Within this context, the federal government has just released its first Emissions Reduction Plan. This plan charts a new course toward achieving Canada’s 2030 climate change target and will shape how we produce and use energy. The plan includes measures to decarbonize electricity so that 90% is from non-emitting resources by 2030 and that it reaches net-zero by 2035.

The Russia-Ukraine war has renewed a spotlight on the importance of energy security, but it has been decades since we’ve given much thought to energy security in Canada. How we define it has evolved. Historically, the emphasis has been on whether a country’s energy supply is affordable and uninterrupted. In the face of a rapidly warming planet, another criterion has been added and must be emphasized: is that energy also “clean”?

The European Union is now defining what 21st-century energy security looks like in real-time, as its member countries look to rapidly reduce reliance on Russian fossil fuel imports. This month, the REPowerEU plan was issued to eliminate two-thirds of Russian fossil gas imports within a year. Diversifying its suppliers, including by importing more liquefied natural gas from countries including Canada, is one pillar of the plan. (Canada recently announced it will boost oil and gas exports by around 5% to help the European energy crunch.) The other is an accelerated effort to reduce the use of fossil fuels in homes, buildings, industry and the power system. The EU will boost energy efficiency, increase electricity generation from renewable energy resources, electrify end-uses, increase green hydrogen production and use, and address infrastructure bottlenecks.

As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it, “The quicker we switch to renewables and hydrogen, combined with more energy efficiency, the quicker we will be truly independent and master our energy system.” In Germany, the EU’s largest economy, the government has committed €200 billion ($280 billion) to bring forward its goal to generate almost all the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 15 years, to 2035. 

What lesson might Canada take from this response to an acute and significant threat to energy security as 2030 fast approaches?

For starters, we should acknowledge our good fortune to have little exposure to Russian fossil fuels, with only minimal imports. (But even then, the significant role of fossil fuels in our energy system – meeting 80% of our needs today – means Canadian consumers are exposed to the price spike resulting from geopolitical conflict.)

The quicker we switch to renewables and hydrogen, combined with more energy efficiency, the quicker we will be truly independent and master our energy system.

-European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

As in Europe, a major contributor to Canadian “clean energy security” will increasingly come in the form of renewable electricity. On this front, Canada has a head start, with approximately double the share of renewable energy resources in our supply mix. Thanks to abundant hydropower, almost 70% of our electricity is renewable. 

So why is hydropower a key strategic advantage for Canada?

Canadian hydropower facilities produce ultra-low levels of greenhouse gases over their lifetimes thanks to our cold and well-oxygenated northern and boreal water bodies. 

It is an affordable source of clean energy. Canadian provinces with the highest share of hydropower in their electricity supply have the lowest electricity prices, making them attractive markets for new business expansions. For example, General Motors and South Korea’s Posco Chemical chose to build a US$400-million electric-vehicle battery plant in Quebec because of the province’s low-emitting, low-cost electricity. 

Hydropower is also secure, and available 24/7. Hydro-dominated provincial grids in Canada can play a similar role to that of countries like Norway and Switzerland, balancing their neighbour’s grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

And there’s still much more that hydropower can offer to our future energy supply in every Canadian region. Whether through enhancing existing projects, or developing new ones, Canada could surpass the 100,000-megawatt mark of installed capacity by 2035 – a status held by only two other countries worldwide. 

The new Emissions Reduction Plan is the most comprehensive climate plan in Canada’s history. If it is to succeed, the federal government must ensure that new major clean-power projects that contribute to energy security can swiftly move from concept to proposal to steel-in-the ground. As the EU is doing, this requires identifying barriers and proposing measures to rapidly accelerate project roll-out. With hydropower expansion, achieving our emissions-reduction and energy-security goals is possible. But action must begin today. 

Patrick D. Bateman is the interim president of WaterPower Canada, the national trade association for the hydropower industry.

The post The success of Canada’s climate plan hinges on speeding up renewable energy projects appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It hasn’t been discussed much on either side of the border, but it’s an emerging narrative that promises to capture the attention of Canadian and American business and political leaders facing a barrage of economic, environmental, regulatory and market realities – a perfect storm in the making, the size of which is becoming clearer.

Preliminary research from Boston-based energy consultancy London Economics International (LEI) has found that clean power generated in Canada – mostly from new wind and hydropower projects – could generate $14 billion in additional annual export revenues by 2030, possibly sooner, with sufficient development of transmission infrastructure. That’s more than five times the value of Canadian electricity exported to the United States in 2013, meaning a six-fold increase in the value of total annual exports.

