In 2008, the Italian oil company ERG faced a crossroads. Having sold its 49% stake in a Sicilian refinery to Russian oil giant Lukoil just before the markets crashed, it had cash to burn. And it had a fundamental choice to make.

The company had always been pragmatic. It was established in 1938 as a small oil, tar and chemicals business; in the postwar reconstruction period, its founder, Edoardo Garrone, pivoted to brick manufacturing. But as the demand for oil grew, Garrone turned to production and refining and, from its base in the port city of Genoa, positioned ERG to fuel the country’s industrial boom of the 1950s and 1960s. 

But in the decades to follow, the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis and the growing dominance of Saudi Arabia and Asia in refining technologies led the family-owned company to question its sole reliance on hydrocarbons. In 2004, it dipped its toes into renewables, entering a joint venture with a Spanish renewable-energy company before purchasing an Italian wind company that expanded into the French market.

In 2008, when ERG was weighing its options, pragmatism again prevailed. Garrone’s grandsons, who serve on the board, agreed with fellow shareholders and CEO Luca Bettonte that the company should concentrate on the fastest-growing segment in the energy sector: renewables. “I can’t say we made the decision because we wanted to save the world,” Bettonte told Corporate Knights in a 2021 interview. “But the idea to go green played a part in it.” 

What happened in the years to follow was transformative. By 2013, ERG had become Italy’s leading producer of wind energy. It now has installed capacity in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Sweden, making it one of the continent’s top 10 wind companies. It also owns major solar installations in Italy, Spain, France and the United States. 

In October 2023, ERG divested of its last remaining hydrocarbon asset, with the sale of a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in Sicily. It now calls itself a pure wind and solar energy company. 

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The winds will not always blow in its favour; ERG’s aggressive push into the United States, which began in 2024, will not proceed as smoothly as hoped under the administration of Donald Trump. And it remains vulnerable to shifting regulatory frameworks and unstable electricity prices – not to mention the weather. Nonetheless, its renewable capacity – and earnings – continues to grow.

ERG’s wholesale transition from black to green took little over a decade, and with it the company redefined itself: no longer responding to Italy’s demand for oil, it sees itself – in its own words – “inspiring change to power the future.” 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Italy’s ERG proves you can trade oil for renewables and win appeared first on Corporate Knights.

***

This spring in Michigan, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Potawatomi, or Gun Lake Tribe, received $4 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Climate Resilience program, an initiative that aims to help tribes prepare for climate change. The money will be used to buy a fleet of electric vehicles, help the nation manage a grey-water system, and install a solar array that will cut the tribe’s electricity bills by around 80% and make the nation more self-sufficient. Underneath the two-acre solar array will be gardens of native flowers like butterfly weed, purple prairie clover and primrose to help with the tribe’s prairie restoration efforts.

“We need to be innovative and find ways to leave less of a carbon footprint,” says Gun Lake Tribal Council member Virginia Vanderband. “If we can generate enough energy for our infrastructure, great.” The tribe has other investments – real estate, a construction company, a grocery store – and while the green energy project is doing well, becoming part of the energy market is “not a focus,” Vanderband says.

That seeming lack of interest in joining the growing green energy market is the focus of a recent economic study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailing barriers – like federal red tape – that tribes face when starting green energy projects. If these prohibitive barriers are not addressed, researchers expect that tribes across the United States will lose out on $19 billion of revenue by 2050.

During the early 1800s, tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations. They were coerced into signing treaties that ceded land for settlers in exchange for lands and rights, a process that built the United States and its wealth. Many of the reservations that tribal nations were moved to were lands that settlers deemed less economically rich; however, today, much of that land is perfect for solar and wind development.

Altogether, tribal lands represent an area the size of New Mexico, but not all nations have access to land for development, leaving out hundreds of tribes from the green energy market. Out of the 574 federally recognized tribes, nearly 250 do not have reservations.

In 2022, approximately 100 solar farms on reservations generated about 2% of all solar energy in the U.S., while around 3,000 reservation wind turbines produced about 5% of the nation’s wind energy. However, the University of Wisconsin-Madison study found that of 169 utility-sized wind and solar projects on reservation land, only around 5% are tribally owned.

In many tribal communities, poverty rates remain high – the result of federal policies that have undermined Indigenous economies – and according to the study, “the top 25 percent of reservations in terms of renewable endowments are also currently the group with the lowest incomes.” But while these tribal communities have the most to gain in terms of energy independence and new income streams, the study found that the lands in question aren’t any more likely to be developed than national parks, forests or wildlife refuges where development is not allowed.

“That’s striking,” says Dominic Parker, the author of the study. “You have reservation areas where there’s populations living. [Wind and solar] development is not expressly prohibited. And yet, you’re not seeing any more development than these nearby areas where it is expressly prohibited.”

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One reason, according to Parker, is the long process of getting permissions from tribal and federal entities, a process he calls “white tape,” instead of “red,” to describe the patronizing relationship between federal entities and tribes. Tribes are not legally allowed to fully manage land, water and other resources that are theirs that could contribute to growing their economies. As well, Parker’s research shows that green energy development companies often go to private land near reservations where “paternalistic” federal regulatory rules don’t apply.

“Historically, when resources have been harnessed for mainstream public or private economic benefit, the consequences have often been disastrous for Indigenous peoples,” the study says. In the 1950s, federal initiatives incentivized nuclear power that eventually poisoned communities like the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe, while the push for dams as an energy resource decimated and flooded tribal lands in the Pacific Northwest.

But a big part of the green energy conversation, at least for Virginia Vanderband at Gun Lake, is keeping tribal sovereignty a priority. Just because energy initiatives are going green doesn’t mean that it’s the responsibility of tribes to go along with what the federal government wants.

“We have a social responsibility to the land to keep it clean, to only take what we need,” Vanderband says. “We must maintain our sovereignty first. We have the right to govern ourselves. This allows us to honour and preserve our culture and our way of life.”

