CANADA- Ideology blocks renewable energy growth in Alberta Ian Urquhart | Opinion | February 7th 2024 Unbeknownst to many, Canada and the petro-province of Alberta. — not OPEC — is far and away the largest source of imported oil to the United States. Canada exports nearly 4.5 million barrels of oil per day to the U.S., the vast majority from the oilsands of Alberta. In 2022, Canada poured more than four times the oil into American markets than all the Persian Gulf states combined. So, at COP28, the Alberta premier’s praise wasn’t for upping the global renewables game. It was reserved for the conference’s lukewarm recognition that burning fossil fuels causes global warming. Scorn accompanied this praise from Premier Danielle Smith. Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault tried to toughen the fossil fuel language. For this, Smith portrayed him as treacherous, as a saboteur driven by “his misguided personal obsessions.” Taken together, these factors did nothing to shake Smith’s conviction that spectacular tarsands production growth must continue. In spite of the direction set by Smith, Alberta has enjoyed spectacular growth of a different kind: renewable electricity generation. While Smith celebrated more barrels of more GHG emissions-intensive Alberta crude pouring into American gas tanks, the province’s electricity industry continued to write a much more positive climate story. In just six years, from 2015 to 2021, the province cut GHG emissions from electricity generation by 50 per cent. In 2022, Rystad Energy predicted this dramatic trend would continue. Alberta would overtake Ontario as Canada’s largest producer of utility-scale wind and solar power by 2025. This generating capacity approximates what a refurbished Pickering nuclear plant will produce in Ontario. Smith doesn’t care about Alberta becoming a green electricity leader. Last August, she stunned the renewable electricity industry by ordering the Alberta Utilities Commission to impose a moratorium until the end of February 2024 on all new approvals for utility-scale renewable energy power plants. Thirteen projects, promising to add 2.1 gigawatts of renewable electricity-generating capacity to the grid, were caught in the moratorium’s net. Second, Smith ordered the independent regulator to study whether the renewables boom was taking up too much prime agricultural land and whether it was damaging the grid’s reliability. This report, possibly with recommendations for regulatory changes, will not be delivered before March 29. The renewables industry was deservedly shocked at these moves. Prior to that astonishing announcement, a generation’s worth of Conservative government electricity policies served today’s renewables industry quite well. https://www.nationalobserver.
