POLITICS
03/27/2018 14:05 EDT | Updated 03/27/2018 14:21 EDT
Environment Commissioners' Audit Shows Canada Is Not Prepared To Tackle Climate Change Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the report looks backwards.
Mia Rabson, Canadian Press
SEAN KILPATRICK/CP
Julie Gelfand, commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, arrives to appear as a witness at Commons committee in Ottawa on March 27, 2018.
OTTAWA — Neither Ottawa nor the provinces have really assessed the risks a changing climate poses to the country and have no real idea what might be needed to adapt to it, said a new audit released Tuesday.
The joint audit, conducted by federal environment commissioner Julie Gelfand and auditors general in nine provinces, looks at climate change planning and emissions reduction progress between November 2016 and March 2018.
It says while many governments have high-level goals to cut emissions, few have detailed plans to actually reach those goals, such as timelines, funding or expected results from specific actions.
Earlier:
The audit says assessments to adapt to the risks posed by climate change have been haphazard, inconsistent and lacking in detail, with no timeline for action and no funding.
The country's emissions goals are also a hodgepodge of different targets, with no consistency in how emissions are measured or whether cuts will target overall greenhouse gas outputs or just those from specific economic sectors.
The auditors say that means there is no clarity on how Canada and the provinces and territories are going to measure, monitor and report on their contributions to meeting Canada's international commitment to cut emissions by at least 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
As of 2015, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, Canada was nearly 200 million tonnes short of that goal, which is the equivalent of the emissions produced by about 44 million cars each year. That is twice the number of vehicles registered in Canada.
'Hard things are hard': McKenna
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said it is the first time auditors have completed such a review of Canada's climate change policies which is an important recognition of the priority climate change should have in government business. But she says the audit, as Gelfand herself notes, looks backwards and does not actually take into account the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change.
That plan was released in December 2016, after the audit's scope was already established. It too falls short of reaching the 2030 goals however.
McKenna said the plan addresses many of the concerns in the audit, including outlining how certain policies will achieve specific emissions cuts.
"The previous government did nothing for a decade but we're 100 per cent committed to our target," McKenna said. "Hard things are hard, we have a plan and we're already seeing measurable results."
SEAN KILPATRICK/CP
Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna poses for a photo in her office on Parliament Hill on Nov. 7, 2017.
Catherine Abreu, executive director of the Climate Action Network, said this audit looks at what progress was made to meet Canada's existing targets including the 2020 commitment, which Canada has abandoned knowing it has no hope of meeting it.
That target was to be 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.
Abreu notes that is the third international emissions target Canada has set and will miss and the Gelfand report points out the 2030 plan is at risk if Canada and the provinces don't step it up.
All provinces but Saskatchewan are currently signed on to the pan-Canadian framework, which requires every province to put a price on pollution by the start of next year. The four biggest provinces already have one, Manitoba will add a $25-a-tonne carbon tax in September and every other province will either have to establish their own price or have a federal price imposed as of next Jan. 1.
Carbon pricing a key issue in provincial elections
There are potentially rough waters ahead. Saskatchewan hasn't joined the framework and says it will sue if the federal government tries to impose a carbon price. Ontario and Alberta both have a carbon price plan in place — cap and trade for Ontario and a carbon tax system with hard caps on emissions from the oil sands for Alberta — but coming provincial elections could bring to power premiers who are running on a promise to end carbon pricing.
McKenna said not only is the clean technology industry developing in response to climate change an enormous economic opportunity, not taking climate change action will cost the government money.
"It is disappointing when you have politicians pretending that there is no cost to climate change," she said. "Right now the cost to the federal government is in the billions of dollars to deal with the impacts of climate change, whether it's floods, whether it's forest fires, a melting Arctic, we need to be taking action."
UK islands used to test $14m storage and renewables model
07/24/2018
Editor
An energy storage and renewables project on the UK’s Isles of Scilly is aiming to become a low carbon energy model for island communities worldwide.