The research, in draft form at the time of writing, was co-funded by Corporate Knights and a diverse group of stakeholders in Canada’s energy and environmental community (visit corporateknights.com for more background). It comes on the heels of a report, published in June by the Canadian Academy of Engineering, which describes Canada’s “clean electricity advantage” as having even greater export potential by mid-century.

Enhanced electricity trade between Canada and the U.S. “offers a strategic environmental and economical advantage that would benefit the entire North American economy,” argues the report’s author Jatin Nathwani, a professor of engineering and environment at the University of Waterloo. He is also Ontario Research Chair in Public Policy for Sustainable Energy.

Nathwani estimates that trade could increase from current levels by “10- to 20-fold or higher” to more than $40 billion a year, which would begin to rival current industry revenues from the oil sands. “Such an epochal change is conceivable over a 30 to 50 year time frame consistent with the time lines for 

achieving a low-carbon energy economy,” says Nathwani, calling existing levels of electricity trade to the U.S. “at best anemic.”

To reach its higher export scenario, LEI assumed the existence of a carbon price of $80 per tonne of carbon-equivalent emissions, which heavily penalizes coal-fired power generation. It also counted on a 25 per cent increase in the price of natural gas, which at current prices is considered the main competitive threat to renewable power development.

Under its “high” scenario, wind power from Canada would flow primarily from Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, while hydropower – representing roughly two-thirds of additional clean electricity that could be exported by 2030 – would come mostly from British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec. Also in play is hydropower from Newfoundland and Labrador, where utility Nalcor Energy is planning two massive developments – Muskrat Falls and Gull Island – along the lower Churchill River.

Those two projects alone are expected to generate 16.7 terawatt-hours of electricity a year, much of it targeted for export. A loan guarantee from the Canadian government – which could prove an effective tool to stimulate other large clean power projects across the country – would reduce financing costs and therefore total project costs.

Just as important, however, is whether U.S. markets would demand it. There are a number of moving parts to consider when assessing demand over a 15-year or longer time horizon and across multiple states and regions. In addition to carbon and natural gas pricing, factors that could drive up U.S. clean power demand include growth in electric vehicle use and the rate at which newly introduced carbon regulations accelerate the closure of coal-fired power stations.

Another potential driver: the decline of America’s nuclear reactor fleet. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that against the backdrop of rising total electricity demand the supply of nuclear power will likely remain flat between now and 2040. And that’s the good news for nukes. The EIA also warned that accelerated retirement of aging reactors and high cost relative to natural gas and renewables could see nuclear supply plunging by up to 70 per cent, creating low-carbon supply shortages that will need to be filled.

Ultimately, LEI pointed out, one critical question needs to be asked: “Do Canadian low-carbon resources have a comparative advantage in terms of investment costs or operations relative to local generation development in the United States?”

There is evidence that certain American jurisdictions are beginning to look toward Canada as a stable source of clean power and an insurance policy against power shortages. ISO New England, for example, is responsible for keeping electricity flowing across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut. It is forecasting potential shortages in its operating region by 2017.

The next few years alone will see coal-fired plants in Massachusetts and a nuclear plant in Vermont among the facilities targeted for closure, creating a hole in supply that the equivalent of four million homes rely on. The concern has created interest in a number of transmission projects across the region that would allow New England states to import more clean power, particular hydropower, from Canada.

But it’s no slam dunk. Transmission projects, which can carve paths into vast distances of wilderness and pass close to people’s homes, can be just as controversial as oil and gas pipeline projects. Meanwhile, there is concern within U.S. industry that importing clean power from Canada will undermine local developers of renewables and, as a result, steal domestic jobs. Why buy Canadian when you should be building and buying American?

It’s partly why most state renewable portfolio standards (RPSs), which require a certain amount of renewable electricity in a jurisdiction’s power mix, don’t recognize the import of hydroelectricity from Canada. The standards tend to favour electricity from wind, solar and small hydro projects developed within state.

“Friendly state regulations for the import of Canadian hydro energy would go a long way toward increasing American consumption of this low greenhouse gas emitting resource,” Andrew Finn, an associate at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, wrote in a recent commentary in the Toronto Star.

If RPSs were to be modified to recognize large hydro, as some New England states are considering, some observers have argued that the percentage of renewables required in the power mix should be increased to maintain market demand for local wind and solar power.

