Canadians don’t have to look hard to find examples of how tinkering with one small part of a large electrical system can wreak havoc in the marketplace, says the spokesman for Canada’s electricity industry.
Canadian Electricity Association (CEA) president Jim Burpee pointed to Germany and Ontario, where business, industry and consumers are facing the consequences of forging ahead with alternative sources of electrical power without considering their impact on the electrical grid.
“[In Germany] they’re shutting down gas plants because they are uneconomical because of wind and solar coming on, and building coal plants (to meet rising demand),” Burpee said in a phone interview from Ottawa. “Their greenhouse gas emissions are going up and the average retail residential price of electricity is $0.45 (a kilowatt hour) compared to under $0.07 in B.C.”
Ontario has made a similar mistake by “walking away from coal too quickly” and focusing on trying to develop solar, wind and nuclear sources without considering the impact of those higher-priced sources of electricity.
“There were some noble objectives but a failure to acknowledge the physics of the system and economics.”
Burpee, speaking in advance of appearing at this week’s Globe 2014 international conference on business and the environment, said the consequences of haphazardly mixing new and traditional sources of electricity rather than looking at Canada’s system as a whole was the driver behind the CEA’s “Vision 2050: The Future of Canada’s Electricity System.”
“I looked around and I heard all of these things like Germany is a model or this place is a model: we are talking about little components, but electricity is an integrated system that is very complicated. We wrote this to re-establish a context for what electricity and energy are about.”
Burpee said an estimated $15 billion a year must be invested just to maintain Canada’s current electrical system, about $5 billion more than is currently invested. At the same time, he said, it’s not realistic with current environmental concerns to simply plan for more of the same in 2050.
Vision 2050 makes four recommendations:
•accelerate innovation and management of energy by industry, business and consumers;
•implement approaches like tax credits and loan guarantees to encourage reduced carbon emissions;
•enable electric vehicles; and
•expand collaboration with the United States, especially in research and development and building new transmission lines.
Burpee said customer management of electricity use through such initiatives as the installation of smart meters in B.C., Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan will be a major source of efficiency and future savings.
“Having more real-time information on how and where you use electricity gives the customer the option of being more involved, unlike the old way where the customers got what we delivered to them and got a bill every month.
Part of the purpose for doing [the report] was also a message to the utilities and to all of us that things are going to change, and it’s best to be in front of it than behind it. •