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One year after the provincial government imposed a seven-month halt on new solar, wind, hydro, biomass and geothermal ventures, a report from environmental think tank the Pembina Institute reveals that 53 projects were cancelled, representing more than 8,600 megawatts of power-generating capacity. Of those cancellations, 33 projects were already in the development queue at the time of the announcement and could have produced enough energy to power almost all Albertan homes, the study found. An additional 20 projects were part of a flood of developments that surged immediately after the announcement, in the hopes of being grandfathered in under the old rules. That interest has since plummeted, the researchers say.

“It appears that the moratorium created sufficient uncertainty in the renewable energy sector even after it formally ended in February 2024 that new applications have, for now, reached a standstill,” the Pembina report authors note.

The 53 cancelled projects would have drawn in some $91 million in tax revenues. Meanwhile, Alberta cities that already had renewable projects functioning have seen the taxes they collect double over the last year, from $28 million to $54 million, according to Business Renewables Centre-Canada (BRC-Canada), a subsidiary of Pembina. For five communities, these proceeds constitute 20% to 30% of their total annual operating revenues. “This revenue is reliable, stable income that communities can plan around for decades to come,” Jorden Dye, director of BRC-Canada said in a statement.

The Alberta government dismissed the report as one that “intentionally misconstrues the facts.” Nathan Neudorf, Alberta’s minister of affordability and utilities, said, “The Pembina Institute is ignoring the reality that not every proposed energy project leads to shovels in the ground.”

According to the Pembina report, three of the 118 projects that were under development at the time of the moratorium have since been approved and another 20 are “advancing.”

“What we have in truth is a growing queue for energy projects, not a shrinking one,” Neudorf said in a statement to the Canadian Press. “Alberta continues to be a leader in renewable energy and jurisdiction of choice for investors.”

Alberta imposed the moratorium August 3, 2023, officially citing “concerns raised from municipalities and landowners related to responsible land use and the rapid pace of renewables development.” But the unexpected move, in a province where renewables were taking off, reflected an ongoing battle with the federal government over climate policy and energy. At the time, Premier Danielle Smith blamed Ottawa for thwarting the natural gas development that she argued would be needed to keep a renewables grid humming. Experts have said that such a backup is not necessary.

The Alberta government lifted the ban in February of this year and released rules around how renewables could proceed. For example, renewable projects are no longer permitted on Class 1 and 2 agricultural lands unless the project can coexist with farming, and areas designated as “pristine viewscapes” must have a 35-kilometre buffer for new wind projects. However, the Pembina Institute says that the government has yet to provide an official map outlining where new projects might be approved.

RELATED:

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Alberta’s approach contrasts with that of similar jurisdictions such as Ontario, which after cancelling renewable contracts five years ago is once again pursuing wind and solar projects to help bridge its power gap. South of the border, red states have been leading in wind and solar development in the U.S. in recent years, although the upcoming presidential election has thrown new uncertainty into the mix.

The International Energy Agency predicts that more than $2 trillion will be invested in renewables around the world this year.

“The Alberta government’s efforts to stunt the growth of the most promising renewable energy market in the country has been a deeply regrettable success,” noted Stephen Legault, with Environmental Defence, in a statement.

At the same time, Alberta is forecasting continued growth in its oil and gas sector, with higher prices and increased access through the Trans Mountain pipeline system.

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The sun and the wind have been the country’s fastest growing sources of energy over the past decade, according to a report the nonprofit Climate Central released Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal power has declined sharply, and the use of methane (marketed as ‘natural gas‘) in electricity generation has all but leveled off. With the Inflation Reduction Act poised to kick that growth curve higher with expanded tax credits for manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, the most optimistic projections suggest that the country is getting ever-closer to achieving its 2030 and 2035 clean energy goals.

“I think the rate at which renewables have been able to grow is just something that most people don’t recognize,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in preparing the report.

In the decade analyzed by Climate Central, solar went from generating less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity to producing nearly four percent. In that same period, wind grew from four percent to roughly 10. Once hydropower, geothermal, and biomass are accounted for, nearly a quarter of the nation’s grid was powered by renewable electricity in 2023, with the share only expected to rise thanks to the continued surge in solar.

The vast majority of the nation’s solar capacity comes from utility-scale installations with at least one megawatt of capacity (enough to power over a hundred homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association). But panels installed on rooftops, parking lots, and other comparatively small sites contributed a combined 48,000 megawatts across the country.

“One thing that surprised a lot of different people who’ve read the report in our office was the strength of small-scale solar,” said Jen Brady, the lead analyst on the Climate Central report.

With residential and other small arrays accounting for 34 percent of the nation’s available capacity, “it lets you know that maybe you could do something in your community, in your home that can help contribute to it,” Brady said.

Still, the buildout of utility-scale solar farms continues to set the pace for how rapidly renewable energy can feed the country’s grid. According to Sam Ricketts, a clean energy consultant and former climate policy advisor to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, solar’s growth was driven by production and investment tax credits that President Barack Obama extended in 2015 and President Joe Biden expanded through the Inflation Reduction Act. Beyond these federal incentives that allow energy developers to claim tax credits equivalent to 30 percent of the installation cost of renewables, state policies that proactively drive clean energy or promote a competitive market in which the dwindling price of renewables allow them to outshine fossil fuels have been critical to ratcheting up growth. Yet, even with the accelerating expansion seen in the last decade, more investments and incentives are needed.

“As rapid as that growth has been, how do we make it all go that much faster?” Ricketts asks. “Because we need to be building renewables and electricity at about three times the speed that we have been over the last few years.”

Achieving that rate of build out is critical for achieving two of President Biden’s climate goals: cutting emissions economy-wide by at least half by 2030 and achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.

To realize those goals, the nation must reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. “I dare say it’s even more important, for the time being, than 100 percent clean by 2035,” Ricketts said. Hitting that benchmark, he said, will require more federal and state policy pushes. Levin agrees.

“The IRA does a lot,” she said, “but it is not likely to do everything.”

The IRA has the ability to push renewable energy from roughly 40 percent of the nation’s energy mix, when nuclear is included, to more than 60 percent – or, in the most optimistic of scenarios, 77 percent.