But barriers to increased Canadian clean power exports don’t just lie on the demand side. Many Canadians are deeply suspicious of using what has historically been – and to a large extent continues to be – publicly owned infrastructure to export power, on the belief that private corporations will benefit on the backs of Canadian ratepayers.

And as Nathwani points out, provinces – which have constitutional control over electrical energy within their territory – have been “paralyzed” by the principle of provincial self-sufficiency. In other words, a province’s justification for capital investments has been based strictly on meeting its own needs. “Trade and export of electricity as part of a deliberate strategy to address the climate change challenge is neither part of the discussion nor an explicit consideration in the planning process or approvals,” writes Nathwani.

That needs to change, and it requires leadership at the federal level, argued a 2010 paper published by the Canadian International Council. “An ad hoc approach to electricity exports will likely preclude our successful capture of the full range of economic opportunities,” wrote the paper’s author, Roger Goodman, a senior consultant with IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Goodman said a more formal mechanism for power exports, coordinated at the federal level, is crucial. “The Canadian federal government should take on a leadership role but work closely with the provinces, as they are the owners of the resources.”

It won’t be easy, but the opportunity is there to seize and the narrative around it continues to grow. Later this year, research from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Canada’s Trottier Energy Futures Project are expected to shed further light on Canada’s true clean power export potential. 

The benefits are too important to ignore, on both sides of the border. They include improved electrical system reliability, more efficient use of power generation resources, and substantially reduced dependence on fossil-fuelled power generation that has been a major source of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

For Canada, it would help to offset a large portion of carbon emissions from oil sands development, recapturing the country’s past reputation as an environmental leader. This “twinning” of Canada’s electricity trade strategy and climate change goals, as Nathwani points out, “has the potential to deliver economic prosperity with a much lower national carbon footprint.”

But, he adds, it requires “a dramatic shift in thinking.”

The post Powering up Canada’s exports appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Across the world, universities are hotbeds of innovation. And in Canada, a growing amount of that Ivory Tower ingenuity involves a vital subject: water. Unfortunately, many of the great Canadian solutions to water issues stay locked away in labs, never making it to the market. That’s happening despite the fact that the need for marketable, environmentally friendly water inventions—a.k.a. the Blue Economy—is more pressing as climate patterns change, the population increases and people all over the world strive for a higher and more water-rich standard of living.

The result, say some of those charged with bringing lab-born brainwaves to market, is that Canada is spending as much as $6 billion a year to fund academic scientists, but their discoveries aren’t making life better, greener or bluer for Canadian citizens.

“There’s no shortage of discoveries,” says John Molloy, president and chief executive of PARTEQ Innovations, a Kingston, Ontario based company set up to take inventions from Queen’s University to market. But, unlike the United States, Canada still lacks the suite of models necessary to push academic inventions into the marketplace, Molloy says.

A report from the Conference Board of Canada in June ranking 17 developed countries on innovation placed Canada near the bottom of the heap—at 14th. The report said that while scientific output s strong and internationally respected, “Canada does not take the steps that other countries take to ensure science can be successfully commercialized and used as a source of advantage for innovative companies seeking global market share. Canadian companies are thus rarely at the leading edge of new technology and too often find themselves a generation or more behind the productivity growth achieved by global industry leaders.”

Not only that, but while the scientific research on water is ripe for commercialization and the need for innovation is clear, the path to the market is not straightforward, says Bernadette Conant, executive director of the Canadian Water Network in Waterloo, Ontario, which seeks to ensure that science shapes the water-management innovations that draw investments. Some of the advances that could help instead fall into a political vacuum.

“The needs are clear,” says Conant. “What we lack is a single or clear client-approval process.”

And, in a trend Molloy sees as dangerous, more and more universities are shying away from available market mechanisms in favour of waiting for industry to front the cash. “I’d like to see it go the other way,” he says. An early triumph for Molloy’s group is a process developed by Queen’s scientists Stephen

Brown and Peter Aston who figured out how to find E.coli and other disease-causing organisms in drinking water more quickly and reliably. They were galvanized by the Walkerton, Ontario, tragedy of May 2000 in which seven people died and thousands fell ill from the notorious bacteria.

PARTEQ, which has about a dozen industry sponsors who pay to sit at the table and help decide what gets developed, helped license the Pathogen Detection Systems technology. It was eventually sold to the French multinational corporation Veolia, and spun off into its offshoot, ENDETEC. The new system is now being launched internationally and PARTEQ and the scientist inventors stand to make royalties once the upfront development costs are paid back.

