Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a new national energy strategy on May 14, and there’s a lot of good ideas in there.
Unfortunately, there are also some backward-looking notions that should be abandoned.
The good includes building infrastructure for generation, distribution, and storage of more power, connecting the nation’s fragmented regional and provincial grids, training more skilled workers, and expanding energy-saving retrofits for Canadian homes. All of these are things that will serve Canadians well, whether we’re using power for businesses, homes, schools, and public facilities.
But the Carney government also seems intent on reversing recent progress, expressing support for increasing natural gas power generation.
This comes even as B.C. is adding 3,500 gigawatts of new wind power from just four approved projects – enough to power up to 350,000 homes.
Canada already has some of the cleanest power generation on the planet. About 80 per cent of our power comes from hydro, wind, solar, and nuclear. More solar and wind is being added every year. Our handful of remaining coal power plants are all slated to shut down in the next three to four years.
It’s true that natural gas is cleaner than coal. But it still puts out CO2, adding to the climate change that gives us searing heat waves, increased forest fires, and violent storms.
If you aren’t worried about the planet, there is another reason to avoid gas-fired power plants: they are on their way to being obsolete.
Globally, onshore wind and solar are already cheaper than building new gas power plants. Add in battery storage, and the cost of new wind power is only fractionally higher than running a gas plant – and that’s the cost as of this moment, not looking a year down the road.
Solar and wind power keep getting cheaper, as does grid-scale battery storage. But between 2010 and 2024, the price of grid-scale battery storage dropped by 93 per cent. It’s still going down. Even better, much of Canada can use our existing system of hydro power to back up renewables – no batteries required.
The risk of building gas fired power plants isn’t just that we’re adding to climate change. It’s that we’re spending money on a technology that might be more expensive to operate than clean generation and storage by the time the politicians are ready to cut the ribbon.
– M.C.