But for the growth in capacity to be integrated into the system and utilized, the grid needs to be able to transmit electrons from far-off solar fields and wind farms to the places where they’re needed. While the transmission conversation most often revolves around building new lines and transmission towers, Levin notes that recent technology advances have made it possible to address half of these transmission needs simply by stringing new, advanced power lines on existing infrastructure that can handle bigger loads with fewer losses, in a process called “reconductoring.”

The other challenge that comes with building out clean energy is learning how to handle the way  wind speeds and sunshine fluctuate. While this is often levied as an argument against their reliability, Levin points out that a host of solutions exist – from expanding battery storage to adjusting loads when demand spikes – to ensure they’re reliable. The challenge is adopting them.

“Utilities are risk averse,” she said, “and their commissions can also be risk averse. And so it’s getting them to be comfortable with thinking about the way that they provide electricity and the way that they manage their system a little differently.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Before the provincial government sprung a sudden moratorium last August on renewable energy projects over a megawatt in size, Alberta accounted for 92% of Canada’s new solar and wind capacity. By the time the seven-month pause ended with a provincial announcement Wednesday, multiple investors had shifted their gaze to jurisdictions with more predictable rules and regulations, with at least one developer writing the province off as a “banana republic”.

With this week’s news, one analyst said Alberta has become “one of the only jurisdictions in the world trying to frustrate the deployment of cheap, clean, renewable electricity.”

On Wednesday, Premier Danielle Smith and Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf closed off the moratorium with a set of new development rules, due to take effect March 1, that ban renewable energy projects on prime agricultural land, require developers to post bonds to pay for eventual cleanup costs, and set 35-kilometre buffer zones for wind farms around “protected areas and pristine viewscapes”, a term the government did not define. “New wind power projects will not be permitted within those zones, and other forms of renewable energy may be subject to so-called ‘visual impact statements’ before approval,” the Globe and Mail reports.

The new rules give renewable energy developers the option to negotiate reclamation costs directly with landowners, a common practice that already gives farmers and other rural landholders much more say in renewable energy projects than they’ve had in their past encounters with the province’s gravel, coal, or oil and gas industries. The Globe says Smith and Neudorf “gave no indication” that fossil fuel or other natural resource projects would be barred from prime farmland, or that fossil producers would now be required to post security to cover the massive cleanup costs associated with their toxic tailings ponds and abandoned oil and gas wells.

“The renewables sector was not consulted before the pause, and some industry executives worried that unprecedented government intervention into the multi-billion-dollar business would stoke uncertainty and stifle investment,” the Globe and Mail writes. “Wednesday’s announcement did little to quell those concerns.”

“What the announcement brought was the awareness that it’s probably time and money that can be better spent elsewhere, so that we can do something that’s competitive,” said Grant Arnold, CEO of Calgary-based BluEarth Renewables, a company that has invested more than C$600 million to develop 333 megawatts of wind and solar in Alberta over the last three years.
“We are struggling to find a way to keep investing in Alberta for future projects,” he told the Globe.

“While the pause has lifted, there remains significant uncertainty and risk for investors wishing to participate in Canada’s hottest market for renewables,” Vittoria Bellissimo, president and CEO of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA), said in a release. “It is critical to get these policy changes right, and to do so quickly.”

“Renewable energy has been an Alberta success story,” said Pembina Institute Senior Analyst Jason Wang. But “the Government of Alberta has firmly chosen more expensive energy for Albertans with today’s announcement and takes Alberta in the opposite direction of global energy trends, which include a commitment to triple renewable energy [capacity] by 2030.”

DEVELOPERS HAVE OPTIONS

Arnold’s and Bellissimo’s remarks brought home a reality the Alberta government may learn at its peril: that with competition for investment turning into a global clean energy arms race, developers have no need and likely no time to dwell on jurisdictions that put up unnecessary obstacles to new projects.

“One thing that is different from two or three years ago is that there are procurements gearing up or that we’re in the middle of in virtually every other province in the country,” CanREA’s vice president of policy—western Canada, Evan Wilson, said last week. “So Alberta is in competition with other provinces where there are long-term contracts up for grabs. People will be motivated to get projects built in other jurisdictions, and the [Inflation Reduction Act] provisions in the United States make U.S. jurisdictions very competitive, as well.”

That means “it is incumbent on the government of Alberta to ensure that there is clarity on viewscapes, and perhaps a reconsideration of viewscapes might be in order, to ensure that Alberta can continue to be the leader in Canadian renewable deployment.”

Within hours, renewable energy professionals outside Alberta had spotted the opportunity to tap the renewable energy expertise their provinces need.

“My heart truly breaks for Albertans today. A backward-looking government, irrevocably captured by special interests, is truly cutting off its nose to spite its face—and it is everyday people who will lose (and have already,” economic transformation specialist George Patrick Richard Benson wrote on LinkedIn.

“It is the smallest possible recompense, but to the renewable energy developers and the tradespeople hurt by this, all I can say is: British Columbia needs your help,” Benson added. “We have billions of dollars of renewable energy projects, not only led by BC Hydro but by innumerable Indigenous nations, throughout this province. We cannot build these alone and we will need your expertise and insights to help do this.”

“As a born and raised Albertan this is maddening,” agreed veteran climate and energy analyst Dan Woynillowicz. “As a British Columbian today, there’s a silver lining given the need to build out new renewables as fast as we can. To Alberta’s renewable energy entrepreneurs, engineers and builders: ‘BC is calling.’”

Wilson said the provincial moratorium and the inquiry that followed were a mistake from the start, covering concerns that were already on the way to being settled. “The issues that were being discussed with the inquiry were all worth having discussions about,” he said. But “we could have continued working in Alberta and discussing policy potions without stopping project approvals.” In the wake of the seven-month pause, key aspects of the new rules are still ambiguous, “so we’re still in the middle of this process to figure out what policy in Alberta should look like.”

