Canada and the United States share a continent that is blessed with renewable energy potential in the form of sun and wind, biomass and geothermal, waves and rivers.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published its Renewable Electricity Futures (RE Futures) study last year to explore the potential for the U.S. to get 30 to 90 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050.

Led by NREL and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the study concluded that in combination with a more flexible electric system, renewables could supply 80 per cent of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050, using technologies that are commercially available today, while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.

Great Resources, Plenty of Challenges

Like the United States, Canada has plenty of renewable resources, and will likely face challenges building a more flexible grid with new transmission, more responsive loads and greater storage capacity.

RE Futures, funded by U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, is a collaboration of more than 110 contributors from 35 organizations, including national laboratories, industry, universities, and non-government organizations.

The study found that the cost to the United States of getting to 80 per cent renewables would be similar to other clean energy scenarios that involve greater reliance on non-renewable sources such as nuclear, or fossil fuel with carbon capture and sequestration.

The abundance of the resource means several different combinations of renewable technologies are possible to bring reliable electricity to Americans, while slashing greenhouse emissions and water use.

A Portfolio of Renewables

Indeed, under all the 80 per cent renewable scenarios, no single renewable source accounts for more than 33 percent of total annual generation in 2050. Onshore wind comprises 20 to 33 per cent, and six different technologies—photovoltaics(PV), concentrating solar power (CSP), offshore wind, geothermal, hydropower and biomass—each supply five to 15 per cent of the total. Although the study was not set up to predict the future mix of technologies, it demonstrated that the portfolio of renewable resources is diverse and abundant. Their future deployment will depend on technological, market, policy and institutional drivers.

Of course, there are hurdles to clear and assumptions built in regarding the cost and performance of renewable technologies. The scenarios are based on incremental and evolutionary technology improvement rates, and they don’t reflect DOE actions to further reduce the cost of renewable energy sources.

While adding higher loads of wind and solar to the electricity grid poses challenges due to their variable nature, large-scale deployment of renewables will not encounter any insurmountable long-term constraints related to materials, labour or manufacturing capacity.

A major challenge is to manage periods of low demand while trying to curtail excess electricity generation—the kind that is wasted. The answer is the more flexible system that would evolve from a broad portfolio of supply- and demand-side options. That system will likely require new operating procedures, technology advances, evolving business models and new market rules.

To deliver a greater load of renewables to various corners of the U.S., additional transmission lines will be needed. This transmission expansion would also enable reserve sharing over greater distances and smoother aggregated output profiles of variable technologies such as solar and wind. The system will still require adequate capacity from dispatchable resources, such as natural gas, biomass, geothermal, concentrating solar power, hydropower and storage.

Although the RE Futures study was restricted in scope to the continental United States, some of its conclusions may be applicable to Canada. Renewable technologies such as hydropower and geothermal are also more abundant in Canada than in the U.S., and could play a greater role in a 2050 electricity scenario.

The United States and Canada share a commitment to a more sustainable future. Seizing appropriate opportunities to work together on our power systems may help both country get to a cleaner, more efficient energy future.

Trieu Mai is a member of the Energy Forecasting and Modeling Group at NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center.

The push to build the Keystone XL pipeline may be less about a pending decision in the United States, and more about mounting fears that the opportunity to fully develop the Alberta oil sands could close forever.

Crazy as that sounds, the idea goes back to an interview by one of the pipeline’s strongest advocates, who also happens to be one of the freshest, most straightforward voices in Canadian politics.

When Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi spoke up for Keystone [download podcast] in a February 2 interview with CBC Radio’s The House,one of his more memorable arguments was that Canada has only a small time remaining to fully develop the Alberta oil sands, beforea decarbonizing energy system forces us to leave a great economic opportunity forever untapped.

A soft toss?

At first, I thought Nenshi was offering up a soft toss for green energy advocates to hit out of the ballpark. Think about it: If Henry Ford is laying waste to your established business in horse-drawn carriages, do you try for another record sales year for buggy whips, or bow to the inevitable and begin converting your stock?

