responsible for any cost escalation in the SMR deal.

A report prepared for the Ontario Clean Air Alliance compared the levelled cost of power – that is, the average cost of electricity generation over the plant’s lifetime. It concluded that, in 2030, electricity from SMRs would cost up to US$174 per megawatt/hour, while wind would be $93 and solar would be $41. Those costs do not include transmission or land development, nor do they account for capacity factors.

Ralph Torrie, research director for Corporate Knights, weighed capital costs for the nuclear options against alternatives in his Climate Dollars project, which provides a decarbonization analysis for each province. The report concludes that the upfront investment for reactors would far exceed the cost of renewables plus efficiency and other demand-management strategies.

“Public investment in new nuclear plants has a double-barrelled negative effect on addressing greenhouse gas emissions,” Torrie says in an email. “It diverts capital from efficiency and renewables that would increase the supply of emission-free electricity faster than nuclear at a lower cost and with less risk.”

“The government subsidies for nuclear expansion are driving electricity price increases in Ontario,” he adds, “and that slows down the switch to electricity that we need in buildings and vehicles to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance against climate change.”

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer and senior counsel with Sussex Strategy Group.

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The vision of a decarbonized, interconnected, resilient national power grid is at the heart of recent analysis by Corporate Knights’ Climate Dollars project that sets out an ambitious plan for a zero-emission economy by 2050, all while securing and revitalizing the local economies that are the cornerstone of our national sovereignty.

It is a grid that we have only recently imagined, one based on millions of distributed, renewable generators rather than dozens of central power plants. It requires capital investments in solar, wind and storage technologies that total $700 billion over the next 25 years, in addition to the roughly equal amount of capital needed to electrify the buildings and vehicles. The capital cost for the grid investments averages $28 billion per year from now until 2050 and is below current investment level in the electric power sector in Canada, which totalled $32 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $34.5 billion this year.

But while this total investment is well within the capacity of Canadian capital spending, realizing such a sustainable outcome requires that government make the right choices now, that both new and existing buildings are fossil fuel–free, that we develop vehicle-to-grid infrastructure that feeds the energy of EV batteries back into our grid, and that we stop building new fossil and nuclear plants.

The renewable grid builds on our current hydroelectric base and leans into the wind and solar resources that Canada has in abundance, and that are leading global growth in electricity generation investment.

• Sized to provide for the growth in electrification of buildings and vehicles, the scenario includes up to 100,000 wind turbines and 100 million solar panels to be built across Canada over the next 25 years.
• The batteries in tens of millions of interconnected electric vehicles will provide the energy storage to ensure a reliable grid, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. By 2050, vehicle-to-grid technology cuts the cost of the national grid by half – even after putting money in vehicle owners’ pockets by compensating them for access to their batteries.

Every part of the Climate Dollars scenario is built on technologies that are proven, affordable and beginning to scale up. Getting it done will depend on government leadership in clearing regulatory and other barriers to rapid action, and an accelerated response from businesses and investors who see opportunities to prosper generated by a positive, pragmatic response to the climate emergency.

The Trans-Canada Transmission Link

At the heart of the transition scenario is what we are calling the Trans-Canada Transmission Link, a bold nation-building project as central to our future as the Trans-Canada Railway and Highway were to our past. It’s a coast-to-coast, high-voltage DC transmission line that will foster interprovincial trade in electricity to bring down the cost of decarbonization while supporting broad distribution of the benefits of the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in renewable electricity through the coming transition.

A Trans-Canada Transmission Link will also be a more efficient means of transporting energy across the country than a new pipeline. As the energy transition unfolds, the link could transport gas-powered electricity generated in Alberta to Eastern Canada faster than pushing the gas across the country in a pipeline, with an important added benefit: the Trans-Canada Transmission Link will not be obsolete after the transition to zero-carbon sources is complete. The link will give each province access to electricity-generating capacity in any of the others, with different parts of the country using and consuming power at different times of day. With the grid itself as a coordinating point, Manitoba sunshine will be able to power the dinner-hour peak in Halifax, while Quebec’s summer winds supply morning electricity for office towers in Calgary and Edmonton.

The Trans-Canada Transmission Link is a bold nation-building project as central to our future as the Trans-Canada Railway and Highway were to our past.

