Ontario and U.S. invest heavily in green technology
About a year ago Alberta’s then-finance minister Iris Evans made a bold prediction while waist-deep in a global recession: Alberta Canada’s economic engine would shed only 15000 jobs in 2009. And by 2010 the province’s economy would be well on its way to recovery.
In the ensuing 14 months 84000 Albertans have lost their jobs — more than five times Evans’s optimistic prediction — many who had worked in the province’s bread-and-butter industry: oil and gas. But environmental groups say there is a solution to Alberta’s boom-bust energy economy: Renewable energy.
RePower Alberta a tour spearheaded by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace aims to educate and persuade the public industry and private investors to move the province away from a fossil-fuel economy towards green energy. It’s a transition they say will create thousands of new jobs diversify the province’s economy and reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint.
“It’s just a matter of people becoming aware of the potential” says Sheryle Carlson associate director of Sierra Club’s Prairie chapter after recent tour stops in Peace River and Grande Prairie. “The old ways of doing business are still going to be there it’s just they’re shifting to a new market.”
The groups are also lobbying the province to implement a green energy strategy similar to Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act which aims to create more than 50000 green-collar jobs in three years completely wean the province off of coal by 2014 and make it the first in Canada to introduce feed-in tariffs.
Hailed by green energy proponents feed-in tariffs require energy suppliers to buy power from green energy sources such as solar and wind farms at a fixed price which is typically higher than conventional sources. “It’s basically an assurance for the renewable energy industry to grow and be given the same chance the oil-and-gas sector has been given over many decades” says Carlson.
In 2008 Alberta announced it would give companies $2 billion for carbon capture and another $2 billion for green public transit — the latter was scaled back to $470 million once the economy nosedived. “We’re saying that $2 billion could have been put into the renewable energy industry and building that up” says Carlson. “Why put more money into an archaic system that’s fuelling horrible toxins to be put into the atmosphere?”
Public sentiment appears to support Carlson’s assertion. In 2009 78 per cent of Albertans participating in an Ipsos-Reid poll said they prefer subsidies for renewable and clean energy while only 11 per cent prefer subsidies for oil and gas development. “The will of the people is there; now we just need the political will” says Carlson.
As Ontario moves ahead with its tariffs Alberta has no plans to introduce them anytime soon. “It’s been popular in other jurisdictions but it doesn’t necessarily achieve the goal unless you have transmission in place” says Bob McManus an Alberta Energy spokesperson. “So we are putting transmission reinforcement in place to support renewable energy.”
Building transmission lines will likely attract more investment in geothermal wind and solar projects than feed-in tariffs says Michal Moore economist and senior fellow at the University of Calgary’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Environment and Economy. “Feed-in tariffs are pretty expensive” he says. “The feed-in tariffs that have been in existence in Germany and Spain as two exemplars of that technique are being recalled or trimmed down quite a bit.”
The benefit of renewable energy is that it creates secure long-term employment in several areas including land administration and construction says Moore. “It’s a growth area. The value in them is that they tend to be stable and even to some extent counter-cyclic so they resist recessionary trends” he says.
However renewable energy competes with several huge unconventional natural gas projects dotting the North American continent. And because these gas projects translate into cheap energy for consumers there’s less chance public dollars will be spent on green energy says Moore. But there is a chance that government money would flow into green technology if it reverses climate change he adds.
Yet jobs in the green-energy sector are reliable and relatively stable compared to the boom-and-bust rollercoaster of Alberta’s oil-and-gas economy says Moore. There’s more stable long-term jobs within the green-energy sector compared to that of conventional oil and gas particularly in the U.S. “The near-term is pretty robust within the scale of the industry but it’s not overwhelming” he says adding “We don’t have as many subsidies as we do in the U.S.”
There’s a fairly stable job market for landmen — people who negotiate large land leases for wind and solar farms says Moore. “For every renewable technology there’s some land commitment” he says. “The nature of the contracts is such that they’re pretty long-term — 10 years or so at a minimum. That tends to be a pretty stable job in an industry that is not necessarily volatile but let’s face it look at the economy around us. A 10-year job isn’t fat but it’s certainly stable.”
Integrating green technologies into existing trades from machinists to architects is another strategy changing blue- and white-collar jobs into green-collar ones. “Green-collar jobs are something we’ve talked about here in terms of: Is there work in the sustainable industry and obviously there is” says David Silburn research associate for green building technologies at SAIT’s applied research and innovations services. “We’re not necessarily looking for brand new trades we’re just looking for trades trained in certain aspects.”
To meet the anticipated demand SAIT is developing and updating several courses to include micro-generation solar and geothermal in its degree and diploma programs says Silburn. “It runs across a huge spectrum” he says. “There’s opportunity for existing jobs to specialize. There are some new jobs but new jobs make it sound like a trend. Integrating into people’s expertise means we do it a little more consistently and longer term.”