British battery company Moixa is installing smart batteries on Scilly – an archipelago off the Cornish coast in southwest England – as part of the £10.8m ($14m) Smart Energy Islands project, which is being led by Hitachi Europe.
The programme is intended to demonstrate how solar power, batteries, smart heating technologies and electric vehicles can work in harmony as one low-carbon energy system.
The Isles of Scilly are home to 2200 people and have no gas supply, thereby relying heavily on imported fossil fuels and electricity. High fuel costs combined with a large number of homes with inefficient heating systems mean that 15.5 per cent of households are classified as ‘fuel poor’, one of the UK’s highest rates.
Infrastructure for the project is due to be installed by this autumn and a not-for-profit community interest company, the Isles of Scilly Community Venture, will sell power generated by solar panels and recycle the income to reduce electricity bills for all islanders through a special energy tariff that will be launched this summer.
The project is part financed by £8.6 million from the European Regional Development Fund, will lay the foundations for the wider Smart Islands programme, which aims to cut electricity bills by 40 per cent by 2025.
It also aims by 2025 to meet 40 per cent of energy demand through renewables and see 40 per cent of vehicles be electric or low-carbon.
Chris Wright, Moixa chief technology officer, said: “The Isles of Scilly will be a global test-bed for batteries, electric vehicles and smart heating systems, showing how they can save money for households, enable more clean renewable power, and support efficient, cost-effective energy systems. It will demonstrate the value of technologies that can benefit communities all over the world.”
Around 450kW of solar panels will be installed on the roofs of more than 70 homes, on the islands’ fire station, its recycling facility and desalination plant, and in a solar garden by the airport.
Moixa will install a total 43.8kWh of smart batteries in homes and at each of the non-domestic sites. Ten smart homes will pilot different mixes of low-carbon technologies which will also include air source heat pumps and smart water heaters.
Moixa and home energy services company PassivSystems have developed smart control systems to manage and optimise the batteries, heat pumps and water heaters for householders, using artificial intelligence to learn their patterns of consumption and maximise savings.
“We’re excited to have reached the next phase of this project where we can deploy our scalable cloud-based energy management platform,” said Colin Calder, chief executive of PassivSystems. “This project will demonstrate the effectiveness of using leading-edge digital energy management systems to reduce costs, carbon and a community’s dependence on imported fossil fuels.”
Moixa will also use an electric van and charging point to pilot a vehicle-to-grid system. Learning algorithms will ensure that the vehicle’s battery is maintained at a state of charge which will allow it to support the islands’ energy system when it is not being used by the Council of the Isles of Scilly’s operations and maintenance team.
The batteries, smart heating devices and electric vehicle will integrate with an IoT-enabled energy resource management platform, developed by Hitachi Europe, which is due to launch in November. It will be able to use them absorb or release power, helping to balance supply and demand.
The smart technologies will create a flexible and efficient energy system, capable of supporting the islands’ ambitions of generating 40 per cent of their energy from renewables with an extendable ten-year guarantee.
Want To Save the World with Your Brilliant Clean Energy Idea?
June 15, 2018
By Jennifer Runyon [Chief Editor]
Credit: Enel.
Multinational power company, Enel, said last month that it was expanding its partnership with InnoCentive, a 17-year old crowdsourcing company that partners with businesses and governments around the world to develop solutions to their business, scientific, and technical issues. To understand why this is important and what it means for renewable energy and you, you have to understand a bit about the InnoCentive platform.
Alph Bingham and Aaron Schacht founded InnoCentive in 2001 based on three principles:
there will always be someone smarter outside of your team or organization
getting a diverse range of fresh perspectives is key to effective problem solving
asking the right question in the right way is critical to eliciting the answers you need
From those tenets they launched a crowdsourcing platform that releases challenges to the world and asks “solvers” to find solutions to those challenges in exchange for monetary awards.
With this newly expanded partnership, Enel plans to release 50 challenges related to energy and is looking for “solvers” to those challenge.