A Canada-wide link also cuts the total amount of renewable generation the country will need. Rather than every province building its own carbon-free grid independently, a national link is stronger, and smarter, together. It will cost $30 to $40 billion to build, including the converter stations in each province, and deliver two to three 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, new 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 through an east–west grid will help out provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario that will be hard pressed to independently develop all the renewable generation they need to decarbonize their economies by 2050.

The battery under your hood

Short-term energy storage, operating every hour of every day of the year, 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 battery under the hood of your electric vehicle is the most affordable way to deliver that reliability.

In the short to medium term, large, utility-scale batteries that can store 240,000 kilowatt-hours or more will support the transition to renewable electricity, and there will likely be a longer-term role for some of these large, more expensive batteries. In the longer run, however, the key to bringing down the cost of emissions-free electricity is to bring down the cost of storage.

In the Climate Dollars scenario, we tap into the millions of much smaller EV batteries that will be available from the electrification of road transport. The cars are generally parked 95% of the time and on any given day use only 10 to 20% of their battery capacity. With relatively inexpensive vehicle-to-grid (V2G) infrastructure that enables the cars to charge at times of day when solar electricity is abundant and partially discharge in the evening and overnight, the otherwise idle batteries become a key enabling technology for the transition to renewable electricity.

Utility and fleet managers in Canada and around the world are beginning to adopt V2G technology for load management and cost savings. In the Climate Dollars scenario, vehicle owners decide , but V2G becomes the universal way in which personal electric vehicles connect to the grid. With utility batteries costing more than $1,000 per kilowatt, access to EV batteries could be worth $10,000 to $20,000 per vehicle battery. In the Climate Dollars scenario, V2G cuts the cost of grid decarbonization in half, saving hundreds of billions of dollars – not because the car batteries are that much cheaper, but because they’re already embedded in the cost of the cars. Those vehicles, in turn, become more affordable to buy if their owners can count on revenue from a V2G contract.

Heat pumps and winter peak electricity consumption

In the Climate Dollars scenario, air-source and ground-source heat pumps are the key to eliminating fossil fuel consumption in residential and commercial buildings.

In most provinces, fossil fuels – mainly natural gas – provide most building space and water heating, and the conversion of millions of gas-heated buildings to heat pumps will result in strong growth in winter peak consumption of electricity. Fortunately, because the heat pumps are so efficient – providing anywhere from two to four units of heat for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they consume – it will require that much less energy to heat the buildings with heat pumps than it currently takes to heat them with gas.

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Nevertheless, there are millions of buildings to be converted, and the resulting growth in winter peak consumption of electricity is the defining factor in the capital investment required to establish and maintain a renewable, emission-free electricity supply.

Ensuring that all new buildings are built to high efficiency standards and retrofitting existing buildings for higher levels of efficiency can make a big difference in their peak consumption – more than $100 billion in capital savings if the retrofits are deep enough. There is also a large amount of industrial electricity consumption that occurs during the winter peak, and which could be responsive to seasonal load management and “time of year” pricing – for example, a manufacturing plant could scale back production from Christmas to the middle of February, and make it up in the spring. Here, again, the capital savings to the electricity system could add up to tens of billions of dollars.

Inevitably, though, any future grid that supplies an electrified building sector in a temperate climate will have a winter peak – in the Climate Dollars scenario, electricity consumption is higher in winter in every province. This will result in idle solar and wind capacity in the spring and the fall, idle capacity that will be available at very low cost to innovators who can devise applications for it.

Canada’s energy-supply mix in 2050

In the Climate Dollars scenario, oil and gas demand falls to nearly zero by 2050. The fuels we use for heating and cooling, vehicles, industry and agriculture are replaced by electricity, and that electricity is generated predominantly from wind, hydropower and solar.

• Wind turbines total 178 gigawatts of installed capacity with a national grid in place to balance demand, 235 GW without.
• With no new large hydropower dams in the scenario beyond projects that are already committed, installed hydro capacity remains steady at about 80 GW.
• Solar panels come in at just over 50 GW, 36.4 from utility-scale solar farms and 14 from rooftops in every part of the country.
• Total electricity end use increases from less than 600 to more than 1,000 terawatt-hours per year, including about 550 TWh in homes and commercial buildings, 150 TWh from road transport and nearly 330 TWh from industry and agriculture.