The decisions on prime farmland and security deposits “reflect the practices our members are already employing in Alberta,” Wilson said. Wind energy “is already easily co-located with agricultural use,” and solar developers “have come a long way in the development of agrivoltaics” to ensure that food and clean electricity production complement each other.

On reclamation costs, “our members by and large are already paying reclamation security. So that’s going to have some transparency added and we’re going to have to talk more about it? I think we can support that,” he said.

CanREA and Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) worked closely together on that issue in response to the provincial inquiry, Wilson added. So “when we see a decision by the government to enhance the role of municipalities in the process, that comes from a joint recommendation from both CanREA and the RMA,” with members of both organizations seeing it as a win-win.

LANDOWNERS HAVE LEVERAGE

When the moratorium was first announced, CanREA said landowners already had the level of control over renewable energy development that the province said it was trying to offer them.

“These are private arrangements between landowners and our members, and our members don’t get to build without their signoff. So the landowner holds a lot of leverage here,” Wilson explained. “Because of the history around reclamation and unfunded liabilities, landowners—who are shrewd businesspeople themselves—have been demanding some form of security. The sector has been responsive to that because it’s become a part of what’s expected, with landowners saying you can’t build here unless you provide us with security.”

Ironically, landowners may be applying experience with other forms of energy to technologies that will behave quite differently over their operating life.

With renewable energy, “the resource doesn’t run out,” Wilson said. “You’re not going to have a wind farm that suddenly runs out of wind and has to close. At end of life for a renewable energy project, the technology basically wears out, the maintenance costs get high, but the resource itself doesn’t run out.”

So “as the industry matures, the renewable infrastructure gets pulled down at the end of its technological life, then new projects get built on the same footprint. You keep the relationship with the landowner, and abandonment of a site is not a common practice.”

It’s in that context that renewable developers post security bonds “to ensure that landowners are comfortable with all aspects of the development.”

The Pembina Institute’s Jason Wang said the new rules actually take decision-making out of rural landowners’ hands.

“No other land use in Alberta is subject to a ban on certain classes of agricultural lands, or not allowed to develop if they are within a 35-kilometre radius of a protected area—a zone that could cover up to 76% of southern Alberta,” he said in a release. “Alberta’s conventional oil and gas industry has no requirement for mandatory reclamation security and the government has yet to commit to addressing the liabilities in that sector, which are 115 times greater than the renewables sector.”

SELECTIVE ‘VIEWSCAPING’

The 35-kilometre buffer zone for new wind projects is the most complicated part of the new system, with Neudorf himself admitting there is no “universal definition of pristine viewscape”.

“We don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about pristine viewscapes,” Wilson said. The province has promised consultation on the issue, but the 35-kilometre setback means they’ll start out from a “pretty challenging standpoint.” Still, CanREA is “hoping we can get through to a more appropriate conversation that does not limit our members’ ability to build.”

The “pristine viewscapes” provision prompted a wave of criticism Wednesday, with Wang warning that the subjectivity in the new rules would only add to the uncertainty around renewable energy investment in the province. “It might just be like a backdoor ban—a soft moratorium,” he told the Globe and Mail.

The Smith government “has now essentially introduced a second ‘soft moratorium,’” agreed Jorden Dye, director of the Business Renewables Centre-Canada.

Evan Pivnick, clean energy program manager at Clean Energy Canada, said Alberta had dropped an “uncertainty bomb” on the industry. “Until last year, the province was the undisputed renewables capital of Canada,” he said in a statement. “Now Alberta is undermining its own success, making it one of the only jurisdictions in the world trying to frustrate the deployment of cheap, clean, renewable electricity.”

The provision came in for its share of online mockery, with Pembina posting a photo of a gas plant blocking a “pristine landscape” and LinkedIn comments carrying an aerial photo of an oil sands tailings pond and power lines sullying a rural highway.

“These ‘pristine’ sightlines in the foothills of Alberta are clearly being ‘spoiled’ by electricity infrastructure (aka poles),” wrote carbon management consultant Duncan Noble. “When can we expect the government of Alberta to protect Albertans from such ‘ugly’ sights?”

RURAL REVENUES AT RISK

Just ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, the Business Renewables Centre-Canada published a map that showed $277 million in tax revenues that 33 Alberta rural municipalities stood to gain from new solar and wind projects that had been expected to come online by 2028, many of them in the southern parts of the province where the “pristine viewscapes” provision could have the greatest impact. The revenues ranged from $857,813 in Bighorn Municipal District to nearly $27.4 million for Paintearth County northeast of Calgary. The totals were equal to as little as 0.9% of operating revenue in Greenview County to 171.5% in Paintearth.

For comparison, The Canadian Press reported last week that fossil fuel companies failed to pay $43 million in local taxes due to rural municipalities last year, bringing their total backlog to $252 million. “Year after year, the problem drags on due to a lack of industry regulation and accountability,” RMA President Paul McLauchlin said in a release.

In a release Wednesday, BRC-Canada warned that some of the renewable projects on its map “may no longer be possible and others may be delayed or cancelled,” meaning that a share of the revenue to rural municipalities is now at risk. “The Alberta government has raised more questions with their supposed answers. This is not the level of detail the industry needs to make investment decision,” Dye said.

“Corporations have invested $6.3 billion in power purchase agreements in the past five years in this province, but I expect the government has now essentially introduced a second ‘soft moratorium’,” he added. “By introducing three new regulatory frameworks without details, investors and developers are left wondering what this actually means for their projects. Investors required certainty, and the government offered confusion.”

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. Read the original story here. 

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Specifically, there is a real concern among some in the party and the general public that industrial solar will displace farming and raise food prices as well as create end-of-life problems with potentially abandoned equipment.

Luckily, we can have our cake and eat it too, with a new concept of agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics is the simultaneous placement of food crops and solar photovoltaic systems that produce electricity directly from sunlight — while also producing a beneficial micro climate. Covering crops with solar panels may not seem intuitive, however, dozens of studies from all over the world have shown that many crop yields increase when they are partially shaded from solar panels.

This is good news for everyone, but especially for Alberta’s ruling Conservatives, as it provides a seemingly simple solution to a potentially complicated land-use debate between agriculture and energy generation within the province.