In addition to those business-specific challenges, however, Enel is taking the platform one step further and asking anyone with any idea, project, business solution or patent, to submit it through the platform for consideration.
Angelo Rigillo, Enel’s Head of innovation governance, planning and portfolio management explained that Enel sees great value in InnoCentive.
“We shifted our way to research and develop new products and services from an internal R&D to the open innovation model,” he said in an interview, adding that InnoCentive is a “a very important partner within our open innovation system.”
Enel already had an open innovation model but by partnering with InnoCentive, it will now have a much broader reach, which will be useful to meet UN sustainable development goals.
“For us, business is sustainability. Everything that leads toward achieving long-term sustainable development is business. That’s why our open innovation approach evolved into open “innovability,” where innovation and sustainability melt in a single word,” said Rigillo.
Rigillo explained that Enel’s other objective by partnering with InnoCentive is to collect ideas that are not linked to any of the challenges that it publishes.
Do You Have a Patent?
Rigillo said that Enel will “apply the same strategy and policy that InnoCentive has applied for 20 years” in terms of protecting the IP submitted.
Visitors to the OpenInnovability.enel.com platform will find two ways to submit their ideas. The first is in response to specific business challenges – you can view them by clicking on “Challenges.” The second is the “I have a project” section.
“That section is very important for us because we are aware that there are people with brilliant minds full of great ideas and they just need a place to share them,” said Rigillo, adding that these submissions will be reviewed by Enel’s team of experts and people who submit will always get a response.
Antarctic ice loss and sea level rise rates have tripled since 2012
June 14th, 2018
Crevasses near Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica, which is one of the hardest hit regions(Credit: I. Joughin, University of Washington)
An international team of scientists from over 40 organizations around the world has completed the most comprehensive assessment of how Antarctica's ice mass is changing – and as expected, the results are worrying. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) shows that the rate of ice loss – and the resulting sea level rise – has tripled since 2012, compared to a more steady rate over the last 25 years.
This latest assessment involves 84 scientists from more than 40 institutions, and combines data from 24 satellite surveys. It follows in the footsteps of the first IMBIE conducted in 2012, and paints a particularly grim picture of the years between then and 2017.
The team studied changes in the ice mass of Antarctica between 1992 and 2017, and the associated contributions to the rising sea level. Before 2012, Antarctic ice was receding at a relatively steady rate of about 83.8 billion tons a year. In the years after that, the annual ice loss appears to have accelerated to a rate of 241.1 billion tons – around three times the previous rate.
Of course all that ice has to go somewhere, and the resulting sea level rise has also accelerated. The IMBIE researchers say that the sea level has climbed by 7.6 mm (0.3 in) since 1992, with almost half of that amount – 3 mm (0.12 in) – occurring in the five years between 2012 and 2017.
"We have long suspected that changes in Earth's climate will affect the polar ice sheets," says Andrew Shepherd, co-lead researcher on the project. "Thanks to the satellites that our space agencies have launched, we can now track their ice losses and global sea-level contribution with confidence. According to our analysis, there has been a step increase in ice losses from Antarctica during the past decade, and the continent is causing sea levels to rise faster today than at any time in the past 25 years."
West Antarctica has been the hardest hit, losing 175.3 billion tons of ice per year since 2012 – up from 58.4 billion tons a year during the 1990s. The Antarctic Peninsula in the north saw an increase of 27.6 billion tons each year since the beginning of the century, including the giant iceberg that broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf last year.
Interestingly, the East Antarctic ice shelf fared better, actually gaining about 5.5 billion tons of ice each year on average. Unfortunately, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the speed with which the rest of the continent is melting.
"Satellites have given us an amazing, continent-wide picture of how Antarctica is changing," says Pippa Whitehouse, an author on the study. "The length of the satellite record now makes it possible for us to identify regions that have been undergoing sustained ice loss for over a decade. The next piece of the puzzle is to understand the processes driving this change. To do this, we need to keep watching the ice sheet closely, but we also need to look back in time and try to understand how the ice sheet responded to past climate change."