To chart a course to this renewable, decarbonized future, Climate Dollars modelled each of the separate, provincial grids that Canadians have relied on for nearly a century. The scenario includes detailed electricity supply and demand projections for most individual provinces, with an integrated analysis of the electricity supply for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Highlights include:

• modest overall growth in energy and peak electricity demand in British Columbia and Quebec, with hydropower readily available and today’s heavy use of electric resistance heating creating opportunities to boost efficiency through heat pump conversions;
• increased reliance on wind resources in Alberta and Saskatchewan that are close to population centres and play a central role in decarbonizing the grid;
• more than a doubling of electricity consumption in Alberta and Ontario, with rising peak consumption in Ontario underscoring the opportunity to boost efficiency with cold-climate heat pumps and building retrofits;
• greater reliance on ground-source heat pumps in the three Prairie provinces;
• low overall energy consumption in Newfoundland and Labrador as the fossil fuel industry winds down, creating an opportunity for the province’s abundant hydropower resources to attract energy-intensive industries; and
• modest electricity demand growth in the Maritime provinces, where electric heating is already quite prevalent and the rise in peak demand is not as sharp as elsewhere.

Building new nuclear capacity increases the overall cost of decarbonization. A high-nuclear future in Ontario that includes proposed new plants at Bruce and Wesleyville costs $55 billion more than Climate Dollars’ lower-cost reference scenario, which includes only the spending already committed to rebuild old reactors.

Corporate Knights will release the full Climate Dollars analysis April 24, during Earth Week.

Corporate Knights is able to carry out this research thanks to support from the McConnell Foundation, the Trottier Family Foundation, the Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation and the Graham Boeckh Foundation.

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Coloured smoke billowed out of the 150-metre tall chimney of the Salmisaari coal-fired plant, open since 1984, as it was officially decommissioned, marking a new milestone in the Nordic country’s energy transition. Now, coal generation makes up less than 1% of Finland’s energy mix, down from 23% in 2003.

The Salmisaari farewell comes four years ahead of the country’s self-imposed deadline for eliminating coal-based energy production and heralds another trend. As coal has wound down, wind has powered up: wind energy now covers one-quarter of Finland’s electricity needs.

“Finland’s case confirms that accelerating the shift from coal to clean energy is in countries’ self-interest, as it increases energy security and fuels economic growth,” said Julia Skorupska, head of the secretariat of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an advocacy group. PPCA was created in 2017 by Canada and the United Kingdom with the goal of speeding the transition from coal to clean power around the world; it now has 180 members. Last year, in one of the fastest coal power phase-outs in the world, the United Kingdom closed its last coal power plant, in Nottinghamshire, making the British power system coal-free for the first time in almost 150 years.

Finland’s coal phase-out has been made possible by a combination of laws and investments, including €22.8 million earmarked toward “innovative energy technologies” in 2021. In 2019, the Finnish government announced it would ban coal-based energy by 2029, “sending a strong signal to utilities and investors,” according to the advocacy agency Beyond Fossil Fuels.

A recent report found that wind power is now “the biggest enabler of Finland’s economic growth,” accounting for 44% of all projected green industrial investment, or €26 billion.

“Wind alone has more than covered the gap left by coal and fossil gas, proving that renewable energy can be scaled fast, particularly when government policy creates the right conditions,” said Cyrille Cormier, deputy campaign director at Beyond Fossil Fuels, in a statement.

In a statement, Sari Multala, Finland’s minister of climate and the environment, lauded Helen Ltd., the owner of Salmisaari, for its “determination to end the energy use of coal” and noted the “far-sighted” wisdom of enshrining into law a coal phase-out that seemed ambitious at the time. “Imported fossil energy has been replaced with cleaner solutions that reduce climate emissions, while consumers benefit from lower energy prices,” Multala said.

Salmisaari was Helen’s last operating coal plant. Its closure means that the company’s carbon dioxide emissions will decrease by 50% compared to 2024. The move also means that the city of Helsinki’s emissions drop by 30%. In a statement, Helen said it will now produce heat with heat pumps while relying on wind, nuclear, hydro and solar power for electricity generation.

“Our success is an excellent indication that, at best, the clean transition, cost efficiency and Finland’s security of supply can go hand in hand,” Helen CEO Olli Sirkka said in a statement.

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While it’s true that solar and wind generation are variable, credible analysis shows they are the most cost-effective sources of new power, even accounting for this intermittency. A report published by the Canadian Climate Institute last spring also estimates these renewables will play a large role in any future electricity system in Canada – ranging from 31 to 75% of generation by 2050, compared to only 6% today. In fact, they’ll likely play this role independently of climate policies. They are simply that cheap. 