Alberta and energy

Alberta’s energy portfolio is changing rapidly. Low-cost solar energy is now growing so fast as to be a “gold rush” in Alberta.

In fact, much to Ontario’s shame, Alberta has taken on the leadership role in solar development in Canada, generating millions of solar dollars and creating thousands of solar jobs for Alberta’s energy workers.

Solar companies have grown so fast precisely because there is profit in offsetting costly fossil-fuel electricity. However, many in Alberta are worried that this new boom will lead to higher food costs, scarred landscapes and a repeat of costs from cleaning up after the oil and gas industry.

This particular land-use conflict between solar and agriculture has been a concern for solar researchers like myself for some time. However, our research in the United States has shown that agrivoltaics provide higher economic productivity, energy and food yields. So much so that the U.S. Department of Energy is now investing millions of dollars to ensure America’s dominance in the field.

One of the studies in the U.S., for example, observed pepper production shoot up by more than 200 per cent while other crops like wheat in Germany were more reserved with a few per cent increase — but they still produced more wheat.

Not surprisingly, agrivoltaics is slated to grow to a $9.3 billion market by 2031.

Agrivoltaics in Canada

Agrivoltaics is happening right here in Canada already (mostly with sheep grazing between panels on marginal land). Last year, we held the first agrivoltaics conference anywhere in North America at the Ivey Business School.

The trade group made up of farmers and solar companies called Agrivoltaics Canada has formed because agrivoltaic farming can help meet Canada’s food and energy needs all the while getting rid of our fossil fuel reliance and greenhouse gas emissions (and the associated emissions liabilities).

Agrivoltaics will allow Alberta’s farmers to keep farming, make more money, drop energy costs, and help protect the environment for all of our children. To take advantage of all the profit that agrivoltaics represents for the province, our team completed a study that showed the changes to Alberta’s regulations would actually need to be relatively modest.

The simple trick is to install solar systems that enable conventional farming, so farmers do not need to change anything. By spacing solar rows out far enough that combines/tractors can drive between them using vertical racks or tracker systems, agrivoltaics are out of the way when the farmer needs to farm. We did a study that looked specifically at Alberta’s agrivoltaic potential, which was second only to Saskatchewan in Canada.

Moving forward together

Agrivoltaics really has broad appeal. Farmers love it as it increases yields and provides steady incomes and so do solar developers and environmentalists. Even most Americans support solar development when agrivoltaics protects farm jobs. It is thus not surprising that agrivoltaics is exploding on the world market.

Eighty-nine per cent of Alberta’s electricity came from fossil fuels, yet we published an article this year that showed that agrivoltaics on just one per cent of the current agricultural land would eliminate the carbon emissions entirely. Less than one per cent of Alberta’s farm land dedicated to agrivoltaics, cuts all harmful emissions from Alberta’s electricity sector while making more food.

This is a win-win for the farmers, and consumers alike. As Alberta’s Conservatives are now able to lift the renewable energy ban knowing that the environment and the food system will be protected, they should ensure that large-scale solar in the province is encouraged to be agrivoltaic. Then all of us, regardless of party, can enjoy the conserved beauty of nature, lower-cost electricity and more food produced per acre. Whether or not this will result in lower costs at the grocery store checkout is a question yet to be answered — but we can hope.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and Professor, Western University.

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The reaction is utterly understandable when you can taste climate change in the back of your throat. But it risks drowning out some essential truths that have to guide every step we take in response to this global emergency:

The last chapters of this story have not yet been written.

We still have the power to write them.

And the only way to guarantee that we lose this battle of our lifetimes is if we assume it’s already lost.

The harsh truth is that we’ve known for decades that this moment would come. $200 million buys a lot of misleading PR and backroom arm-twisting, and that’s what fossil companies have spent on climate delay and denial since they turned their backs on their own early climate research around 1984, according to Fire Weather author John Vaillant.

So it was foreseeable, foreseen, and pretty much inevitable that we would reach this point. The crisis is obvious, and obviously terrifying. The solutions are gaining ground, but not yet quickly or widely enough. And the day-to-day grind is getting less aspirational and a whole lot more granular as governments, institutions, businesses, and financiers move from the big-picture “what” of declaring a climate emergency to the detailed “how” of delivering on the transition.

While that tough and necessary work gets done, we can’t let the panic set us back. Particularly when the response is to just shout louder, block more rush hour traffic with street protests, or splash more pink paint on Group of Seven artwork or woolly mammoth statues. Those desperation moves only drive climate concern and action farther out to the margins, at just the moment when climate solutions are moving to the mainstream.

Building the Future Brick by Brick

Part of the disconnect is that the solutions we need almost always start out smaller and less dramatic than anything that speaks to the immediacy of a cascading, global crisis.

The incremental action items that eventually lead to big wins, then scale up into even bigger transformations, aren’t nearly as conspicuous as a raging wildfire travelling an average 23 kilometres per hour.

But unless we want to put our faith in megaproject pipe dreams like carbon capture and storage and small modular nuclear reactors, the practical wins we need will have to combine the occasional, big political breakthrough with small but significant gains that don’t initially sound like much to celebrate.

Like a wastewater energy transfer system that cuts a hospital’s energy for heating and cooling by 90% and its climate pollution by 250,000 tonnes—so that the idea will only show up in a big-picture emissions reduction scenario when it’s been repeated and adapted in dozens or hundreds of other local projects.

Or an energy management software that allows a big high rise to accommodate up to four times as many electric vehicle chargers before it has to upgrade its utility connection, opening a door for those EVs to deliver lifesaving backup power in the next grid emergency.

Or the City of Nanaimo banning gas as a primary heating source in new homes as of July, 2024.

Or a court case where the judge doesn’t rule against the Ontario government’s active, ideologically-driven hostility to climate action and renewable energy development, but still affirms that seven youth plaintiffs are entitled to Constitutional protection of their climate rights.

Or a South Korean automaker that funds a non-profit to collect 55 tons of plastic waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, announcing plans to reuse the material in its upcoming line of EVs.

