City needs focused energy strategy
Tailor plans to Edmonton’s unique situation
Edmonton has a quiet but impressive history of municipal innovation in energy and environmental management, from waste management to water infrastructure to our river valley and ravine park system.
The city’s energy and environment plan was set out in 2011’s The Way We Green Strategy, and this week concrete steps will go before council in the city’s Energy Transition Strategy. There’s a lot of potential in this plan, and some promising initiatives. There’s also a tendency to try to do too much. With a few changes, the strategy could lay the framework for the next pieces of our impressive history.
The strategy could easily be written for a typical mid-American city, not one that is adjacent to and heavily exposed to the fossil fuel economy. What the document paints as risks — high traditional energy prices — are fodder for booms in Edmonton. While citizens of mid-America might be looking for smaller cars and more dense living when oil prices increase, Edmontonians are looking for larger houses, and so development pushes further out of the city. We’re counter-cyclical in this regard, and an energy strategy should recognize that. There are risks to our economic exposure to fossil fuels here, but these risks are not the ones discussed in the Energy Transition.
The strategy also needs to do a much better job of focusing on fewer priorities, prioritizing actions and keeping in mind the city’s jurisdiction. The strategy touches on everything from 10-block bike lanes to the location of a fusion plant to changes to national building codes — hardly a focused or local approach. The strategy would be more effective with far fewer actions, and more attention to detail in those areas.
That’s the bad; now the good. Four areas addressed in the Energy Transition which strike me as crucial.
First, we need to look at how we heat and power our buildings and houses, and this must include the total social costs of the energy used. Ours is a winter city with a large industrial base, and so solutions like district heating have potential. We’re also in the midst of an energy technology revolution — solar power is markedly cheaper than it was five years ago. Looking at these opportunities, and how the city can enhance or at least not stand in the way of them, makes sense and allows Edmonton to be well positioned to take advantage of further improvements in technology.
The second area which deserves attention is transportation. We need a better understanding of how people move in this city, how much that infrastructure costs, and how they would move with different opportunities. In part, that means giving them more access to bike trails (yes, I’m biased here as a year-round cyclist), light-rail transit and walkable neighbourhoods. It also means doing the work necessary to optimize our road network and to ensure we send the proper price signals to users of all forms of transportation infrastructure (yes, even bike trails).
Third, while not as exciting as a fusion plant or a district energy centre, I like the attention to municipal small ball — the little things. The most important changes may involve decision-making practices. A lot of new technologies have different cost profiles than the infrastructure they replace, and may add benefits not immediately obvious on the invoice — LED lights are an example. LED lights are more expensive to install, but much cheaper to operate and maintain. They also improve our city’s dark sky performance, allowing for more visible stars and a brighter aurora right in the middle of a city of a million people. LED lights make sense and cents, and the Energy Transition Strategy, properly applied, will allow for more of these opportunities to be explored.
Finally, the discussion with respect to neighbourhood design holds promise. The strategy covers everything from optimizing house position and minimizing obstructions for solar power, to mixed-use residential and commercial and walkability. The central neighbourhood of Blatchford, on the old City Centre Airport site, will be crucial to provide proof of concept for many of these features. The challenge will be to demonstrate the value of small changes and to deploy technologies which are not widely used here while not going overboard and creating an expensive boondoggle. That Blatchford is only mentioned 13 times in a 170-page document is nowhere near enough.
I hope council will adopt the Energy Transition Strategy while directing the environment department to focus on plans tailored for Edmonton, and that they’ll push for a little more small ball, and fewer home-run swings.