There are lots of ways to balance variable renewables. But they don’t necessarily fit into the categories that come to mind when we think about power. Rather, they belong in a new category of things that provide “flexibility.” 

Flexibility refers to the ability to manage variability in supply and demand in a cost-effective manner over time. Historically, coal and gas plants have played this role, but any type of generation that can be turned on quickly can provide flexibility. Non-emitting hydropower is a great source of flexibility – and it’s abundant in many regions. Other emerging technologies, like geothermal and hydrogen, may play a larger role in time. 

Technological innovation has also given us entirely new types of flexibility. Battery storage is now cost-effective and getting deployed at scale across Canada. In partnership with Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario is about to build Canada’s largest battery farm, and when it comes online in 2025, it will double the energy storage in this province’s grid. While batteries tend to offer only short-duration power storage for now, new solutions like compressed air or longer-duration battery storage may extend this significantly. 

Demand-side management is also becoming more important. This is where some types of electricity load are shifted to move demand to when there’s plenty of supply to match it through pricing signals or direct remote control. Some types of industrial load are already moved around this way – for example, production in pulp and paper mills – and we will increasingly see households participate in it too. Think EV charging that costs less if you’re willing to let your utility decide when exactly your car charges overnight. Or paying you to slightly adjust your house’s temperature for short periods when electricity demand is high. 

The fourth category of flexibility is a very old technology we’re simply not using enough: interconnection. While most Canadian provinces are quite well connected with their southern neighbours, east–west transmission capacity is much smaller. Every Canadian province that could decarbonize with wind and solar has a neighbour with abundant hydro. The potential for a mutually beneficial relationship is there; we just need to tap it. 

Building more flexible electricity systems doesn’t only help balance intermittent renewables; it makes sense for its own sake. Flexible systems are better able to withstand shocks like extreme weather, which we’ll see more of in a changing climate. How we balance cheap renewables and build resilient systems using various types of flexibility is the electricity sector’s 21st-century challenge. New technology options mean that we’re no longer in a world that’s all about base load versus peaking.  

Planning and investment need to catch up to this new reality, since power-purchase agreements and electricity-market design across Canada’s provinces and territories don’t yet reflect it. Even now, when provincial utilities and system operators consider their options, they don’t necessarily take a close look at all the different types of flexibility. Pilot projects in Germany and elsewhere have shown that a grid that relies on renewables is technically feasible. The hardest work lies on the planning, policy, and governance side of things. Canadian clean power will be a competitive advantage if we can maintain it. So let’s roll our sleeves up and get serious about building a modern 21st-century electricity system. 

Jason Dion is senior research director at the Canadian Climate Institute. Sara Hastings-Simon is an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience and the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary.

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As far back as the 1880s, traditional utility businesses created value by building and operating electric power plants and transmission lines to satisfy the instantaneous demand for power on a 24/7 basis. Technological advances in the 1950s and 1960s led to bigger generators and cheaper power, with single generator units reaching one gigawatt – enough electricity to power 100 million LED light bulbs. And transmission lines operating at 500,000 volts and higher became commonplace. Power utilities achieved high levels of reliability through engineering design and redundancy. They also built business and financing models around the sale of largely undifferentiated kilowatt-hours in a regulated market to captive customers.

The grid in most neighbourhoods is currently energized with electricity that is brought in on high-voltage transmission lines from large-scale generation assets located either by necessity or by choice in rural or semi-rural areas. In a new call to action, Corporate Knights, members of the Council for Clean Capitalism, and others are urging the federal government to fund neighbourhood-scale “microgrid” pilot projects. These would integrate the technologies, business models and regulatory frameworks needed to decarbonize buildings and transportation, which together account for most greenhouse gas emissions in our cities.

The individual technologies required to achieve this have already been developed and deployed to varying degrees. They include advanced retrofits, heat pumps, battery storage and bidirectional electric vehicle charging, among others. What we urgently need now are demonstrations of how these new technologies can be deployed strategically and cost effectively at a neighbourhood scale. We also need to understand the regulatory barriers they face and how they can be integrated with the established, central grid.

Show me the microgrid

In the emerging system, technological and business model innovations are transforming the way electricity is produced, stored, used and marketed. There is a shift in value creation toward the consumer’s end of the business, and the grid itself is evolving to support the two-way flow of energy and information between producers, consumers and prosumers (those who consume and produce).