A Run of Bigger Wins

The bigger wins are fewer and farther between, but even there, we’ve been on a pretty good run lately.

Canada became the first G20 country to mostly ban fossil fuel subsidies and released a solid set of clean electricity regulations, with a draft fossil fuel emissions cap due this fall.

In a binding referendum two weeks ago, Ecuadorans voted against oil drilling in a protected area in the Amazon that’s home to two uncontacted tribes and serves as a biodiversity hotspot.

Climate youth won a landmark court case in Montana that could have implications for Canada.

California, which has begun styling itself the world’s fourth-biggest economy, has just endorsed the call for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Colombia joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.

Global renewable energy investment is set to hit $1.7 trillion this year, outstripping fossil spending for the fourth year in a row.

None of these advances have been easy or perfect. All of them combined won’t be enough to stop the next wildfire or clear a 1.6-million-square-kilometre garbage patch. Not yet. We need much more of the same, and we need it yesterday. We should have been in this place five or 20 or 30 years ago, and there’s no reason it couldn’t and shouldn’t have happened.

But to get the speed and depth of change that the climate emergency demands, we first had to reach the threshold where we are right now. And then the next. We needn’t have waited (fossil companies and their allies needn’t have forced us to wait) until multiple climate tipping points were on the immediate horizon. But finally, so much of the momentum is increasingly in our favour. And that means we have two choices that are not mutually exclusive.

We can rage, grieve, mourn, and track down the resources we need to cope with a devastating global emergency. I’m guessing that most of us have been there from time to time.

And then we have to pick ourselves up and get back to work. Keep on building wins, big and small. And make a habit of listening for the investors, policy-makers, practitioners, and other allies outside the “bubble” who may not spend every day fretting about climate change, but still have their own, essential part to play in achieving faster, deeper carbon cuts.

Stop Shouting, Start Connecting

This line of thinking translates into a somewhat different agenda for climate hawks.

Because shouting indiscriminately at people who aren’t already out there alongside us, working all-out on the climate emergency, is not one of our options. Not if we want to build a wider, louder voice for climate action and solutions, rather than painting ourselves into a self-righteous (and, these days, pink-hued) corner.

A week rarely goes by without the some variant on the same language popping up in email, in our comments section, or on social media: What will it take for people to wake up??

That question is almost always misplaced.

There’s ample evidence in public opinion polls that people in Canada largely understand that we’re in a climate emergency and want something done about it. We also know that a precarious economy, with some of that precarity driven by climate change itself, rips away the time, attention, and dollars that many households would need to put climate solutions or emission reductions at the centre of their day-to-day thinking or action.

So—if we really mean it (and I’m convinced that most of us do) when we talk about climate solutions that leave no one behind, our strategies and messaging should sound like it.

Sending Allies to the Sidelines?

Pointing out that fare-free transit makes it easier and more affordable to get to and from work is probably a more widely appealing message than leading with the emission reductions that also result. But either of those benefits is a whole lot more constructive than blocking traffic to disrupt “business as usual” and get commuters to somehow, magically, abandon the cars they depend on, often for reasons that are far beyond their control.

Tossing washable, pink paint on works of art generates coverage, though the logic is a lot less obvious than if the target were an oil and gas AGM or a fossil-friendly bank. But are the pink paint headlines building a wider climate community or sending potential allies and supporters screaming to the sidelines?

The academic theory behind the protests holds that no non-violent movement has ever failed if it managed to engage 3.5% of the population. But I’ve always wondered—if the climate community can aim to connect that widely while operating on a shoestring, how long will it take for the fossil industry with its various faux-grassroot offshoots to mobilize its own 3.5%? I fear that question may have begun to answer itself in last year’s convoy occupation in Ottawa, and more recently in the smaller convoy-style protests against wildfire restrictions in Shuswap, British Columbia and Yellowknife.

The brutal reality is that, sooner or later, the traffic disruptions and pink paint protests will help drive up despair over the very crisis they’re meant to solve. Sooner, if they convince people farther outside the climate bubble that the are’s no other way to take action, or later, when the protests themselves fail to deliver as promised. If that’s right, it means that shouting at people who are already struggling with everyday life, rather than calling them in to a combined agenda of climate solutions, a fossil fuel phaseout, and social equity and justice, is nothing short of malpractice.

None of which should stop any of us from gearing up and spreading the word for Global Climate Strike 2023 on September 15. But maybe we should think about leaving the pink paint at home?

Mitchell Beer is the publisher of the Energy Mix.

This article was first published in The Energy Mix Weekender. You can read the original here.

The post Don‘t let climate grief and despair defeat climate solutions appeared first on Corporate Knights.

After a summer of raging wildfires linked to climate change, and in a province that is the automotive hub of the country, Ontario can and should do much more to accelerate the electrification of heavy buses and trucks. And investing in the electrification of school buses is a good place to start, especially when you consider that transportation is the single biggest source of GHGs in Ontario and that the province has a clean electricity system (estimated to be 92% emissions free) to charge battery-run vehicles.  

Not all heavy-duty trucks and buses can be easily transitioned to zero-emission vehicles. Long-haul trucks – given their size and weight, the long distances travelled between charges or refuelling, and technology that is not yet market-ready – will take longer to decarbonize.  

This is not the case for buses. In fact, of all the classes and sub-classes of large vehicles, school buses are one of the easiest to electrify. Typically, school buses have a predictable daily mileage of around 63 miles (100 kilometres) and return to the same base regularly, making them ideal for overnight charging at a central depot. Because electric school buses don’t typically use public chargers, relatively low-cost Level 2 chargers can be installed by private fleet owners.  

Yet, to date, just 20 school buses are electric in this province.  

Some might argue that sticker shock is the reason for the tepid interest in electric school buses:; they’re more than double the purchase price of a conventional bus. But this claim fails to account for the cost savings associated with a zero-emission bus. Over a 12-year lifetime, electric school buses save approximately $14,000 a year by using electricity in place of diesel fuel and realize additional savings of about $3,000 annually on maintenance costs. Adding in the $150,000 rebate offered by the federal government, the total cost of ownership of an electric school bus can reach parity with diesel in just under six years.    

