Canada doubles down on clean energy commitment, plans to reduce electricity costs

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a clean electricity strategy Thursday he says will help double Canada’s electricity grid by 2050 and lower energy costs for the majority of Canadian households.

Canada is facing major challenges, including tariffs imposed by the United States, higher energy costs resulting from the war with Iran, plus the effects of climate change, Carney said.

“When the world fundamentally changes, we must respond with new approaches,” he said.

The new strategy includes regulations that will allow natural gas to play a larger role in building the grid. Construction is expected to cost more than $1 trillion Canadian ($730 billon).

“The path to affordability is electrification,” Carney told a news conference in Ottawa. “The path to competitiveness is electrification. The path to net zero is electricity.”

Carney said the plan includes new partnerships with Indigenous people and a willingness to use a wide range of energy, including hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, some gas, carbon capture and geothermal.

“The scale is huge, the timeline is short and the task of getting the right mix of power is complex,” he said. “We can’t simply rely on restrictions and prohibitions. We must do things differently.”

The government forecasts 130,000 new workers will be needed to double the size of grid.

The strategy signals a shift from the existing clean electricity regulations presented by the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That plan to decarbonize Canada’s grid by 2050 set limits on carbon dioxide pollution from almost all electricity generation units that use fossil fuels.

Electricity accounts for about 7% of Canada’s total greenhouse emissions, an amount that has fallen substantially in the last 15 years as most provinces reduced or phased out the use of coal power.

The strategy doesn’t say how much money the government is willing to spend to achieve the goal, although it mentions offering tax credits and bringing back energy-saving retrofits for up to a million households.

The Canadian Climate Institute, a climate change policy research organization, said the strategy is "pointing in the right direction” but several important issues remain ambiguous or missing.

“Ultimately, the success of the strategy will depend on details of how — and how swiftly — the government follows through on expanding clean power generation, transmission and widespread electrification,” Dale Beugin, the institute's executive vice president, said in a press release.