It is fertile ground for the new technologies of distributed generation, energy management and energy storage. Relatively short product-development cycles, the commodification of services, the “internet-of-energy,” sophisticated data analytics and mass production of distributed energy resources all challenge status quo business models and regulatory frameworks. Activities and technologies “beyond the meter” and out of reach of the traditional utility modus operandi are proliferating.

Fortunately, all this disruptive change can be aligned with the imperative to decarbonize building heating and transportation. But to fully capture that opportunity will require strategic coordination of business and government at all levels, which is why the Corporate Knights Council for Clean Capitalism is advocating for microgrid demonstration projects on an urgent basis.

The opportunity of microgrids

In 2019, Siemens announced a pilot project in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in partnership with power utilities. In that project, smart energy consumers (and prosumers) are engaging with utilities to optimize the integration of renewable sources of energy, ensure the stability of the grid and manage decentralized distribution.

It is essential that what we learn from such projects is quickly deployed in other regions across Canada. And we need urgent clarification from governments on the enabling conditions (such as regulations) to ensure the ability to create living labs and test results within 12 to 18 months. If we can get this right, it will help to determine the financial requirements of the energy transition without compromising the reliability and resilience of the grid.

The action needed now

What is needed urgently now are 10 to 15 demonstration projects that will test and prove these effective business models. The required investment is approximately $25 million per project, for a total of around $375 million for 15 demonstration projects. Inclusion of this investment in the forthcoming federal budget will signal the government’s serious intention, and the signatories of this call to action will be there, willing and ready to help.

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“Even without carbon pricing, wind power is set to be 40% cheaper than gas-fired power in both provinces by 2030,” the report states. “Solar power, meanwhile, is already cheaper than natural gas power in Alberta and is on track to be 16% less expensive by the end of the decade.”

With storage added, wind and solar are “still highly cost-competitive with natural gas.”

The study, based on analysis by Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors, comes at a time when both provinces are planning to add new gas plants to their electricity grids — and both will be using a lot more electricity, as vehicles and home heating switch from fuels to electricity. While the grid operators in Ontario and Alberta are both “investigating pathways to a net-zero power grid,” CEC points to a fatal flaw in their analysis — they rely too often on obsolete data that may go back as far as 2001, or draw from experience in other countries.

When Dunsky built a set of “bottom-up cost curves” for each province, said report co-author Evan Pivnick, CEC’s clean energy program manager, they showed that “in most cases renewables are cost-competitive or vastly cheaper, depending on how you treat the carbon tax,” while storage batteries “are competitive today, not theoretically down the road.”

Renewable energy now

With new federal regulations expected to mandate a net-zero grid by 2035, “we need to be doing everything possible to mitigate any new emitting electricity generation, which means preventing to the greatest extent possible any new natural gas building,” he added. So while the report doesn’t tell provinces not to build fossil gas plants, it does urge them to “properly examine the cost to get that same electricity and reliability through other means.”

Those decisions are happening right now, and they carry very high stakes.

“Because power plants typically operate for decades, the choices made today will have substantial ramifications for 2035 and beyond,” Clean Energy Canada writes. “Building new natural gas-fired power plants means locking in emissions—and costs—for many years to come. There is also the risk that fossil fuel infrastructure is retired before the end of its economic lifetime and becomes a stranded asset—a liability taxpayers would likely pay for.”

The report notes that Ontario is currently planning to install 4,000 megawatts of electricity capacity between 2025 and 2027, including 2,500 MW of storage and 1,500 MW of new gas plants, to fill the gap when the province’s aging nuclear plants go offline for refurbishment. The looming electricity shortage was made worse by the Ford government’s ideologically-driven decision to cancel 758 signed renewable energy contracts and rip a fully-built wind farm out of the ground after it took office in 2018.

As a result, carbon pollution from the Ontario grid is expected to increase 375% from 2017 levels by 2030, and 600% by 2040. The province added 7,152 MW of new renewable capacity, mostly solar and wind, between 2010 and 2017, but just 466 MW between 2017 and 2023.

The Alberta grid is coming off a surprisingly fast shift from coal to natural gas, the report says. Provincial legislation calls for a 30% renewable grid by 2030, and renewables have grown from 9% to 22% of grid capacity in five years.

But while “Alberta has the potential to lead Canada in wind and solar deployment by 2025,” CEC writes, “increasing its share of renewables will ultimately require long-term energy storage and transmission solutions to meet the needs of Albertans year-round.”

