I am presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Environment and Resource Studies and the Director of the Environment and Business Program at the University of Waterloo (UW).
Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics:
Comparative and International Perspectives
Edited by Miranda Schreurs, Henrik Selin, and Stacy D. Van Deveer
- Entsorga-Enteco 2009 – focus on ‘Incineration & Renewable Energies’: Starting out into a new age of energy
- Siemens, Munich Re Study $555 Billion Solar Project
- Foreign companies betting on Obama’s green regime
- Climate bill a pain in the gas
- Norwin A/S Commissions Petaluma, California Wind Turbine
- Iran-Pakistan Pipeline: Iran’s New Economic Lifeline
It is now widely accepted that many of the systems for generating electricity in place worldwide are unsustainable. In spite of helping to create unprecedented levels of economic wealth, a predominant reliance upon large, centralized power stations, largely “fueled” by fossil fuels and uranium connected to a web of transmission and distribution lines, has a number of negative consequences as well. One of the most significant of those sustainability impacts is the effect that systems of electricity supply have on global climate change. With 66 percent of the world’s commercial electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2003 (including 40 percent of the total by coal), conventional methods to generate power are serving to increase carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere (and, though to a lesser extent, also serving to increase concentrations of other greenhouse gases). As such, a reconsideration of how electricity services are provided (and the extent to which they are needed, or might be provided by other, non-electrical, means) is critical. While an effective response to increasing energy sustainability consists of numerous different approaches—energy efficiency and conservation is also a key part of the overall strategy—it is widely agreed that the greater use of renewable resources in electricity supply should be part of the wider plans. This is not only to mitigate climate change specifically, but also to advance sustainability more generally.
This sentiment—that is, that increased use of renewable electricity should be a key part of broader climate change mitigation strategies and plans—has been expressed by a variety of international organizations and national governments. Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, devotes considerable attention to the ways in which the greater use of renewable electricity could serve to address climate change challenges. In particular, it is often argued that it is during the longer-term—that is, 20 or more years—that renewable electricity could play a large role, for it is recognized that many parts of the electricity system have a useful lifetime of 20, 30, 40 years or more.
As another example of the attention that renewable electricity is receiving in international fora, the leaders of the G8, in the 2005 Gleneagles Communiqué, declared that they “will promote the continued development and commercialization of renewable energy”. National governments have also done the same: the United Kingdom’s March 2006 Climate Change Programme, for example, had energy supply—with renewable energy resources through the country’s Renewables Obligation playing a key role—as the first of six chapters that, together, outline the key elements of the national plan.
Turning to the two countries under consideration in this article, namely, the United States and Canada, first consider the former: the White House maintained, in its Energy Policy Act of 2005, that it was promoting “the use of renewable energy sources …”. And with respect to the latter, though the new federal government had not, as of June 2006, described how its “Made In Canada” approach to climate change might include support for renewable energy, the previous Canadian government saw renewable electricity as central, as evidenced by the role of both a wind power production incentive and a renewable power production incentive in the 2005 Action Plan on Climate Change.
The relative role of renewable resources in both the United States’ and Canada’s electricity supply systems is shown in Table 1. As will be explored further on in this article, the significance depends to a great extent upon how “renewable” is defined. What is clear following this table, however, is that the role of “new renewables” often focusing upon solar and wind, but also sometimes including low-emission (and sustainable) biomass and run-of-river hydropower, is extremely small.