If that’s the concern, the Calgary mayor has good reason to fret. As we’ve already reported on this blog, energy productivity improvements have already been the biggest contributor to Canada’s energy security over the last 40 years, saving us “more fuel and electricity today than the combined total of all the new sources of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind and biomass energy we’ve developed over the last four decades.” That’s before any serious, sustained effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The investment community takes note

Still, it’s a stretch to suggest that Nenshi had energy productivity gains on his mind when he had his conversation with The House. It’s much more likely that he was thinking about investment managers like Jeremy Grantham, the legendary co-founder and chief investment strategist with Boston-based Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, who are paying close attention to the prospect of a looming carbon bubble.

In mid-March, Grantham told TV host Charlie Rose that unburnable carbon will be a serious challenge—since the only plausible alternative is for fossil fuel production to drive climate change out of control. The world’s proven oil and gas reserves already far exceed the global carbon limit of 565 Gt, Grantham said, so a decision to licence Keystone would “start facilitating the flow of such utterly dangerous energy resources that we have no reasonable hope of surviving with the planet as we know it.”

Grantham is not alone in his concerns. And with institutions like HSBC Global Research, Deutsche Bank, Standard & Poor’s, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund all paying close attention to climate risk, Naheed Nenshi may be right: for anyone who’s intent on finding new markets for Alberta’s oil sands, the window may be closing fast.

For anyone with a direct stake in those projects, the next step is clear. But the public policy question is slightly different: To place Canada at the centre of the next energy economy, do we bet on the next megaproject, or on a cluster of emerging technologies that are sweeping the planet, proving themselves in the marketplace, and eroding demand for today’s product?

The conversation about low-carbon energy futures will only deliver effective solutions if there is a full understanding and discussion of the costs, benefits and trade-offs behind various options for transforming our energy systems.

This larger dialogue will be far more complicated and time-consuming than a linear choice between energy technologies or projects based solely on their carbon footprint. But without a wider view, even the most comprehensive response to climate change will fall short, and rapidly lose public acceptance, if it’s seen to create a new set of problems beyond the one it sets out to solve.

An 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is a daunting enough challenge in itself, and there is no doubt that we’re on a very tight timeline to transform energy systems. But for better or worse, there are no shortcuts here. The solutions we come up with will only succeed if they somehow balance the full range of sustainability criteria—economic, environmental and social.

A Question for Every Answer

The questions lurking behind the various low-carbon solutions depend on the answers we come up with.

For example, crop production for biofuels could mean a 100-fold or more increase in water use per kilometre travelled, compared to the already substantial water demand for making transportation fuels from Alberta’s oil sands. In areas with surplus water, this may not be a problem, but as the scale of biofuel production increases, and water becomes a limiting factor, the former solution may create a new problem.

The rural backlash against wind energy reflects the human tendency to react differently when a new technology shows up in our back yards, rather than 100 or even 10 kilometres away. While there is no scientific evidence that wind turbines damage human health, some people don’t like their visual impact on the landscape, or they have simmering resentments of neighbours who were able to cash in on a developer’s offer.  Societal constraints on transformational change also need to be understood and managed.

As the Trottier Project showed in its Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy, Canada could tap significant new hydroelectricity reserves by 2050. But large hydro development, in particular, involves significant land use and biodiversity impacts that would have to be addressed—in full, and in public—for any project to earn a social licence to operate.

The common denominator, to paraphrase the not-quite-wily Dennis Moore of Monty Python fame, is that this redistribution of energy supply and demand will be trickier than we may have thought.

A Wider Frame

The Trottier Energy Futures Project could help frame these issues by opening a truly integrative dialogue on energy systems choices. It would begin with water and land use, biodiversity, and air pollution. It could extend to broader topics like the economics, stability and resiliency of different energy systems configurations. These concerns won’t be addressed easily or quickly, but that’s all the more reason to begin weighing the costs, benefits and trade-offs of different energy systems choices.

Along the way, we’ll find out that the conclusions we reach are different in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal, and can vary widely between urban and rural communities. That’s the point when the real conversation about values will begin—and none too soon, as the 2050 deadline for an 80 per cent greenhouse gas reduction looms ever larger.

Dr. David B. Layzell, FRSC, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy at the University of Calgary.