While the report shows how tough it will be for new gas plants to compete with new utility-scale renewables, Pivnick acknowledged that the analysis was limited to onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaics, and four- and eight-hour batteries. That means it left out decentralized or “behind-the-meter” options like community solar, demand response, and energy efficiency that are already cutting into the demand for new generation.

Late last month, the Snowmass, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute urged U.S. grid planners to include distributed solar and storage in their models, at a time when one major rooftop solar company says customers are “banging down our door” to get installations done.

The choices made today will have substantial ramifications for 2035 and beyond.

– Clean Energy Canada

With limited time to get the study done, Pivnick said the first priority for the Dunsky project was to gather current, local data. As result, “we may very well be understating the true benefits,” he acknowledged.

“What we’ve seen in other jurisdictions is that as renewable energy, as batteries, as hybrid systems get deployed, there’s a learning curve where utilities realize they can provide a better suite of services and benefits, not least of which is a more distributed grid mix that’s more resilient to weather events. There’s an inherent resilience in the [less centralized] grid that is never costed in at this point.”

As an initial point of reference, “the cost input is a key consideration, but just one,” he added. “Given significantly cheaper ability to produce energy, that’s something that even on its own should lead us to ask how we maximize deployment.”

But the report warns that a clean electricity system “is not inevitable.” It urges governments and grid authorities to invest in wind, solar, and a stronger, more flexible grid; provide the policy certainty and incentives needed to attract investment, including the federal government’s upcoming Clean Electricity Regulations; remove barriers to adoption by supporting storage alongside renewable supply; and use up-to-date data to drive their projections of future potential.

“Natural gas plants are incredibly expensive to build and operate, and this report shows that wind and solar, when combined with storage, can do the same job for far less,” Ontario Clean Air Alliance Chair Jack Gibbons told the Toronto Star. “It makes no climate or economic sense to build gas plants when we’ve got these cleaner and lower cost options to keep the lights on.”

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

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A big switch is coming to Canada: the switch from fossil fuels to electricity, powered by electricity systems that are bigger, cleaner and smarter than what we have today. 

It’s a switch that will change the cars we drive, the way we heat our houses – even our stoves and dryers. Streetscapes will change, as charging stations for vehicles pop up and old gas stations transform. And at the same time, we’ll use a lot more clean sources of electricity such as wind and solar, backed up by more storage, smarter appliances and regional connections between electricity grids. 

But here’s the most important thing: that switch is going to make Canadians better off. 

The big switch is essential for achieving Canada’s climate goals, helping to stave off the worst of climate change. Plentiful, affordable electricity will drive emission reductions all through the economy, from electric cars and school buses in transportation, to highly efficient heat pumps and induction stoves in buildings, to electric arc furnaces in steel manufacturing. 

Less widely recognized: the big switch can make energy more affordable for Canadians. The costs of wind, solar and batteries have fallen dramatically over the last decade, without the same volatility and price spikes that fossil fuels have seen. Our research shows that Canadians will be spending less of their incomes on energy (including not only fuels such as natural gas and gasoline, but also the vehicles and appliances that those fuels power), largely because electric technologies are just so much more energy efficient.

The opportunity is clear: rapidly declining technology costs and the growing demand for clean technologies mean that Canadians can use clean electricity to power more and more of their energy needs. It’s about using energy in different and smarter ways. 

The big switch is essential for achieving Canada’s climate goals, helping to stave off the worst of climate change.

The big switch to clean electricity is both necessary and achievable. That’s not to say that it will be easy.

Building out bigger, cleaner and smarter electricity systems in every province and territory is a massive undertaking. Electricity demand in Canada could double by 2050, and most of the new capacity we bring online to meet that demand will have to come from solar and wind. That’s a lot of wind turbines and solar panels, and overcoming regulatory hurdles and local opposition to build this much, this quickly, will be a huge challenge. 

The same is true for expanding connections between energy grids in provinces and territories. There are huge benefits to connecting regional grids to share electricity resources, but provincial governments aren’t used to cooperating on electricity infrastructure and markets.

To drive these changes, governments at all levels will need to get policies right. That means creating strong incentives for building clean rather than dirty electricity. It means articulating a vision for regulators and public utilities that aligns with Canada’s climate plans. And it means creating opportunities for federal, provincial, territorial and Indigenous governments to leverage the different clean electricity advantages that exist in different parts of the country. 