One of the key organizations set up to commercialize academic inventions from all over the country is GreenCentre Canada, also based in Kingston. Established in 2009 with $22 million from the federal and Ontario governments, it aims to match start-up investment money with clean, energy-efficient chemical processes—known as green chemistry. It does that both by buying licences to the technology and selling them to industry, and by creating new companies to house the innovations.

“The idea is to get it beyond: ‘Gee, isn’t it a great idea!’ ” says Rui Resendes, its executive director.

Resendes says in the two years since GreenCentre began, there’s been a spike in interest and investment around the world in Canadian inventions. “Water has become the new currency,” he says.

He points to an invention by Rob Singer, a professor of chemistry at the Maritimes Centre for Green Chemistry at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, which is still at the laboratory stage but has immense potential for commercialization. GreenCentre has done a market assessment and wants to license

the invention with a consortium of industry partners. It involves ionic liquids, meaning salts that are liquid at or below room temperature. These have unique chemical properties, Singer says, because they stay liquid instead of easily becoming gas but they also bind to metals.

That means they can grab onto metals in water but not evaporate into the atmosphere. And in turn that means they can decontaminate water of metals, keep them from polluting the atmosphere and allow the metals to be harvested for reuse. It’s a blue benefit on all fronts.

Conceptually, the ionic liquids could replace toxic solvents in hydrometallurgical metal refining, suck the valuable metals out of discarded electronics for resale and even clean up tailings ponds. Singer is still trying to figure out how toxic the ionic liquids are over time and is focusing research on making them both non-toxic and biodegradable.

Perhaps the most famous recent success story is an invention by Don Mavinic, a civil engineer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who figured out how to mine phosphorus from liquid sewage. Phosphorus is a precious element, mined in only five places in the world and poised to run out in a century.

It is also crucial to feeding the global population because it stimulates plant growth, whether on land or in water. Left in wastewater, it can run into coastal waters and cause destructive algae blooms and low-oxygen zones as phytoplankton convert it to food.

Mavinic figured out how to cause a chemical reaction in liquid sewage to extract most of the phosphorus and turn it into environmentally friendly, slow-release fertilizer. The process is patented, licensed and managed out of the Vancouver company, Ostara NutrientRecovery Technologies. It’s in use at Edmonton’s Gold Bar wastewater treatment plant, in Portland, Oregon, and in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and is being tested in Europe. The fertilizer is used in horticulture and on turf, marketed as CrystalGreen.

“We see ourselves as a fertilizer company,” says Ahren Britton, Ostara’s chief technology officer, who helped develop the idea as a grad student of Mavinic’s in 2000. “We just happen to mine from wastewater instead of the ground.”

Britton says the company reckons there are 200 to 300 plants in North America that could use the system to treat sewage and as many in Europe. China and Southeast Asia are also prospects. Ostara believes it will eventually mine as much as one million tonnes of fertilizer a year, reducing the amount needed to be taken out of the ground. Ostara, which has grown to 35 staff from just three in 2006, has won awards as a clean technology pioneer and was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, his year.

The innovations aren’t only chemical, though; nor do they relate only to water quality. One of the globally significant water inventions under development in Canada is a project to harness tidal power in the Bay of Fundy. It’s a collaboration among academic and government scientists and industry, including Nova Scotia-based companies Nova Scotia Power, Minas Basin Pulp and Power, and Fundy Tidal; French company Alstom and U.K. company Atlantis Resources. The Bay is considered the prime site in the world for tidal speed and height, and the tidal power would replace some of the coal-fired electricity Nova Scotia uses now. It’s one of just two massive commercial tidal power turbines being developed in the world, along with another in the Orkneys in Scotland.

A test turbine the size of a house went into the Bay’s Minas Basin in November 2009 and came out 13 months later, likely failing in the first few weeks because of the ferocious flow, says Anna Redden, a biologist with the newly launched Acadia Tidal Energy Institute and director of the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy.

Now, four sets of cables are going down in the Bay so that energy from four new test devices can feed straight to transmission lines next year. Redden says there are still unknowns about the direct effects on the environment and wildlife, but she’s helping design tests to figure that out. And although tidal power has gone in and out of vogue every few decades, Redden is sure it’s here to stay now.

“I think we’ve come to the point where it’s never going away,” she says. “We have to harvest tidal energy.”

While Redden and dozens of other academic scientists continue to piece together the complex puzzle of how to help society benefit from their water research, Conant of the Canadian Water Network has some provocative ideas about what the future will hold. Because water is integral to life and a shared commons, she posts that within a decade, patents and licences on water inventions may be passé. Instead, the new trend may be to break open the market, making patents openly accessible in the hopes that innovation will accelerate, and the Ivory Tower will be an even nimbler and more powerful driver of the Blue Economy.