In this hour-long interview with TV host Charlie Rose, legendary money manager and investment analyst Jeremy Grantham cites the decline in fertility rates and the rise of renewable energy as his two sources of hope for civilization.

Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist with Boston-based Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, famously predicted a series of market failures, including the U.S. housing bubble of 2007/2008, the turn-of-the-century dot.com crash, and the Japanese equities and real estate bubble in the late 1980s. He told Rose he does it by focusing strictly on the numbers, rather than the gut instinct that drives many money managers.

Today, those numbers tell him that unburnable carbon will be a serious challenge for money markets—since the only plausible alternative is for fossil fuel production to drive climate change out of control. Grantham said he opposes the Keystone XL pipeline because “the carbon math is pretty simple.” The world’s proven oil and gas reserves already far exceed the global carbon limit of 565 Gt, so “by licencing that pipeline… we’re going to start facilitating the flow of such utterly dangerous energy resources that we have no reasonable hope of surviving with the planet as we know it.”

He cautioned against blind faith that science will solve the climate crisis, noting that our deeply-held confidence in technological solutions is itself a product of the fossil fuel era: before humanity began digging coal and pumping oil at the turn of the 19^th century, population growth and human development rose and fell with the availability of food supplies.

As the fossil fuel era enters its twilight, renewable energy development is where Grantham has the greatest hope for technology. “Solar, wind power, storage, a new, state-of-the-art grid system, all of those suppress the need to use our finite resources, and that is wonderful,” he told Rose. “The cost of a solar panel has dropped in two years to 25 cents on the dollar. These are Moore’s Law-type reductions, the kind of efficiency increases we only saw in semiconductors.”

When you set out to solve a big, complex problem, it is essential to put your effort and resources where they will generate the best results.

Based on my experience as a member of the Global Studies Committee of the World Energy Council, it is evident that deriving an overall solution for the climate change challenge requires a very comprehensive approach. Such an approach requires assessment of all possible sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and all options for reducing GHG releases to the atmosphere. The overall framework has three dimensions:

• Assessing all GHG sources associated with production and processing of primary energy sources to the point of final consumption, including exploration, extraction, upgrading, refining, conversion and transport to point of end use (referred to as “well to tank”), to arrive at an understanding of GHG production at each stage of this supply chain
• GHG production for final consumption to meet energy-related end uses, such as burning gasoline to transport vehicles or natural gas to heat homes
• All options for managing GHGs, by preventing or reducing their release to the atmosphere.

It is of special interest, and often a huge surprise, to note that GHGs are generated predominantly by consumers, not producers. For fossil fuels, in particular, only about 15 per cent of GHG emissions are generated in the entire “well to tank” process. The remaining 85 per cent occur when the fuel is burned.

For example, people are astonished when they hear that, for all the concern and controversy surrounding the Alberta oil sands, the massive process of harvesting the energy and bringing it to market only represents such a small portion of its overall ultimate impact. There is a much greater relative reduction in GHG generation when people shift from using personal vehicles to commuting by public transport, than by seeking further efficiency refinements in the oil sands production process. This is not to suggest that efficiency improvements are not important. But it is even more important to consider how energy-related services are being used by society at large, and how to make fundamental changes in the way we consume energy, especially fossil fuels.

The tough, fascinating challenge for energy engineers is that these choices are not driven solely by energy. Shifting personal mobility toward electric vehicles would reduce demand for carbon-intensive fossil fuels and point toward deployment opportunities for non-dispatchable electricity. But three things are true about the option of investing in our cities to get people out of their cars:

• It’s a worthy policy goal that many of us might embrace with great enthusiasm.
• It is not a strategy that traditionally receives in-depth attention from energy supply and demand modelers.
• When city planners do address issues like commute times and urban sprawl, it’s often to meet objectives that have little to do with energy or GHGs. So the impact we seek in the energy sector often results from choices that may be made for other reasons.

There is much to be done in reducing GHG production, and any short-term effort is worthy. But if the end target is to reduce GHG releases by as much as 80 per cent, the dominant transformations will have to occur in the way in which we, as members of society, use energy-related services. As the Trottier Energy Futures Project has pointed out, much of that activity will be situated outside the energy sector, where the underlying demand for energy-related services originates.