But this also comes back to Canadians. There’s a tendency for us to underestimate the benefits of climate action and overemphasize the costs, but those benefits will be considerable. Switching away from fossil fuels means cleaner air and no more pain at the pump (we’ll be plugging in at home instead). The big switch is coming, and it’s something to celebrate. 

The promise of clean, abundant, affordable energy to heat our homes and power our vehicles can be our reward for getting serious about climate change. It’s time to flip the switch.

The post Why Canadians need to flip the switch on fossil fuels appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Proponents of nuclear power argue that we will need it to meet our greenhouse gas emissions targets. But to paraphrase Australian feminist and activist Irina Dunn, the world needs nuclear energy to address climate change like a fish needs a bicycle. 

It’s a bad fit given our need to dramatically and quickly reduce our greenhouse gas pollution at the lowest possible cost.

Nuclear is no bargain, as the skewed ratio of nuclear shutdowns to start-ups worldwide amply proves. Of 13 nuclear reactors scheduled to come online in 2020, only three actually did. The others were all delayed. In the U.S., we see a growing lineup of nuclear operators looking for bailouts, while in Ontario, only the willingness of our governments to absorb huge cost overruns has kept nuclear afloat.

Nuclear energy’s heavy costs and long timelines matter because we all know we’re at the 11th hour on climate action. If we don’t drastically reduce emissions now, we stand no chance of keeping warming to even an uncomfortable 1.5°C. So what’s Ontario’s plan? Increase gas plant use by 500% or more by 2040 while new and rebuilt reactor projects are underway. This may be just about the most backward approach we could take at a time when Ontario is nowhere near meeting even the Ford government’s unambitious climate targets.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) recently announced it’s teaming up with U.S.-based GE Hitachi to develop a $3-billion reactor that will not be particularly small (300 megawatts) or in any way modular (this remains a completely custom product). The result is that the projected cost, according to the Canadian nuclear industry itself, of power from this reactor will be an astronomical 16.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) – at a time when the global average cost of new solar and wind energy is hovering between 3 and 7 cents per kWh. And the currently unapproved reactor likely won’t be operational until 2030 at the earliest.

Currently, OPG charges 9.6 cents for power from its reactors. That’s after Ontario ratepayers and taxpayers spent years paying off the enormous debt racked up by our nuclear projects, which essentially bankrupted the old Ontario Hydro. This is roughly double what Alberta is now paying for solar energy, and almost double what Quebec has offered to charge Ontario for power from its vast waterpower system. And OPG acknowledges that its price for nuclear power will have to rise to 13.7 cents per kWh to pay for the rebuilding of reactors at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, east of Toronto. In 1975, Ontario Hydro estimated the cost of building the Darlington station would be $3.2 billion. The actual cost was $14.3 billion.

Nuclear is no bargain, as the skewed ratio of nuclear shutdowns to start-ups worldwide amply proves.

The nuclear industry’s answer to its long and troubled history of massive cost overruns, premature shutdowns and accidents is to promote a new type of “friendlier” nuclear – small modular reactors (SMRs). But to date they’re all in the development or research stage. 

This fall, the U.K. government announced at the UN climate summit in Glasgow that it was handing luxury car manufacturer Rolls-Royce more than £200 million to develop its SMR technology. Given the massively over-budget and years-late Hinkley Point conventional nuclear project, it’s clear why the British government is eager to change horses. But with offshore wind power now costing Brits half of what power from Hinkley will cost, it’s not surprising that there is no big rush by the EU to follow in Britain’s footsteps when it comes to its investments in SMRs. 

Nuclear has already shrunk from 26% to 17% of the European Union’s power supply since 2015. Germany continues to work its way toward a full nuclear phase-out and is integrating ever-higher levels of renewable energy into its grid. Germany, like all countries that have used nuclear power for decades, will have to find a home for millions of tonnes of radioactive waste, but at least they won’t continue to produce it as the British and Canadians seem determined to do.

Ontario’s dedication to nuclear power is unnecessary. Quebec keeps offering to supply its neighbour with power at a third of the cost of juice from OPG’s dream reactor. Ontario has enough transmission capacity right now to triple its electricity imports from Quebec and could also dramatically increase its interprovincial transmission capacity, using Hydro One’s existing transmission corridors, at a very small fraction of OPG’s budget for its various nuclear projects. 