The post Making waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.

– Oystein Dahle, former VP of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea

Ten years ago, Corporate Knights ventured forth into the realm of corporate rankings—not the usual league of tables comparing revenues and profits, but the murkier space deep in the woods. This shaded area of corporate eco-social performance will answer civilization’s big question: Can we find a way to reconcile our capitalist system on this hot and crowded planet or does an age of Mad Max proportions await?

Some may ask: What does corporate citizenship have to do with the fate of humanity? Thirty years ago, states were more powerful than corporations, but no longer. In 1980, the market value of all publicly traded companies was one-quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP). Today, that ratio stands at eye level with global GDP at approximately US$60 trillion. What’s more, our largest corporations hold marionette strings extending into the heart of the democratic world’s super-structures; from 24 Sussex and the Beltway, to Whitehall and Elysée.

What companies do with social, ecological, natural and financial capital to thrive in the present and shape the future matters.

The nature of the quest has morphed along a continuum that started with corporate social responsibility, evolving to responsible business, and then to the cusp of clean capitalism—a daunting but more exciting age of opportunity that will reward companies that pursue profit concurrently with social and ecological prosperity.

Imagine a prediction 10 years ago that investors with trillions of dollars in combined investments would be holding companies’ feet to the fire to usher in a low-carbon economy (the $65-trillion Carbon Disclosure Project) and standing on guard for human rights and long-term societal value creation as an existential fiduciary notion (the $25 trillion committed under the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment). Or that more money would be invested in renewable electricity ($243 billion in 2010) than coal, natural gas and oil power stations combined. Or that Proctor & Gamble, Nike and Johnson & Johnson would quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its dinosaur position on climate change. The list of ideological accomplishments doesn’t stop there, and would have been written off as crackpot predictions a decade ago. Yet, as so often happens, yesterday’s dreams become today’s reality.

What can we do in the next 10 years to veer even further from the path of corporate and planetary bankruptcy and seize the opportunity of cashing in on the Promised Land of enlightened clean capitalism?

Capital market actors can innovate the transparent, low-cost, inclusive tools and products (like green and social impact bonds) to transform the trillions of dollars of dead money and rhetoric (less than two per cent of investors who hail the virtues of clean capitalism have made it part of their mainstream investment strategy) into investment reality. Yes, bond traders really can save the world if they update their valuation models to take stock of merging social and environmental realities.

Energy more than any other vector is where the rubber hits the clean capitalist road. With $243 billion of investment in renewable electricity generation in 2010, we are half-way to the average of $500 billion a year for the next 20 years the International Energy Agency says will be necessary to win the fight against dangerous climate change. Winning will require a smart electricity grid that maximizes our potential to generate and integrate clean energy wherever it lies —from the Sahara desert’s solar power, to the wind of Saudi Arabia, and the hydro pump storage in Canada’s great wilderness.

Many billion-dollar companies have already caught the scent of opportunity that lies in the clean capitalist economy. The next step is to refashion policy so it rewards those who lead the way on natural and social capital productivity. Get ready for business councils for clean capitalism, a parade of big businesses who take the policy bull by the horns to lead this change. This is already happening on single issues—such as with the International Emissions Trading Association, stocked with members like Shell and Rio Tinto, which recently beat environmental groups to the punch to help prevent a possible climb-down by the B.C. government from the highest rung of continental carbon pricing leadership.

Last, but certainly not least, the eco-social data revolution offers the chance to optimize natural and social capital productivity with the same meticulous vigour applied to financial productivity. But this is not a given. Focus can cut through the data obesity. Thanks to Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters’ provision of social and environmental corporate data and the 15 countries, including India, now working on implementing a green GDP, we are rapidly moving environmental and social data out of the statistical ghetto into the heart of the main documents that guide decision-making in our society: profit and loss statements, and GDP.

The prize of clean capitalism is the space race of the next decade. With Canada’s unparalleled combination of per-capita natural capital assets and stable pots of rock-solid big money institutions—and the 2011 Best 50 Corporate Citizens leading the way—we are uniquely poised to pioneer prosperous models that will enable us and our civilization to win this race against the clock. We have nothing to lose but our chains to a fairy tale whose time is up.

The post 10th anniversary of Best 50 appeared first on Corporate Knights.