One of the Trottier Project’s strengths is its mandate to look at the low-carbon challenge in a totally integrated way, then systematically select the transformation strategies that will deliver the greatest impact at lowest cost. Even with this pragmatic approach, the process of implementing a lengthy list of actions will require tremendous leadership.

But for the overall effort to deliver needed results, it will, very obviously, be necessary to expand the decision domain beyond our traditional, nearly exclusive focus on supply-side transformation options.

This broader frame is perhaps the Trottier Energy Futures Project’s most important contribution to energy policy. An expanded solution set takes a conversation that is already very complex and makes it even more so. But it also points to a different set of strategies and trade-offs that will have to be considered if public and private decision-makers are to craft a meaningful, practical response to the challenge of global climate change.

Overcoming obstacles that lie on the road to a sustainable, low-carbon future is not child’s play. Yet there’s inspiration to be found in a favourite childhood gathering place. 

Visualize a giant sandbox, a place in which there is the freedom to explore—creatively and collaboratively—solutions to many of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. Imagine researchers within that sandbox, testing the technological, economic and behavioural aspects of solutions such as green buildings or bioenergy or innovative education models,with a view to applying outcomes in the wider world.

Universities can—and, in fact, must—take on the role of societal test beds for sustainability.

In this scenario, universities turn their entire physical plants into testing grounds where the institutions and their private, public and NGO partners test, study, teach, apply and share lessons learned, technologies created and policies developed.

Of course, universities are more than just buildings and utilities. The University of British Columbia is a community of some 50,000 students, staff, faculty and residents, with over 50 per cent of campus households occupied by someone who studies or works at UBC.

We are making great strides in transforming our campus into a vibrant and complete sustainable community. And, importantly, we are working at a scale that is interesting to other communities. The hope in the long term is that, because we are representative of any community, any community can become a sustainable community.

Universities are uniquely suited to this role. In most cases, they are single owner-occupiers of significant capital stock. Many of them have their own energy, water and waste systems. They are public institutions that can be a little more forgiving on payback and long-sighted on returns. They have mandates to research societal problems and create solutions. And they teach the next generation of leaders. No other organization has this mix of capabilities.

At UBC, we are exploring different aspects of the Trottier challenges. In the case of buildings, we are thinking beyond net zero to an approach we call regenerative sustainability. It might best be explained with a question: To what degree can human activity actually improve both environmental conditions and human quality of life?

In 2011, we opened the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, a 60,000-square-foot building designed to be net-positive in seven ways—four environmental and three human—and to help seek answers to our regenerative sustainability question.

On the bioenergy front, in September 2012 we opened the Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility, the first demonstration of its kind in the world of a community-scale heat and power system fuelled by biomass. We are exploring smart grid applications for our campus and with other jurisdictions, including the City of Vancouver.

Our efforts in transportation have yielded significant results. For example, by putting a transit pass in the hands of every student, transit ridership nearly quadrupled in 15 years. On the education and training front, we offer more than 480 sustainability-related courses and are developing pathways so that every student, regardless of their degree program, can incorporate sustainability in their studies.

It is through students that our efforts have the greatest possible impacts. When a university acts as a societal test bed, students can integrate their learning through research and demonstration. And when those students graduate, they take their sustainability skills into the world.

Finally, experimentation is a fundamental part of university culture. Failure is seen as part of a circle of learning in which solutions are developed, demonstrated and researched. When universities act as test beds, society benefits from research, demonstration and integration that might not otherwise happen.

John Robinson is the Associate Provost, Sustainability at The University of British Columbia and a professor with UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and Department of Geography. Robinson was a report co-author and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, awarded the Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007.

After reading the Trottier Project’s Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada, what I find most striking about the results is how utterly unremarkable they are.

The findings on Canada’s reserves of low-carbon energy are consistent with recent inventories of U.S. renewable energy assets. And the results are the same in Germany where, at a Canadian latitude, they’re already generating huge amounts of renewable power.