In addition, Hydro-Québec’s hydroelectric reservoirs can act like a giant battery for our wind and solar energy. By integrating our wind and solar energy with Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs, we can convert our intermittent renewable power into a firm 24/7 source of baseload electricity supply for Ontario. The previous Liberal government made two smallish deals with Quebec to purchase their surplus water power and storage. In 2020, Ontario’s net electricity imports from Quebec amounted to just 3% of our total. 

But that’s just one way to store intermittent renewable power. We are seeing rapid advances in battery technology, and costs for battery storage are sliding down the same cost curve that solar and wind already have. We have the potential to use our electric vehicles’ (EV) batteries to store surplus wind and solar energy and to provide this power back to our electricity grid during peak demand hours to help phase out our gas and nuclear plants. After all, our cars sit idle for 95% of the hours of the day and we don’t want our EVs to be an underused resource in the battle against climate change.

With the cost of renewables continuing to drop, we can get far more climate bang for our buck by investing in energy efficiency, wind and solar energy, two-way chargers for our EVs, and by expanding our east–west electricity grid – rather than sticking with high-cost nuclear and polluting gas plants. The last thing we need now are costly and delaying distractions from real action on climate. 

Angela Bischoff is the director of Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

The post We don’t have time to wait for the emissions-reduction nuclear power could bring appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“The race to net-zero will be a defining feature of the 21st-century global economy, but Canada’s climate change response is absolutely stuck at the starting gate,” Ralph Torrie told a webinar on December 1.

“The share of our electricity supply provided by clean, renewable power is stagnating when we need it to be galloping forward, and the share of fossil fuel use in our total energy is stalled when we need it to be declining dramatically.”

On December 1, Corporate Knights launched an Earth Index, in which it will track the two key elements of long-term decarbonization: scaling up the use of non-fossil energy on the grid and electrifying transportation, buildings and industry, which currently rely on oil and natural gas. A webinar coincided with the release of a white paper by Torrie on the details of the index.

The Earth Index is based on a scale of one to 100, with each of the two elements accounting for half the score. Based on 2019 data, Canada now sits at 43 on the scale and needs to get to at least 80 by 2030 to reflect a pathway that is consistent with its commitment to be net-zero by 2050.

The share of renewable power on the grid – mostly hydroelectricity but also wind and solar – is currently at 64%, while the resulting electricity provides just 22% of Canada’s total energy use. Torrie did not include nuclear power in his basket of fossil-free electricity, saying the Earth Index is aligned with the European Union’s definition of “clean” – which excludes nuclear.

In the webinar, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault said the federal government is determined to close the yawning gap between commitments on climate change and the action needed to meet the pledges.

“We’re no longer talking about whether or why we need to take action on climate change but how we can get this done,” he said. Guilbeault added that the effort must be done with equity partnership with Indigenous Peoples and increased stringency of carbon pricing in the power sector.

The index represents an important tool to help ensure government actions move beyond the “say–do gap” to reflect their commitments, said Severn Cullis-Suzuki, executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation. She pointed to a recent report from Canada’s Environment Commissioner that highlighted 30 years of missed opportunities for meaningful climate action.

One key factor will be ensuring that Canada’s provincial energy regulators are aligned with the net-zero goals of decarbonizing the electricity grid and switching from fossil fuel use to electricity in transportation, buildings and industry, said WaterPower Canada chief executive Anne-Raphaëlle Audoin. She noted that hydro accounts for 60% of Canada’s electricity supply and more than 90% of its renewable output. “We are envied around the world by countries that don’t have access to this renewable hydro power,” she said.

To get to a score of 80 on the Earth Index by 2030, Canada will need to see a doubling of renewable power generation by 2030, or roughly 10% per year over the next eight years. Torrie estimates such an effort would require investment of between $30 billion and $40 billion per year over that time frame.

That includes growth in interprovincial transmission capacity to connect provinces with enormous hydro capacity, such as British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec, with those that are phasing out coal but continue to rely on natural gas, such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia.

The grid will also have to accommodate an expansion of electric vehicles and the use of electricity to heat buildings and power industry. However, investments in greater energy efficiency would reduce the need for greater electricity supply.

Torrie said the investments are already occurring as part of a reinvention of the electricity sector.

“This transformation is a global megatrend and is the centrepiece of the multi-trillion-dollar economic opportunity represented by the transition to sustainability,” he said in the white paper.

The post Canada is ‘stuck at the starting gate’ of global decarbonizing megatrend appeared first on Corporate Knights.