Moreover, investing in electric buses could help revitalize Ontario’s medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sector that has yet to fully recover from near collapse in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The North American electric bus market has become increasingly buoyant and is predicted to nearly double within the next two to three years. Meanwhile, the global market has gone into overdrive: sales projections for electric buses are expected to reach US$3.1 billion by 2030.  

Ontario can leverage its automotive infrastructure and labour force to take full advantage of current market conditions. As it has done in the passenger car sector, the province should consider comparable investments in manufacturing zero-emission heavy vehicles, including school buses, while also incentivizing domestic uptake. Purchase incentives, such as rebates, have been shown to be more effective at growing local markets than   subsidies for manufacturers.    

If the province doesn’t shift gears soon, the economic fallout of this missed opportunity will be bracing. The Pembina Institute recently released a report on electric school buses in Ontario in which our modelling shows that if 65% of Ontario’s school bus stock is electrified by 2030 (Quebec’s target for school bus electrification), multiplier effects along the supply chain would result in more than 13,000 jobs and generate nearly $2 billion in economic output for the province.    

 Cost savings can also be realized in the health system. According to Health Canada, health costs related to diesel exhaust are estimated to be about $2.3 billion annually.  

Not every argument need be reduced to dollars and cents. In Canada, the transportation sector spews more carbon pollution into the air than any other sector save oil and gas. Those two sectors combined are responsible for approximately half of Canada’s total emissions. While emissions from passenger cars have been edging downward, emissions from medium- and heavy-duty vehicles have been tracking upward – countering Canada’s efforts to lower GHGs by 40% in the next seven years.  

Some 20,000 school buses transport children in Ontario on a daily basis. Of those, only a couple hundred electric versions are expected to be on the road in the next three years. Ontario’s sluggish pace compares unfavourably with other provinces such as Quebec, where Transport Minister François Bonnardel has declared that nearly 2,600 electric school buses will hit the road over the next three years.  

 The provincial government is in the driver’s seat. Ontario can take the road that leads to a clean environment, healthy communities and economic prosperity. Turning the yellow school bus into a clean, green one can be the first stop along the way.  

Chandan Bhardwaj is a senior transportation analyst with the Pembina Institute.

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While this move will not be popular among environmentalists, I expect it will please some investors, who would like to wring as much money as possible from these fossil fuel assets before they become stranded. 

Kruger’s walk-back away from clean energy comes after the CEOs of Shell and BP made similar moves. The former Imperial Oil CEO came out of retirement in May only to steer the company “back to being a good old-fashioned oil company,” as Western Standard noted. Suncor had already divested from solar and wind assets last year, reportedly to focus on hydrogen and renewable fuels. Now Kruger has made it clear that the company is returning to its oil sands roots. 

Why the change in tune? The fickle price of oil.  

A few years ago, when Western Canadian Select was trading at US$12 per barrel, oil companies were professing their commitment to clean energy; now it’s at US$56, down from a high of more than US$100 last June.  

It’s hard to find anyone willing to bet serious money that high oil prices will persist as a decadal trend – there are too many forces of disruption dampening long-term structural demand for oil. Given the situation, an oil company has two choices: it can focus on fundamentals, juice profits to the max and give the money to shareholders as the company disappears into the sunset, or it can leverage its various forms of capital to plow these proceeds from old energy into the new energy that will dominate the near future, reinventing itself to own and thrive in the low– carbon future. 

Not that long ago, this is exactly what Mark Little (the CEO of Suncor at the time), was calling for, noting in an article he co-wrote for Corporate Knights that making advanced materials (including lightweight carbon fibres) from the rich feedstock that is bitumen could “quadruple the revenue from Alberta’s current bitumen output.” 

With Big Oil incumbents bailing on clean energy, it will be up to other sectors and entrepreneurs to accelerate the energy transition and reap the rewards of leading the low– carbon economy, one that’s already rivalling – and will soon dwarf – fossil fuels.  

Let’s cheer them on and let’s stop wasting time by giving Big Oil a seat at the tables where we make important decisions about our future, starting with the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in November. More than 600 oil and gas lobbyists registered for last fall’s summit. 

It’s bad enough that this year’s summit is being chaired by an oil company executive. Let’s at least keep the rest of the dinosaurs out.  

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Smith says the federal government is preventing development of the natural gas backup she apparently thinks the renewable energy systems would need, The Canadian Press reports.

Smith, whose government surprised the province’s renewable energy industry last week by announcing the freeze, told her province-wide radio call-in program Saturday that backup plants powered by natural gas are needed for when wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, CP writes.

But, she said, the federal government doesn’t want Alberta to add any new natural gas electricity plants to the grid.

“So I’ve told them, how can I bring on additional wind and solar if I’m not able to secure the reliability of my power grid by being able to bring on natural gas peaker plants? That’s the heart of the problem,” Smith said.

“No one is proposing any new natural gas plants because the federal government has created so much uncertainty in the market.”

That rationale was confusing for one of the province’s leading energy economists, as well as a representative of a renewable energy industry group, who said there’s no requirement in Alberta’s market for generators to be able to supply power 24-7.

“If somebody adds solar to the grid, you don’t need to add backup to compensate for it,” said the University of Alberta’s Andrew Leach.

“It just adds a source of cheap electricity for times when it is sunny outside,” explained. “Essentially, you bring your power to the market every hour and see what it sells for.”

Leach said it’s possible the addition of cheap wind and solar energy could discourage natural gas-powered projects by lowering the price of electricity. But he said the reverse is also true—that fossil fuel projects could discourage green ones if they’re less expensive.

He added that Alberta’s energy market, by law, operates on exactly that kind of free and open competition.

“Good gawd Premier, give yer head a shake,” Iron & Earth Communications Director Mike Spear advised on LinkedIn.

“We got screwed,” declared Mike Lambros, founder and CEO of Texas-based Proteus Power Developments LLC, which the Globe and Mail says had spent millions on the application process for the three solar farms it planned to build in Alberta.