What’s remarkable is that we still go to great lengths to find deposits of filthy oil, when the wind blowing overhead somehow goes unnoticed day after day. While oil and coal are scattered in just a few places, the sun and wind are ubiquitous.

The good news about the Trottier Project report is its potential to put new pressure on Canada to continue an inevitable transition, from a petro-state toward something very different. All the evidence—on the rising tide of climate change, on the falling costs of low-carbon technologies, on the shining potential of a green economy—shows that the tar sands are the last gasp of an earlier era. But now, it’s decision time, because if we burn them, we help foreclose the possibility and promise of the next era.

By pointing to a new direction for Canada, An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy adds to the overwhelming weight of evidence that the profit motive of the fossil fuel industry stands in the way of the low-carbon transition.If we could work around that, we’d be well on our way.

The report shows that the technologies and supporting deployment strategies are already within our grasp. Our task now is to continue building the momentum.

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org, one of the world’s leading low-carbon advocacy organizations.

The Trottier Energy Futures Project’s Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that our supplies of sustainable, low-carbon energy will be more than enough to meet our needs through 2050.

But one of the biggest questions is how to get that energy from there to here.

As the TEFP team worked on the first-ever comprehensive inventory of the country’s sustainable energy resources, we realized we had to rein in the raw numbers. With insolation of 130 watts per square metre through much of southern Canada, the solar resource alone exceeds all our foreseeable energy demand. With capacity factors as high as 30 to 50 per cent in some parts of the country, wind’s contribution to meeting Canada’s energy needs in 2050 is not constrained by the size of the resource.

Even wave power could theoretically exceed the country’s total energy demand.

All of this is good news, possibly even great news. But it doesn’t tell us very much about what a 2050 energy system might look like.

From supply sources to system

One of the most important takeaways from the Inventory is the need for an integrated energy system that combines individual technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable energy services. With the electrification of space heat, personal transportation and some industrial processes that prevail in many low-carbon energy scenarios, a decarbonized grid will depend much more heavily on a larger number of smaller, distributed sources.

Until recently, energy analysts believed electric power systems could only draw about 20 per cent of their total supply from distributed sources without compromising reliability, not to mention affordability. But the Inventory captured two recent developments that will transform future energy systems:

• Renewable electricity costs, particularly for wind and solar photovoltaics, have been plummeting, making affordable, low-carbon electricity a realistic prospect.
• The 2012 Renewable Electricity Futures Study by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) showed that “non-dispatchable” renewables—solar and wind resources that can’t be turned on and off to match fluctuating system demand—can supply up to 50 per cent of U.S. electricity needs by 2050.

Building the smart grid

With raw resources that are practically limitless, Canada’s use of solar and wind will still be constrained by our ability to integrate them into the daily operation of the grid. In an energy-efficient, low-carbon Canada, with total electricity demand of 600 TWh (a terawatt-hour is a billion kilowatt-hours) and non-dispatchable renewables limited to 50 per cent of that total, solar and wind could each supply 150 TWh without approaching their technical potential.

But today’s electricity grid, an antiquated system designed to serve a more limited network of larger, centralized supply sources, is not the high-tech web that will hold a low-carbon energy system together. The “smart” electricity grid of the future will use information technologies to balance a wider range of supply sources, energy storage, interprovincial transfers of electricity, and a wide variety of energy management and efficiency tools.

That grid will combine:

• Dispatchable and non-dispatchable generation
• Conventional renewable and non-renewable generation
• Energy storage
• Inter-grid transfers
• Responsive demand
• A transmission and distribution infrastructure that supports a high degree of connectivity and multi-directional flows of energy and information.

A low-carbon energy transition will call for significant capital investments in storage, transmission infrastructure and the backup capacity required to ensure the continuous, reliable electricity supply that Canadians need and take for granted. But this is actually an ideal moment to invest in the future electricity grid: the existing one is due for an overhaul, so a smart grid strategy could mean redirecting some of those investments with a reconfigured system in mind.