The latest findings are discussed in the IMBIE video below.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
Climate change policies to cost oilpatch $25 billion over 10 years, having 'serious unintended consequences'
Canada risks losing investment and jobs in the energy sector unless it considers changing policies to encourage growth, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers
GEOFFREY MORGAN
Updated: June 6, 2018
CALGARY – The Canadian oil and gas industry estimates it will pay $25 billion over the next 10 years to comply with federal and provincial climate change policies and is asking the federal and provincial governments to reconsider a few “duplicative” regulations.
In a report released Tuesday, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers says the country’s new emissions regulations are driving up costs for domestic oil and gas producers, which is causing investment to leave the country for jurisdictions that are doing less to reduce emissions.
CAPP puts the cost to the industry at $25 billion for the next 10 years and its report said the regulations are having “serious unintended consequences” for the industry and jobs.
A debate about the Canadian energy industry’s competitiveness in the face of increasingly stringent environmental regulations has intensified in recent months, especially as governments move forward with placing limits on methane emissions and as the price of carbon emissions is projected to rise.
As a result, CAPP’s report — the third in a series of seven — contains a series of requests for governments ranging from big asks, like the immediate deductibility of expenses related to reducing emissions, to more specific requests about targeted regulations, including a request for oil and gas companies to be allowed to use more carbon offsets.
“Investment in Canada’s energy industry — and jobs for Canadians — will continue to leave for other jurisdictions unless there are changes to regulatory policies that enable growth,” CAPP president and CEO Tim McMillan said in a release.
He said domestic oil and gas companies support meeting environmental goals, but governments need to take into account the extra burden of added costs or activity will just move to places with lower standards, in a phenomenon CAPP calls “carbon leakage.”
On methane emissions, the country’s largest oil and gas industry group says reducing methane is “a critical step for meaningful action on climate change” but local oil and gas players are subjected to tighter regulations than direct competitors in the U.S.
In Canada, new methane regulations will target both new and existing natural gas facilities. In the U.S., only new facilities will be subjected to methane reduction targets and old facilities will be grandfathered.
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but is also less abundant in the atmosphere, according to NASA.
“Canada is being a leader and is the first jurisdiction to implement methane regulations for both new and existing facilities and this should be applauded,” Pembina Institute interim federal policy director Isabelle Turcotte said.
She said that methane regulations are still being developed in Alberta, and so it’s too early to tell how stringent these new regulations will be for the oil and gas industry.
She also said that methane can be a valuable commodity, and so there could be an economic benefit for capturing and using it.
“Reducing methane emissions makes good sense because it’s a wasted resource. The leaks and the vented methane is a cost because ultimately it’s a product and there are very cost-effective ways of catching those emissions,” she said.
Turcotte added that Canada cannot meet its obligations under the Paris agreement on climate change by granting large exemptions on methane reduction limits, and that Canada will be challenged to meet those commitments given current regulations.
But McMillan said in an interview that there are costs to Canada being a leader on methane emissions and is calling on governments to avoid “duplicative” policies.
“When you’re out in front of everyone else you have to be smart and you can’t be duplicative or you’ll see carbon leakage,” he said, referring to the movement of oil and gas investments to jurisdictions with lower standards.
McMillan stopped short of saying Canada’s methane regulations should only be applied to new facilities, but he said the difference in costs between methane regulations in Canada and the U.S. should be considered.
In its report, CAPP praised regulations in Alberta and B.C. that have targeted flaring and venting from natural gas facilities and have resulted in emissions reductions.
Specific oil and gas producers in Calgary, including CAPP members Encana Corp. and Cenovus Energy Inc., have released details of their own initiatives to reduce methane emissions.
Cenovus has said it uses compressed air rather than natural gas in pneumatic pumps to reduce methane emissions, among other initiatives.