‘Taking a Jackhammer to a Nail’

The province’s burgeoning renewable energy industry said it was blindsided by last week’s announcement and warned Alberta could lose billions of dollars in investment to the United States and Europe as a result. “Most troubling, some executives said, is that Alberta’s decision to pursue the pause will put it at a disadvantage in the competition for capital for emissions-reducing renewable energy, even as the effects of climate change worsen in Canada and globally,” the Globe and Mail reports.

“This sort of move obviously has a chilling effect on the investment climate for renewables in Alberta. Up until this surprise announcement, Alberta has been leading the nation in renewables growth,” said Dan Balaban, CEO of Greengate Power, the company behind Canada’s biggest solar farm near Vulcan, Alberta.

“Sure, the industry’s been growing quickly. It has been experiencing some growing pains, as with any fast-growing industry,” he added. “But I think putting a moratorium on new project approvals is a very extreme measure. It’s like taking a jackhammer to a nail.”

Balaban said any issues arising from solar and wind development in the province can be addressed without shutting down the application process.

“Right away, it makes the U.S. jurisdictions more desirable. It calls into question whether Alberta really is an open-for-business province,” said Jordan Dye, acting director of the Business Renewables Centre-Canada. “The other angle that’s important to consider is, right now there are major multinational corporations that do renewable development looking to enter the Canadian market, through Alberta. I’ve been meeting with a few companies over the last few months, and this calls into question the pace and decision to move to Alberta.”

Citing data from the Business Renewables Centre, the Globe says Alberta has seen C$4.7 billion in new renewable energy projects since 2019, and 2023 was on track to be a record year. “The centre said in a statement that the industry has created 5,300 jobs, and contributed millions of dollars in property taxes and annual payments to landowners.”

That’s in contrast to deadbeat fossils in the province that have steadfastly refused to remit more than $250 million in unpaid municipal taxes, creating deep hardship for rural municipalities trying to pay their bills and deliver services.

Nathan Neudorf, minister of affordability and utilities, allowed as how the moratorium would be “a little bit of inconvenience now for the next few months” but was worthwhile to get things right for the long-term, CP writes.

Vittoria Bellissimo, president and CEO of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, said Alberta should remove impediments to energy storage projects, like tariffs that she said could treat storage providers the same as energy consumers or generators. That way, she said green energy from solar and wind could be stored and released when it’s needed.

“The premier and others are under the impression that you have to have natural gas to make the system work, but you don’t,” Bellissimo told CP. “You need any type of resources that can time shift, and there’s lots of them out there.”

‘This is Not Orphan Wells’

Alberta has been a leader in renewable energy development in Canada, accounting for 75% of the country’s increase in solar and wind generation in 2022. In that year, 17% of the province’s electricity came from wind and solar, exceeding its 15% target.

A representative of Rural Municipalities Alberta has said that while farmers and municipalities get tax and rent revenues from renewable energy, members are concerned about possible cleanup problems, similar to issues they’ve experienced with abandoned oil and gas wells. They’ve also said they’re concerned about agriculture being displaced.

But there’s a crucial difference between the subsurface oil and gas industry that has left Alberta with a massive legacy of toxic tailings ponds and abandoned wells, and renewable energy projects that are built above-ground: With wind and solar, Bellissimo said last week, landowners hold surface rights, which means they get to decide whether an installation proceeds and under what conditions.

“This is not orphan wells,” she told The Energy Mix. “Landowners can refuse entry if they so decide,” and “they can decide when and how a renewable project gets installed,” through private, civil contracts that can include provisions for decommissioning or other assurances to address landholders’ concerns.

But CP says Smith told her radio audience on Saturday that a solar farm in her Brooks-Medicine Hat constituency in southern Alberta was covered for months with ice and snow, and wasn’t producing power.

“When we were in the winter,” she said, “several times the grid almost failed because we didn’t have enough power, and you can’t call up wind and solar on demand.”

Leach countered that some solar projects are built in order to capture peak summer sunshine, and wondered why the province would intervene if they made economic sense for the landowners and power producers.

“When you stop and think about that for half a second it’s incredibly ironic because, of course, you’re not growing a lot of canola in the snow and ice, either,” he added.

‘Held Hostage by Political Intrigue?’

While some analyses this week have cast the renewables moratorium as part of Smith’s opposition to the federal government’s forthcoming Clean Electricity Strategy, veteran Alberta energy journalist Bill Whitelaw has a different theory that he admits might “suffer a little from tinfoil-hat syndrome.” In an opinion piece this week, he asks whether the idea might trace back to the work of a five-member provincial panel, consisting entirely of oil executives and “nary a renewables person among them”, that was meant to advise on the province’s energy future. It was chaired by oilpatch veteran and Smith energy mentor David Yager.

“We all know the world needs long-term energy solutions that are responsible, reliable, and affordable,” Smith said in a February statement. “Now is the perfect time to create a panel of experts to look ahead to the future of our energy sector and how we can meet global energy needs in the years ahead.”

But “fast forward to July and the report is nowhere to be found in the public realm. Indeed, Albertans have been told the report is currently classified as ‘advice’ to the premier—a status that protects it from the inconvenience of the public’s prying eyes,” Whitelaw writes. “That sort of clashes with the whole spirit of advice to Albertans, which was the pretty explicit subtext when the panel was announced.”

There’s been no public information on who the panel consulted or what it advised, Whitelaw acknowledges. But “here is the $64,000 tinfoil-hat question: Did Yager’s report recommend the moratorium? Did it contain sufficient Gatling Gun rounds of ammunition, gussied up as recommendations, to start bringing renewables to heel in order to protect the legacy oil and gas sector? Is this really all about the premier’s determination to stare down Ottawa over contentious issues like clean electricity grids?”

In the end, “we don’t know. And we can’t know this because we’re not worthy enough to know the report’s contents,” even though the subsurface rights to oil and gas are supposed to belong to all Albertans.

This story first appeared in The Energy Mix.

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