As with so many other elements of low-carbon energy futures, the economic gains and job creation flowing from smart grid investment may show up in unexpected places. Keynote speakers at utility conferences these days are as likely to be from Google or IBM as from Edison or Westinghouse. At one recent public forum, we heard the suggestion that IT infrastructure specialists who lost their jobs after the dot.com bust might find a new home—and fascinating new challenges—in smart grid development. Best of all, with the right commitment of policy and capital, the amount of work to be done between now and 2050 makes it very unlikely that those jobs will go away.

Download a copy of An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada.

An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada

But the ability to reduce GHG emissions by 80 per cent compared to 1990 levels—the target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—will depend on an integrated energy system that combines individual technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable energy services.

Download the full report
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If anything limits Canada’s transition to a low-carbon energy system, it will be integration, economics, and politics, not the lack of energy itself.

An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada, the Trottier Energy Futures Project’s second research report, shows that Canada will have no shortage of renewable fuels and electricity by mid-century. But our ability to hit an 80 per cent target for reducing our energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will depend on an integrated energy system that combines individual technologies to deliver affordable, reliable, sustainable energy services.

We’re often told there are no substitutes for the high-quality energy that fossil fuels supply. At the same time, we’re told fossil fuel reserves are depleting and leading to ever-higher prices. We’re told renewables can’t compete with the reliability and versatility of fossil fuels, wind farms would have to be massive, biofuels would reach some unimaginable scale, and solar power arrays would have to cover vast tracts of land, just to eat into our demand for fossil fuels.

So the Inventory research addressed two basic questions: Whether Canada will have enough low-carbon energy to meet its energy demand in 2050, and what the implications of a transition to low-carbon sources would be.

Any country’s raw renewable energy potential is essentially a function of land area. With the second-largest land mass in the world, Canada is endowed with an enormous amount of renewable energy—so enormous that the raw numbers are almost meaningless in any practical energy scenario. In theory, enough solar energy lands on Canada to supply all our energy in any conceivable scenario. With our long coastlines, the theoretical potential of wind, wave, and tidal energy is practically limitless. Even with a finite annual stock of raw material, all our available wood cut, agricultural residues, and biomass waste would supply 70 per cent of the energy we currently consume in Canada, although only a fraction of that would be available as a sustainable energy feedstock.

So it’s good to know that the availability of raw resources won’t limit Canada’s embrace of low-carbon energy futures.

The more interesting question is how much of that raw potential can be turned into actual, delivered energy.The answer depends on the cost of harnessing the energy, the challenge of integrating it into the existing system, and for bioenergy in particular, the sustainability of the source materials and the ecosystems that support it. These and other factors make a precise figure for Canada’s low-carbon energy supplies a moving target.

The Inventory concluded that solar photovoltaic (PV) energy and wind could each provide 150 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year (540 petajoules, or PJ, from each source) by 2050. That’s half of Canada’s current electricity consumption. Hydroelectricity could supply more than 100 TWh, about 45 per cent more than current generation, and some of the estimates indicate no need for large, new dams or their environmental impacts.If bioenergy supplied another 3000 PJ of energy, that would represent a four-fold increase over our current use.

But it would take a concerted effort from industry and government, plus greater engagement from ratepayers and citizens, to make it happen. To hit the low-carbon target, production would have to increase 15 per cent per year for solar PV, seven per cent per year for wind, four per cent per year for biomass, and one per cent per year for hydro. In total, Canada could produce 6000 PJ of carbon-free energy—a sizeable amount, but still much less than our current consumption of 10,000 PJ. Left unfettered, energy consumption will continue to rise as our population increases and the economy grows.

All of which points to a challenge that underlies any low-carbon energy scenario: To achieve an 80 per cent GHG reduction, Canada will require an energy system in which fuels and electricity are both produced and consumed much more efficiently than they are now. This implies not only a transition in which our energy technologies are transformed, but also a fundamental shift in the underlying habits, behaviours, policies, and practices that shape our energy use. It’ll take significant changes in the physical shape of our society—and in the decisions outside the energy system that determine our urban, transport, communications, manufacturing, shipping, and industrial systems—to hit the 80 per cent target.

The Trottier Energy Futures Project is dedicated to addressing these challenges and outlining the path forward to a low-carbon energy system. An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that the renewable energy resources will be available to us, but that’s just the beginning of the story, not the end.